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Looking for a place to discuss your favorite books and hear more about the book industry? We're here to help. When we're not reading a book together and discussing each week with friends, we're having casual, fun and informative conversations with other readers, authors, and content creators in the book sphere.
While we mostly read fantasy books, we venture out into other genres often. Love comic books? Our Panel Chewing series has you covered! Mike, Jarrod and Steve discuss their favorite weekly books on the Pick of the Week and discuss other series with their own dedicated episodes.
On the Friday Conversation we often invite guests to discuss certain topics or meet with a group of friends from the Page Chewing forums to have a talk about anything type of discussion. We invite you to start your weekend the right way with us. So grab a drink, relax and unwind with us.
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Friday Conversation Ep 99 | Embracing the New Era of Reader Support & Storytelling in Books and Games w/ Michelle West, chibipoe & Jose's Amazing Worlds
Have you ever wondered what drives an author to leap into the world of self-publishing and Patreon, especially when they've already tasted success in traditional publishing? Michelle West, the author of Shards of Glass, joins us to recount her odyssey from mainstream publishing to taking the reins of her creative destiny. Alongside her, we have chibipoe, a diehard fan and connoisseur of Michelle's literary worlds, and Jose, the curator of Jose's Amazing Worlds, on hand to dissect the intricate aspects of an author's journey through the modern publishing landscape.
In this episode, we foster a dialogue about the practicalities and hurdles Michelle encountered while embracing self-publishing, specifically the nuances of print-on-demand and the intricate dance of managing editorial tasks and coordinating with various professionals. Our conversation illuminates the visceral experience of writing, the liberation from sales figures, and the fresh connection to readers that platforms like Patreon offer. We also unravel the unpredictable nature of publishing success, the priceless value of writing with passion, and the evolving roles of social media and promotion in an author's life.
As we progress, our discussion takes a fascinating turn into the realms of gaming narratives. We dissect the emotional layers and character development in MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV and how these stories elicit profound emotional connections. Exploring the controversial social and political topics that have emerged from gaming culture, we reflect on the power of stories not just in books but across the digital landscape, cementing the bond between creators and their audience as we navigate the ever-changing world of reading, interaction, and the art of storytelling.
Find our guests:
Michelle West: https://michellesagara.com/
Jose: https://www.youtube.com/@JosesAmazingWorlds
Chibipoe: https://twitter.com/chibipoe1
Film Chewing Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2235582/follow
Lens Chewing on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lenschewing
Speculative Speculations: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/speculative-speculations
Support the podcast: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/7EQ7XWFUP6K9E
Join Riverside.fm: https://riverside.fm/?via=steve-l
Hello friends, my name is Steve and welcome to the Friday Conversation. Episode 99, 100 is next week, but today we're here with some friends and Michelle. Will you kick us off with an introduction? Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:I write as Michelle West. I write the the Signing in Universe books. There are 16 books, 17, 17 books in that series now and I'm self publishing the last art. I also write as Michelle Seguera. I write the Chronicles of Alantra, the cast novels and a couple of spin-offs, and those are published by Mira.
Speaker 1:Okay, and our friend Chibi Po is here. Chibi Po, how you doing.
Speaker 4:I'm doing good, thanks. Well, I'm Chibi Po, a long time fan of Michelle's work and other authors as well, and glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Glad you can make it, and Jose.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I'm Jose. I run the YouTube channel Jose's Amazing Worlds and still amazed that Steve has me over for these conversations after all the times.
Speaker 2:You ever ask why you're amazed? No, no.
Speaker 1:I'm still amazed that you say yes whenever you know we're all surprised. So I'm just glad you haven't scared you away just yet. But, michelle, I guess, to start off with, I was curious. I didn't realize that you're self publishing the rest of the books. Is there a reason you made that change?
Speaker 2:No, I'm not sure. Well, actually you'll probably discover, I'm never short. The first 16 books were published by Daw, by Daw Books, and I think 1994 was the first time. So all along they've had the same editor, they've had the same publisher. And I was quite happy at Daw, I was kind of like my home.
Speaker 2:And then a number of different things happened between Daw and Random House and Betsy Walheim and Sheila Gilbert some health issues, some other things, and Betsy decided that she would sell the company, partly because if her daughters had been interested in publishing I don't think she'd ever have sold it. But the distribution agreement and the renegotiation were causing issues. So when they did that, betsy like they'd bought four more books, which it wouldn't have been. And I told Sheila that when I sold them, and so they actually canceled that contract before they sold. So then I had no contract and I was about 200,000 words at that point into the book, although I had just decided 110,000 words had to go. And then it was a little bit of panic. I was not at my best, it's like, but I haven't finished yet, I'm not done. So they were household discussions. So what can we do? My one small regret is two weeks after I started the Patreon, canadian publisher ECW said that they would take the books up to 275,000 words and I said, no, I'm not sinking a small Canadian press like really, really this focused. And also because Canadian publishers are supported in part by Canada Council grants and published by a Canadian publisher, even though I'm a Canadian author. So I didn't know, and still kind of don't, how that paradigm works.
Speaker 2:It's not entirely just commercial, but also I'd started the Patreon because, after looking at various models like I had friends who'd run Kickstarter's, I know people who were still running Kickstarter's I thought actually having to cheerlead Kickstarter for 30 days would cause a mental breakdown, because basically you have to spend 30 days saying, wow, this isn't exciting. I'm not a cheerleading exciting person in that way and you have to constantly blast it on social media and I'm also not a big social media person. I do some social media but for me it still retains the. I have 15 minutes, let's go to the water cooler, I'm okay, and I'll chat to people I know or chat to readers and I get back to work. So you can I'm not monetized, but you can get word out on social media and so discussion with people. Excuse me, while I quit this. You're going to get this. And I finally said, okay, I'm going to try a Patreon, I'm going to try starting a Patreon.
Speaker 2:So that was my household discussion, with two people saying absolutely no Kickstarter and I don't know what the Patreon. They didn't say no to the Patreon and I said, look, I only have to do, I only have to make this amount of money. Right, I want to. I want to finish these books and I don't need money to write them, but I do need money to copy, edit them and to edit them and to proofread them and for cover designer. Those are the very base things that I need. I can I can just do the book as a new book, but I need to make that much money. Now, one of the things about all of the forms of editing and proofreading not cover design is that the longer the book is, the more money it costs. That's why publishers, by and large, want smaller books. Readers are okay with larger books, but the cost of the whole production is greater if the book is longer, and so I started the Patreon and just kind of had about.
Speaker 2:Actually, it was less than a week of breath holding, because, of course, you look at other people's patrons at the point where you think, okay, this is what I would like to do. If I can make enough money, then I can publish the books and I don't need an advance because obviously it's in a publisher. I don't need to be paid to write them. But if I sell them afterwards, whatever money they make being sold will come to me. And so discussion again around the household said this is fine. And actually the first week I thought, okay, I can do this. But here's the big but All of the very successful patrons did one of two things.
Speaker 2:One, they offered short fiction, so it's a paper piece. If I have to write short fiction to generate money, I'll never have time to write novels. Other people can do things differently. Every writer has a different process. I wouldn't be able to do that, so I couldn't do that and that was kind of big. And the other thing was a strongly parasocial interaction. I have a private discord and I have this and if you're paying $100 a month I'll do a Zoom caller. So this was just and I thought I think they have to do that. I'll die and I'll also never get any rating then.
Speaker 2:Well, because there's a certain pressure in it and some people are really good and some people like to get a lot of energy from social interaction and even if they're quiet people who read books, I call those people extras. Some people require energy to interact socially and I call those people introverts, and that part would be me Plus. Then I'd have to start being self-conscious because I'm not good at not being myself, and I'd have to start, I don't know, being more concerned about and, as I said, I don't care if people like me, I just want them to like my books, right Me. But they're two different things. So I thought, ok, there's a limit, there's a limiting factor, because readers often they want to help you. So if you go out and you say this, but they also want the personal connection, and if you're not pushing those things, people sometimes don't come and that's totally fine.
Speaker 2:But then you also have to ask people for money. You have to go out and say I really would like to do this, can you give me money? Which, again, older person, was the hardest part. So I wrote blog posts explaining the dog situation and explaining what I'd like to do going forward, because I can't if I don't have the dog advanced money coming in. It was a lot less than the cigar money anyway, but I can't take the money the household money from the cigar books to pay for all of the publishing. So I explained everything and then I mentioned it on Twitter. I don't think I mentioned it on Facebook. To be honest, I haven't been on Facebook much since 2016. I have not forgiven Facebook for the never mind, not even like in the free. And we're going into politics, you said 2016.
Speaker 1:I think everyone knows what you're referring to.
Speaker 2:Well, yes, but then I watched my godson's, godfather's wife's niece I know how sad Because she was a very young mother become totally radicalized by Facebook, human non-mommy groups. And now vaccinations are evil and only parents who hate their children give them. And none of this stuff actually exists and it's like, but me, mothers are often incredibly insecure and the problem with Facebook is your friends are recommending things, so you might join a group, but you're not assessing because you're terrified. So there are many reasons that I don't. But then I did that and that was fine, and then I just thought, okay, we're going to let this be.
Speaker 2:And I think in the first 10 people who joined, one person said what are you doing? I, you know, I saw this by accident because I had Twitter open. You should be going to Reddit and you should be going to do this and you should be going to do this. And it's like, yes, probably I should, but let's just see how this goes. First, because I'm old and this is very difficult. And then people came and that was great, and so about two weeks I thought, okay, we have enough. And that's when ECW came. But they were not interested in giving me 450 at the time ebooks because that was my thing If you support, you get the ebook when it is done and in retrospect, because it's a small press so there's not a lot of money in it. But in retrospect if I had said I'll buy the ebooks, then it would have saved me an enormous amount of publishing Whoa at the end of the process, typesetting things and everything else.
Speaker 2:However, that did not happen and they wanted a maximum of 275,000 words and I finished this book and it was 304,000 words, which is the longest first novel in a series that I have ever written in my life and second longest published book. It's like who does this? Apparently me, but that's why I started to do it. So the newest book in that series is entirely self published and I, because I work in a bookstore, I had told people okay, guys, you understand, because people want to print books, or specific people really want to print books, and they started reading a lot of them in the 19, in the late 1990s, when there was no ebook, there was no anything else.
Speaker 2:So saying you know, you know I'm not in print, did not see reasonable because you can do so. You can do print on demand and, and I warn people, print on demand. Pricing is based on how long the book is. It's a page count. So all these people who are saying you can do really cheap on Amazon are talking about four point font in 200 pages, which I'm not like. I can't publish a book you must read with a magnifying glass. You're laughing that I did.
Speaker 2:I did do this for just for $20. And it's like you know, no, you can't, you really can't. So I? It was interesting for me because I was very nervous about it to begin with. And there's this fear. It's like why is it taking so long? Why is it taking so long? People are giving me every month, why is it taking so long?
Speaker 2:I get calm down, michelle, just calm down, write your book. So you'd calm down and you'd write. And then you come back and think, but why is it taking so long? And I thought that I wouldn't be worried about book length and I sort of wasn't. But but it's because I thrown out the entire. So I did 200,000 words and I told people I had I was going to remove 110 and and so I had 90,000 words when I started. So it shouldn't take that long.
Speaker 2:I just had to start new beginning that by the time I thought I'm going to write these first three or four chapters, I'm going to add the 90,000 words and then I'll have however many thousand words, except by the time I got, by the time I got to the place where these words in theory should join by plot. It was the wrong time. They were the wrong. It was not the right voice of book anymore. So then I thought, okay, but I can at least keep this section no. Okay, I can at least keep this section no.
Speaker 2:When I had a big, when I hit a writing wall at one point, my alpha reader said you're trying to keep that bit in the end and I said yes, because I think it's very, it's important. And he said give up. But but it was the same thing. There was no way to kind of grashed that part in. So it's 200,000 words of book. That is almost totally different from the book that was published, because that's the way books work for me. The Sagaire books I'm still at, mira is still publishing, and that's probably a good thing, because if I had to do all the same amount of work for the Sagaire books as well as the West books, I'd probably get like what can I have done here? I don't know.
Speaker 2:People say publishers add no value, and I get to tell you I think they're very wrong, because now you have to be a managing editor, you do have more control in theory, right so, but I don't know how many authors are actually certified, or directors, but one of them is not me, and I don't know how many authors are certified managing editors, and the managing editors are the people who schedule everything.
Speaker 2:I have a copy editor who is incredibly precise, and she is. She does a whole bunch of different things. She loves this particular job for a variety of reasons, but she is slower than she sometimes thinks she will be, and if she is late, then the audiobook narrator loses that slot, and because it didn't, 4,000 words, that's three weeks and the proofreader loses that slot time. So she's they both booked time that they that I've been kind of screwed them out of because of this, and this is the type of thing managing editors are used to, so they they kind of fudge deadlines kind of other things so that they so that they can try to massage things, to get things to the people they need to be sent to on time.
Speaker 2:So next book and then I learned other incredibly important publishing things. I have self published short stories that were reprints. So I figured this would be like that. This was so not like that, because I thought I'm finished the book and on my on the writer blog, and then people immediately went to Amazon and then they came back. One person said this is going to sound like a stupid question, but what name are you writing this book under? Because I went to Amazon and I couldn't find it and that would be because it's not an Amazon yet. So so people were looking because they read about it. So then I had to say, ok, I need two months in advance, like I need all of that information, so I can put that information out there earlier, so that, so that I'm not fielding panicking readers who are saying we can't Find this, or I thought you said you'd finished, and this is a thing a publisher does. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this is a thing that a self publisher who has no great desire to be a publisher, does not think of. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because for me the best thing about the the patron is this is going to sound terrible, but I don't have to care if they saw, I do not have to care. I don't have to go and watch numbers and wonder if this book sales will be too low and then maybe they won't publish any more of them. I don't have to care. I just all I have to really care about when I'm writing the book is book and then making it Publishable, like it copy, editing and proofread and everything else so that people in the patron can get their book. And I can work on all the other things like the print on demand and the hardcover, because hardcover covers and trade paperback covers are more expensive and the cover design, ebook covers and audio book covers are kind of like a square rectangle and with the ebook covers basically they take the front of the wrap around trade paperback cover and that's the cover. So all of that stuff is kind of later.
Speaker 2:But I can. I can write them and I can finish them and I can do all of the things that I initially set out to do. I can go to the south and I can finish the stuff and finish up the empire and I can go to the north because the north is important. And when I sold the books to the last arc I was trying really, really hard to do as few books as possible because because they should really not have bought these they really shouldn't have I was told that my numbers would be fine if the books were half the length. Oh OK.
Speaker 2:But the length that they're at the cost of everything, including the unit cost for the hardcover and paperbacks, just plain things out in a not good way. So there was no way to make this particular set of books shorter. But no, I don't have to worry about that either. Well, ok, I don't want them all to be three hundred and four thousand words, because what I discovered is Amazon has a maximum page count of eight hundred and thirty, which nobody told me. Everyone said you can publish any length. No, you can't.
Speaker 2:Hmm, and oddly enough, I had more than Amazon wanted with end materials, so I killed one section in that and it still wasn't enough. So then I had to make a choice to and I hate this Chapter should always start on the right hand side of a two page spread, always published books. Now, sometimes don't do it and it drives me nuts because I'm old and grouchy and old fashioned and it's here it starts here. You can, however, choose not to do that in the output so that, because that saves you some pages, then it will start on the empty page. And I had to do that for the Amazon version, but I didn't have to do that for Ingram, because Ingram actually can go up to 11 hundred and thirty now. Hmm.
Speaker 2:I know this is stupid, right, but all these people are calling me Amazon can publish at any length, meant at any short length. I they'll publish a 70 page book or a 60 page book, and not they'll publish a nine hundred page book, which, unfortunately, is what this was.
Speaker 1:Hmm, I think I've seen a 20 page book on Amazon before, so maybe that's what they meant.
Speaker 2:You can do saddle stitching for some places, like their 20 pages. They haven't do pamphlets, um, but I think what they meant at any length was short and not at any length being way too long.
Speaker 4:I might be talking ebooks too, because I think I've seen some you know Amazon published ebooks that get kind of crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, ebooks you can do anything with. You can, and so you can. You can put them together and have an omnibus that is 2000 pages long, because it's an ebook, it's just it's bits, but print books you can't do that with. So that was that, was me learning and stumbling, but that's what I did, and so there are lots of things that self published authors are possibly supposed to be doing, and so the one advantage that I have is that they have readers for these books, and so I'm not trying to establish a name, an unknown name, in the wilderness of Amazon, and that's a lot harder to do.
Speaker 2:I asked you how he one of the indie successes. We were on a panel together and I asked him all right, so which? How many books did you have out before one of them hit, before one of them gain traction? He said nine, but you expect the self publishing model of the time is short books like about 70,000 words quickly. These are two things that don't apply to me. So I understand how different paradigms and self publishing work, but he did mention that I don't have to care. They know I'm making enough to publish the books and to do them properly to give them to the people who want them. So I really just focus on writing the book and I love writing.
Speaker 2:But I have a few things to say. When you're asking, is there anything you want to talk about? I want to talk a little bit about that because in the last three months, like five different people have asked me how have you kept writing, how have you written so many books? How? What is the secret to career longevity? And one of the secrets is luck. It takes a certain amount of luck, but the other secret is I write the way I always wrote, and publishing is the day job, because publishing and writing are not the same thing, but they are very separate for me. So there are things I can't write and there are things that I can't quite figure out how to bring into my writing. They just they don't take root, they don't grow from that. So if I could, maybe I'd sell better that.
Speaker 2:I truly 100% believe that when editors or agents tell you to write the book of your heart, they're not actually lying, they're not patting you on the head. They kind of mean it, because nobody knows what's going to sell, nobody knows what's going to hit. There are people who thought their careers were over and now they're New York Times bestsellers after this kind of debt. But the thing is they kept writing. There are people who are mid-list and enough that they could get their books published, but it wasn't until book 16 that again they hit, and also NYT number one. But it what distinguishes them is they kept writing.
Speaker 2:Jim Butcher, nyt number one, maybe not with the Cinder Spires and I'm not going to talk about that cover because I ran for at least 10 minutes but he was published, not even his frontlist title. The very first couple of maybe the first three were kind of you know the fourth book offers by rock. When the sales reps came around, you don't know what's going to catch on. You don't know for sure what's going to sell. Everybody has hopes, everybody has dreams. But if they tell you right from the heart, they're not necessarily saying don't write something derivative, because so much of what we write is a response to what we once read, things that we love, things that moved us, things that kind of sunk into the loam of our writer brains. But they are saying write the story that you have to tell, or write the story that you really want to tell. Write the story that moves you the most and some people do not believe that, but it's kind of true because nobody knows. So I don't think writers are fungible.
Speaker 2:I started writing because I always loved reading. You know, when I was like a new five, you remember, when I was six, I decided that I would write a book and I was so frustrated because none of my letters looked like type, because I didn't understand printing presses, right, like, how did they do this? How did they get it to look like this? I was so frustrated. So the books that I love can't be switched out. I love what I love, say, I love Terry Pratchett and I love A J Richards poet and I love the Tolkien's, I love Guy K. But they can't you can't substitute one for another in my library canon. They're not fungible. Do I love them? Yes, do I love them like a crazy person sometimes? Yes, are they fungible? Can I just please one with the other? No, so that's the second thing. I don't find it. I don't ask why wasn't that me? Why didn't I get?
Speaker 2:that Because my general feeling is, because I don't write the books. If you want to ask, what are they doing, right? So let's say Terry Goodkind I was paid. Somebody answered that it's going to be spam. You open it, you hang it up, and she did sell relatively well. I was paid $450 to review one of his books and when they asked me if I was going to, if I would do another one, I said you will need to pay me two orders of magnitude more because I cannot scrub this out of my brain and it was so unpleasant. And they said okay, no, no, thank you. But it's perfectly reasonable to say, okay, he is doing something right. What is he doing right?
Speaker 2:What in this book that I could barely read works for readers, and over the years I have come to believe that in part, for a lot of readers, if they can get to your story, that's the only thing that really matters. Because I'm a writer, the way that you construct sentences actually matters, and so evil chickens matter, and there are certain things that are just they do and they just distract me, because that's what I require and so I love it's the name of the wind so very much, because I thought I can't everything, and so all of the language, all of the sentences, the words, the flow, the character, everything, I loved it. You do not have to be a garbage writer to sell well. You don't have to be a brilliant writer to sell well. Conversely, you don't have to be a garbage writer to disappear, and you don't have to be a brilliant writer to disappear, because that happens as well. So I worked in Bookster since I was 16. Do you remember Dragon World?
Speaker 1:Sounds familiar.
Speaker 2:Do you remember Risherach?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Do you remember the Burning Stone? No.
Speaker 2:Okay. What these three books and I could come up with more have in common is they spent, holy crap 30 years ago, $150,000, $200,000 on promotion. Even in our little chain bookstore we got copies physical copies of the advanced ARCs. They spent so much money on this. For the most part they sank like a stone. They disappeared. So writers who haven't worked in bookstores believe that it's a promotion. Promotion that's how you sell. These people are promoted to greatness, but I have seen so many people promoted to nothing. I don't actually believe that, or I can't completely believe it.
Speaker 1:No, no, I just I wonder how the how social media has changed that. What has that changed your ideas of, or your perception of, promotion Does? Can social media propel someone to the best seller list, if it's done right, is that? Or is it just a matter of typing?
Speaker 2:at luck, you gotta have the book Hunger Games. How much social media was the Suzanne Collins on? I don't know, zero Zero.
Speaker 2:Which was done by her publisher. She was not on social media at all. Did that hurt her? Nope, was her book promoted to greatness because of social media? Yes and no. And the yes part is people read this and said, oh MFG, this book, oh my God, I just read this book and it what it does is it allows you to have a larger world of mouth effect. So all these people who love this book are talking to their friends who love this book. And it's the word of mouth. And if you, as a reader, have a little social not even little social media following, then your word of mouth is reaching way more people. But it's not like she gave that person the book because she wasn't on social media. Hmm.
Speaker 2:So do. I think it hurts now, but if your social media presence is not somehow reflected in your box, you can have a great social media presence but the sales don't reflect it, because what you'll get is the bump of people thinking I really like this guy, I'll try his or her or their book, and then thinking I really, this is not for me. They can interact and they can read the social media, from that point on but, they're not going to be a buyer.
Speaker 2:People who follow John Skellsey can stand his books, but he would love him, and so if you want to be big on social media, everybody's grasping. It's around us. Because let's go back to, nobody knows for sure what's going to sell, and publicists or editors are looking for your social media presence. They're looking for your platform Sort of. It's much more important for nonfiction, but that's not an entity that books are going to sell. It just means that you are better at building social media platform.
Speaker 1:We talked to a lot of self-published authors and a lot of them say, well, I hate social media, but I have to be on it, and I wonder if that's true.
Speaker 2:I will say that all of my knowledge about self-publishing is actually old it's probably about eight years old and my general feeling at the time was no, because the long tail model of publishing which doesn't really exist in bookstores anymore. If you're wondering why publishers will sometimes go book one, book two, book three, like a month or two apart, it's because at a month or two apart those books are still likely to be in the bookstores. So it looks like when people come to look at the shelf this person has written books, whereas if you do a book a year, the second book might be there but the first book might not. The bookstores might not pick up the first game. So you're trying to build shelf presence when you can't guarantee that you're going to keep the backlist in stock. And I had wondered about that until editor said, oh yeah, because of this. And I thought, oh my god, of course, because now everybody is trying to sort of fit in with the changes that had been made over the long term.
Speaker 2:When I first sold a book to Delray in 1989, their general feeling was you needed five books before they could tell whether or not you'd have legs. Nobody has five books now. They have one book, maybe two books if you write them quickly enough. But you don't have that. So the idea that you're now building an audience slowly not there. And it's unfortunate because, again, if a publisher decided you had to have huge numbers instantly, then there would be no Jim Butcher, because that's a slow build. Steve Sterling's books same Like. I can point at certain authors, some of who disappeared, like Lee and Miller, for a long time and who kept writing and I think Bain eventually picked them up Well, aistead and then Bain, and they made a home, bain, and they're still writing. But you almost have to have a little bit more control of the publisher to give people that backlist that keep these books in print. Let's see if it builds and it's not a forgiving system. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was different when I was 16, there were hundreds of publishers but then they started to get absorbed so they bought this, they bought this, they bought this. Ace Berkeley got bought by Penguin. Well, bain, which is New American Library, was what eventually became Penguin USA. Bantam, double Day Dell they were separate. So Double Day Dell was separate from Bantam. I mean all of these things. Valentine, del Ray Del Ray was part of Valentine, but Valentine and Bantam were completely separate publishers, completely separate editorial.
Speaker 2:So when I first started there was a lot more options and a lot of different editorial and publishing tastes. And that is less true now Because now you have Big Five instead of 30 places. You could reasonably consider mainstream publishers in genre to sell your book. So I'm sorry, I train train derailed because I was thinking about longevity and writing. So I feel that a lot of writers I know who stopped writing stopped because they were so discouraged. It's like they're looking at everybody else's success and they're unhappy and they feel unseen. And then it isn't about writing the book, because to them, writing the book, what's the point? I have never thought what's the point when I'm writing the book. What I want to do when I'm writing book is to finish the book.
Speaker 2:Now, afterwards, when you're trying to sell the book, you may think this might not have been the smartest idea you ever had in your entire life, but the two are actually functionally separate. They shouldn't be so. If you can say, if you have five projects you're really excited about and you want to try to guess which one would be the most easily marketed, that's fine. But if you've decided you need to get published, so you're just going to write whatever that person is writing, you're going to discover it's not as easy as it looks, especially if you have no feel for it. It is much harder than it looks to. It's easy to be contemptuous. I have seen some science fiction authors do it. Oh well, fine, if you want to do that, we could just write big fat, pointless fantasy. It's like, ok, but at least one or two of them have tried it.
Speaker 2:It's not as easy as it looks, because it's not easy to write something that you, in theory, have contempt for and I don't even know if you truly have contempt or if that's just talking heads Because also, some people care about how they're seen and some people care about how they're perceived, and I'm just well, it's too much work. It is work that is not writing. It is work that is not the book. But I would actually ask and I have some of these people what do you want from being published? Like, what are you hoping to achieve? Some people just say all they want to do is be published, but that actually counts for the first book. And then they start to have that reality of dealing with publishing system and with bookstores and with bookstore returns and with Angry One Store reviews and everything else, and it takes its toll. So my thing is do not do things that cause you writer anxiety, because most people's writer brain is also their anxiety brain and if you are now filling your head with anxiety, it hurts the writing. Just don't get writing done.
Speaker 2:So every single writer I know in 2016 lost between three months and a year of writing. I mean, I think it took me three months to actually start again and I started writing. I was a little bit behind in that deadline and then when I finished, when I got my feedback under me and finished the book, I went back to the beginning. I did throughout almost half of it, because it's just all of this that fundamental world shift had changed so much and the anxiety had just eaten too much of that space. So then I realized, ok, we cannot do scroll, we can't act on it. If there are things that you can act on, sure, do those things. But now you're going to approach certain things in an actionable way. I mean, I am not going to Gaza and I am not going to Israel, and if I am concerned about the situation, I give money Because I can do that. I give money to different aid organizations Because I can do that. But I can't. I have a perfectly good imagination. I can absolutely guess what is happening and I'm not going to spend all day, every day, reading it, it will just. So, then, actionable, do I have the time and the time and the money to do something? Yes, ok, read enough so that you know that this is a reasonable place to go and a reasonable thing to do. Do the thing and then put it aside and go back to what you were doing.
Speaker 2:And it's like Amazon reviews. Somebody was sent, don't you check? And I said you know what? I used to check, maybe three times a year. But here's the deal when I'm in a bad writing place, if it's a bad review, as all authors, I feel terrible and simple. But if it's a good review, don't you feel encouraged? I said no, I feel worse Because it's a good review and when they read this horrible thing I'm working on now, they'll stop reading me forever. It'll be the end of my career, because then you can get disappointed expectations. It doesn't help. So when I'm on a very even keel you can go and check, but that doesn't happen very often and I avoid it. And because I just thought you know what that's destabilizing, let's just skip that part. And the social media wars are frequently destabilizing and enraging. So let's just skip that part, because it's not like there's a lot I can add without getting into an internet slot fight and, as we all know, those can go south very quickly and last forever.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, you are invested in it. So who you don't pull out, it's just don't start the investment. And so, honestly, it's acknowledging the things, acknowledging your strengths and acknowledging your weaknesses. And a lot of people don't like to acknowledge the weaknesses. If they think, well, they shouldn't bother me, they will keep doing it. When it is bothering them. And I don't think they shouldn't, I can think they shouldn't bother me. My second response is but it does. So the pragmatic approach is do not do things that injure your right of brain. Do not do things that eat at it, that take away writing space.
Speaker 2:My big writer advice, second if you aren't in a position where you see people's good news and it makes you feel terrible, stop looking until you are on more stable ground and you can go and be happy for people. But if every time you see good news you feel like it's never me, stop looking, just stop. It doesn't matter. If you shouldn't feel that way, it doesn't matter. Just stop. Unless you complain about it, no one's going to know, just stop. And some people look at me funny and one or two people have said so. I have nothing else to say to that. If people aren't talking about my books, then I feel like they're not being seen, they're irrelevant. No one's reading them and OK.
Speaker 2:And there are some people who do need the whole social interaction in social media. Gives them energy, it boils them up. Now, if you told John Skellsey that you would pay him a crap ton more money but he has to stay off social media, I think he'd die. I'm serious. There's energy that he gets from it and it feeds in a positive way. So if you're one of those people who needs that interaction, also acknowledge it. This is how you get energy, so that you then go back and writing is easier.
Speaker 2:Elizabeth Baer said that once to me. She said she loves conventions. She comes back so energized and so ready to work and I'm looking at her thinking it takes me three days to recover. But both things are completely valid, because your books come from you. Your books come from your experience. Your books come from, in part, who you are, things that you love, things that you hate, things that you value. Just acknowledge that you have these things and accept them, and I think that it's much, much easier for you to keep going.
Speaker 2:But also, if what you need is status or hierarchy so now I need to be properly published so that people will acknowledge I'm a real writer and I don't understand that either, to be honest Then it's information, except that that is true and then again, start looking at what the new paradigm is. Start looking at the things that you can act on, what are the things that you can do, but it becomes the same thing as the how to get published, where do you go to meet editors? Or where do you go to interact and social media is not terrible for that, as long as you are good at writing short form, being somewhat amusing and being respectful. People often will remember Don't ratio, don't say yeah, exclamation mark no more remembers that. But if you have something germane to say, say it.
Speaker 1:No, I was just thinking. What social media I think, like you mentioned earlier. You see, someone's follower account has, let's say, 3,000 followers. That doesn't mean you're going to sell 3,000 copies of your book. It also means that you can just like, you can have that goodwill, someone who gets to know you and say I really like this person, maybe I'll try their book. It can also be the reverse of I really don't like this person because of some offhand thing they said and it turns out to be a negative. They follow you because they want you to fail, and so it can go both ways. It's such an interesting dynamic.
Speaker 2:It can. There are some people who find it amusing to look at trainwrecks, in part because they have that. Well, I could be worse. Yeah, and that's the kind of black humor, and, in particular, black geek humor which we're all good at, but it is really hard. If you love an author and meet them and they're an ass, it actually really does influence, because people should be able to separate and no, it's not easy to separate. So if you think, wow, this person's an ass, there's a very good chance that you might in future, not like their books. And I have a people I loved and I can't read their books. And.
Speaker 2:I've tried eight different books just looking for the one that I can penetrate. So I separate and I don't separate. And you're absolutely right. If you are a complete and you know what I shouldn't say jerk, but if you are the, if your social media presence is at odds with the readers, then probably that is going to affect the writing. The one person that I never understood I didn't understand her readers was Laurel Hamilton. Because you people buying her hardcovers so that they can curse her. It's like they're hate reading and I'm thinking, well, I probably stay off social media, but that's still $5. I mean, they're still buying hundreds of thousands of hardcovers.
Speaker 2:The thing about social media presence is my Twitter account. Before I just stop using Twitter. I may be 3,200 people or something, but I was in training at Twitter following. I would respond to people who adequately. It was a place where if somebody had an app for me, I would answer it. It was much worse on Facebook. I will answer blog comments or questions, but the social media presence as an author is in part so that if authors want to, if authors, if readers want to, they can reach out to me.
Speaker 2:I had no idea who it was. I was on someone on Twitter who said you can write more about this sagara character, robin, and I said, sure, in my copious free time, because I have to write these two severing books and a cast book. And they said it's just, I really love magic school books. And I thought, oh my god, I have a magic school, like I have the academia and I have this, and I have this. So then I wrote the two severing books and then I wrote the magic school book. And the magic school book oh my god, it was the worst one ever. It was just like why is this book not going anywhere? I thought it would go. Why is it doing this? Why did I have to start this five times? I never have to start a sagara book five times, and if I could remember which reader it was, I'd probably thank them and then kick them in the shins both.
Speaker 2:But there is some interaction. So that's the thing about the social. For me, it's speaking about things, but that's kind of it. I'm not trying to gain a Twitter following so that people follow me on Twitter. I don't care, and my Twitter following and the number of books I sell are very, very separate, but it's the overlap of people who want to interact with their authors because many people don't, and people who want to be on Twitter because many people don't, who will reach out to me? Does that make any sense? So I think people kind of get caught on.
Speaker 2:If you're not big in social media then you're not relevant. But Tanya Huff sells way better than I do. My husband said she's like the invisible successful author. It's like almost nobody is talking about her online because he'd check and I said they're lost. But clearly readers are finding books and readers are buying her books. Maybe they are not people who interact socially and they're really missing something that Tanya's Twitter feed or Tanya's feeds, because she is very witty and very funny, but and in fact her wit is in her books. So if you like the type of dry humor then you will like what she does in her books.
Speaker 2:But people conflate oh, you're big on social media, you must be big. I think that might probably get worse rather than better because there's a TikTok generation. However, book talk is big and the book talk young adults. They're all reading print books, they're all reading physical books. They're doing their little videos about these books that they like on TikTok, or so I'm told especially by young adult authors, because I don't have a TikTok account. Well, I don't.
Speaker 2:It's the whole Chinese government owns thing, and I realize that that's paranoid, but it's the same reason. I have never, I'm never going to do one of those DNA find your ancestry things. Although it's not just because the Chinese government owns it, it's because my general feeling is, if that information is essentially publicly available, insurance companies are going to screw everybody over when they get their hands on it. Oh, we're not going to ensure you because you have this genetic tendency. We're not going to ensure you because of this. And no, it's just thanks I can mess things up on my own. I do not need to pay somebody else to take my DNA sample and get that information. I know so sometimes we're cranky.
Speaker 1:No, I think anyone who reads the TikTok Terms of Service should be worried.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not everybody's Terms of Service, it's the YouTube Terms of Service. It's not good. The Twitter thing, everything else. I don't like video and I don't like cameras and I can't talk for 30 seconds, so it's not my medium. It's just not my medium.
Speaker 2:That Godfather's children the son really loves TikTok and he does really weird things on TikTok Not just weird funny things. So my children will be in the corner sporadically laughing and they're now in their 20s, late 20s, thinking it's hysterical, but they're one generation up, so they're the Twitch generation. My son was 13 years old. Nobody said what television shows do you watch. They all wanted to know which YouTuber you watched. And then it became which Twitch streamer do you watch? And now it's TikTok. So every it's. One really good thing about having young children and then young teenagers around you on a constant basis is that you actually watch the social dynamic and the things that people are using as they're in motion.
Speaker 2:Also, reading is still really important. I really do as a writer. If you can find the time for reading is important. If you can't find things you love to read in the current publishing paradigm, it's a lot harder to write to it. It's a lot harder to write for that reading audience because reading tastes smooth.
Speaker 2:I love Lord of the Rings. I first read it when I was 12. I could have read it when I was nine, but when I was nine I opened it up and it's like who the hell is Frodo? I'm going to read about Bilbo because I'd love the Hobbit. So I was 12, I opened it up and I thought, okay, I'll read it. I loved it and I immediately started it all over again and I think I read like six times in a row because I loved it. And then I read it at least once a year until my children were born. He was exhausted. I can't get people to read it. People will write because I love the movies, but you really have to bookmark them past the birthday because nobody wants to read a pastoral birthday Like oh my God, this is so boring. When does it get good? And that's modern, in fact. Patricia McKillop, riddlemaster of Head, I loved those books. I still do.
Speaker 2:15 year old English class come in and they were bitterly complaining about that fact. It's pages of nothing. I hit their teacher over there with a book. It's like David, what are you teaching these kids? I don't mean because, but everything about the tone and the mood and the texture, and it's not pages and pages of nothing compared to birthday parties they just missed. None of it resonated with them and I sometimes wonder if that's this proliferation of constant imagery.
Speaker 2:We, if we wanna know what the AI fall trial looks like, we look it up. If we wanna know what anything looks like, we look it up. If we wanna know the following, someplace we need to Google and then hope, as AI and chat G and Pt go live, that some of the information you're getting is actually accurate. But you have the visuals for every single thing, and back in the Victorian times, tourism was reading. Practically you might spend your entire life within a 20 mile radius or 10 mile radius. So reading these travel logs with their long descriptions of freaking trees was actually relevant because you were giving information to people who might never have it. Now nobody wants it. So even what is in a book, what readers want in a book, has shifted. You don't think so.
Speaker 1:No, I think it has, I think it's almost, I think I know it's an old and crotchety, but I think attention spans are shrinking. But I don't think it's. I think it's just a byproduct of TikTok and short form content that people are absorbing, and it's just your brains adjust to a 30 second video instead of sitting down to read a 500 page book. One of my English professors, who I absolutely adored.
Speaker 2:Although he was teaching Beowulf in Old English said she experienced time. People memorized whole place, whole sonnets. Everything is memorized. Nobody does that now. That was part of the social interaction. Everybody knew it. So instead of watching a movie, you ran and memorized a pentameter for days. So the culture changes.
Speaker 2:Obviously things change, but I still think it's important to find things that you love in that shift of things. So if you are in a place where you think you know read these days are so superficial or there's so, there's so impatient or they're so stupid, then you're never gonna write a book. That is gonna. You can't read a book while you're watching you. You cannot write anything thinking that way, because then you fundamentally have no respect for the audience. You want to read it. So finding things that you love fine, and even though they can be a bit different, they can start differently. Finding things that you still love and still interact with is, I think, one of the most important things you can do for longevity. And it's not just finding books because you're writing books. It can be finding movies, it can be finding comics, it can be finding games, it can be finding things that are modern and now that you interact with, that have, that have a strong effect or that you resonate strongly with. Because I think, honestly, part of writing is actually experience positive experience or negative experience If you can really sift through it and examine it and everything becomes part of book, becomes part of the book, part of your awareness.
Speaker 2:I think world building it's harder as you get older because your understanding of how the world works makes everything so much more complicated. So you know back when you write your first book oh, and I wrote my first four Did I really think about that? Did I think about the economics? No, not at all. I was 26. Can you work? You get a job? What am I thinking about? The movement of economics? Was I thinking about the type of industry or country that arises when you have certain types of forests or certain types of geology? No, it wasn't, and I would argue that many people still don't.
Speaker 2:But as you get older, you become aware of all these things and all of a sudden it's just harder and harder to to build a world that you can still believe in while you're writing, because that, for me, is world building. It's you need to write something that you believe in really strongly when you're writing. That's what makes you have to be able to suspend your own disbelief, and the older you get, the harder it is. It's just OK. I didn't think about that, did I? Oh my God. And the stupid thing and Tanya always gets mad at me for this is a lot of the stuff won't appear on the page, it just won't. It's kind of that background knowledge, but it won't appear on the page. In which case, why, are you doing this?
Speaker 2:OK, fair enough, good question. But I also think like I hate maps. I hate them, but I know two writers who love maps. They're downtime If they're. World building is to go to campaign cartographer. I don't know if you ever heard of that. It is your hostile mapping program that was originally written for Dungeon Masters and make maps, ok. But then now we know, and if we do this and we have the geology for this, so we've seen this and this and and I think, ok, I'm going now. I just I'm not doing that here. You can do one for me. I'm not. It's not one of my downtime activities, partly because it's very visual and zero visual argument. I think visualization, kind of Men thinking about something like the idea of visualizing. They might have said, ok, you say beach, what do you visualize? And I said yeah, and he said no, I can have sand or I can do this or I can do this, and I got nothing. Hmm.
Speaker 2:So Should? My doctor said that's impossible to write books, it's like, oh right, because I'm painting them. I said it's not like an interact with the world and it's not like I can't see. But if I see something that strikes me in a certain way, I am always pinning it down in my head with words. I am describing it with words and some in the words, that sense of what the words in focus is what I remember. So then, for word phrases, cadences of course mean or hit more, because words are what I really have.
Speaker 2:Some people are hugely visual. Some writers See their book as a television show, so when their character is talking, they know what they're wearing, then what they look like. They see it play out as if they're watching television and I'm thinking, no, really, it's like, can I have that? Because I bet seeing blocking would be way easier, because I can think, ok, these are the people in the room, but forget to mention it until one person speaks. That's my worst weakness. Someone will say, wait, wait, wait, but when we see them I was in the room. It's like, well, he's in the room, he's speaking. But the idea that I have to say something about everybody being in the room before they go into the room to clean several books to a king realize.
Speaker 2:And then the physical description was really hard for me because I started writing poetry and poetry doesn't have physical objects that are not fundamentally important to the poem. So my first iteration of a book, my editor said OK, this is very powerful. There is no physical description whatsoever of anything in it. And now, michelle, you're going to go back and you're going to add physical description. I've never seen, oh my God. So I had to go back and add 15,000 words, scene by scene, trying to kind of fit them into the flow of that scene.
Speaker 2:And one of the very few reviews I got for that book was a locus review from Carolyn Cushman that said this book has no physical description. So I mean so? So then I would go back to books where Because like Anne of them actually where they have six page descriptions of a building, but it's still fascinating. And so now you're reading these things but you realize that it's a viewpoint. The viewpoint is fascinating with this building and the history of this building and knows all of its nuances. And so then you go back and you're in your choosing viewpoints that have strong investments in the thing that you're describing in one way or another. So it takes it into the internal but it externalizes it because it's really, really important to the character You're looking me for the no, I was just wondering how many authors have struggled with this visualization.
Speaker 1:I'll say to you are you visual when you write?
Speaker 5:Sometimes I do. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think definitely, particularly because the kind of things I write I kind of set in the present world, so I will have a relatively clear image in my head of where the action is taking place. So, yeah, definitely, I will find it very hard to write fantasy, I think, even though I read a long fantasy. And it's very fascinating that people can imagine all this world. So you know, bring them to life on the page. I think that's it to me and a skill.
Speaker 2:I don't think you have to see it, I think you have to feel it.
Speaker 5:I'll take your word for it, but usually people say, right, what you know about, and obviously no one knows more about the world that you've created than yourself. But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't love that advice. To be honest. I've heard it a lot. I've heard it a lot in my grade 13 workshop class, right where you know. Right where you know, and my person who was running it, oh my God. He was a Canadian writer. He worked at Coach House Press. He had the class taught in a boardroom because he was a chain smoker and at that time the teachers were allowed to smoke in their boardrooms but you weren't allowed to smoke in classrooms. It was just this insane class. And he opens it up with I hate teaching. I'm just doing this because I need the money, so I'm making my friends do it. And then he brings in this roll call of Canadian authors and he meant it. He was forcing them to teach things, but he hated science fiction things and that's what I was writing. So I write these things. And he'd say you know it's powerful, but I want you to write what you know. And I said you don't think that viscerally.
Speaker 1:I understand this.
Speaker 2:And then we argued about it, but then all the rest of the kids because it's a workshop class would say David, you're an idiot. He was a teacher, but he was the type of person around whom you could say that. So I found that it was like a bubble space, and so my advice always was to write what you feel. But then that's, you sink into viewpoint, the viewpoint that you're writing from. Ok, the viewpoint that I'm writing from really matters. So it's the viewpoint that notices different things. I mean, if you have four different characters who walk into a bar because CD bar they're going to notice different things. One person is going to think oh my god, the air is so thick you can't even see five feet because they don't like smoking. Like, what they notice defines them almost as a character what they like, what they don't like, what they're afraid of, what they're tired of, like. You know, when somebody walks into a bar and things great, pick up, jerk is walking over it, like you it tells you a lot and it's the same location and it can be the opening of the same book, but the different viewpoints give it a totally different feel, even though it's modern and I think that's important. But then the minute that you start to write from the viewpoint, lots of things come up. So cultural things come up, because that's the culture of the viewpoint character has lived in all their life and the way that they respond to things comes from that culture.
Speaker 2:And that got me in trouble a couple of times in Broken Crown, more than a couple of times. People found it very upsetting in places and once in Hidden City somebody actually reviewed the book and it really upset him a lot. And then he sent me a link to the review, which reviewers in my generation never did, because authors of my age were told don't read reviews, don't interact with reviewers, do not respond to reviews. And so the idea that you're sending me the link to review was just. It was so weird, he's the first person to do it, but it really upset him. And so finally we started talking back and forth about why it upset him and he finally said I do understand why this orphan like why would somebody who rescues her leave her at home alone? And I said I don't understand your question. And he said but she's at home alone. And I said okay, if her father had not died in the port accident, she'd still have been alone the entire time, because it's not like there's a welfare system, right, it's not like she has any other family. If he doesn't go to the port and earn money, they will starve. And he was just shocked because it hadn't occurred to him that the entire structure and I'm obviously not lying about it, but it hadn't occurred to him to think, in a situation where there's no social, where there's no family net, there's no social welfare net there's, did people starve, sure, sure. So it was interesting and it was the same with the broken crown People, the person one both men, oddly enough really upset, because he wanted, he did not understand the reaction of one of the characters and I didn't even understand his questions.
Speaker 2:So we're going back and forth until I realize it's, it's a game, it's a cultural question, and I said okay, so what you want is for her to be Buffy, but you understand that that is not in the culture and if and she knew this she had done anything, she would have just died. So she made the choice to do nothing and it almost destroyed her so that she could destroy them all later, because there was nothing she could do to stop what was happening around her. And I think what he wanted from the book was the type of superhero that she was never going to be, which doesn't mean that she didn't win and it doesn't mean that she didn't do damage, but even the damage she did is prescribed by the role that she has in a culture in which women don't have a lot of freedom. So that's why he said this was just so anti-feminist. So he thought it was pretty misogynist, and I've had women tell me that it's very feminist because it is taking that medieval period and he was looking at the power that people did exercise because of powers, and it's just like I said, it's a dominion and if you want something that's a little bit more egalitarian, that's the empire. I mean, there are two different cultural paradigms Slavery exists in the dominion and it doesn't exist in the empire in any obvious way.
Speaker 2:But then I started to think you know what? The current ruler? How do you get rid of slavery? He's not an idiot, his advisors are not idiots. How do you get rid of it without having a bunch of people starve? How do you get rid of it in a way that doesn't immediately cause everything to break? So then, actually, one of my readers had this whole. Okay, because one of the things she studied and which countries that kind of change occurred without revolution, death and starvation all over the place. Afterwards Big social upheaval, because it is a thing. I mean. I'm sure somebody could just say slavery is now legal, but it doesn't change the actual context of the entire country and the people who are really going to suffer for it are the people who are now not allowed to be enslaved, but then have no living, no shelter, no anything else. And so how would that work? How do they get around the laws? These are the types of weird things that I think.
Speaker 2:I went to stop a book, uncrunking, and I stopped and thought, no wait, because I have three commanders.
Speaker 2:Sweetheart, as I said to my long-suffering spouse, said yes, I said how do you move an army of, say, 50,000 people? And how do you fucking feed them? Like, how do you actually feed 50,000 people? Like, if I march 50,000 people on foot let's assume you know not Calvary like they could still be walking 50 hours, like how do you do this? And he said well, that's a good question, very helpful. And then I started to look for logistics, and what I sometimes do is I find modern logistics and then you kind of pair it back, you look at the practical ways different things work and you look at how to streamline it or how this would have been a problem back then because we don't have this, and you kind of deconstruct it backwards to the technological period that you have. Except you can cheat because you have magic and you have a little bit of cheating and there isn't anything because supplies and logistics in a modern army are not legally allowed to be talked about.
Speaker 2:Are you kidding me? So then I go into the Napoleonic nothing, it's tactics and strategy and frankly, I don't give a shit about that right now. I don't care. If you can't feed people, everything's going to turn to shit anyway. How do we feed people? And nothing. And then I got in touch with two military history professors. They're not giving me things that I actually need.
Speaker 2:And then I kept going backwards and backwards and I finally found one absolutely brilliant book called Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army. It's in the book. It was fabulous, and the reason apparently it caused a little bit of controversy is that the professor who had to have written the book said that he believed that Alexander's military targets were based on his logistical abilities. Where could he go fast? Where could he strike? Where could he easily support an army? And me? I can't even figure out why that would be considered controversial, because you can't feed them, you're going to lose them and you'll lose all the rest of the people, and if they're marching through your land it's going to be bad. But it's this kind of thing. Now, does it matter? Possibly possibly not, but it's something that I feel that the commanders would know. So it's knowledge that I have to have, even if the character directions don't actually bring all the stuff that I finally found onto the page.
Speaker 2:I have a weird world building paradigm. I like writing when I hit that wall of I don't know this and I'm very sad. So when I started, before I started Broken Crown, I just did 200 pages of world building On any of the big characters or big political organizations that I could think of and God's here and festivals and other things and cultural things and city areas in one city and etc. And then then I started writing and I'd tell you even the world building stuff. You start writing and then you go back Because you have all this stuff infuriating your head and you changed a lot, because the minute you're writing book words, that's when the book actually is real, so you can plot everything else.
Speaker 2:You can think okay, this is where I'm going. You start writing it and your characters turn left and it is both you scream and pull your hair out, but also the moment at which you know the book is real Because it's not like, oh, I can't figure out what I'm doing, so I'll just throw this in here it really is. The character is said and you're following that viewpoint. Sometimes people ask about character and plot, but to me character is plot. It's not everybody, To me it's plot. So you have a rough idea and sometimes you get close.
Speaker 2:And sometimes with the Saguaro books I write to an epilogue. With the West novels I write to an ending. So the ending, everything that you do while you're writing the book, any little strand, any little direction it's kind of it resonates with that ending. So obviously they're not going to turn left and jump into a convertible because there are no cars. Your subconscious is never going to make them do that. It doesn't happen. But your characters are smarter than you are and your subconscious is a little bit smarter than you, and things that make perfect sense on the page when they happen are not things that you plan on. So it's just like, oh my God. And then you know, you go away. And the way I usually get out of these difficulties is, I think well, all right, this is what happened. What does everybody else do? And some of the people are panicking and some of the people are planning, and that it kind of said does that sound weird?
Speaker 1:No, I guess, further than that balance of character and plot, like you said, you see characters more as plot than characters.
Speaker 2:No characters are characters, plot is character. My favorite piece of female broken crown was a reader who I still have and she said the broken crown was the first book she had read in 10 years or longer in which no character did anything that she thought was for authorial convenience, no character, anything out of character. And I said thank you because it certainly wasn't very convenient in at least three places. But you can either choose the plot that you thought you were writing or you can choose to let the characters go. Let the characters do what the characters are doing, even if it seems suicidal and insane, and I always go with characters. So the story is built on the character and the response and the way those character choices of consequences are putter, baited out. But those choices always, always reflect in some way the end be or the end note. So that's why I tend to trust my writer brain.
Speaker 2:And if I didn't, I don't know.
Speaker 2:my husband thinks it's magic or voodoo, Because he doesn't understand how I can go from page one to the end the way I do. But I don't like outlines at all. I have an internal outline like I'll think, okay, this chapter is going to be about this. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it drops a book off a cliff and then the book is off cliff and now take a deep breath and then you keep following the characters, keep following the viewpoint, but the various characters and viewpoints will take you to that ending in a far better way than a superficial outline. And it's funny because I tend to be a little bit Taipei and a little bit control freak about certain things. But I've learned not to do that with books. With books, I just trust the writer and I trust the instinct and the story. But that's also probably why I would have difficulty writing somebody else's story. I could start it, but it would be my understanding of another person's character and my understanding of their interior and it would never be the same. So if somebody had said to me, michelle, we would like you to finish Robert Jordan's books and you want the money desperately, but no, I would never have been able to do it, which is sad but true.
Speaker 2:There are some people who can and there are some people who love outlining. There are some people who love revision. They love it. They hate drafting. They find every single page of a first draft it's like cutting off your own toes, slowly, but then, when they finally get to the end, they love revising that. My analogy for that is their first draft is throwing every possible piece of furniture you could ever need into the house, and then the revisions are putting those pieces exactly where they need to be. And if you somehow have five bathrooms, you throw it for them. And so they are now creating the perfect interior. But to get to the perfect interior, they have to throw in everything before they go.
Speaker 2:That's not what I do. That's not how I work. So if I have to, if a book is not working for me, what that usually means is I have to throw a book, or throw 200,000 words. Okay, that's where it stopped. Throw them out, which many writers will say well, don't you keep anything. And you can't. You said you can't keep it. Where are you going to ever use it? Okay, it is going to have no place in any of the other books. It is the wrong book. So it's not that I don't rewrite, it's not that I don't have difficulties, but it pretty much is of a piece All the way through.
Speaker 1:The Chibiplo. Did you have a question for Michelle before we wrap up?
Speaker 4:Well, I kind of did, but I'll probably throw it out of blue sky because it was kind of a heavy one. And if I ask you, for what? Well, I was going to ask because, if I recall correctly, we share a similar hobby in a particular video game that which one is Final Fantasy? Yes, and, as I recall, you do play 14.
Speaker 2:I do, Although I'm taking a break at the moment while I wait for the next expansion. I started replaying from ARR again and the only bad thing about it is it's like rereading, Because in Final Fantasy it's a story. I desperately want to get to Heaven's Word and go through it to the end again well, 3.3. And then I desperately want to do all of Shadowbringers again. Heaven's Word made me weep in one place because it was so perfect. It's one of those perfect writing moments and it pays off a lot, yeah it's still sad.
Speaker 4:I bet I know the moment too.
Speaker 2:And that's in Heaven's Word. In Shadowbringers they do something with villains that people forget sometimes, that bad guys, that villains, if you will like. People want very simplistic villains. I want a good guy and a bad guy because it's just easier, it is simpler. If you want comfort reading, you want to know that these guys are bad and these guys are good, so you can root for them. That is not what they do, but they sort of do Like with the Emmett Sall character.
Speaker 1:No, with the.
Speaker 2:Emmett Sall character by the end of Shadowbringers. There is no question that he has to die, right, no question. And if I were any one of the characters facing him, there would be two things, and one is it's heartbreaking, and two doesn't matter because she's not going to stop. So it's almost a perfect balance. And what was interesting about that to me is it's the breaking bad thing all over again. There is no question that this person is a mass murderer. Right, and all the reasons are tragic and they become really, really hurt-rending as you have a deeper understanding of it. Because the guy is a mass murderer and has to go. I don't think that.
Speaker 2:Because you understand why somebody does something that makes it OK. I had this with baking cram, somebody's in an audience. They put up their hands and they say the thing I really like about your books is there's no right or wrong. Right, it's not black or white. And I put up my hand on the panel and said that is wrong. He said stop. I said no, these people are wrong. And he said but I understand why they're doing everything. And I said yes, because they're people. But everybody has reasons for doing things. And just because you understand what the reasoning is doesn't mean that all of a sudden it's right. It's still wrong and that shocked the person.
Speaker 2:But I have discovered it in a lot of readers If they understand why somebody does something bad, then somehow that can't be bad anymore. No, no, it's still a bad thing. It is frustrating to me because you still get people saying, oh, but you didn't do anything wrong. No, no, no, no. He killed seven planets worth of people. I'm sorry, no, but he didn't consider them people, so it's not wrong. Hello, no, no. I love all the stuff they did with the villain. I love it. I think it is easily the best exploration of a super powerful, godlike bad guy I have ever seen in any medium. But the philosophical discussions that came up around and made me want to burn things down. It's like I'm sorry that you understand him and now you think it's OK because it's not OK and it's that for me.
Speaker 4:No, I feel like just to touch on that briefly, it's like and then people got to Endwalker and they were like they had been around. You've probably seen these ones too. They've been around with the Hygiene as evil.
Speaker 2:Well don't do it sure, Like I wasn't, I said come on. Come on, Because I wasn't sure. So in that when we were playing it, because we got to play it all the way through, we bought Endwalker right, so we had all the stuff leading up to it. I'm sorry, guys. That's fine. But there was a moment where I said oh, please don't tell us that we, that we're essentially I can't remember. The word is the moment.
Speaker 4:Don't make us the bad guys. You know, a lot of people were like I'm worried about it, but, but.
Speaker 2:I thought that tempered, tempered, thank you. Don't say are we tempered.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are we tempered too? But so there are all the questions, because you realize that she's also not wrong. Right that she could not think of anything else to do that would stop the people who had essentially been her brothers and sisters and preserve as much as possible. But she's totally right.
Speaker 4:Yeah. What she did. But yeah, it's like my point where that was. So you get to the whole pullback story to it and you even get previous in itself and even he's like when you tell them the future and he's like no. And people are like, oh OK, it's like no, even even he himself is like what?
Speaker 2:No, I would never do that he said what stupidity would do that? Who would do that? Who would invite somebody into the heart of there Like he's so mad at him. Stupid, you're saying he was in the future and he's right right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and he's like oh my God, I cannot believe how stupid I was.
Speaker 2:Well, I won't believe this, I won't believe it, but she believes it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Because he just didn't want to even. How do you wrap your mind around that? It's like your entire world just goes up in flames and so it's like, yeah, I get why he did the things he does, but what I was going to ask is just getting a little back on track, is just with the whole progression from a realm reborn all the way through Endwalker and they spent about 10 years there and what your thoughts? Just because that's like a pretty massive I don't think any other Mimos done that just telling a single player story across and how well they, what your thoughts and how well they executed it and everything. But you kind of answered that.
Speaker 2:I absolutely loved it, but that's why I wanted to play through it. I started playing through it again Because it is like rereading a book. It's just, unfortunately, 400 hours of rereading a book. You could new game plus, but it just doesn't have that impact that it does.
Speaker 4:No, because you blow through everything.
Speaker 2:All the way through Because and you catch things and it's like rereading You're catching things in ARR that you didn't hold on to Because it's the beginning of an MMO and you're expecting like MMO story I mean like World of Warcraft story or like garbage story, garbage story. So you're not really paying attention. It's like OK, these are the bad guys, these are the whatever. And it's only after you get through Heaven's Word that you realize that is not what they are doing here, that is not what they're doing. So when I started to game, I paid attention to a lot of the little details, a lot that I had not, of course, retained the first time out. And I think the one thing that I will say before I play the End Walker is I'm watching somebody because he's gone completely nuts about the Bahamut fight in coils, and the thing he went completely nuts about is the song. He said oh my god, this is me, I keep forgetting, because he's with a bunch of friends who were taking him through and he is just standing there and he almost died Because it is so visually spectacular it doesn't mean 10 years old and the music and the song. And so somebody in the comments said this is the world's second clear if you want to hear the full song, because even though they've brought you down to the same level, the gear is still there's slight differences. So then I of course clicked on the world's second and I heard the whole song, and I'm listening to the whole song, and I said which my son was also playing I said this is Endgame. He said what I said the words here, this is an Endgame song. And it was, I mean, from the very start, from the moment they relaunched ARR. It's the Endgame music and it is because that's a high tone. But it was to the words, it was the lyrics. I said no, this is Endgame. And the people. My husband always looks at me funny when I do that, but there's a way that people use words, the way that songwriters use words or the way that writer uses words, where you understand that there are more layers to it. You can just tell by what they've chosen. And then I wanted to hear it again, but I wanted to hear it without the constant loop, because it was a long fight and they have a perfect loop, so you don't notice it immediately. They the musical. The people are doing the music, gods. And somebody said it's in the very first opening trailer of ARR. That's how they played. So I go and Daniel comes downstairs because my sons are now dissecting what they do and the musical traces they've made because they compose in different ways. I start playing.
Speaker 2:My son watches the opening of the. He said, oh my god, mom, mom and I said what he said those are the Warriors of Darkness. I said pardon. So then we had to watch the whole thing, because by now we've gotten to 3.5, but we haven't done the Stormblood. He said they're one for one, the Warriors of Darkness. That's us, that's the stand-in warrior of light, that's the little priest. And he was right.
Speaker 2:So this opening segment was all of those characters with that song and those lyrics, and that's the very beginning. And that beginning goes all the way through varies things to that ending and I just I was totally amazed by it, to be honest. And they had. You can say it's 10 years and it's many, many, many movies worth of structural creation. And it's blended in with all of the MMO aspects and the dungeons and the dungeon bosses and the raids. That I didn't do Because I followed the story all the way through, but I really want to see what they do coming up, because Shadowbringers would not work if it hadn't been for Heaven's worth, and Enwokka relied on Stormblood. So all of the end relied on things that they'd established all the way, but they still had to finish every segment in a way that was satisfying as a segment.
Speaker 2:They couldn't just give you half a book and toss it in. That, by the way, is what I have said to many people when they say can't you split your books? No, you cannot just cut a book in half. How would you feel I ripped a book in half and gave you one half of it? There has to be a beginning and an end arc within a book or it doesn't work as a book, same with the game. So they're making structural choices that are beginning and end arc.
Speaker 2:But I have to say, if I had played ARR at launch and I had got to the end of 2.0, I think I'd have burned something down. It was the worst cliffhanger ever. And then people had to wait six months. I don't know if you guys play video games either the two of you and if you don't play video games it won't be of interest, and if you dislike MMOs it really won't be of interest, but it is really actually brilliantly written. Oh, it's brilliantly written.
Speaker 2:Sorry, people sometimes, creech said when he was because he would do this review of each segment. When he got to MWalker he said if you had ever told me when I was playing ARR, I would have laughed in your face. But I swear to God, in this sequence I actually told everybody on my team anything happens to those two siblings. I will eradicate everything. And I was laughing, but you do feel it. And so they also have the characters and the characters learn. So they start it in places and they end up in different places. They learn from the experiences. Are they scarred? Yes, do they lose people? Yes, but so, yeah, no, I think that the story is the strongest thing about it, but I like some of the MMO elements as well, and it's just that if you want to reread it, you've got to go through.
Speaker 2:You have to have the time to go through all of it again, and it is a very important thing it is. If you don't play games, if you don't play MMOs, it is definitely not for you. But it is a very strong RPG and it's a really strong RPG story. And it's because it breathes, it's because you're crewing character details, and these characters are changing and growing, which, by the way, is the advantage of a long book series Start to finish. You have the room for characters to experience things and to get older or wiser, angrier or happier more independent or more dependent, depending on where they started.
Speaker 2:People ask about why long series it's not just the movement of armies and gods and demons although that's part of it and ancient history it's also the characters have room to breathe and to really fully step out. I'll stop now. I'm sorry, chico.
Speaker 4:No, it's fine. I was also going to say one of the other fascinating things is how, even though it's ostensibly an MMO, it's still a single-player story, that in order to play it, everybody has to go through the same story.
Speaker 2:Everyone has to. But I think that's why people talk about the toxic positivity and I think we all both should People talk about non-toxic. I actually really like playing Final Fantasy XIV and I only played Warcraft with friends Because they're kind of like the Warcraft community is not quite League of Legends, but it's like you're in a room full of 14-year-old boys who are so insecure they have to make sure that everybody else knows that they're not the worst person in the room and it's so unpleasant. I mean, did we not graduate of this in junior high? Oh, no, clearly no.
Speaker 2:But in Final Fantasy I think the reason that you don't have that level of toxicity is because there are things that will kill the most expert of players for three months. You guys go have fun, but everybody has to do the story. And for the story that a lot of people love, it's like you come in and you say never been here before and someone says, oh, you're going to die so much. I'm sorry, but they're not angry and they don't want to spoil anything Because it's the first time you've seen this and they know what it was like the first time. They finished this instance and they came out of it before the trial.
Speaker 4:So it's like, and you can say oh my god, you do the vault and everybody's like. You know they're first time here and they're like well, enjoy, don't forget to smile, because people like that.
Speaker 2:They also aren't swimming at you because you don't know everything, because you're there for the story quest. You are there to do the story. You are taking them, you're walking the same path they walked and they would like you to be moved by it. And if basically somebody is basically telling your shit and go commit suicide because that's what happens all the time in a while Dungeons you're probably not going to have that happy feeling. You're not going to keep going because you have to do those instances. However, they changed it so you don't have to do anything with people.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, they've made it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they minimized a little.
Speaker 4:They're like. Yeah, they're like because I think he said hey, we get all these things where people are like I really want to play this, but I don't play MMOs. So they've reduced substantially how much stuff. But you know, why?
Speaker 2:It's because he thinks of Final Fantasy 14 as a final fantasy flagship game and there are tons of mostly Japanese, of course players telling him that they played every Final Fantasy game except I think it's 10 and 14. Was it 10? Was it Final Fantasy 10 with the MMO?
Speaker 4:There was one MMO but 11 and 14.
Speaker 2:They played everything but 11 and 14. And it bothered him because it's a Final Fantasy game to him. So that's why they came up with the. You can do everything solo if you really want, because that's another Final Fantasy. Well, you can't.
Speaker 4:They still haven't done the 24 MMOs and some of the eight MMOs.
Speaker 2:The 24 MMOs? Oh no, actually one of them is mandatory.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's mandatory, but it's the other haven't. You're right, but no, what I was going to say is I thought how it was. It's like it's ostensibly a single player story, but you are the main character, the warrior of light, and so basically, being a player character, you're basically a blank slate. But even with that taken into account, it's really fascinating how they managed to pull this story off and actually give the player character actual personality and you can tell even little things about the character that and made them a centerpiece of this world, even though you can basically throw whatever back store you've got in your mind, and it more or less works.
Speaker 2:It does. But the thing is because of the hierarchy, you are the warrior of light upon whom everybody depends, but actually the people who are ruling still get to tell you what to do. But I hate. You are not a governor, you are not a ruler, you are never going to be either of those things. You are like you are a very special troubleshooter.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm not going to call you a murder butt, but basically you're a murder butt. You go out and you can face down gods, but you're not going back in ruling cities. You are not making laws. In fact, to one point, you are wanted by the law.
Speaker 4:So they put other people in for NPCs, for that.
Speaker 2:They lower the structural psychological cost of Power Creep because you have the context of the world and Power Creep is an issue in that there are some stories and some books, like the Anne Rice vampire novels, in which every single book say Lestat gets more and more and more powerful until the books have to be freaking, ridiculous and ungrounded to work. In the cast novels and also in the West novels, one of the things that I am always considering is play balance. I don't know if either of the two of you have ever played D&D or have tabletop or other things. Play balance is important and you cannot.
Speaker 2:If you want your character or a character to become essentially God, they're off the page. You can have them come in now as NPCs, but they have been retired. You cannot have them as active player characters because you can't interact meaningfully with most of the world anymore. If you're basically God, it's the same thing with the game. So they contextualize the story structure for me in Final Fantasy to prevent that the enemies grow bigger, but the stakes in some ways remain the same. You are still trying to preserve the people of Eorzea, and those would be the villagers, and those would be the people in the city and those would be the people who are the refugees, and those would be. I mean, you're still trying to preserve the same people.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I also like that they've kind of underlined that if you really look at it, your character's real strength isn't the fact that they can go murder, hobo murder, blend everything in their path, like Shadowbringers even outlined it. It's like the real advantage here isn't it's all the connections that you make with people and that was like the best moment in Shadowbringers. It's like, yeah, you just basically united an entire world to pull off the enemy.
Speaker 2:It's the elevator right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah. It's like you make all those connections throughout the game and then it culminates in a moment where you need to get to murder blend a guy.
Speaker 2:but he's a spot you can't get to him, right, but that's also what I'm talking about with Pyrocreep. So you still have to make those connections in this place and you don't have, fundamentally, I can do anything For them to get these things. You have that the tower genius, and you have the insane trolley worshipers and you have the I mean everything has to sort of come together. You don't have the know-how. I mean hi, can you just? Can you fix this now? Next, but your friend is a scholar and so it's always that sense of context.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because it's always a sense you are fighting for something.
Speaker 4:Yeah, because it's like the warrior, can kill things really well. But they're kind of a bizarre little cryptid who you know tastes you know stuffed dinosaurs in their sack and no one understands why.
Speaker 2:Story-wise. This is also important. In my opinion, it is that because the character connections are the context in which they work, or the lack of context if they're that type of character Like it really does make a difference. I am really, really sorry, steve. We're fine. I can stop at any point, because I know this is not actually about books. It is about story structure, it is about piecing and how these things are done, but it isn't necessarily about books. It's just a type of game.
Speaker 4:Just to play Final Fantasy XIV, then you will understand.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know if people would.
Speaker 4:It's a lot of time investment, though I will admit that, a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you don't like them, don't I really the whole proselytizing. You must do this, you must do this, although I did admit, after I played Last of Us on the PS3, I tried to make everybody I knew play a bit. That didn't work out really well, did you? Ever I haven't watched a television show at all. The only thing I've done is play the game, and I don't like the newest remake at all. It's to uncanny valley for me, but it's like zombies and shooting people and I hate first person shooters. But the end of the first act was such a perfect gut punch for everything else that had happened and then it was like I'm doing the rest of this, I don't care. And then the end of it, I'll see you later, jose.
Speaker 4:Sorry.
Speaker 5:Jose, no worries, no worries, no worries. Thank you, bye, bye.
Speaker 1:Bye, bye.
Speaker 2:Was just phenomenal. And then that was another controversial one and I was still screaming about the ending of it and I said, ok, the difference in the reason, I'm not upset about it. Thomas said I'm not sure I would be happy with that ending and I said yes, but it's his story. And if you've been paying any attention to the character as the character is developed very well developed you know there's only one choice. There is no other choice this man is ever going to make. You know how it's named. So if you really thought that at the end of this this was going to happen, you weren't paying attention to anything that happened emotionally. So I wasn't upset by it, expected it. But boy, some people are mad. You ever going to play it, steve?
Speaker 1:Probably. I like MMOs a little bit too much, so I try to avoid that?
Speaker 2:Oh, no little fantasy. This is last of us. Last of us, oh, last of us, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think I played the first one a long time ago.
Speaker 2:OK. So at the end you know that the choice is he kills everybody or he rescues his daughter. Well, okay, you've played the rest of the game. He's gonna kill everybody, like there's no question. Of course he is Because he has just found his daughter, he has just found her game and there is nothing in the world that this man will not do to save her.
Speaker 2:So the idea that he could have saved all of America by the only thing that was totally true, that I thought, oh, this could cause you trouble in the future is that Marlene was right. If she had asked Ellie, are you willing to do this? Ellie would have said yes, no question she would have. She would have been willing to do it. And Joel did not give her that choice. And at 14, you could argue that she's a child and she shouldn't get to make that choice, but she was not a child who could not make that choice. So sort of interesting. But I had much television show. I watched one or two people complaining about television show or really liking television show, but I haven't actually watched it.
Speaker 1:I played. Well, it's been a while. I played Dark Age of Camelot back in the early 2000s. I was addicted to that game, not necessarily in a healthy way, but it was starting to take up too much of my time, so I had to stop. Be more productive with other things.
Speaker 2:I thought, wow, rating, when I got an offer for a book contract and I thought, no, I can't do that, that's my right to get to all. And then I thought, okay, well, camichael, now examine what you just said. So then I had to stop. But that was when there's 40, you needed 40 people, right? Yeah, basically, the median age of your entire guild was 14, I swear to God.
Speaker 2:And then so you get a bunch of 14 year old kids and mom. They called me mom, well and not. It was affectionately, eventually. But the 21 year old was saying I just stuck in a room with my mom, and then Steve, one of the 17 year old, said it really is. I said, okay, that obscene joke that you just told, pretend that you're sitting across from your mother and do it again. He said, no, that's gross. I said, exactly, you can want to go, do that, go to a different channel, and they're kids. But then, because they were kids it's a supervising thing, it's the. I want you to stay on your own side of the car, do not cross that line. See, we're going. You know, it's like I have to go to the bathroom. Didn't they tell you to go before we leave? It was just, it was a humor in it, but it was, it was that, and so eventually I had to quit that, and that was my first big MMO thing.
Speaker 2:And then Final Fantasy. I didn't start playing. It was COVID. Right, it's COVID lockdown. It's not seeing people. It's well, why don't we try this? We'll try this. Let's try this on a server that has my golds and I'm playing on.
Speaker 4:You're laughing, but not even you know him, just you know.
Speaker 2:I think he's gone back to wow, so he bounced around all over the place and he never finishes everything, anything but and I hate listening to him play again. But I actually, oddly enough, like his political takes for certain things and I was shocked when he came out using Twitter 4.2 million likes Twitter, he says. Read the whole abortion thing. He says if you don't have autonomy over what happens in your own body, you don't have freedom. I think everybody who wants an abortion in any state should be able to get one. And it's like, well, you're going to get it in the neck, but he doesn't care if he gets in the neck, because he was an odious troll for many years and he's totally used to getting it in the neck. But he couldn't understand why it's like 4.2 million likes. Like what the hell is this? Because he's Texan. So it's obvious. And the thing they don't get is the Texans that I know, the Texan writers that I know, are all very much that kind of don't tell me what to do, right, and so how this occurs in Texas, like Texas and their ridiculous abortion laws, I do not know. Like I can't imagine that Texans wouldn't be like you think it's on fire because people were telling them they couldn't do something they used to be able to do. But maybe I don't understand Texas because I don't live there. I'm Canadian. I live in Canada. So far all of this stuff has not crossed the border.
Speaker 2:But it was quite surprising. He's a bit of libertarian bent. He does not like the social justice stuff, but he does not like racist or bigoted assholes either. So it's kind of interesting because you can watch him do one of his funny political fakes or not funny, depending on who you are. Half of his comments are he's a libtard, half of his comments are he's a fascist. You know it's just and everybody means it, and he just doesn't care. So I find him interesting, as long as I don't have to watch him play games. Because he's playing games I think, oh my God, this guy is such a jerk. But he started when he was 13.
Speaker 2:And he has continued in the vein of a trolling. 13 year olds and he's mostly. He has come to well for some things, partly because everybody likes it when he watches hardcore WoW deaths. I'm sorry he knows the game so well. He's actually like my son. My son played when he was 12. So everything stuck in mind, so he knows exactly what's going to kill people. He knows exactly what's coming, because there's almost no mechanic and no mom. He doesn't know. So those people and in fact he has huge chunks of people who've never played WoW, who love watching these because he breaks it all down and so we. Then he said, if Blizzard does this, I'll play hardcore. And they did. So he started and I really wished that he'd started on the other server. Well, because if you have a huge server like it kills you if you're in the wrong place. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And he had so many people join who had never played the game before that the server liked.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm going to log in and you'll be there, you know, follow him around, yes.
Speaker 2:Yes, they, and then join his weird guild and then everything else, but they're it likes to serve. You do not want to be on any layer of his own because you won't be able to move. And as long as you are not trying to actually play the game, that's fine. But in hardcore, if you have bad server lag at the wrong time, you're dead. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you have to start all over again if you want to or you stopped. But, as I said, politically he's interesting. Also, he loves Lord of the Rings and has read them. He's read a lot and he has. Obviously, although he can, you know, he doesn't think he's a little stupid, exactly. Maybe he's read a lot. He knows a lot of stuff. So when he's not playing as one gold, he's actually quite insightful. He's a little bit business things. He's insightful about business gaming things. So he has a persona, I don't know. Daniel said, yeah, it's interesting to listen to him, not while he's playing a game thing, but then he gave up on money for a while and one of his friends screams at him every so often because he could make so much money if he was playing on his monetized channel. But he said monetized channels for pressure, so he doesn't do it. So he's got like 2 million people he's 60,000 people watching him play on Twitch no, monetized. Wow.
Speaker 2:I know All right, so thank you very much. Well, thank you.
Speaker 1:Where can people find you before we?
Speaker 2:go. I am. Hold on for two seconds and I will. I'm just trying to find my. I was just going to copy the link but apparently it's not working very well. So what about this? No, they've changed it, so let me just go to my. I know right, my profile. Maybe the profile has the I'm on blue sky. I got it. I found where it is. I'm blue sky. I will. I check Twitter, but I don't stay on Twitter anymore.
Speaker 2:I had to explain to my husband why I was so sad to lose it and he said you know why? Why Twitter? And I said when you first started Twitter before they had to change some things, it was just, it was interesting, everything had to be short. You were seeing what other people liked and you were seeing what other people liked was important. So I'm on Twitter, I'm following my few writer friends and a couple of my writer friends are following Tressie, and Tressie is one of the black academic feminists and I follow black feminist Twitter sometimes because of very different take on feminism and what's important, and I actually kind of snub with that more often If I have to take a side, which generally don't.
Speaker 2:But I found the rice guy, the guy with the 50 tons rice his brother-in-law had ordered and instead of like 50 pounds, he'd ordered like 50 bags of rice coming into his house and it's this long thing. That is hysterically funny, you find, and would I have looked for that? No, of course not. I mean, we would start looking for that. There's so many little things that you would find or trip over. So you find the medieval studies people on Twitter, and then you find this hysterical softies book book store person on Twitter because one or another of your friends has tripped over it. It's like you're not looking for things, but in your feet you'll find the oddest things and some of them are really useful. And science Twitter is really useful, and medical Twitter is really useful, and they're not things that I would have ever stumbled into before. So that's why I kind of missed it a lot. I missed the Muslim guy, I missed things that kind of widen your view.
Speaker 2:I watched Fergus you remember Fergus unfold on Twitter. So it's like, okay, black thumbs, twitter has gone off like a bomb. It's what is going on and you're getting them, your photos, and you're getting people because the police are there and somebody has been shot, he is dead, and now everything is going to help and I'm watching, watching the videos, watching what's happening. I said Jesus, fucking Christ, they have tripod machine. Who's police force has tripod mountain machines, like seriously, who's? And it's all there because people are in Fergus and they're kind of you know black in America and they it's. I said Thomas, it's like they just brought the army and this is please. And you read about the reports. You read the reports in the newspapers later and it could not cover any of it, just didn't. But that growing sense of absolute horror all of this unfolds made me understand why it was such a useful tool. The same with in Egypt. There was a just it's getting things out in a visceral way you can read about in the papers. But filtered.
Speaker 2:Well, you're not watching somebody get shot and die, which was actually quite terrible, and one simple, very upset about it, and it's like it. It. It's not the filter, it's just the range of experience. And then who's speaking, what they're saying, how they're arguing, what they're agreeing with, what they're disagreeing with, and so you, you take this whole range of opinions and you can start to kind of get some sense of the landscape that you don't get if you're just reading one thing. You got to read multiple things. So that's why I missed a little bit Twitter's not that now, so, but Blue Sky, as people have slowly migrated, is the place and gain. As I said, I don't do it for following. I do it sometimes. I want to see what people have to say, and for a while my entire feed was Pope hat and John Scalzi. I swear to God, it's like because I post a lot, and so that was kind of it. So, mostly there, they can come to my website and I will answer if they leave comments.
Speaker 1:Great, I'll leave that. I'll leave that link down below in the description for the podcast so people can can connect. I think we have any websites. That's important, especially with the different platforms.
Speaker 2:Oops, I said Michelle at oh my God, that's my mail address.
Speaker 1:No, I got you. I actually have your website pulled up here on my other monitor, so sorry.
Speaker 2:Michelle Sorry Michelle Sorry Michelle Sorry, michelle Sorry, michelle Sorry, michelle Sorry Michelle Sorry, michelle Sorry Michelle Sorry, michelle, sorry Michelle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it knows okay. And Chipi, where can people find you?
Speaker 4:Still put her around on Twitter. I'm on Blue Sky, but I don't say a whole lot there. You know, like Michelle, my feed tends to be a lot of pop-up.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just like, well, I do call me Melana, I really like right now, and she's been covering legal stuff too, from a slightly different angle. So if you're not reading, courtney, I follow her on Twitter.
Speaker 4:I haven't looked her up on Blue Sky.
Speaker 2:She's posting a lot on Blue Sky.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I'm also on the page doing forums and I lurk every once in a while on Michelle's forum you know when posts things there.
Speaker 2:Well, I'd say I recognize name though.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's true, I can also, you know, if you happen to join, I can also be found on her Patreon every now and then take her, so yes, I'll leave that next time.
Speaker 2:Well, if anybody wants to find the Patreon, they can go to the website and they can. There's a bar thing. I don't need to. Actually, the whole point of the Patreon for me was to publish the books properly and I can't. Like I have, I can and I could afford to hire the actual artists. Who's done all the rest of the books and like I could afford to do the audiobooks. I have enough money, so I don't need more people to join because I have enough money to actually do the publication. That was sort of it. So then I don't often don't. I don't often mention it, because it's the same thing. It's like I'm asking you to give me money that I don't need anymore every month and it just makes me feel guilty.
Speaker 4:Well, I just said I appreciate the snippets when you post them, but I was always. My view is and I think I've said that to you before was just you know, I'm here to support you, you know publishing these, I don't need you know to read anything you know, just you know, there'll be a book eventually, and that's all I need.
Speaker 2:The snippet things for me are not snippets, by the way, steve, I post half a chapter. I was going to post snippets, but then I started to look at it and I thought, okay, post this. Then there are going to be 20 people who are trying to. Well, x murdered me because somehow this is a spoiler. I can't post things out of context, so they have to be context-free, but even the names will be spoilers for some people. And fine, fuck. And of course I know now I see now it's late, so now I'm swearing, so I post the.
Speaker 2:I just started with the prologue and just posted that, because then anything in that can't be a spoiler. You just read the whole thing and then the second half of the prologue. It's the same thing. You could say well, this is a spoiler, except it's a whole thing. So no one's going to be screaming at me because I have. There's a gap between that. Somehow they won't be able to experience before they reach this point. But my initial thing had been I would post some kind of post-mix. It's just when I really thought about it. I didn't think that would work very well. Yeah, it's tough, but what can you do?
Speaker 1:Hold on one second, let's go ahead and thank you for Michelle. Michelle, thanks for your time and hope everyone has a fantastic weekend.
