Discovered Wordsmiths

Erin fell in love with Canada after working on a cruise ship and now lives in Calgary, Alberta.

She has written a kids book based on her daughters questions. Naturally, she named it Mommy, why?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1999507401/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1999507401&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=3249d283f492d099091d4b9707cb598c

One of her favorite bookstores is Owls Nest Books.

Josh and Rose are unique in that they have collaborated on a fantasy book , but are also mother and son. We talk about what it's like to work with someone that's related to you.

Since Josh is focused on a very connected universe, we talk about his worldbuilding. Below is a link to the wiki he is building for this.

https://www.worldanvil.com/w/talifar-joshforeman

And here is Rose's book on writing speculative fiction

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1640084479/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1640084479&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=363adc93b415b0a3f070a9b4f93de1d4

Transcription by otter.ai

0:51Welcome back to discover word Smith, second half of the podcast with Josh and Rose. This time, we're gonna be talking about the their writing together cooperatively. So we'll get into that in a little bit. But first, um, what are some things you guys learned? Writing together? Because rose, you said that you've written before, but now you're writing with somebody and it just happens to be your son. So what are some things you've learned differently? Writing with somebody as opposed to writing on your own?

1:21Actually, I think it's easier for me to write with somebody because then I have a direction that I know instead of where in the whole world am I gonna go? I like that part. I like assignments, I think some people would really hate to have an assigned plot given to them, or assigned character. But I like it. That's how I write most of my books worth what he does, first, we come up with this this species, human or otherwise, then we come up with its physiology, how it interacts with its its surroundings. And then we ask, what would make life hard for this thing? And, and then how does this thing overcome, based on its thought processes, and physiology, and etc. I mean, if you lay 1000 eggs, and one grows up to maturity, you have an entirely different concept of parity than, say, human debts. And so that's, that's fun for me.

2:32And it sounds like though, that you've still had that room to expand and grow, because you were saying how you basically came up with the one character, and you take some of what he has and refine it. So it sounds like you've got some constrict constraints, but you're still free to come up with new stuff and new directions. You both throw ideas off each other is what it sounds like.

2:55Yeah. So to me, it's important for, you know, like I've been talking about, I'm trying to design a franchise at the same time, that we're developing stories. And part an important part of a franchise is how are you working with collaborators? And so to me, that's as fundamental a question is, how do we make a good story. And so, in order to collaborate, to truly collaborate, you need to have a lot of freedom, be able to emotionally give a lot of freedom to your collaborators, otherwise, it's not a collaborative collaboration. It's a, you know, because sort of a I it's like a creative dictatorship, which I'm just not interested in that. That's, um, I, again, probably getting back to my career in video games, no one makes a video game alone. There's not one guy who sits in an armchair and says, I want to make a game about a spaceship flying through mines, shooting robots, you know, that's not how these ideas develop. It's, the programmer has come up with this amazing way to make a door that opens and the designer says, ooh, that would look good in the sight of a mountain. And the artist says, oh, what if there's, you know, a robot behind it, you know, and, and then it develops into something that, you know,

Rose and Josh are a mother/son co-writing team. They are working on a universe, not just a book. There are plans for multiple books within this universe.

Josh works on video games and uses that knowledge to help build his world AND design other items - like the sculpture used in the picture below.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QTQ3TDW/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B07QTQ3TDW&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=87c861249138f13dfc206b016b23b6bd

If you'd like a sample of their first chapter, you can read it here:

https://www.worldanvil.com/w/talifar-joshforeman/a/the-scarred-king-i3A-exile-7E-chapter-one-article

To find out more about their books, visit their website and YouTube channel.

https://breathoflifedev.com/

https://www.youtube.com/scrybe

Transcript:

1:53 Well, welcome to another episode of discovered wordsmith. And today I have Josh and Rose. How are you guys doing today? Very good. Oh, how am I doing? Except for allergies? I'm doing fine. Well, that's bad enough. Believe me, I know that I have had allergies my whole life. This is interesting for me, because you guys are not only the first Co Op writing partners that I've interviewed, but you're also family. So I get dinner review a mother and son team. I think that's pretty cool. And we'll probably talk a little bit about that. It takes a lot of patience. I'm trashes that part.

3:25Oh, he's not saying anything. So we'll just leave that there.

3:29Alright, so Josh, and rose, tell me a little bit about each one of you a little bit about what you like to do when you're not writing. How about you go first month, I garden a lot. Time.

3:45Got it.

3:47And she has always transformed any landscape that we lived in into a giant garden with the most variety of plants that the biome can possibly support. I think that's a way to describe our name. Well, Rosie, I don't go to public gardens much anymore because my Plexus kit is there's rose, you would probably get along with my father growing up. He turned most of our yard and we've got couple acres, but he turned most of it into garden. So there was gardens everywhere. So you'd probably get along with him very well. So what about you, Josh, where do you live? What do you like to do? Well, we both live in the Pacific Northwest. I'm near Seattle and she's in Vancouver just north of Portland.

4:33And so we have a lot of dark rainy winters. I'm mostly a homebody I do a lot of video games and TV and movies. When I'm usually I'm multitasking I'm watching those in the background while I'm developing on our tails from telephone series, or recording our YouTube videos or updating one of

5:00The 12 different social media platforms we're on. So I keep very, very busy. My my day job is I work on video games, currently working on a game called blancos Block Party, which is a big sort of party game where everyone gets together with

5:17what appear to be collectible vinyl figures and run around and play games together. Oh, nice. And do you have a company you work for? You just do this on your own? Yeah, that's, that's sort of my day job that pays the bills. I've been doing video games for 26 years now. mostly focused on art and level design.

Annabelle is a 10 year old girl that lives in London. She goes to school and enjoys the same games and movies and other activities that her friends do.

Annabelle is different in one very important way. She is a published author.

I didn't get the chance to talk with Annabelle directly, but I spoke with her mother and learned about Annabelle's process and what she did to get the book written and published.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08NYV8LLV/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B08NYV8LLV&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=f8ec9613ef724a0ce22aac9250452597

http://www.annabellejohnligali.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm_RsLdTbUUFwCZvkfXSK0Q

https://www.amazon.com/London-Eye-Mystery-Siobhan-Dowd/dp/0385751842

On the second half of the podcast with Caramel Lucas, we discuss being an entrepreneur in today's world.

Caramel has multiple streams of income because there are many things she enjoys doing. She's an entertainer and likes to entertain - whether it's on a YouTube clip, in a book, or onstage as a comedian.

We do talk about her publisher and the benefits that she has received because of it.

Transcript:

Stephen 0:47Alright, so welcome back Carmel to the discovered word Smith podcast. I have some questions after talking to you about your your business life, your intrapreneurship. You mentioned, like half a million things that you do. And I love that because I also have been doing some talks with parents, telling them basically, hey, the workforce that you grew up with is not what your kids are going to have. And you kind of have already embraced that. You don't just do comedy, you don't just write a book, you've got comedy. And you've written a book, and you have a blog and a podcast and you do all these multiple things. Was that a very conscious thing that you said, I want to do this to earn money and make a living? Or was it I kind of fell into it? Have you always wanted to do that? Give me a little insight in that because I'm very intrigued,

Caramel 1:41um, that the reason why that I do all the things I do is not because of money. I mean, it's because it's a passion. You know, and I enjoy doing the things that I do. You know, so, how I fell into it is because I love the entertainment world. Anything about entertainment is a lot for me, is this excites me and makes me feel good. Like, I just love making people laugh. I love you know, talk to people about you know, situations. I love writing about situations. I like to be creative about things that I do is it's just a passion for me. The money yeah, okay, is great, but it's not about that. It's about just seeing the spark in people's eye or making someone even if it's not a lot of people, these one person has smell that day, you know?

Stephen 2:31Right. Okay, so with that thought, if you had made your book came out, and people said, It's okay, and nobody bought it, would you still be working on a second book?

Caramel 2:42I would, nothing's gonna stop my motivation. You know, I'm a motivator. And I'm a go getter. You know, and you know, everybody's not gonna like what you do, you know, and that's life. So everybody's not gonna like what I do, but I enjoy what I do. That's all that matters to me. And if you like it, come along with me, let's go, let's hold hands and skip along the line, you know, down the way. But other than that, you know, I'm gonna continue doing what I do and continue writing and continue, you know, influencing and motivating, inspiring, just because you know, people don't like it. That's okay. That's okay. Because you get knows a lot of times you can get a lot of nose the four yeses.

Stephen 3:21Got right, you probably have not had a great night on stage every single night, you've probably not had every great post you make on the blog roof, dude, well, with people, it's part of the game,

Caramel 3:35it is part of the game, you're not going to please everybody because somebody is going to find something wrong. Okay. So being on stage or being on stage, and, you know, people laughing or people not laughing when people are saying this looking at you, like you're crazy, you know, it doesn't matter least you took that time to show them what you have. At that time, you know, you might have been off key a little bit or, or written something that wasn't the best writing that you've done, and they don't like it. But that's okay, because you're gonna get rejections regardless,

Caramel is a very busy woman. She writes books, but is also a stand up comic and a motivational speaker in Orlando, Florida. And it doesn't stop there. She has a YouTube channel where she shows a movie she made based on her book and she's even created a perfume. All that, and she's a mom also.

Her book is a steamy romance, because she's a romantic gal, that is the first of many books she is working on.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/149182686X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=149182686X&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=1009f7c376fae722d451c1263e8dcecf

Below is the movie she made based on her book:

https://youtu.be/ekUQo_2SCPg

Transcript

Stephen 0:43Great. Welcome to discover wordsmiths today. I've got Carmel Lucas Welcome to the podcast.

Caramel 0:50Hey, how are you? Hello, everybody.

Stephen 0:53Hey, good. And obviously if somebody is in a great mood,

Caramel 0:57you know what, you know, I'm always in the great move. When you wake up in the morning you should be you know, in a great mood because you see another day, right. So I know so I'm

Stephen 1:09alright, well, Carville. Before we started talking about your book. Tell us a little bit about who you are, where you're from some about your background, and maybe some of the things you like to do besides writing.

Caramel 1:20Oh, okay. Well, I am here in Orlando, Florida. And I've been here for like seven years. And I love it. I love the weather. The weather is great. And my background, I am a stand up comic as well. I also do motivate speaking. I I do creative writing. What else did I do? I'm a podcaster as well. And I motto and I you know, I'm an actress. So I do a lot of different things. Because I like to be motivated and always moving. I can't sit still for some reason. I don't know

Stephen 1:57why. It sounds like your days are kind of boring. Like you don't have much to do.

Caramel 2:03I mean, I have a lot to do, you know, I have fun and doing what I do. So it's awesome. And what I like doing on my downtime is spending time with my daughter. And or we go I like going to like different places like you know, racing, I like to go to Daytona and and watch the, you know, racing cars and I like doing fun things, you know, arcades and stuff like that, you know?

Stephen 2:29Right. And you said you live in Orlando for seven years. Where did you come from or that?

Caramel 2:35Well, before that didn't I was in Jacksonville for two but then I came from Connecticut. Yeah. So I was tired of the snow and all that, you know, when I was like, I need some warm weather because I love the hotness. So Atlanta was one of the states that I was like, yeah, that's where I'm gonna go because it's always hot and I just couldn't do the snow anymore. It was too much blizzards and all this extra stuff. Not for me.

Stephen 3:01You don't miss ski or anything.

Caramel 3:03I don't miss none of that. Okay. It was just too much for me. You know all that snow and and you know stay in Kohl's and some days you go to work some days you don't cuz it was blizzards a blizzard, you know. And it's just crazy. Like,

Stephen 3:18I like to focus on your book in the readers for this first half. The second half, I like to talk about the writing. But you've got so many things going on. I think we should talk a little bit about your whole entrepreneurial life.

Doug talks about finding the time to write and using the time you have to write. Authors need to get the words out, but we don't always follow our own advice.

Transcript:

Stephen 0:47All right, well, welcome back to the podcast, part two with Doug Lawrence. And we're going to talk a little bit about some author writing things. So, Doug, with this book that you wrote, what were some things that you learned, and things that you're going to do different for your second book, you know, the

Doug Lawrence 1:03biggest thing that I've found with writing the first book, the gift of mentoring, and now I'm working on this second one, it's the whole time factor, and it's being disciplined enough to carve out so much time a day to actually sit down and write. Because what I find is that it's very easy. With everything else that's going on, it's very easy to get pulled in different directions. And, and then the end of the day comes in the book is you haven't even cracked, you know, any writing or anything like that. So for me that it's definitely the discipline that's required to make sure that you have time allocated on a daily basis to write the book.

Stephen 1:48And what do you do to make sure you have that time? Do you have any tricks? Or, you know, what are you doing? Or what are your goals? What to you is a good amount of time?

Doug Lawrence 2:01I think, you know, and actually, I had this conversation earlier this morning was one of my close colleagues said to me, so do you have time carved out in your calendar, to do your writing today, and that's the big thing that I need to do is, if it's not in my calendar, then it probably won't happen. And so, you know, carving out, say, even if it's just an hour is just putting an hour in the calendar, you know, to be able to say, okay, from 9am to 10am, I'm going to write, and probably earlier in the day is better, because as the day goes on, you know, your creative juice in the tank kind of diminishes. So it's, it's being able to hear what's the optimum time and then how much of that optimum time Do I need to carve out and make sure that I do that on a regular basis. And I've, I've been negligent in doing that. And all that does is you have people that are, you know, wanting to read the next book, and you just keep pushing the date out, eventually they're gonna lose interest in, you know, following and waiting for this next book.

Stephen 3:10And I do that too. I think a lot of authors do finding that time blocking, put your mind in the right mental state. That Okay, at nine o'clock, I'm going to right so Okay, I'll take care of the dogs get some D and then your brain gets in gear. We were talking a little bit before about like the the flow state. Once you kind of it's Pavlov's dog, you know, you train yourself, okay, I'm ringing the bell time to start thinking about writing. And you start salivating words and you go off. And I know a lot of authors say oh, I struggled to write I struggled to write. And it's like, well, when did you plan to write? Well, I was going to try in the morning or I was going to try after lunch. They don't actually tell themselves I have to do this. And that I think becomes a big problem.

Doug Lawrence 3:57Yeah, most definitely. I was just going to say I envy people that can pack up all this stuff and move away to someplace and spend you know two months writing a book. I actually those are the people I really envy that. Just it's not going to happen that way for me.

Stephen 4:14So do you write at home Do you write Do you have a computer do you write on like a yellow pad you go to a coffee shop what's your what's your way of writing.

Doug Lawrence 4:24Now for me,

Doug Lawrence went from being a Canadian Mounted Police to a mentor which led him to writing a book on mentoring. He has spent his time with various groups being a mentor and teaching others about mentoring.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0147WVG6I/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0147WVG6I&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=9e939c565f6f7f5bc9dbec56d6741ace

Ken Blanchard is Doug's favorite author:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/074323538X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=074323538X&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=5f76981cf35544fc9b3454089a10e9e7

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0006530699/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0006530699&linkCode=as2&tag=saschneider-20&linkId=c84b13206726a746c553e873853e9a65

He buys most of his books digitally, but does like Indigo:

https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca

Links may be affiliate links.

This is a very different podcast than normal. This episode was actually recorded for my other podcast, Relentless Geekery, so you'll hear my co-host - Alan Baltis - on here.

We chatted with Ted for quite awhile about many things, most of which weren't book or publishing related. I edited the episode so that it focused on the book and publishing.

What also makes this weird is that Ted's books are comic books, graphic novels. It is a look at writing and publishing that isn't seen as much.

I encourage everyone to check out Ted's stuff. I love it. Even though the kickstarter is over, you can still get his books.

https://www.herotomorrow.com/

Transcript:

Stephen 0:41Welcome to a new episode of discovered roots. This is a special episode. It's a little different. I have another podcast called relentless geekery that I do with my friend Alan baltus. And on that episode, we interviewed Ted Sikora. He is from Cleveland does a graphic novel comic book called apama. And he has a new one coming out called bloom. When we interviewed him, he was working on his Kickstarter for bloom. Alan and I both love the stories, the art, everything about the eponymous series. And we wanted to make our first guest someone special. And we asked him and he said yes, it was a great time. Good interview. But because Ted's a writer, I thought it would be a great episode to listen to for discovered wordsmiths. I know most people probably don't know who he is. And it's a shame because I really love what he's done. So this is a little different avenue episode. It's not your normal fiction or nonfiction, but I love what he's done. This is something you should check out. Even though the Kickstarter is over, you can still go to hero tomorrow.com. order any of the books from Ted, any of his comics, check it out on comixology. They are fun, they are really reminiscent of the 70s. If you're like that era of comic books, or if you just want to read something that's not your typical Marvel DC. superheroes enjoy enjoyed the interview. And if you haven't figured it out, the other voice you hear is my friend Alan. I did edit this one down quite a bit. It's still a little longer than normal. But there's a lot of good information, a lot of good things Ted says about his path, his journey and working with Kickstarter. So enjoy.

Alan 2:26Ted is a delight to have you here everybody. This is Ted Sikora, who is a longtime Comic Book Creator, movie creator, head of hero tomorrow. enterprises. I'm not sure if I have exactly the word but has done all kinds of things that I have first stumbled onto at a comic con and then began to actively follow because I love the quality of the work.

Ted 2:47Thank you so much for having me.

Stephen 2:49Okay, so I'm sure. And hopefully, we've got some people out there going. I've never heard of this guy who is he? So go ahead, do some unabashed bragging about yourself. Tell us all about how happy you are to be doing what you're doing. Oh my god. Well, wow, there's no reading.

Ted 3:08Hey, thank you so much, guys, for having me on the show today, you you picked up on things that I hope we are accomplishing, you know that we're trying to do comics in a modern way in a new setting, but with a nod to the classics that we grew up loving so much. And, you know, trying to almost take like the Bronze Age of comics and evolve them in a different direction than the way things did evolve. So we kept, you know, the big captions on the cover and all the hype. And you know that these kind of exactly larger than life arcs that, you know, you really can't get from Marvel or DC anymore. And it's not anybody's fault.

Brooke and Stephen continue their discussion but this time they are talking about getting your book done.

Brooke is a wellness coach, so it would be easy to neglect her writing while working her day job. We discuss what authors can do to ensure they get their writing done.

Brooke has supplied everyone a copy of her 6 tips to getting done below:

BrookeDavis-GettingtoDoneDownload

And you can find her at:

https://www.brookedaviswrites.com/

https://www.instagram.com/brooke.davis.writes/