Discovered Wordsmiths

You may know Troy from his work with Plottr. We’ll get to that. Troy is also an author – which is one reason Plottr has been so successful. The people working there know writing and use that knowledge to fashion a great tool.

If you haven’t heard about Troy’s writing, tune in today as we discuss his books and writing. Troy has written over 30 books in the mystery and thriller genre. We discuss his books, which he doesn’t get to do as much as talk about the company he works for. The current series is focused on Max Boucher and we talk about book 2.

https://troylabertwrites.com

so I’m excited to get on with this. All today on Discovered Word Smiths. I have Troy Lambert and if you don’t recognize that name, go listen to a few other podcasts.

He’s been on several and we were joking at the beginning being on Jay Thorns. So I’ve snagged a couple people from Jay at times. Troy you do work for a company we’re gonna talk about, but tell, before we do that, we’re gonna talk about your books. Tell us a little bit about you and who you are, where you’re from, that type of thing.

What you like to do besides writing and working on software company stuff.

Troy: Oh, my goodness. So besides writing and working on software stuff I have two very talented dogs and one of them is a German Shepherd. And if you wanna establish a writing and basically routine for your life, get a German Shepherd because they’re very German.

And they’re going to they want a rigorous routine. You don’t take ’em for a walk on time. You’ll get out, you’ll get your steps, I promise. Nice. But anyway, , so I just wanted to throw that in there. But so

Stephen: that’s our best writing advice I probably ever heard. You wanna be a good scheduled writer, get a German Shepherd, get a German

Troy: Shepherd.

It’s that’s the answer to all of your, if everyone had one, the world would anyway. No, probably not true. But anyway but I’m like a lot of other people I wanted to write when I was young, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was six years old, wrote my first book. George and the Giant Castle never been published, oddly enough.

Didn’t get picked up. But but when I was about 14, I knew I wanted to write full-time. I knew this was it, this is what I wanted to do. But all of those wise people in your life, like college counselors and parents and stuff like that, told me it was an impossible dream. I said, you’re a creative guy, but you need to be able to do something that makes money.

And being a writer full-time is an impossible dream. And so I believed them and I tell people, basically three decades later, a collection of hairnets and name tags and various career starts, I decided I should probably figure out this writing thing because otherwise I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do with the rest of my life.

And things were just kinda a mess. I’m like, I didn’t know. I honestly didn’t know what am I gonna do? And so yeah, so basically then I decided to write full-time and my timing was pretty good. Indie publishing was just becoming an accepted thing. It wasn’t quite as dirty of a word by then.

And so there was that, there were a lot of small presses emerging. Because of the digital first options of publishing, there were a lot of small presses coming out that could, that would actually take on writers that were a little lesser known and you didn’t have to deal with the agent thing all the time and things like that.

So that resulted in, for me, a hybrid career. I’ve been working as a writer full-time since 2009. Oh, nice. Just

Stephen: a little bit before the revolution.

Troy: Yeah. Before the revolution happened, I was in the middle of the revolution and didn’t know I was in the middle of a revolution. I was just trying to exist in my writing career with what was happening and re and later on we all realized, oh, we actually were in a revolution, but most of us were just head down trying to get the work done and had no clue how this was disrupting the rest of the world.

Stephen: Most people know you from plotter if they’ve heard you on other podcasts, and we’re gonna talk about that. But other than that, you’ve written many books. I think Roland said 25

Troy: Finish number 31 about two weeks ago, . Wow.

Wow. We need update somebody. Yeah. I told him, I said, you gotta update the stats. Even though it’s one of those, when you say 25 or more books by that point, what people know about you is you can write a book. And you can finish one. And so I’m like, eventually the number doesn’t really matter.

It’s more just about the fact that I’m writing full-time and it that I know how to write and I know how to sell books, and that’s really what it’s about.

Stephen: Nice. That’s pretty good. So tell us about your latest book. I believe it’s called Teaching Moments. Give us a little bit about what it’s about without giving it away.

First, what genre do you like to write in?

Troy: So most of the time I write in mystery and thriller simply because that’s become my author voice, and that’s another, that’s a whole podcast by itself. But teaching mo what teaching moments about is it’s about a detective who I introduced in the first book in the series called Harvested.

And he’s a former Seattle pd. His family was brutally killed, and so he basically broke from the police department and decided he was going to investigate their deaths full-time as much as possible. But he needed to pay the bills. And so became a detective and got roped into kind of being a pet detective type thing.

So he gets hired for these cases, basically to find missing animals and things like that. So harvested is kinda about that. Teaching moments is the, it starts with a similar story, but it’s actually a serial killer thrill. It is a dual plot line. There are two plots happening exactly at the same time, and they don’t tie in until the very end.

And you’ll think that you know what’s going on about halfway through and you are wrong. You’ll find out in the end what is actually happening, and that’s without giving it away. That’s the plot of the story.

Stephen: And that sounds like something mystery people would be like, oh yeah, that sounds great.

And dual plot lines. I know that can be difficult. I bet there’s a good tool that could help you with plot lines in your book, .

Troy: There is came in. Talk about that. It came in very handy because honestly like for people who are new writers, writing a dual plot line thing is not something I’d recommend you do for your first book.

I always recommend you keep your first book rather simple. You’re showcasing to a reader that you know how to write and that you can finish. And when you add complication to it, there’s a certain amount of skill involved in tying those things together without giving things away. And things like that.

And it’s just a little more work. And your first books, you really just want to get your momentum. And then you can do the complicated stuff later. Because I didn’t even realize, I just thought, this is really cool to have two plot lines. And by the time I got done, I was like, man, this is a lot of work.

It was worth it. I love that book. It’s one of the favorite books of any book that I’ve written. And it’s just super, it’s really awesome the way things turned out, but that getting them to turn out that way was a significant amount of work.

Stephen: It’s something that, as you mentioned, your skill as a writer, as it grows, it gives you the ability to do that because you’re not so focused on sentences and words and punctuation cause and plot holes.

You, you’re able to expand. So it’s like you said, not something to tackle right away. .

Troy: Yeah, for sure. I don’t know if I, there’s some experienced writers, I’d tell ’em, man, don’t tag. This is just it’s a lot. It’s hard. Not to discourage anyone, but anyway.

Stephen: Mystery thriller.

Are there any books or authors you can think of that yours are similar to, to give people an idea of what yours are like? So

Troy: really it’s interesting because mine are more similar to Dean Coonish, if you mis mixed him with mysteries. So if you mis mixed him with like Lisa Scott line. Type books or clai is another one that comes to mind that’s got some thriller mystery ish type stuff where it’s more, there’s a little more psychological to it.

It’s a little bit darker in some ways than some other fiction like that. But it’s Dean Kunz. There’s always a dog in my books. People are always I obviously the German Shepherd has some kinda influence and and they’re also, most of the time they’re set in the Pacific Northwest cause that’s where I live and I love it.

Perfect. So there, there’s those two things that kinda combine. Although I have written one set other places, but yeah, so like Lisa Scott line type books, but with a Dean Kuk type feel, that sometimes a little paranormal stuff happening. Other stuff like that, depending on.

Stephen: And that’s a great answer for readers, it’s I know what I like and if you tell me this person’s similar, it makes it easy to say, yeah I wanna go check ’em out or Yeah, I don’t usually read them, so it’s probably not of interest. And I think a lot of authors miss thinking that way.

And I think it would help find readers. So I love your answer cuz it was very clear. I love that .

Troy: It, yeah, it’s helpful from an author perspective, it’s helpful to know whose books are like yours because there is this myth with young authors where they go and I I had it too, where I was like, who?

They’d be like, who are your books for? And I’m like, they’re for everyone. Everyone I love my books. Not true. Okay. I don’t care how great you are, it’s just not true. There are gonna be people that don’t like your books. I teach a lot about writing. There are some people that don’t like my teaching style.

Okay. Cool. There are other teachers out there. It’s amazing, right? Not everybody has the same taste in the same the same appeal. For me I’m like, it’s more about let’s focus on readers that do like this type of thing. And the ones that don’t, I’m not worried about. I’m not trying to read win over Nora Roberts band to go, yeah, you should read Troy Lambert’s.

Stephen: And there’s people that don’t like King and there’s people that don’t like KOTs and there’s people that don’t like JK Rowling and they’re all the tops you would say as far as sales and Debbie McComber. I wouldn’t read one of her books if you handed it to me for free, cuz it’s not what I like.

Troy: And right and Nora Roberts, she also writes under JD Rob, I believe it is. Is that right? Yeah. JD Rob which actually I love those books tho. That’s another author I would consider comparable is JD Rob. But I wouldn’t compare myself to Nora Roberts different pen name, completely different genre, completely different style of books.

So you know, there’s, like I said, everybody just has different tastes and the reason she has two pen names is Nora Roberts fans who like that genre are not gonna cross over to jd. Yes. For the most there will be some crossover and I But there will be very little because they’re so far apart,

Stephen: but she doesn’t hide the fact that she’s writing as different people.

And the point is to keep ’em separated. And some authors agree and don’t agree with that, but it seems to work so .

Troy: And I would say in today’s world, you’re not gonna hide a pen name for very long. No . Just to be honest with you, it’s not gonna happen. There are internet sleuths out there that are deliberately trying to find out who you are and so you’re not gonna hide it for very long. So in some ways I like her approach. You’re just coming straight out with it and saying, Hey, this is me and this is me too. And they’re both me.

Stephen: Yeah. So what type of feedback are you getting from readers for,

Troy: from your. Oh man. I’ve gotten some of those readers that are really mad because I kept them up all night and I’m okay with that.

That’s a great thing, is kinda my goal. But I’ve got really great feedback on both harvested and teaching moments as far as especially people identify with that main character. And I didn’t I, when I initially crafted him, he was one of those, I figured he’s just gonna be this kind of a cookie cutter, kinda the gray man or whatever.

The real, he’s the backdrop to the real story is the bad guys, but people really sympathize and like that character a lot. And so that’s one of the biggest feedback things that I’ve gotten. Is it changed, it actually changed the way I’m writing the next couple books in this series. And having him be a little more character focused on his character journey.

That series, I have five books planned and then it will be over. And I know what the last book is gonna be and I know exactly how it’s gonna turn out. Oh, in interesting. Cause my next question was gonna be, what’s your plans coming up? You’re, this is book two, you’re working on book three now, using the same plot or same characters and all that.

Stephen: What can you tell us about what is coming up from your books?

Troy: So the there’s actually a lot of things going on. So one of the books, the book I just finished is actually what’ll be the last one in this part of the Capital City Murder series. It’s a series. I started with another author he had to drop out because of some family health issues.

And so this book is actually a real pivotal one for that series cause it’s changing the tone of the series and where it’s going. To something that’s more because when I was writing jointly with him, it was kinda more his lead and his style, and now it’s flipping to mine. And so I, this book ha I had to have create some kinda a transition.

That’s what this book is one I just finished. So that’ll be out later this year. And then next in the Max series is a book called Compelled. And all I’ll tell you about the start of that one is, it’s basically about a serial killer who’s been repressed for a while and suddenly decides kinda like Stella gets a groove back, only more murder, like way more murder and And and my wife read the first part of that, which is you can find the introduction to that in the end, at the end of teaching moments. And she said, this is almost too real. This is very scary. And I’m like, It is very scary. It’s intended to be very scary. So great. Anyway, it, that one’s gonna be a lot of fun.

And then towards the end of this year, maybe a little sooner, depending on how fast I can write I’m actually starting a new series, which is a crossover series between murder, mystery, thriller, and romantic comedy. Wow. So it’s about serial killers who fall in love and it’s going to be a blast.

Stephen: So that, that sounds great.

I like comedy in my action, my mystery, my thrillers and all that. I’m not a huge mystery thriller reader by itself, but you throw a little comedy in with it and that’ll draw my interest. One of my newer favorite writers Jeff Strand writes comedy horror often, and I fell in love with it and it’s give me more

Troy: I love, that’s one of the ones that I love. Another friend of mine just writes Hers are almost straight humor and they’re hilarious. And I read them when I just need a break from the serious. Although I tell people you should hang out with mystery and thriller writers when you go to conferences and stuff.

And the reason is we get all of our darkness out in our books and then in bar, we’re really funny. So you should come hang out with us because we’re a lot of fun. Because we don’t, then in real life, we are not as inclined to wanna kill people,

Stephen: We’ll save that for the page, .

Troy: Yeah, exactly.

Works out, works for me.

Stephen: Great. So Troy if you were given a choice this series of books, would you like to see them turned into movies or a TV show?

Troy: Oh, for this particular series, I would say probably movies. And the reason is because each book is un, unless it would be more of a challenge to break each book into se, into what am I trying to say?

Episodes. Rather than, and make it into a season, each book would then be a season. But that would be, I think, more challenging. Now. I’m not like, I’m not a script writer. I go to guys that do write scripts and I say, what do you think of this? So I think they would do better as movies cause each one has a different setting and all that kinda stuff.

Nice. But the capital city murders books I have always thought would make a great television show. They’re shorter. So you could make shorter, almost short, little like triplets of the different books into, and you could make those into episodes and probably make a pretty cool series out of it. So that one I would think differently.

Just it all, a lot of times it just depends on the book and the story, how it would. Nice.

Stephen: I like that you’ve have different answers depending on the book. That’s something that all authors think about , but I think more of us are lately with all the streaming and everything going on,

Troy: well, and there’s a lot of small studios out there and a lot of independent stuff being made and it’s what do you like?

What do you want from sure, I would love for Netflix or somebody to just pick it up and it turned into something, but if a smaller studio made something first and then it caught on, I would not be upset by that at all. We’re living in a different world of streaming where you could have episodes on YouTube and be making nearly what you’re gonna make from a major series if you had the right viewership.

I just at this point, for authors and for others, I’d say just don’t discount the options that are out there. There’s tons of different ways to get your workout into the world and use them all. Yes. And have a good time with it cuz one of the most important things is that you’re having

Stephen: fun.

A agreed. Do you have a website Troy, that people could go to?

Troy: Yep. Is www.troylambertwrights.com. It’s in the middle of an overhaul but at the moment. But there are still some really cool book trailers there and there are places where you can order signed books if you’d like. Or you can find my books all over the place.

Just Google me and you’ll find it. And if I don’t come up, when you Google me, your internet service is down and you need to get in touch with your provider and as soon as they get you back up and running, you’ll be able to find them.

Stephen: Easy to find. Which is bad for the mystery people cuz who knows who wants to kill you but the other thing with mystery people is you don’t get harassed as much as other people do because people know, oh yeah, that guy knows how to kill people. I don’t think I’m gonna show at his. And he mentioned that German Shepherd, yeah. Which is when I’m doing podcasts and stuff, I’m like, if a German Shepherd comes in, suddenly I’m not being arrested.

Troy: The police have not shown up at my house. He’s actually mine. And he just wants to be a part of what’s going on and he’s wondering why he wasn’t invited. So we’ve

Stephen: had many four-legged furry sidekicks on the podcast at times, . So lemme ask you what are some of your favorite, besides Koons and a few others, what are some of your favorite books and authors?

Troy: Oh man. So I just read a book now. I can’t remember the name of the authors. You gotta have to look it up. It’s called weed Lie Here. And it is super. So I’ve read a bunch of books at the beginning of the, of this year. The other guy that’s one of my favorites and he’s a friend of mine, so I but I still don’t feel bad promoting his stuff with Vincent Zand.

He writes some great award, dark thriller type stuff. His Chase Baker series is one that I just eat up. And another one is Diane Capri, like I really love her. Her Finding Reacher series where she has these couple FBI agents that are chasing Jack Reacher and it’s that one’s a pretty cool series.

Like it was one that Lee Child said, Hey man, go for this. You should write it. That’s cool. Advocates her series. And she, for, and the other thing is she’s just such a wonderful person. But she writes some great like mystery thriller type things that really that’s the kind of stuff that I love to consume because of course that’s the kinda stuff I love to write.

The other one is the Gray Man series. The Gray Man series is, . Th those books are just a lot of fun. It’s like Jack Reacher with a guy that’s a little older, so I can relate to him a little more. So I do a geek podcast, geek nerd type podcast, and my co-host has been reading The Gray Man and ranting about it.

Stephen: So yeah I’ve seen the show and I’ve got the first book on hold at the library right now yeah.

Troy: Extremely well written. And again, another guy that’s a super great guy as well he’s a super great human being, but he’s, he writes some fantastic books.

Stephen: Great. Do you have any bookstores that you really like to go to close to you in your

Troy: town?

Oh, yeah. We, so we have a bookstore that’s called Rediscovered Books, and I have two locations in our area, so live about an hour from Boise area. Okay. So they have a bookstore there, and then they have one in Napa and Caldwell, which is another area around us, and they also have an online store.

And they are some of my favorite people on the planet. When Covid hit, they figured out how to weather that and they it’s been a bookstore for years and these, the owners are fantastic and amazing people. But the other thing that’s really cool about them is they’re very vested in local and indie authors.

They’re like, if you have a solid book, it doesn’t matter what your path to publication is, what matters is that you have a good story and they will actually find people in their staff who will read your story and they’ll champion your story to readers. So they’re actually not just about putting your book on a shelf, on a dark space in a shelf that says local authors in their store.

But they’re about showcasing local authors and really promoting them. Nice super great group of folks. And if you don’t, if you don’t have an indie bookstore in your area look them up and order from them online because it’s a great way to support independent bookstores and independent publishing because as we’ve seen in recent weeks, we, some of us already knew this, but big publishers have no idea what they’re doing either.

So

Stephen: Yeah I totally agree. That’s I why I always ask that question because I put links and a map on the show notes to encourage people if you’re traveling, go look up some of these areas and find some of these bookstores and goes to my kids And I, every time we’d go on vacation, going to a bookstore was always on the list of things to do, no matter where it was.

When we went down to Disney, we went to a bookstore and found one. So we’ve got some great bookstores. We found great stories.

Troy: Oh yeah, I can get lost. I’m, I have to be careful when I go into a bookstore, I have to set a timer or something because and have a budget restriction in mind. That’s the bigger thing.

Leave your friend. Especially if it’s a used bookstore. I walked in this used bookstore, so this friend of mine, I, quick story, this friend of mine and I wrote a non-fiction book about Star Trek called The Tile Trek. Ok. Ok. Talked about the philosophy of Star Trek throughout the years. And we’re, we were just finishing up writing this book and stuff like that. And I went to visit a friend of mine over in Idaho Falls, which is my hometown, where I grew up and I saw, Hey, there’s this cool new bookstore there and I haven’t been there. This in the place used bookstore. I’m gonna go in there.

And somebody had come in and sold to the bookstore owner their entire, like all these Star Trek books in his whole collection. And so I went home. To Boise with a lot more than I left home with. Yes. But simply because I found that and I was like, that’s a complete collection. Like what?

Why did you sell that to this store? And I go up front, not too sheepishly, like here, I will just take this stack. Just ring them up. I didn’t look at the prices, I just swiped the card at the end and just hope. Come on. But,

Stephen: Yeah. Speaking of Star Trek you’ll probably appreciate this.

I got to talk to Armon Shimerman on the podcast cuz he wrote a series of books. It was such a wonderful conversation, such a great man. But it was so hard not to geek out , but I will say with all my nerd friends I had a lot of nerd credit going on there. .

Troy: Yes. And here, so here’s the thing about Star Trek too, is this is a very unifying thing, and this is probably a whole other topic, so we won’t dwell on it for too long, but it’s a very unifying thing.

We go to conventions, fan conventions, and we literally, even if people don’t buy the book most of the time, they come up and they buy the book and then they talk to us. But sometimes they come up just to talk to us when they learn. It’s about the philosophy of Star Trek. It starts this huge discussion that’s An amazing unifying thing of all of us surrounding this fake universe that was created by Gene, rod initially.

And we begin to talk about how that has impacted the world and how the world has then in turn impacted Star Trek, which is exactly what the book is about. And so for me I don’t really care how many copies of that book we sell. In some ways what I care about is the conversations that allows me to start with people about aspirational thinking like that, that can move us forward better as human beings.

So I love that.

Stephen: And that really fits Roddenberry’s original thinking of the future in Star Trek. You’re living it right there.

Troy: Yeah. It’s actually, it’s absolutely amazing. It’s an amazing.

Stephen: All right, so Troy, before we move on, then talk author stuff and more about plotter. If somebody came up to you on the street and said, Hey, I heard you’ve written some books.

Why should I get your book and read it? What would you tell ’em? You know what

Troy: This is interesting cause Rod is gonna ask this question a lot, and the question I lead with first is I say, what else do you read? The question, the reason for that is very simply, this is exactly what we’re talking about before.

My books are not for everyone. So if that person tells me that they read Epic Fantasy, Brandon Sanderson stuff, I’m gonna say, you know what? You could pick up my books if you’re interested in a little crossover to mystery and Thriller. They’re thrilling, they’re exciting. There’s clues there.

They’re a lot of fun, but you may not be the type of person who likes to read about serial killers. Now, if you like True Crime Pro podcasts and you like solving mysteries and figuring out on TV before the. The TV detective does and those type of things, then my books are for you. They have clever twists, clever ending.

You’re almost never are you gonna start one of my books and know what’s going to happen in the end. Even if you think you do it, it’s like the guy that’s arrested in the first 20 minutes of law and order, we know you didn’t do it. We’re just waiting for the real bad guy to show up. So it’s kinda a similar thing, but I always ask him first, what do you read and see if it’s even related.

So if I even wanna make that kinda recommendation to them.

Stephen: And I really like that because it’s very true. You don’t want people reading your book that don’t read that type of book because that’s the ones where you get the bad reviews. It’s I normally read romance and this sucked well cause it is not a romance

Troy: well or things like the goat there, there are too many cuss words.

Okay. But I warned you, at the outset there’s, it’s pretty clear what type of book this is going to be. Cause I had a friend of mine that he had one and like he got this scathing review that goes, this was not Christian fiction at all. And I’m like, this is not in any Christian fiction categories on Amazon at all.

I dunno how you found this book and then said there’s just certain qualifiers that you say cause not everyone’s gonna like your work. My brother does not read my book. It’s okay.

Stephen: Yeah. My, my first book, my mother read it, and the only thing that bothered her was I needed the main character to be an orphan.

So for the first five chapters, she’s in this happy household and then they get killed and she couldn’t get past that. And I’m like, I needed it to happen in the story Yeah. Yeah. It there are certain triggering events that people are going to they’re gonna say, okay, I was gonna read your book, but this just, I couldn’t go past that point.

Troy: And it’s perfectly okay. It’s, again, it’s one of those things that every, not everyone’s going to love your work, so be okay. The sooner you’re okay with that, the easier it are. It is to look at reviews, the easier, it’s to just move forward with your author career.

Stephen: Agreed. Agreed. All right. Great. Troy, thanks for sharing all that, because like we talked about, I’m betting any authors listening to this probably didn’t even know you’ve written books.

And I know we get a lot of mystery readers. That’s a huge genre. Hopefully we’ll turn some more people onto your book. Thanks for sharing them.

Troy: You betcha. Thank you. Thanks for letting me.

A different episode for the podcast today. We start out with Roland and I discussing author news. As always, its fun to deep dive into what’s going on.

My guest is Jacob Way from Deep Water Gaming, so we don’t talk books. Instead, we have a great discussion on writing as it pertains to comics and games and how author’s can put creative effort into these other avenues to coincide with their writing. I also try to ask some questions of interest to educators and parents and what kids can do now to prepare for this type of career in the future.

Jacob talks about being creative and how that starts at an early age, but how author’s can channel that into more than books. Gaming teaches kids lessons, but so does interacting with content. And kids can develop a passion for entrepreneurship at an early age – which is something that happened to Jacob.

https://deepwatergaming.com

Roland brings us some great discussions about:

I attended Origins game fair in Columbus and guess who I ran into!

o today, interesting, exciting episode for my podcast and for my other brand line of work. I want to welcome Jacob way to the podcast. He is the president of Deepwater Games. Jacob, how are you

Jacob: today? I’m doing fantastic. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Stephen: And I must say I’m very jealous of your hair.

I saw the picture. Yeah, the camera doesn’t get it all. . No it doesn’t. It’s very nice. I, my son has long hair. I got not the front long hair and I used to have, not as long, but longer. Very jealous of that. . So Jacob, tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what you do and that’ll lead to the rest of the conversation, cuz normally anyone listening is hearing about a new author with a book they’ve not heard of before.

And then we sure discuss some author stuff. This is like a little different, but I still think it’s tied in. So give everyone a rundown of who Jacob Way is.

Jacob: I’ve been doing entrepreneurship for the last 10 years. I actually started as a print broker that brokered printing of comic books, board pgs, all sorts of different types of books from Taiwan.

And I started that when I was 23, 22. I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but , I had been doing that for a couple years and then I got into the board game space. So entrepreneurship has just been my path for the last 10 years. And now I run Deepwater Games, which is a board game company located in Saginaw, Michigan.

If you’re a Michigan Knight or if you’re familiar with the Midwest, we’re right here. Okay. Detroit is about an hour and a half away. And then we’re in the middle of this, not in, nearly in the middle of the state, but close to the middle of the state. And we make games that are approachable.

We try and do games that, that fit in our mission statement. And when I say games, I talk about tabletop games. So one, it has to be a game that is easy to learn. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s devoid of strategy but you should be able to learn it pretty quickly. Two, it is a theme or a story that is not just your traditional castle, European castle story, right?

We want to represent more than just the traditional story structure. And then three, it has to be affordable. So almost all of our games are under $40, and most of them range in the $20 price point. We had our most success when we first started our fourth or third game, something like that.

Was welcome to which was so popular that Daniel Radcliffe talked about it on people in People Magazine which was just nice. Yeah. Crazy okay. , Harry Potter himself is talking about one of our board games. And now we have a game called Monstrosity which sounds like it’s right up your alley as it’s about art and teaching and learning.

And it’s currently in all 1800 target stores as well as 600 Barnes and Noble

Stephen: stores as well. Beautiful. Beautiful. I must say I wish you hadn’t said that cuz I already bought five of your games and I almost seem to collect games more than I should. I was just at my cousin’s yesterday.

We played four different games and taught them all new stuff. I’m like the game master. Oh man. Yeah, I love that.

Jacob: Yeah, we need more of you my friend . I

Stephen: love, yeah, I love games. So here’s where I thought it would be great to talk to you for the podcast for two reasons. We have authors that listen and we have new authors I interview and a lot of times we’re talking about not just doing stories, but branding and other avenues that branding can take for other revenue streams, which comics and games is something that could connect to that.

Yeah. And I also do a lot with parents, educators for kids, and I think we’re missing an opportunity teaching our kids entrepreneurship. And when they get older they’re like there’s no jobs. They’re all taken away by the robots now that I can get, and I don’t wanna go to school and spend $300,000 and then get a $25,000 a year job as is becoming much more feasible not to go to college. That’s a whole nother discussion, . So what you have done is a great path that is a choice that they have more than ever. I think it hasn’t been since like the fifties that interpret ownership and starting your own business has been such a solid choice for people starting out and absolutely moving on.

And it’s not like you have to, oh no, I can never get a job somewhere. It could be part of, it could be the only thing it could grow. And you’ve even changed. So I just wanna jump in, dive in, have some questions, and if there’s anything you think would be super relevant, throw it on out. Just a little discussion on it, sure.

Jacob: Oh, one thing before we jump on I completely forgot to mention when we first met and talked Deepwater games as part of Oxi Media, yes. Oxi Media is a conglomerate of different companies including. Source Point Press, which was a is a comic book publisher, probably the biggest in Michigan, if not the Midwest.

And for about 18 months I served as publisher for Source Point Press. I dealt with Diamond Comics and Yes Simon and Schuster and we sponsored, we were the bad sponsors of New York Comic-Con while I was publisher. I have a lot of comic experience as well, so we can dump jump into there

Stephen: as well.

Yeah that’d be awesome. And we won’t talk about Diamond cuz we might keep things upbeat and happy. . I, I used to do small magic store buying, selling, trading magic cards and dealt with Diamond. Now my son works at a store and deals with Diamond, so that’s all we’ll say about that. Oh boy.

but your table was the whole reason I regretted taking a credit card to that show. . I ended up with board games and comics. My son had helped me carry stuff out f fantastic. These guys owe me. That’s what, that was the deal. . So let’s at, let’s look at the interpreter ship first. So you are not as old as I am.

And you’ve been doing this for about 10 years. You started young about where My son’s at. Why did you choose to go jump in and say, Hey I wanna do games, which isn’t like I’m opening a restaurant or starting a auto mechanic store. I wanna do games and see if I can find people to play them, and I wanna see about creating.

Why did you decide to do that and what were some of the struggles you had to overcome with that?

Jacob: That’s a great question. So I’ll start with. Since I was five years old, I’ve been, I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur. I still can’t spell the word though, I’ll tell you that. I can’t say years old today.

There’s like way too many Rs and E in there. It just makes no sense. But yeah I’ve always been fascinating with business and I think it’s mostly my genetics. My, my grandfather was an entrepreneur. I never met him, unfortunately. He, a famous story about him is he had all of the franchise rights for Wendy’s in Texas.

Unfortunately, he sold those rights very early and the Wendy’s history and did not really cash into that. But it’s just been in my blood of tra blazing trails, right? And trying new things. And I actually did not start in board games. My first business was the print brokerage.

And the focus actually was on comic books. And if we go back a little bit, even farther I were, was starting businesses all throughout my childhood. My earliest known business that I can remember is I would cut limbs off of the trees of my grandma’s trees, which she loved

And then I’d fastened them into weapons and sell it to the chil children in the neighborhood. Beautiful. Yeah.

Stephen: It’s, you should have followed that up with packs of band-aids. So after you sold the weapons Oh, yeah. You know that Yeah. Missed opportunity

Jacob: at eight. I hadn’t learned about vertical integration yet.

It’s I was a slow learner. , and then I would sell Pokemon cards. I wish I had actually kept that business up. And then I played chess competitively for a little while. And then I was doing chess coaching. Business when I was around 18 years old. So it’s always been something that I’ve been experimenting with.

And it’s really interesting to me when you do see kids that have that spark that wanna do something that, that know, that business is like something they’re passionate about, because it just like art, it happens at a very young age and fostering that is extremely important.

My mom is a single mom and she went to college while she was raising me. And my older brother who’s actually a writer wrote on a couple of our comic books nice. Yeah. And she fostered that, that entrepreneurship, she encouraged it. She tried to connect me with different people that, that would show me the path of how to monetize that.

She really didn’t have that ambition herself. Skipped the generation she at least recognized it in me and tried to foster that. Love that. The path of, yeah, and the path of entrepreneurship is, is winding right? You’ll go one day and I was actually a wedding photographer for a little bit, there’s all sorts of different businesses that I thought this is the business that I was meant to be in.

And in reality it took a lot of those situations for me to realize what I really want to do and to say board games is the end. Goal and the end of my journey that’s where I’m retiring, I would say is probably not true, but I have found what I like to do, and that is helping creators create.

I’m not a creative person as far as writing and drawing goes. I’m creative. Business wise. But I’m very good at talking to creators and finding a way to make what they have in their mind or have on paper and monetize it onto the market. I don’t get bored by spreadsheets.

I don’t get bored by sales a lot of those things that creators don’t necessarily like to do. And that’s where I’ve, where I found my niche, I guess the best way to put it.

Stephen: And I think that, oh, I’m sorry. I think that tagline, whoever I talked with at the table, that was what they said, that kind of sparked me.

Oh, okay. I, if that’s what their, their goal and mission goal is, then that’s exactly somebody I wanna talk with. And I love that what your purpose is e Exactly. That. . Yeah.

Jacob: And that’s the cool thing about Axi Media too, is they have a lot of people at that company that still there today that are there to help creators create.

And there’s a lot of creators there still to this day, right? A lot of the founders are writers and artists and stuff like that but yeah, I mean that having those businesses that failed, having those jobs that didn’t necessarily work out of just take you on a path and I think that one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life is there is no such thing is failure.

It’s just or failure isn’t a bad thing, really. You. . Just because something doesn’t work out doesn’t mean that, you know it was supposed to work out. Doesn’t mean that you did something wrong, it might just be that thing isn’t meant for you. And there’s a lesson still be to be learned in there.

Stephen: And look looking at it from the author aspect be before even looking at it from my parents and kids aspect in the author aspect helping creators create, I think a lot of authors get so focused on, I’ve gotta write, and yes, you do. The thing is write your next book. That’s the best marketing for your current book.

Get a series and people buy series more and all that. But the numbers show that you gotta have Like the book, 20 books to 50 K. You actually gotta have 40, 50 books before you start seeing enough of a real world profit that you’re making money. That’s what the latest surveys, numbers and all that show.

And I think for me, it never was, I just wanna be a writer and write and that’s all I wanna do. It was always other things. I actually have created a couple board games which I should talk to you about, off, off of this interview. But it was always more about the being creative and what I can do with that.

And you mentioned something else for the entrepreneurship, that it’s not you’re not stuck. Even if you have a job that someone hired you, they tell you, be here every day at this time for this long. We’ll pay you this much. Here’s the job functionality. Then the stuff you do, you, you’re stuck.

You have to do it what they say, when they say it, how they say it. And you do that every single day. . Whereas you, if you get an idea, you can go in another direction. You can add that idea on. And I had an argument with a guy during one of my talks once where he was like, oh I’d never want my kids to do any of this cuz I want them to be guaranteed they get a paycheck.

I was like, where the heck is that happening at? Cuz everybody’d love to know that . And the point was if you enjoy what you’re doing and you’re creative, you can always find a way to bring the money in. And that’s kinda the message. I’ve tried to get out with some of my talks.

Jacob: Yeah, no I agree with you. Like there, there is no guarantees on life, right? There is no guarantee that job that you have currently, it’s gonna be stable. Building value is what entrepreneurship is really about. And even if you have to. Straight from that path.

I’ve had times in my life where I’ve had to get a real job. For a little bit. And I still bring those lessons I learned from entrepreneurship, how to build value into those companies. And the other thing I love about both comics and writing stories and board games too is, and I, and some video games, is that it is, those are all things that kids younger than 18 can start doing, can do right away.

Stephen: You even said you, you made weapons. It’s old them I have a whole box inside of board games. I created Moon, I as a kid, based on all my favorite movies, Indiana Jones star Wars, et and I look at ’em now and a lot of ’em are real, like really bad. But I, that’s, I got started, I got the skill, I got that spark and it built, and now I created a game that people actually played and enjoyed and I’m working on another one.

And same with the writing. Kids can write they don’t have to wait till they’re 18. Yeah. Or outta college at 24. And okay, now I’m gonna be a writer and write. Cause if they have the same 10 to 15 year path that an adult would have, then let’s start ’em when they’re 13. That way when they’re 23, they’re already going with full-time income as a professional experienced already.

That’s my whole goal with kids is these are skills they can do younger and by the time they’re 18, 20, they’re rolling and they know what they’re doing.

Jacob: Absolutely. The. Board games are about problem solving, right? That’s the best way to look at it, is if you break it down into its base base equation, right?

Is that you’re putting a problem on the table and you’re trying to figure out what the solution is. And how do I make the most points in my turn? How do I I know my opponent’s plan, how do I beat them in that plan, right? So problem solving as a skill is something we learned very early.

So really having a way, not just Hey, cr, express yourself creatively, but also creating something just in general, right? Like creating a set of rules, creating a scenario, creating pieces. All of these skills that you’re teaching your child doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re.

Only applicable in the world of board games, right? Hey, I’m teaching my kid how to play a board game or make a board game. That’s what practical applications does that have? But in reality it has a lot of practical applications. When I was in high school I studied and played chess competitively, and that problem solving aspects go back to I still use them today.

18 years later, I’m still using some of the things I learned in chess on a daily basis. I don’t think, I don’t think you should parents shouldn’t think of the actions and the things that they teach their kids. A direct application, right? This should not be if you teach your kid how to draw a comic or write a comic, that doesn’t mean that they have to then become and take this 15 year path to become a comic book artist or writer.

It’s a skill that you’re teaching them that they, that then can distill different knowledge in different ways. Oh, this is how I express myself. That is one of the most important things to learn as a kid, is how to express yourself, right? Who are you as a person? Very true.

Yeah. And e even to today when I analyze artists, when I analyze artists for comic books and I analyze artists for board game I looked a lot at has this person figured out their style? Is this an imitation of somebody else or is this person’s style?

And it was, , it didn’t really matter necessarily. Okay did they accurately represent swords correctly? Did they get the reflection of the water? Correct? It’s not about accuracy, it’s about how you express yourself. And that’s so much more important I feel like in, in life than just learning.

Oh, okay you’re gonna learn all of these elements of art and you’re gonna become an artist. No just like that parent is really concerned about having that kid having the stable income it should be way more important. That kid feels fulfilled in this stuff that they do in life, right?

We spend a majority of our waking time working . You’re not gonna get around it, oh, unless you’re born into money, right? . But you’re not gonna get around this idea that you are spending most of your time. working. And if you can find something that is enjoyable, like I, I feel like I’ve found that’s much more important than the amount of money you earn doing that thing, as long as you can make a living, being happy is so much more important.

Being fulfilled is so much more important. That’s agreed. And being, teaching your kids how to express themselves is the first step to that in my mind.

Stephen: Agreed. And if you know how to create, you know how to think logically. Yeah. You know that you’re never really stuck. I know people who get nervous that, oh, I think my job might disappear.

I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’ve been out of a job for three weeks and it’s just so make the money. And I, as someone told me that, they’re like, look, if you’re an entrepreneur and you need money, then figure out how to make that money. And that’s the end line. Does it always have to be writing the next book, writing a short story?

No. It could be creating a board game, which authors if you like, oh, maybe I’ll just whip up a board game. Create really coming up with a concept and then good game mechanics is way harder than you would think. it take even a simple game like I did, took way more iterations to get it, so it was playable.

But then for kids, also, the other thing that it teaches them, whether it’s drawing or creating a d and d module even or something is that they. One of the studies I mentioned in my talk is the rate of anxiety and depression in young people meaning under the age of 30 has risen like 18% in the last five, six years.

And yeah, part of that is they’re being told, go find a job and get the gold watch after you retire. And that doesn’t exist. So they get out into the world, they’re like and then they get a job that’s horrible and it’s no wonder they’re getting depressed and anxiety ridden. Whereas if they’re at a young age shown, look, you can draw this picture, you can make art, you can create comics, you can make board games, you can write stories, you could figure out some online thing.

Now for stores, t-shirts as big, you know that they, if they see that and it breaks through the I have to get a job somewhere else. Then they’re empowered to go do that and the world isn’t as scary and life isn’t as scary and they realize their lifestyle, they can make choices. That’s another part of my talk.

If you have a job where you have to live in New York, yeah, you have to make a lot of money and you have to make sure you keep that job. But if you’re doing that same job, but living here in Ohio, you don’t have to earn quite as much money, . So that takes on the anxiety away. So that’s the other big thing, is it teaches kids and empowers them and it helps break through some of the scary adult life,

Jacob: Yeah, no, for sure. And that’s something I’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs that are on their beginning of their journey, right? Is you have to figure out exactly how you define happiness, right? What is happy to you? Rarely is it a dollar amount , right? Rarely is oh, happiness is a hundred thousand dollars every year.

That’s not true. That’s not like I could be making a hundred thousand dollars a year and be in Manhattan and feel like sh crap, I could be in, I could be making a hundred thousand dollars a year and live in Ohio and feel much better because it’s much more affordable. Right?

So happiness, you have to figure out what that is. The other thing is that creating things in my mind, one of, one of the cool things about when you start creating things and realizing that you can create board games that people enjoy, you can create comic books that people wanna read is that everything around us has been made by a human, everything around us the computer that we’re talking on, the webcam that is filming us, the coffee that I’m drinking, , it’s all made by humans. Like this, these things are made by people. just like us just the same flaws. And it’s easy to be like, oh Nicola Tesla and Albert Einstein.

These people were the unachievable le levels of reality. But in like how many of those inventions are you using on a day-to-day basis? There’s other things that are in your life that other people made that are much more realistic. And I think realizing that you can have an impact on life itself is extremely important.

The things that are built around you, the road that you drive on is built by somebody just like you. And

Stephen: the improvements and the improvements in the road material. Somebody thought of that Sure. Some engineer probably went to school, learned new materials, and we’re learning new manufacturing techniques.

But somebody said hey, let’s use this hexagon, carbonite factored material for a road, and how much better is that? And then the business sprung up. And I know the last some of the studies I’ve seen that the rate of single person employment jobs that they’ve started has gone up 20% since Covid started 25% over Oh yeah.

Previous years instead of 2%, things like that. And there’s endless opportunities.

Jacob: Oh, absolutely. Our country was founded on small businesses. Yeah. And that’s the backbone of our economy. Yes. People don’t realize that it’s easy to think oh wow, Walmart has a hundred thousand employees or something like that.

It’s that’s not the. Majority employer, it’s usually small businesses, right? You go drive down your street and see how many companies you pass that have less than 10 people that work with work for them. It’s crazy to think.

Stephen: Yep. Absolutely. So what do you, when you say you help creators create, what exactly do you do to accomplish that?

Jacob: That’s a great question. My role in most creation processes varies dramatically. So sometimes I’ll be brought a product that is pretty well thought out as far as theme, as far as marketability, as far as concept core mechanics of the game. Vice versa with comics, right?

There’s a lot of similar thoughts in comics. Just different things like is this story captivating? Are the characters relatable? What perspective are you telling the story from? I see a lot of writers don’t really think about perspective, but in reality, most of the time you have to be like, who is telling the story where, you know, what information do they know, where are what’s still a mystery to them?

So it depends on where the product is brought in on the process. So I’ll give you an example. I have a game right now that we’re working on. It’ll be released at GenCon of this year. And the concept. The mechanism of what you do in the game was very solid, very enjoyable, very approachable created conversation and this is a party game.

So that’s, those are things are very important. But there was no theme and there was no hook. I went into the pro project thinking about those things. Okay, what is the theme? What is the hook? Where are we? Where do we. Hit so that we can sell more units of this game. Cuz I know that the mechanism, the way that people play the game is very enjoyable.

When I help creators create it’s really dependent on the product and it’s dependent on where they are with the product. But in the majority of the situations, my expertise lies in markets, understanding mass market, understanding, hobby understanding Amazon Convention, sales those places, they look for certain things.

They look for a game that’s understandable by just looking at the cover. They look at the back of the box is the back of the box, explain the game in three simple steps. Those things are difficult as a creator because you get kinda wrapped. This is the thing, and I know so much about this game, and like, how can I tell the story?

And I see this a lot with comics too, right? It’s like, how can I tell the story of my comic book in a paragraph on the back of the bo back of the book, , right? How do I summarize 18 months of my writing and to a single paragraph? And it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and be too close to a project so that you can’t easily summarize it to consumers, right?

And that’s why you need to find people that, that can help you with that, right? Either it’s an editor or it’s a co-writer, or it’s what whatever you need in that situation. Sometimes it’s just nice to have that outside fresh perspective. So that’s where I see myself fitting in a lot of these situations is assessing the marketability the sales ability of the product and expanding on it.

And another thing in board games, it’s not necessarily in comics or books, is expansions how do you continue the product? How do I guess you’d look at it as sequels or right storylines or different arcs for comics, but how do you continue the product so that it can continue?

Staying on shelves how could it keep fresh in the minds of the consumers? So that’s kinda where I see myself helping creators the most.

Stephen: So a lot like an editor. The creator came up with it and you help fine tune it from the outside perspective. And like a publisher if someone’s going more traditional route we’ve got this product with the editor and the creator have created it, but now we need someone to help get it out there and put it out in the world.

And as you’ve proven, you started a company that does all of that, and you get everyone. But it’s not saying that somebody could not say I have this game and I wanna put it out there. We have more avenues for that in today’s world than ever. Absolutely. So it’s still, you can have that choice if I like making games, but I don’t necessarily wanna spend all the time going to the cons and setting up tables and pushing it.

Then find somebody like you and make that agreement. And everyone does what they do best. I’ve got four or five game ideas that I if I sat and worked on ’em and really focused, instead of just toying with it on weekends, I could have five games in within a couple years. And it would make more sense for me to hook up with you to push that out.

And that’s the other thing I think parents with younger kids don’t understand is, doesn’t all have to fall on the shoulders of that kit. They, any business they wanna run doesn’t have to be full-time. It could be part-time. And there are other companies out there. Fiver is a great example as something that people can get work and do full-time work.

But not have to necessarily do everything if they don’t wanna start from scratch. And I like that aspect of what you’re doing with that much. It sounds much more approachable than bigger name game companies, .

Jacob: Yeah it, it depends on the way I always phrase it those same people that are looking at self-publishing and looking at trying to start a business is like, are what is, what do you want to do, right?

What is, if you close your eyes and you said, okay, this is what I’d want to do in this creative process, and if I then have you open your eyes and say, okay, but what, how do you feel about tape? How do you feel about boxes? How do you feel about shipping rates? Those types of things that are like business Bs, right?

What is a purchase order? How do you a acquire distribution deals? Those things that like. Boring business. Things in the creative world are very important if you wanna run your own business and self-publish. Now, if you define your success differently, right? And you just say, I just want people to read my pro, my book.

I just want it to be out in the world. And maybe that success means I put it on Amazon Kindle. It doesn’t have to be in bookstores. It doesn’t have to be in Simon and Schuster or the he who not must not be named. Like defining your sec success differently means that you can do different things and you can decide differently if you want a publisher or not.

And self-publishing, like he said, has never been easier. Now Amazon’s making it a little bit more difficult, , as Amazon wants to do. But you still you have so many d. Avenues for which to publish and promote your work. There’s Zup, there’s Kickstarter, there’s Indiegogo, there’s all sorts of different avenues.

And if you define your successes, I just want it to be out there and I want people to play my product, and I want it to reach to people. Then having a 5,000, $10,000 Kickstarter for your comic book is amazing. It allows you to do everything that you want to do. If you have higher ambitions for that product or you want to get there faster.

Some people bringing in a publisher and that situation is important. There’s a lot of people that self-publish that are okay with where they’re at. And there’s a lot of people that self-publish that are trying to reach a new a different platform, right? Like a different size of their publishing.

So yeah, I think it’s really important to define success to yourself before you start that process. The other thing is if you go through a publisher it’s a collaborative thing, right? I’m never gonna sign a game that the designer doesn’t want my input because then what am I doing?

Why am I publishing this right? I’m never gonna sign a design that I can’t talk to the designer and say, okay we think that adding this is going to help that, right? That’s not a good collaborative relationship. And as a creator, you have to assess yourself as being able or not able to take that criticism or that collaboration, cause as being a writer yourself, right? There is a lot of circumstances where writers aren’t able to take cri constructive criticism or constructive Yes. Collaboration. that’s a, the job of the publisher, right? Like they, they are taking a large part of that risk in publishing your work.

So you have to be ready to work with them to make a good product, right?

Stephen: Yeah. So I know you don’t do so much with the comics anymore but I myself have thought of doing a small prequel comic for my current series. I know other authors out there have said maybe I’ll turn it into a comic or a graphic novel.

And I’ve talked to a couple people who just made a straight graphic novel instead of doing the book version. So what types of things do you look for? What would advice would you give them to say, Hey, these are the types of things you need to know about comics to get a story in there because you got books and you got movies and comics are a little bit somewhere in between.

It’s got aspects of visual movie, but you gotta keep that story because you can’t hear anything and then on a page. So what advice or whatever about that.

Jacob: Sure. I think it goes back to that style aspect. There are a lot of Comic creators, comic writers, comic artists that tried to emulate what they’ve seen before.

And I think that’s important to learn, right? I think it’s important to study the masters study, how they did things. But it, the things that are getting attention and getting a lot of eyes are the things that are unique. Right behind me, I’m lucky enough to have a Matt Kent piece of art here.

He did he’s a big board games fan. Fan. I don’t know if Matt Kent from mind Management is his biggest, no, I don’t, but Depth and he’s also got a, his own label at Dark Horse right now. Oh. Oh, wow. Yeah. And he’s a huge board game fan as well. How I got him to do me a little piece there.

Beautiful. The thing is Matt Kent is so unique as stuff is him, right? And I think that’s really important is finding your identity as a creator, and that’s really difficult though. I will say it’s much easier to be like, okay, I like the Avengers. I’m gonna write an Avenger type story.

And I’m not saying that you can’t write a good Avenger type story, but if you wanna be a creator and you wanna self-publish, or you wanna get your stories out there and you don’t wanna work for the big two then you have to find your brand and your identity. So that’s first of all the most important thing.

Finding people that can contribute to your piece of work and not just do exactly how you scripted the panels to look, I think is another very important part. The best pieces of comic book. That were submitted to us had that feeling to it, right? That it didn’t, it’s not necessarily just the writer dictating to the art, the artist this is what I want.

It’s more of here’s the story, here’s the script. This is what I want people to say. I want you to take it and run with it. And that’s super important because as writers it’s easy to be like, okay, this is how I envision it. This is how it plays out in my mind. But in reality, like a lot of times that doesn’t look as good as you imagine it

And finding an artist that will translate your intention into visual visual piece is extremely important. And then finding an artist that compliments the style of writing that you have is extremely important as well. Yeah. Agree. Those are the things that I think are important, right?

Like I think the comic book industry itself is a very tumultuous, we’ll say . I think that’s probably the most conservative viewpoint. I could put

Stephen: on it as PC as we can get it. .

Jacob: Yep. Yep. Tumultuous is what we’re gonna deal with. Okay. . And if you define success in the comic book world as I need to make all my money back that I invested into this, and I need to be paid a fair hourly rate it’s gonna be very difficult for you.

I think you can find success in the comic book industry, and I think that I know a lot of people. Have started in the comic book industry. Like Paul Jenkins is a friend of mine and he started writing Marvel books and did a bunch of that stuff and then moved over to video games and started writing for video games.

There’s a lot of career paths to make a lot of money writing. Or when we say money we really mean have a happy and successful life. But I think that ties really right back to that defining success and defining happiness and what you create, right?

Because I know a lot of people that have just spent tens of thousands of dollars on artists. that’s just a hobby of theirs. And it’s just they’re creating comics because they want to create something. And that’s their happiness, right? They don’t necessarily need to make all that money back.

And comics is just very difficult. Anytime you deal with a $4 product in a market that’s probably three to 4 million people at the most that’s not, it’s not an easy market to, to succeed in. And like regular novels, books, it’s not always one is go make your success.

Stephen: It’s that series. It’s the 20th book you may do and sometimes you gotta keep going if that’s really what you love and appreciate. And I think what the way things are in the world with more people working from home, people getting used to Fiver and all the online everything. And I, in Kindle you can even publish independently though it’s very hidden and they don’t do much with it.

But the point is you can do it a lot easier, cheaper than you could have even five. Years ago, let alone 20, 30 years ago. Oh, yeah. And people are more open to the things that are not the Marvel and DC superheroes. My, my son and I, he wants to do a podcast where each episode he picks a graphic novel that we discuss and none of them Oh, cool.

Are the superheroes that you’ve heard of at all? The first one we’re doing is Murder Falcon, and I have it right here on my desk. I’m halfway through it. Oh, nice. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, that’s the type of thing more and more people are open to that, so you’ve got more of a chance. But just like you’re probably not gonna publish one book and make as much money as Stephen King or JK Rowling, you are not going to make one comic and become Spawn or Batman, and you’re not going to make one game and have monopoly that’s played a hundred years from now necessarily.

Just catch Oh, absolutely. Your expectations.

Jacob: Yeah, just find what you really love about the thing that you’re doing and try to do that more . Like some, for some people like me, it’s selling more stuff for other people it’s actually getting the products there and like creating a page and seeing that page finally in drawing form and that’s interesting to them, yeah I think you’re, I think you’re right on the money that just keep creating. And I think another important thing is push boundaries. Try new things for yourself. If you look at some of the most famous painters in the world and the ones that have museums after them, you’ll see that they experimented, they tried different things.

Van Gogh was not the same painter that he is, that he was at the end, right? Like when he started it was very much, he was doing life studies studies of people, and a very realistic setting. And he moved as he went on into more post impressionist, right? And did a lot more work on colors and experimented and pushed the boundary.

And he eventually found who he was as an artist. Those just like my path in business I had to try all of those different things to understand what I enjoy and what I like. In your creative world, in your creative career, you have to try different things And like you’ve said, what makes you happy?

Stephen: Which I think is something the even younger generation than you, is grasping more than the boomers and the Gen Xs like me that they wanna do something that makes them happy. And that doesn’t necessarily mean hitting that a hundred, $200,000. It’s something that makes me happy. If that means I don’t own a big car, if that means I don’t own a big house and I don’t have lots of stuff inside that house, that makes me happy.

And I think this the younger generations are getting that a little bit more than us past the generations have. And Oh, I lost my thought. What I was gonna say, I’m sorry. But so when you were doing the comic books, what did you look for in the comics to say, yeah I wanna get that one out and published.

Jacob: The biggest thing was definitely is this person unique? Is their story unique? There’s a thousand stories of superheroes. How does this one about superheroes? We didn’t really do much superheroes, but just to give you an example how does this one story of a superhero hit me differently?

One of my favorite books we ever published was a book called Darling. Brilliant book about drug addiction. Not kid friendly, unfortunately but it was about this character who was going through a heroin addiction and how his life just was affected by heroin, but also how his mind interpreted the world around him while on heroin as well.

And there’s just, it’s just a gorgeous book. I highly recommend it. And that’s the type of stuff that unfortunately it’s not always a commercial success, but it’s just a story that needs to be told and a story that needs to go out there. Because one of the other brilliant things about this book is that it’s based on reality.

The author’s brother Died of an a heroin overdose and he found his brother’s journals. Oh. And in these journals, he would talk about all of these things that happened to him, but in reality, none of these things happened to him. It’s just his brain imagining these things. Wow. Wow. The drug addiction.

And it’s it’s crazy. It’s a crazy book. It’s, and it’s drawn in the style that’s Miyazaki but different. Wow. It’s just so weird. And that’s an example that. Can get out there and get told that would’ve never seen the light of day 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. I know I had a friend in late two thousands him and a another friend were writing a book.

Stephen: They had eight issues done. They did it all had it already, but they got held up. First of all, Marvel and DC weren’t even interested. Didn’t even wanna talk about it. So they were gonna try and do it independently before all the self-publishing stuff. And Diamond basically said, eh, nah, not interested.

So they were done. They had no avenue to do anything with what we have. They ha they would’ve had a chance to get that out there now. And that’s, I remember what I was gonna say is what you were saying earlier, I think authors quite often forget this. Don’t worry about writing this book cuz Oh, I want to make money and I have to make a lot of money, worry more about I wanna write and my craft of writing, my storytelling abilities.

And I’m just doing that. Okay, now I’ll do the next one. And each one is something where you’ve learned, you’ve expanded, you’ve gone different. And pretty soon you’ll have a lot of stuff behind you that you’ve written. And your craft you’re writing will be where it is making lots of money and the things that you already did that don’t need to be forgotten, you can bring those back in.

The back order nowadays is crazy how much people buy stuff that was came out years ago. That would’ve never happened before too.

Jacob: No it’s a hundred percent true, right? Like it’s you just gotta keep creating. And some of the best writers that I know, just, they just kept doing things, creating things, and then eventually it caught on and eventually they either found their audience or they or, and, or they perfected their craft.

And I think that’s important. I, the other thing that I always was looking for is somebody that knew how to talk to me as a publisher as far as what we were publishing, right? So I’ll give you an example, don’t pitch adult content to Marvel, right? It seems super simple, but that’s.

The same idea goes to don’t pitch horror books to action comics or don’t pitch kids friendly stuff to heavy metal, right? . You have to figure out who’s the publishers or who the publishers are that you are interested in publishing with, where your story fits in.

And don’t waste the time of the publishers that don’t fit this blanket email to everybody saying, oh, hey I have this great book and it’s gonna really work with you. It’s superheroes. I, we don’t do superheroes. You can see a publisher’s catalog and get a vibe of who they are pretty, pretty quickly.

And if you’re not doing the research when you have a book to put push to that publisher, they’re less likely to be like, Oh, wow. You’re sending us another pitch that doesn’t fit right. That’s so important to to really think about. It’s who is the publisher that I wanna work with?

Who should I focus on talking to? Who should I try and craft a tailored pitch to this publisher and say, Hey this is this book. I think it will fit in really well because it fits within your horror genre. And it’s similar to this and this that kind of stuff is way more important than the shotgun effect of, here, let me pitch to every publisher.

I can find the email

Stephen: of . Agreed. And that’s advice. I’ve seen the Facebook groups authors get on there and they’re like hey, I just finished my first book. You should all go buy it. It’s written for everybody and you’ll all love it. And chirp, nobody answers.

It’s dude, this is a group for authors. We’re all here for author advice, and your book is a fantasy. No one cares. We’ve got 20 other fantasy authors right here. And I’d be a little crass and cruel. But the point is, like you said, no you’re correct. Figure it out. Where the best place absolutely agreed.

Jacob: I’ll give you, I’ll give you an experiment you can do at home. Okay. go onto your TikTok if you have one, and scroll through and try and find the most obscure video that’s just made for you. Is it, I I have a redheaded, red haired husky and there’s not many red-haired huskies, right?

But on TikTok, they know that and they post, they give me videos of red-haired huskies and then go to that person’s profile and see how many views that video has. And you would be surprised how niche of. Content you’re gonna get. And then how many people watch that niche of content, right? The world is massive and you don’t need a billion people to like your product, right?

To be successful, right? You only need several thousand, right? That’s the reality of the world, right? And why waste your time trying to make the most commercial like Disney products, right? Why are you, right? Why are you trying to make the next Pixar movie when in reality you could be Guillerma Deltoro, right?

Not everybody likes Gui Deltoro , right? No. Not everybody likes how bloody his stuff is. But he has a fan base, right? And you can even go drill down farther and farther. We worked with Adam Green. Adam Green’s a great example hatchet. Yeah. He made the horror movies, hatchet and Holliston.

We did the comic books for Hollist. and you would be surprised how many people are fans of this canceled TV show that only had two seasons. Like they it’s. You don’t need the world to love what you’re doing. You just need to find who in the world

Stephen: loves what you’re doing. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Alright. Jacob, I’ve kept you for an hour. I was like, oh my gosh, it’s already been an hour. Honestly, I didn’t Oh,

really?

Jacob: Geez. Yeah. I’m

Stephen: surprised. . Yeah. I appreciate the talk. It’s been great. I think you, you had tons of great advice for both authors to look at other revenue streams and these are some things that can be done and parents that it’s a reality that this could be something your kids could do in the future and they’re not missing out on life or anything.

To get it all together. Would you have any last words of advice for parents and kids or authors or anything about your company, the games, the comics that you’d like people to know about? And what’s your website? Let everybody know about that too. Sure.

Jacob: So our website is deepwater gaming.com.

We’re on TikTok, we’re on Facebook, Twitter, all of Instagram, all the different places. We’re actually doing a revamp of our website and everything pretty soon. Keep watching for that. As far as recommendations go, I definitely recommend Darling. I’m trying to think of some other ones that are just fantastic.

There’s also this other comic that we published oh my gosh, why can’t it, buzzard and Bone, which is Hatfield versus The McCoy’s meets Harry

Stephen: Potter. I crazy. I remember seeing that one. I think I may have got that one. I’ve got a huge comic book stack that I have to get through that I’m way behind on.

And then I do stuff like, bone is great. Yeah, I think that was one of ’em I picked up cuz I, I can picture it. It rings a bell.

Jacob: and then anything Matt Kent is fantastic too. Like I, I love reading and watching things from creators that have that style that they’ve nailed. And then as far as board games go boo right back here is made by one of my good friends.

It’s at Barnes Noble Stores. He also made cues and cues, which is a great party game as well. That’s, I played that one. Yep. Cues and cues is fantastic.

Stephen: Like two, three in the morning being a little wasted with a bunch of friends and we were laughing hysterically and it’s now we mentioned that game oh my God, don’t mention that game again.

Yeah I

Jacob: played that one. So he made this game Boo, which is basically I’m a chess nerd, right? So it’s just hit the right places For me it’s just like a strategy game where you try and move your cats onto this. actually got a quilt in it. It’s super, super cool. Beautiful.

But besides that I also wavelength is one of the games I always recommend for people. Very fun party game. It’s about communication and then our games monstrosity is one of our biggest hits. It’s in Target in Barnes and Noble. Nice. But my advice really is just you’re gonna learn a lot by just consuming content, right?

I almost always have a podcast on a YouTube video a show on Netflix and. just observe, right? You can observe and see, oh, why did they do this? Why did they tell the story like this? My fiance loves it when I’m interrupting and pausing the show and be like, that’s

why

Stephen: they set up this thing

Jacob: and this story, and it’s foreshadowing.

But you know what the great thing about that is? You’re learning about story structure, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s one of the most important things, even if your child isn’t interested in creating, or they are more shy about actually creating things. Get them to consume, get them to consume content. It’s not a horrible thing that they’re on YouTube, right? It’s not a horrible thing that they’re watching TV shows. It’s not a horrible thing that they’re

Stephen: playing video games. Yeah. I talked that exact same thing to parents. Yeah. Yeah.

Jacob: They’re learning about the way that we storytelling is the reason that we have civilization, right?

That is what has brought us together as a, as a. Oh my gosh. Science term, that is what has brought us together as humans. , right? Species. There we go. Species is this ability to tell stories and interact with each other. That, I think that’s probably my biggest tip for parents if they’re worried about getting their kids to create stuff, get your kids to interact with creations freedom.

Bring them to museums, let ’em play video. Talk about those video games and story, I’m like, oh, what did you think about the story in this game? Oh, what did you think about the story and this comic book. That’s super important, and for them to start analyzing those things, I’m thinking about them more critically as

Stephen: important as well.

Great. have you liked chess games? Have you tried Hive? Have you played that one? I

Jacob: haven’t tried Hive. I’ve heard it’s really good. But yeah, I haven’t, I’ve tried to avoid, I’m really obsessed with Party games right now. Okay. Just because I find them fascinating. Because it’s not designing fun is much more difficult than you can even imagine.

Yeah.

Stephen: So you ought to try a floor plan. I played that with a bunch of people. , we

Jacob: got that one. Where’s that one? I got that on my desk here. .

Stephen: Yeah. I played that with my cousin and a group of people. And my son loves Gladys or Gladius. Oh. Yep. Gladius is Glads. It’s one of his favorites now. And oh, what was the other one we played?

Oh we got Sovereign Sky, but we haven’t played Sovereign that one yet. Sky. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Whoever was talking to me at your booth was like this is special and it’s a special packaging and we got the expansion. And I’m like you’re just like, just to my arm right there.

But

Jacob: Hive, I know. Train

Stephen: them all. . Yeah, hive is very good. It’s very chest though my son and his friend said they figured it out how to. basically make it a stalemate in the game. Oh, interesting. Every single time. And so they’re like, eh, so I’ve bought the three additional pieces that they offered as expansions and I’m like, here, this changes the game a lot.

There you go. Yeah. Good game. I like abstracts cuz like that’s where my background is. But abstracts are, are hard for consumers, like they don’t do super, super well. So it’s hard for me to, I get excited about, we have this one game that’s been in our queue of pitched games for a while and it’s just this beautiful two player abstract game that just plays very easy.

Jacob: But it’s got a lot of depth and strategy. And I just can’t do it because it’s just not, or I can’t pull the trigger on it because it’s just not like in our realm of what our consumers are looking for. So it’s sad. I never actually like that’s the dirty secret of when you get into the business world of a creative world, right?

So like comic books, board games, you rarely get to actually do the thing that you’re selling . Right? Much I bar I barely get to play board games outside of the prototypes that we that we have. I mostly watch people review and talk about board games. And I barely get to I, at the time I barely got to read books outside of the books that we published.

Stephen: I understand that. Yeah. Have you played Is of Cats?

Jacob: I have, that is a brilliant game too. Yeah, that’s,

Stephen: that’s super good. Talking about esoteric. A little weird. It, my son loves it took me a bit to get into it. I’m like, what the heck is going on in this game?

Jacob: I love polynomial games.

Okay. Patch Patchwork is

Stephen: one of my favorite. Yes. I love that one

Jacob: too. That’s a good one. It’s about quilting too, so it’s like really weird. Oh, what the heck? Yeah. Yeah. I love that one. Picked it up, oh, my favorite game store is having a sale. Where’s my credit card? . Yeah, that’s bad me, all right. Jacob, I appreciate you taking so much time. Doing really cool talking to you. And I personally may be in touch cuz I do have a few ideas for a couple games. Yeah. I’m the toying with the idea. Using it as part of my writing business and attaching it somehow or trying to put it out myself or finding somebody to do it and which way I want to go and Sure.

Stephen: So maybe we’ll be in touch on that. That’d be

Jacob: awesome. Yeah. Just in general. know, My email is [email protected] and I don’t mind that being out there because I may not always have a ton of time to, to chat over email. But when I find the time, I try and respond to everybody’s email and talk to them about creation.

I think it’s important. To have a bridge to understand like the business aspect, just as much as you understand the writing aspect. So I’m always trying to answer questions about okay, what the, in, what is the industry like what does it take to succeed in this industry?

But also I love looking at people’s creations and trying to give some feedback like, oh yeah, this is great. Oh this needs some work here, but yeah. Cool. Great. No,

Stephen: I, I look forward to it. Nice. All right, Jacob, thank you very much. I appreciate it was great meeting you and chatting with

Jacob: you.

Great meeting you too. Thank you so

Stephen: much, Steven. Yep. Have a good day. And I’ll let you know after we play sovereign Skies and the others what we thought of them.

Jacob: Oh, perfect. Perfect. Floor plan Only. Good stuff though. .

Stephen: Yeah, Gladius loved it. Floor plan, I liked it. Took us a bit to click with it. I got Sovereign Skies left.

Oh. And fantastic factories.

Jacob: Fantastic. Factories is really good. It’s a solid engine building game. Very puy if you like that type of game, it, it’s gonna hit really well.

Stephen: Oh, good. Maybe we to move it up in the, let’s try this new game list, . All right. Thanks man.

Thank you.

Besides his writing, Robb also does speaking about finance. He enjoys helping people and being able to give them financial advice to help their lives. His speaking gigs are full of advice, which has helped his speaking career.

We discuss having a book and speaking based on that book. This is just one area of additional revenue stream that Robb has and recommends.

I wanna talk some, not just author stuff, because you’re a unique case for people I talked to in interview with a book. Because the author part, the book is not your only biggest focus.

You have a financial advising career, and you are a speaker. So I wanted to just chat with you a little bit on why you chose to do tho all of that and how it, it works, how it’s affecting you. So first of all, you’re a financial advisor. Why did you want to start speaking and why did you wanna write a book and combine all three of.

Well,

Robb: actually each piece came at different times. Okay. Like I was saying, in 1990 19 93, 9 11 happened and all that, and then I got downsized, and that’s how I got into the financial side. Okay. As I was in that I was speaking more about. getting off the drugs and all this kind of good stuff, and it melded together because I, I love talking to people.

I like to see the light go on and all that kinda stuff. And so the two just melded together. The book aspect, it came along a little bit later and to ask the right questions, get the right answers, that book was birthed out of anger because so many people don’t know that. They don’t know what they think.

And then I wrote a couple of other books called are You Willing And Start Over. And those books were with the transformation of my life because there was a time when I wanted to take a long walk off of a short period, okay. It had gotten that bad for me. I just didn’t know what to do.

And I looked at my life and I looked at what I was doing. , the drugs and the alcohol. I had to walk away from that. Okay. Then the funny thing that happens is once you stop doing that, you gotta start doing something else or else that’ll just fill, it’ll just come right back in. And so I started reading and I found out you can’t argue with the.

Okay. There’s a battle that goes on and it happens in those six inches between your ears. you go from, wow, I didn’t know that to man. I can’t believe this to all, could this really be true to, maybe they’re right. Okay. It’s I like to call it mental gymnastics. Okay. I would suggest to anybody that is making a change in their life.

Every book that you. Read it out loud. Read it out loud. The reason why I suggest that is because you see it, you say

Stephen: it and you hear it. Agreed. I like that

Robb: That bolsters it inside that psyche, man. And you just the book it shortens the journey. It shortens the journey so much.

You ever heard that old expression experience as the

Stephen: best? Yes, but it’s incorrect. Do you ?

Robb: Yeah. Do you, you believe that?

Stephen: Okay. To some degree, .

Robb: Let’s take the degrees out and let’s get it down right here. Okay. Experience is the slowest, most unforgiving teacher that you ever want to get with, okay?

So that, like I said, somebody else’s experience is the best. You ever heard that old cliche that everybody can teach you something? Yes. You know what? Everything ain’t worth learning. .

Stephen: Okay. They can teach you something. You got you, but it may not be the best, may not be correct. ,

Robb: that guy standing over there on that corner with that bottle of wild Irish rose in his hand.

He’s teaching me something that I don’t even have to talk

Stephen: about, right? .

Robb: Okay but no, the the idea that we are so much more than what we have become. We gotta get a we gotta get a firm grip on that first, and then we have to discover those talents and abilities that we have that are, they’re, that are just they’re just land.

They’re dormant inside us. and something’s we need a catalyst to get them started, to get those juices flowing. And so those juices start flowing through a couple of things. Number one is anger. What upsets you? Number two, what makes you happy? Those are two areas you can look at to determine what it is that you can develop in your life to impact others in a positive,

Stephen: yeah.

In the one talk I. I tell the that if you wanna be successful, there’s really two things you gotta think about. You gotta think about what you’re passionate about and what you can focus on. Because what the conjunction between those two things is that’s where you’ll be successful. And so let me ask you this.

You could have been just a financial advisor. You could have been working for a company, gone out to people and had your job, your life, your career but in instead, you. Going around speaking and doing books. Did you do this because it makes you more successful financially? It gives you other avenues in case one disappears.

Is it just because you enjoyed doing it? Why did you choose to add? Because a lot of people are like, oh, once I work all day, I’m done. I wanna go home, watch tv, and I’m done with my life.

Robb: For me it was a little bit deeper than that because I. I’m not happy with just to fail.

Okay. We wanna make sure that we’re solving the problem. Alright. There was a story I once heard where , the lady was telling the pastor, she said, oh pastor, that was a real good sermon. You cleared out a lot of cobwebs. And the pastor told her, come back tomorrow sister, and we gonna take care of the spider

Okay? So see it’s not a bandaid. . All right. What I do is I educate people about these different products that we’re sitting down, talking about and all this kinda stuff. I find that people are much more appreciative when you help them solve problem as opposed to introducing another problem.

I have seen cases where people have been sold insurance products that they out. I e term. Okay. There’s not no good or no bad, but there are certain places where certain things fit in the other and certain places where things don’t fit. And I’ve seen situations where people have bought these policies because of the price and it doesn’t meet their expectations down the road.

Okay? And so that’s where I just bring people up to speed as far as the education goes. The speaking is a beautiful thing. , it hits so many people right between the eyes. They be like wow. Look, really? Wow. Wow. And so I’ve put a lot of information together over the years, and I share that really quickly with a lot of people.

And I have them take notes when they’re writing when I’m speaking to take notes, whatever applies to you. Write your question down there and all that kinda stuff. So at the end, I have the q and a. and we go, we do the deep dive into it. I enjoy it. It I just totally enjoy it.

It,

Stephen: it’s phenomenal. So one of the things, a lot of the authors here now is revenue streams, having multiple revenue streams. So that’s what you’ve got. You’ve got. Job, your career, you’ve got speaking and you’ve got your book. Have you thought of any additional things you wanna do? Like maybe an online course or teaching a class somewhere, or obviously more books a workbook or is there anything else you’ve thought of that you might

Robb: add?

The the idea. Spending all these different plates, it keeps you very busy, but are you being productive? That’s the question. Okay. Me, myself, I focus more on educating my client base. It’s, there’s an endless stream of clients out there that, that need what I’m delivering.

Okay. And that’s where I’m at. It’s. So much more about me putting all these different programs and all that out there. I’ve got some relevant knowledge right now that needs to get out to the masses. Okay. And. The best way that I’ve found so far is one at a time. . Okay. Just keep on moving.

And the speaking arrangements. I speak at affinity groups small businesses churches and things like that, and share the information there on that level. And a lot of people are receptive that way. because they’re okay. There’s some things. And when it comes to finances, a lot of people

Stephen: don’t wanna top looks like we

froze.

Robb: They don’t want just put it all out there. So in the atmospheres that that I’m presenting to them they feel very comfortable with that.

Stephen: Okay. Do you have any plans for another book? Or I know I sat in on one of your talks. Do you have a plan for any additional talks or.

Robb: Yeah I get invited to different organizations and all that. And I’ve got several different topics too. The one that you attended was Get your Butt out of the way. I’ve got several other programs that that I do. Yeah, there’ll be, I’ll post ’em on my website at www.rhillenterprisesinnc.com or you can punch in R O B H I L speaker and you’ll get information about me.

But yeah I post them. A lot of the the talks that I give are for specific groups, so they’re not just open to the. , you understand what I’m saying? They’re geared towards delivering a message to a certain demographic within their organization. Yeah, we can, you can go on my website and look at the different subjects that are there and.

Perhaps you’d like to book me.

Stephen: Okay. . That, that, that’s a thought. I enjoyed your talk. I was actually thinking it’d be great. Cause the talk I, the main talk I give is focus towards parents of younger kids, middle school age kids. and basically telling them, look, we’re now preparing our kids for the future work world.

It’s not like it used to be. Kids can’t turn 16 and get a McDonald’s job or get a cashier job at Target or Walmart. All those early entry level jobs are disappearing. And later in life my parents, they had back in the fifties, people, the expectation, the thinking was I would get a.

and I would use that job the rest of my life and I’d retire and get a gold watch at the end. But I always ask anybody know anyone right now that has only had one job their whole life and very few people ever raised their hands anymore because we just don’t have that anymore. People move between jobs disappear, and with the technology.

Our kids will have opportunities we never had. Right now you and I are in two different cities, in two different states. We’re having a talk and discussion. I can see you 10 years ago that was unheard of. But that’s the type of thing our kids are growing up with. So the technology is enabling them to have more and better choices for their career and have control of their life and their career with what they wanna.

Now that doesn’t mean somebody can’t become a financial advisor and go work and be happy and have a great job, doesn’t mean they can’t go and work construction or a truck driver. I have a friend that left his job at age 52 and became a truck driver, and he loves it. you know that none of what I say means that all those are bad choices or all those are going away.

It’s just we’re not preparing our kids right now for what the future will be. And the choices they do have, they carry their phones around, they have their laptops, their iPads, and they use ’em to watch things. They use ’em to watch other people on YouTube and TikTok but they don’t understand and.

that they have a tool in their hand that they could learn skills that will lead to a career before they’re even 18. The one I have a workshop I focus on for kids teenagers to teach them about storytelling in video games because our video game industry is bigger than our football game industry, and there are more people that need.

Find other people to work in video games, and one of the avenues is becoming a storyteller for video games, which is totally different than writing a. . And it’s also a position that the companies want people with experience, and they don’t care about degrees, they don’t care about college, they don’t care about the education because the experience is the education and there’s no good education out there.

So if we had a kid in fifth, sixth grade that started learning how to write stories, learning how to tell stories and video games, made a few little video. The chances are he could get a full-time job at age 18 paying more than he would after a college degree. These are the types of things I work on in my talks and workshops to educate.

So I, that’s what I loved when I listened to you. I’m like, oh my gosh. Me and Rob are two different paths, but very similar thinking. And I’m like we should figure out some way to work together to do some things together, workshops, talks get into a conference and play off each other with something.

I think that’d be. I think it would be too. What the look into that. I’d love to I did at the men event, we were at the Weem. I did a talk one day you did a talk the one day. Now that I know if I ever go again and you’re there, I’d love to just, Hey, go hear Rob. He’s got the similar type of thing yeah, definitely. The yeah, go ahead. No. You

Robb: finish. . No, I was saying that with the way that the workforces are going now, we have gotten so far away from hands on. I’m talking like the welders, the manufacturers and all this kind of stuff. We’ve gotten so far away from that.

Everybody wants to go in and get into these computers and all this kind of stuff. When the opportunity, the real opportu. Lies and us getting back to hands on, back to knowhow and all this kind of stuff because having all these technical people around isn’t gonna do anything when you need to change the tire.

All right. , you got all these technical people, but

Stephen: none of ’em know how to use a rent. And that’s actually something I do talk about, that those type of jobs are going to be the ones more in demand in the future. So if you aren’t controlling your own life and work career with your choices, books, speaking whatever happens to be or you’re not doing one of these face-to-face careers that has to be hands-on.

You’re going to be probably in trouble. We’re going to need less accountants in the future. We’re going to need less even doctors from what I keep hearing in the future, because they found out during C O V D, they’re like, Hey. We could do these remote things and one doctor, instead of seeing six patients a day can see 26 P patients in a day.

So we can get rid of five doctors . And they’re finding out the 90% of what they do in the office can be done with nurses. And now the computer telehealth robots. So we don’t need five doctors. We need one. And so even doctors are going away, but nurses are becoming more in demand. So it’s a totally, our world’s changing so much, but we’re.

Prepared for that. Our kids aren’t being prepared for that. They’re still being taught, go get a good job and work hard and you’ll have a successful life. And that’s not necessarily always the case with what we’re teaching them.

Robb: No. And like I was, I had mentioned earlier about the level of deception.

Okay? The powers that be do not want an educated people thinking on their own. They want to tell you everything they want to tell you. Everything from cradle to gray. This is this two plus two is five. Shut up is not four is five. Okay. This is what we’ve got to get away from a Agreed.

Okay. We have, and I think we’ve got to pick,

Stephen: I think the newer generation is starting to see that a bit, which is why we’re having some of the conflict we’re having that they’re not ex just. Completely accepting and they’re pointing spotlights on some of these problems. That’s my personal opinion on some of the upcoming kids and generation.

I think there’s a lot of change in our upcoming generations and old people like us. It’s gonna get harder to, to live in the world. I mean with a lot of the change that is coming about now, More along the lines of accepting the unacceptable. Okay. It’s being forced down our throats. Yep. And we have, we’ve got to, we got to stand up for what’s And that, that’s writers writing doesn’t wrong anybody. Okay. And that’s where we used to be. I remember when I was in school, we used to say the Pledge of Allegiance and everything was beautiful back. We had civics in school. We learned about our government, our country, and all this kind of stuff.

Robb: Now how do you go from schoolhouse rock to SpongeBob Square? ?

Stephen: If it’s aint consolation, my kids grew up on Schoolhouse Rock also. I got the disk. I had, I they know the Schoolhouse Rock .

Robb: That’s a beautiful thing. Cause what we’re not coming up. Is a bunch of

Stephen: sheep and. That’s what I think what I hear from your talk, hear from your book and the same things, messages.

I’m trying to the big bottom line message is we need to take control of our lives. We need to be the ones in charge of where our destiny is not just following along. And plotting and listening to what everyone else is telling us that I think that’s why I said, oh, I clicked with this guy. We’ve got the same basic message just in two different areas, and that shows that it’s not just one message that’ll cover your life.

There’s areas that same type of thinking applies. And that’s why I was like I love Rob’s talk. I gotta talk to this.

Robb: I do appreciate you. I do

Stephen: appreciate you and I like the fact that your first and last name both have double letters in it. I think that’s, I thought that was pretty fantastic.

It’s like a boggle word

Rob before we get going here I love chatting with you. I’d love to stay in touch and see what’s coming up with you in the future. What advice would you give to authors, not necessarily for book writing, but what to look at for their career as a thinking of how you’ve taken your career what advice would you give to authors?

Robb: For those that want to write a book, I would have them consider who your audience. Who are you directing this information to? Okay. Once you got that down, that, that’s 50% of the way, one, who is it directed to? You gotta figure out who your who is the who?

Who are you? Who is this message for you? Get that down. And that’s half you halfway. Okay. Once you figured out who, so that’s what I would say. Who is it that you wanna reach? That’s the first thing that I would give

Stephen: consideration to. Okay. Great. All right, Rob, thank you. We had a few little technical issues.

I think we’re good. I appreciate you taking some time. And like I said I’d love to stay in touch so we could See what’s going on with you and maybe sometime we can help each other out and get into the same talk or book thing or something. That’d be great. I look forward

Robb: to it. I do appreciate you inviting me on.

Stephen: No problem, man. Thank you. All right.

Robb has turned his life around and used lessons from the past to elevate his life. He sees financial situations as a way to help others and has written a book to pass on the lessons.

Most people have financial problems that Robb addresses by guiding them to the right questions. He is passionate about his topic and shares his wisdom through speaking and his book.

https://rhillenterprisesinc.com

Stephen: today on Discovered Wordsmith, I wanna welcome Rob Hill. Rob, how you doing this morning? Outstanding as you. I love that answer. And that’s your answer when I asked you earlier. So I love that something people can learn from. Rob, I’ve met you, but nobody else on the podcast probably knows you.

So before we get started talking about your book, let’s talk a little bit about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you like to do outside of.

It’s okay. I’m sorry. You know what? I’m sorry that I have no problem with that because most of the people I interview are new authors and a lot of ’em are like in their laundry room or in their bedroom with cats running around. And I love that, honestly, because. It show because too many other authors I think, get anxious.

Oh I’m not in a cabin in the woods writing full-time. I’m not as successful. And what I’ve found after almost 150 interviews is just about everybody. Even the biggest names I’ve interviewed aren’t necessarily that Stephen Kings. We can’t all be Stephen Kings. When there’s stuff going on I actually love that because it makes all my listeners a little more comfortable, so no problems there.

All right. Go ahead. Tell us about you, where you live, what you like to do.

Robb: Like I said, my name is Rob Hill and I’m a financial advisor, author and speaker. What I like to do is I like to see the light come on in people’s eyes because there’s so much the level. of deception is so deep these days.

We gotta get back to the truth of the matter right here. You look at the way things are going with our finances and all this kind of stuff it’s it’s really challenging for a lot of people. A lot of people have no idea what retirement is. They just think that I don’t have to work no more and I’ll still get.

That’s not what retirement is. But then I go into that a lot. The reason that I’ve written this book in a couple of other books was because reading develops the powers of concentration and creative thinking. Okay? It’s something about those black words on that white page. It just rearranges everything.

Okay? And I’m not talking about breeding for entertainment. I’m talking about reading. Improvement personal development. Okay. I spent about 18 years of my life in the drug, drugs and alcohol. Okay. I, one day I woke up and realized that I was so much more than what I had become, and so I had to replace those habits with something else, and that something else just happened to be.

Nice. Breeding is a beautiful thing. It’s a

Stephen: beautiful thing, and I love that you say that because you probably have listened to Anthony Robbins, or at least seen him around a bit. He is a pretty well-known big motivational speaker, and some people like him, some people don’t, but, One of the big things he basically says is we either do things because we want pleasure or we wanna avoid pain.

And we usually don’t do one or the other until it becomes so overwhelming we don’t have no choice. And. It’s so simple to make a change. You just decide to do it and do it. And that sounds stupid. And people always look for that golden panacea, the pill that what do I gotta do? That sounds too simple.

I need to do something else. It’s, it seems to be, if you decide this is what you wanna do, this is your priority, that’s what you work on, and it sounds like that’s what you did and what it, what got you out of your situ.

Robb: See the decision is just one part. That’s just one part. This it’s very simple.

However, it is so simple that it gets complicated.

Stephen: Yes, absolutely.

Robb: The first thing you want to do is you decide that you are not where you want to be in your life. The second thing you gotta do is you have got to control your tongue, . You have got to control your tongue because what you say is what you get.

It’s so true. What you say is what you get. So if you want something other than what you’re living in right now, you gotta start speaking what it is that you want it. It’s

Stephen: the old, you gotta put out into the universe what you want and it comes back manifest. ,

Robb: most definitely. I wouldn’t say the old, put out what you want, universe.

I would call it new because a lot of people have no idea how much control their words have over their current

Stephen: situation. Okay. So we’ve talked, oh we’ve jumped into things. Give everybody what is the title of your book and what it is about, and it’ll make more sense what we’re chatting about.

One

Robb: The one book that, that I believe would make the most difference is called Ask the Right Questions, get the Right Answers for Sound, financial Retirement Planning. And this book goes into four areas of any solid financial plan. One being rules and trust, long-term care, safe alternatives to the stock market, and final expense.

Now, these four area. Need to be visited by everybody. Okay? So many of us are just barreling along and we don’t realize that the road that we’re on goes off of a cliff, but we’re just rolling right along. We just keep on going right along and we don’t realize that it rolls off a cliff.

See, a lot of people think that retirement is an age. Retirement is not an age. Retirement is a financial. . Okay. The reason why they have 65, or it’s gonna be higher than that now, but anyway, 65 was the retirement age was because number when they input that nobody was living to 65, right?

And so now they’re, because of medical advances and all this kind of stuff, people are not. 18 months in retirement, they are living 18 years in retirement or more. So now we gotta where? Where’s all this money coming from? You’ve stopped producing, so now you want to just get paid. This is why in 1978, a law was introduced by president Ford called erisa.

That’s the employee retirement income security. I think that’s a misnomer because what it should be called is the Employee I Retirement Income Security Act. Because what it basically did was it made all W2 wage earners investors, but didn’t tell ’em about it. Okay? This is why we have what is known as a 401k, which was never meant to be a retirement vehicle.

What the 401K did was it took the burden of retirement off of the employer and placed it squirrly on the back of the employee, but didn’t tell ’em about it. Okay? This is where they come up with the, you can do this 401k thing, you can put your money here, and here, but they’re all their choices. You think you got choices, but they’re all their choices.

They said you can pick this and regardless to however the stock market. , the managers still get paid. What happens? You remember Enron, WorldCom and all forget, we get to the cupboard and the cupboard is bare . Alright? Our ours just think about this.

We live in a consumer driven. Now just on his face right there, it really doesn’t say anything. But when you really think about it, when you dig down into it, a consumer driven economy, what does that mean? That means that we have got to get these consumers to spend their money. So then you come up with advertising, all these different TVs, all these different advertisers on advertisements on Televis.

just getting you to separate from your money. You are like, Walmart, save money, live better. Really? No, you don’t save no money, you just

Stephen: get more stuff. It’s that old joke where the wife went out, I spent $3,000 cuz everything was on sale, so I saved money. , right? Yeah.

Robb: And you, it would surprise you how many people believe that people that they will.

Hours driving around looking for a deal. They got the cheaper over there across town and all that. When,

Stephen: what’s your time worth? Yeah, that was my father. That was totally my father. You might, you

Robb: might as well buy it here and use that time to do something else, as opposed to riding around. My my stepmother , she goes out and just buys things just because it’s on , right?

My, I had ads too, like that, man. They would just go to the store and just buy things that they never opened. They sit there why’d you buy this? Or it was on sale,

Stephen: right? Yep. Yep. I think that’s the post depression era thinking it is just, they don’t know what to buy anymore. It’s like the millionaires and billionaires that lose all their money because they had to buy a. Bathtub or something. . So lemme ask you this, Rob. Why did you decide to move into financial planning, financial advising, and write this book? Why choose that avenue? It

Robb: Actually it, it we have to back up to when nine 11 happened.

Okay. Nine 11 was a transition period for me because that was when I was working for the. . I worked at a high energy physics laboratory and nine 11 happened, and the bottom fella, okay, so I had to find a new a new avenue. And so I started working for Caterpillar, and then I decided to go back to school and finish my degree.

All right? I was enrolled in school and I walked in there one. My counselor, she said Rob, you gotta meet my cousin. And I was like why do I have to meet your cousin? She said, because he’s got a job for you. And I told her, I don’t want no job, and anyway long story short, I met with him.

He was a partner with New York Life, and that’s how I got into the life insurance thing. Okay. After a short stint with New York Life and a few other organizations, I realized. , I could help people better if I did this on my own without, because most of the insurance companies and I, I don’t mean anything bad about this, but all they want is sales.

That’s it. They want What did you sell that? That’s it. Me, myself, I go in and educate people cause. . A lot of people, the first thing they out of their mouth is they wanna know how much does it cost? How much does it cost? And I said that’s a great question. However, that’s the wrong first question.

Alright? The first question should be, when does it start? And the second question is, when does it end? Because there are a lot of different types of insurance products out there, okay? And price is not always the best. That’s not always the best indicator of having the best product. Okay. What I do with people is we sit down and we do a forensic audit, so to speak.

Okay? We find out what it is that you have and what it is that you think you have, because nine times outta 10, when I sit down with people, what they have and what they think they have are two very different. . And so we, first, we gotta make sure that you, everything is dressed right, dress then there are other different products out there.

There’s there, there’s so many ways that companies go about selling things. They want to mislead you this way and pull you over this way and it sounds good over here and all this kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, we gotta find out what the bottom. Okay.

That, that’s what I do. And I’m not gonna say that I’m the sales guru and all that, but when I do put something in place, it’s solid. Okay. It’s gonna meet their expectations

Stephen: all the way. So how did you take this knowledge, this information, and working with people and put it all into a book so people would understand and be able.

Get some benefit from it. People that live in Canada or over in California where you aren’t how did you go about that?

Robb: The idea is simply this. It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. That counts. Okay. That, that, that’s what it all boils down to. It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep the counts.

Because our government, whether here or anywhere else, our government has an insatiable appetite, okay? They just want more. And if you don’t have everything nailed down, guess who’s gonna get it? Okay? You look at the. You’ve heard the name Vanderbilt. Yeah, of course. Commod Vanderbilt.

Commodore Vanderbilt. He had amassed something like 93 million back in the 18 hundreds. By the time 1973 rolled around, there was not a millionaire in his family. Why is that? It’s because of our government, our taxes. They just keep you heard of death tax estate. Tax here, sales tax, income tax, all these different tax.

We’ve got so many taxes. We don’t know whether we coming or going. Okay. But the politicians that put these taxes in place, oh, they know how to avoid them. Tax evasion and tax avoidance are two very different things. , okay? Tax evasion is illegal. Tax avoidance is. So we want to avoid paying those taxes and how do we do that?

There are a lot of different tools out there and just briefly will and trust. Okay? If you don’t have a will, get one. If you don’t have a trust, you need to look at it because if, let’s just say you got this $300,000 house and you leave it to your. You know what you just did, you thinking it’s going to be a blessing, but actually it could turn out to be a curse because there are taxes that are gonna come with you.

And before he can get take possession of the house, he’s got to pay the taxes first. So the idea is simply this. Why not move all your hard assets into a trust? Okay. The trust is a legal. Okay. The trust does not have to pay taxes, but your heirs can still have access to that property that you leave.

Now, there are many different types of trust and one that really rocked my boat was called the dynasty trust. It stays off taxes for up to a hundred years. Wow. Think about that. It’s a beautiful thing. Now these we live by the Golden Rule. You know what that is, right?

Stephen: Yeah. Do who?

Robb: So these people, they wanna keep more of what they want. They want keep more of what they’ve earned. And they do that through the different financial vehicles that are out there, the will and trust, the, all these different kinds of things. Now, medical. Costs are skyrocketing. This is where that long-term care insurance comes into play.

Nursing homes aren’t no joke. You gonna be paying three, four, $5,000 a month to stay in a nursing home, right? Where is this money coming from? It’s coming from all that money that you’ve been making. Steve, our system forces people into poverty before the government takes over. . So you can’t very well retire with a hundred thousand dollars in assets and expect the government to foot the bill.

No, they’re gonna make you sell everything first, and you’re gonna, you’re gonna be pretty much on welfare. That’s what the government steps in. So in order to stave off this kind of stuff, there’s long-term care. Okay. And the long-term care insurance, you’re gonna pay a small premium over the years, and then in the events, something catastrophic happens and you end up in a nursing home.

Then they’re gonna take over the payments for you. Okay? So it’s better to get it sooner as opposed to later, like all insurance favors your age and your health. Okay? The reason, another main driver for me writing this book and why I titled it asked the right question. Was because people asked the wrong questions.

See, if you asked the wrong questions, you not gonna get the right answer. Okay? I don’t care how many times or how many ways you ask it, if you ask the wrong questions, you are not gonna get the right answer, right? And so sorry. Finish Jeff. No, I was just saying that’s why it’s entitled that because it was out of anger.

Because I would sit down with people and the first thing outta their mouth would say my agent said this. My agent said that, my agent. And I said, wait a minute, hold up. The only thing that really matters is what’s written in the contract. I don’t care what the agent told you. It’s all about what’s written in this contract.

Cause all life and financial instruments, there are, they are. And if it’s not in the contract, they are not obligated

Stephen: to it. So what you said about the questions, it so if someone’s really worried about cost I can get long-term care insurance for 50 bucks, but if I go into a nursing home, it’s only gonna give me a hundred a month.

Whereas I could get another one that’s a hundred dollars and it’s gonna pay 5,000 a month. So that early cost is almost, who cares, cuz it’s, it gives you a lot better. That’s what you gotta look at. That’s, and is that the right there, is that the exa type of example, what you want people to understand after reading your book?

Things to think about?

Robb: Yes. See, the thing about that is when you’re talking about health insurance, earlier is better. Okay. Get it while you’re young. Because even with life insurance the longer you wait, the more it’s gonna cost because all insurance favors your age and your health.

Now, as far as what’s gonna meet your expectations down the road, then we would take into consideration some family history and things like that. Okay. Because if you’ve got a person that’s got heart disease in their family, okay, and. 55 years old, it’s gonna, it’s gonna be pretty, it’s gonna be a pretty big chunk to be set aside.

Okay. So there, there are a lot of different things that need to be looked at when we’re talking about this long-term care insurance. Okay. It’s not a one size fits all or anything like that. It’s tailored to each

Stephen: individual. Okay. So the people that have gotten your book and read it, what type of feedback are you getting from.

Robb: Well, a lot of people like the first thing is I didn’t know that . I didn’t know that. They’re really looking at the way that I go through a short history of how we got to where we are today with regards to retirement and our financial system and all this kind of stuff.

A lot of. Think about inflation. When they say inflation think things are costing more. Things are costing more. Things are costing more. That is not what’s happening, okay? What’s really happening, what’s really going on is that the value of your currency is falling. Your money is not as strong as it used to be.

Since 1913, the US dollar has lost 98% of its value. Wow. they’re still printed, 40 going North . Okay. There’s nothing backing it. There’s nothing backing it. And here we are. We’ve got 300 million people that are running around and have no clue. No clue what’s going on. Okay. We got payments on everything, right?

I Why do you think we have renter centers and all this kind? Okay. Payments on everything. Just, and it, it is ridiculous. See, it used to be, when I was coming up that if you wanted something you worked and you saved up the money to get it. The powers that be said, oh no, we can’t have that.

Give it to ’em now. Easy monthly payment plans and all this kind of stuff, man. And that’s where we’re at right now. You can finance anything these days. Yes. Anything. Why? Because the borrower is servant of the lender.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen that and I’ve warned my kids against that. My, my son’s pretty good.

He basic, he has basically no bills, no credit cards, and pays cash for just about everything he can. And he’s doing good there so far. .

Robb: Yeah. That’s a good thing. Now he’s also gotta learn. Pay himself too. See, because a portion of all that you earn is yours to keep. Okay. The 95% of the people that I run into are living paycheck pay.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. He’s, he is working on savings and I’m working with them on the next things and looking at that. Hopefully we’ll get some of that,

Robb: a really good book to. The millionaire next door. Okay.

Stephen: The millionaire next door. I’ll put that in the show notes too for everybody.

Robb: Definitely. That is a great book. Okay.

Stephen: All right. Rob, I wanna besides just talking about your book, I want to talk about your career and your talking and stuff. But before we get, move on to that phase if somebody came up to you and said, Hey Rob, I heard you wrote a finance book.

Why should I get that? What would you tell. The elevator pitch.

Robb: Okay. I would tell ’em that because I would say, look, there’s four areas that you, that need to be addressed and you need to look at these four areas. Okay. And that’s what I would say. This right here is just a guide. It’s not going, it’s not a how to, it’s more of a why to, why you need to look at these boys.

And that’s what I would doubt just the curiosity. Why do I need to look at these forms while I read the book?

Stephen: Okay, great. All right.

Erica reads a chapter of her horror novel This Cold Night

Being a new writer, Erica can relate to getting advice and being overwhelmed with what to follow. We discuss various advice but also what we’ve chosen to follow.

Of course, we give some advice ourselves.

Let’s talk a little bit of author stuff and find out about some of your writing styles in that. So first of all, what type of software and services do you like to use when you’re.

Erica: I just have, usually what I just use is word.

And I, sometimes I use it on my phone. A lot of times what I do is I write in a notebook and then retype it on the computer and that kind of helps to get a second. It’s almost like a second draft going in cuz you’re, words that you’re like, oh, I used that word too many times, or I, whatever.

So like seeing it back and then putting it on a computer, that kind of helps. , make sure that it looks the way I wanted it to. So a lot of times that’s what I’ll do. I usually write in like actually on paper and then

Stephen: interesting paper. Okay. And you wrote a bunch of short stories. You’ve written a novel.

Are there some things you learned writing, the short stories that you did differently when you wrote the novel then you might have done, or some things you’ve changed about your writing? There’s, I’ve, so since I’ve been writing short stories and sending ’em out to publishers, I’ll get they have an editor, you editor usually looking at them and they’ll send it back with suggestions.

Erica: Hey, we wanna print this, but can you change this? Whatever this, and this. So throughout that feedback I’ve learned one of the, one of the first feedbacks I got was try to make. your characters sound like different people. So like these two characters sound very similar when they’re talking obviously, cuz they’re both from my brain, so I have to think, okay, I really have to get in the secondary character and they can’t sound the exact same as the main character.

And a lot of places don’t want you to use like too much slang or like right mispronunciation. So that was of difficult for. was to make myself, make my writing sound like two fully developed different people. So that was something that I definitely tried to work on. And I think with this novel, it’s from the perspective of the main character.

So that made it a little bit easier because I could say what she was thinking and what she said, and then have the other characters reacting to that and really trying to develop them as best they could outside of her perspective. I think that’s one thing that I really try to do in this,

Stephen: in this book.

Have you you said you learned from feedback from others, feedback from the editor. Do you listen to a podcast? Do you have any books you’ve read, any websites you like to go to? Anything like that?

Erica: I don’t, I, when I was first writing I did, I would go to different websites or I would listen and I think it is helpful to listen to people’s.

But I think if you do that too much or rely too heavily on that, it becomes overwhelming because I feel like sometimes you almost get conflicting advice. I saw something.

Stephen: We’re gonna talk more about that in a moment. Yeah. I’m sorry, go ahead. Yeah, .

Erica: No, that’s okay. I saw something where just for example, like I’ve seen things where it says starting off with dialogue is, can pull the reader in.

know, That’s an intriguing way to start. And then I’ve seen people like, please don’t start with dialogue. We don’t like to that we’d rather start with anything but a quote. So it’s, yeah. I don’t know. You hear so many different things that sometimes it’s it’s so overwhelming that you’re almost like, I just don’t wanna, I just don’t wanna do it.

Because it seems like I said it doesn’t seem like there’s any right way. It’s like everybody has an opinion against, you’re doing

Stephen: in some way. A and that kinda leads right into what we were gonna talk about is advice from other people writing advice and how to figure out what works, what doesn’t, what you should listen to, what you shouldn’t.

So one of the things I’ve told people, and this is my general rule of thumb advice, if I was going to go back and talk to my young, my slightly younger self start writing, I would. Say, don’t focus on getting a book written to publish, to focus on writing and writing and not writing something, and then editing and rewriting it 500 times.

Writing something, putting it aside, writing something else, putting it aside and writing some short stories, writing 2, 3, 4, even five books, different series even. Because I realize now in h. That a lot of the advice, like you said, that I was getting it, would, I’d get conflicted and should I do this, should I do this?

And I was learning it, getting advice about publishing, but I hadn’t even written my book yet, so who cares? But you

Erica: know, so it just, then it becomes more overwhelming cuz you’re like, I don’t, yeah.

Stephen: So I think. Getting a lot of writing under your belt. Then when you hear the advice, it makes more sense and you can apply it more.

That’s my general rule of advice is ignore it all until you can understand and comprehend it. . So what’s some advice you’ve you mentioned some advice you maybe ignored and then found out later that you shouldn’t have or he was like, oh, now I understand that it makes more sense. Anything like that?

Erica: I think that I’ve gotten advice more than once that my intros in a nice way that, that the introduction to the book are when I start writing that the background’s too much. That it’s we don’t need to know everything about this person’s life story. Just get us, but we need to know and get us into the story.

But I really like thinking about their backgrounds and I really like coming up with this specific thing. , but not all of that needs to go in the story. It’s okay for you to have that in your head for your character, but you don’t need their whole life story at the beginning of your book because that does get boring for okay, who cares what’s gonna happen?

So I’ve got that feed. I’ve gotten that feedback more than once where the introduction’s good, but can you cut out this, and this. Just stick to what’s relevant to your story. And,

Stephen: and I, that’s important too because not all advice may apply to you, but it may apply to me something different.

Right.

Erica: You might not have that problem at all, but Right. . Yeah. So for me that was definitely, and it was, I was reluctant to do it after the first one. Cause I was like no, I think it really I really like it. think it’s fine. And then I got it again. I was like, okay, yeah, you’re probably.

Stephen: You, you gotta get that experience to really understand that. Even if you’ve read forever I’ve know several authors. Oh I’ve read. So I know I can write a good book. Totally different skills. Totally different . It is. And

Erica: I think you don’t realize, even like hearing if you’ve had any, like some of my writing is now audio hearing somebody read something that it took you maybe.

I don’t know, two months to write. And they read it in like less than an hour. And you’re like, oh. It so much more goes into it than it sounds like when it’s being read. I think about that with movies a lot, because you’ll see the budgets for movies, how big they are.

Stephen: And you’ll and you’ll see a scene where it’s three, four seconds and it shows a particular. Person with particular clothes on and dressed a certain way or whatever in a setting, but then you don’t ever see that person with those clothes or whatever. So it gives you that feel. You it immerses you in it, but the amount of time they spent on it is so much greater than what it was on screen.

But without even that little bit, sometimes it would draw you out. So that’s why writing you have, like you said, Put this stuff in. So I wanna go back to the one thing you said you put too much like background and things like that in, so how did you handle that? What, did you just pull things out or do you sprinkle it later?

What, how did you handle that? So

Erica: both if it was some things that I put in really weren’t relevant at all to the story and never it was a good thought I had in my head, and that’s fine. Just keep it in your head. And then some of it was they can reveal this about themselves in the middle of the book.

When this happens or after this happens, they can remember something like similar that happened. It doesn’t have to all go right here at the beginning. So both I, I took some out and then I. At took some out and replaced it later

Stephen: in the book, which again, I think is a difficult thing for authors and you gotta have the experience maturity of writing to do that.

That was really difficult. My first book, I wrote without any plan, any thought, didn’t know, and right. Rush through it a little. Because I wasn’t really sure what I, where I was going with, I didn’t have an end goal or anything and I sent it to an editor and came back and it was like just pages and pages of notes and not in a bad way.

It

Erica: was like no, it’s not. It’s never, I’ve never gotten something back where it was like this was just critic. This is just criticism to be criticizing. It’s always been with the goal of helping you, but it is still overwhelming. A lot of times when you see like pages

Stephen: of it, you’re, and I literally, it was like 70,000 words.

I literally ripped out 35,000 words. I was like, yeah, I get it. This what? What? It just jumps. It’s like there’s no flow. Yeah. So it took me doing that to start understanding, I think, Even the last couple things I’ve written have been better, but not as good as they could be. But the latest thing I’m working on, I’m like, oh man I totally am seeing the whole story.

I’ve got the beats, I’ve got the flow. And when I sit down, I know a lot of people are discovery panthers and a lot of people are plotters outliners, and that. I’m more logical thinking, so the outlining fits me very well. I just haven’t done the greatest job at it. I a few little things and I go from there, but I struggle a lot.

Where’s the story going and get it? , but this latest one, I literally got all the beats on Save the Cat, and they all fit. And the story made sense in my head. I moved some things from my original thoughts and now when I sit down to write, I’m like, oh man got 3,200 words today. And I didn’t even realize it cuz it, it took the burden of thinking about the story off of me and I.

Do all the creative stuff. The one part that’s here’s what happens here is a one line sentence of the major point, but it turned into a whole big scene that was fun. And had other things in it because I was able to relax and just write .

Erica: I think it’s like you said, I think if you hadn’t had the experience writing so much before, the more you do it, the, I think just like you said, the naturally better it’s gonna be, you’re.

Say okay, this worked, this didn’t work. And I think, yeah, just having the experience of writing, even if it’s not something you ever intend to publish I think that just writing really

Stephen: helps. And the hardest part for me is, Understanding. Yeah, this sentence is great, this chapter’s great or whatever, but it doesn’t fit with the rest.

It needs pulled out. That’s hard for me.

Erica: That’s really hard to, sometimes you’re like, I got this description. It’s so cool. It’s so immersive, but it doesn’t move the story along and it really doesn’t. It’s not as relevant as it should be, and that’s really hard. Cause sometimes you work on something for a really long time like that.

That’s exactly what I wanted that to sound. , but it just doesn’t flow with the rest of the story. It’s just not right.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. So is there any other advice that you’ve gotten that you started to do and realized, no, that’s not the right advice for me? I’ve gotten, not specifically from an editor, but I’ve got, I’ve heard advice about perspective.

Erica: Like unless, and I feel like unless you’re, like some publishers, if you’re trying to write for the specific publisher will say, third person, pass, whatever only, and that’s fine. If you’re writing for that specific, if you want that specific publisher, then write like that. But I think in general perspective depends on the story and how you see it.

So I don’t think. I’ve written stories, like first person present, like I, I turn on the light and I see. But I’ve heard people I’ve heard publishers or just people in general with say that they don’t like that they don’t like that perspective. So I think for me it’s what feels the best for your story that you’re writing.

Cause I think that’s how it’s gonna come off the best. So

Stephen: I don’t really. That, that’s a rough thing for me too. I had, cause I, people kept telling me, you’re head hopping and you’re doing this, and I’m like, no I’m not.

Erica: Yeah. That hops another one. And it’s but, and I’ve done that in a story too where I’ve like head hopped between chapters or sometimes in the middle of a chapter or whatever, and.

Yeah, I don’t, and they’re like, that’s what, I dunno. That’s how I see it. That makes sense

Stephen: to me. Yeah. And it didn’t confuse me and I went back and looked, and a lot of the books I’ve read throughout my life had that because back more in like the eighties into the nineties, it was more common and Right.

Things like that. I even wrote a couple author. That of some books I really liked and said, Hey, I’m a new author. I’m learning this. I’ve always loved your books, but I got a question. It, it has this and it’s head hopping. Why did you choose to do that? How did you get away with it? Is there any advice you give?

And the one answer I got back a professional writer that’s I’ve been writing her whole life. She basically had, that was the times. It’s different now. That’s not how I write. Oh okay. , so that it, it was a little hit me over the head with a frying pan type moment. But it was good to know that.

That’s where I got it from. But I maybe need to learn to be modern. It’s really hard

balance. You it’s so do you have, okay. I’m. Come back to this in a moment. What are you doing to market your book? I, my publisher brought on a publicist, so that’s been really helpful for me cause he’s been setting up all, sorry, one second.

Erica: Yeah,

sorry. So he’s been really helpful with, he’s setting up a lot. He’s reaching out and getting podcasts and d. I was on a radio station and then sharing through he’s got it out to different reviewers to write reviews and we’ve sent out some advanced copies for those of reasons to come on Amazon and good reason, whatever.

But before a publicist, I would try to market, so I would join, like on Facebook for instance, I would join groups of who fans where it was okay for you. , like some groups don’t want you to post promotions for your things and some groups are fine with it. So I would do that. I would try to market two people who I thought might be interested in horror or the books that I was writing.

And a lot of times, like with the anthologies and things, the publisher would do a lot of the marketing. So it wasn’t really something that I had to do that much if I didn’t if they wanted me to do podcast or an interview or something, I would do it, but it wasn’t something that I had I had to reach out that, that much for.

But I did find that especially on Twitter, that the community there of authors and writers is really supportive. And usually if you reach out to people they’re very nice about it.

Stephen: Yeah. That’s one of the things I’ve said. I. Part of what spurred me to actually sit down and start writing was I met a professional author who’s been writing for 35 years and is a known author in his genre and in fact, After we met him, my son was just talking about it at his high school and several of his friends like dropped the books and went, oh my God, you know that person I’ve done all their books.

And that’s when we realized wow, this guy really is like a famous author. Just not. We read. But he didn’t give me any indication of, I, I’m a better author than you. I’ve, I’m more po. I think in general, authors are much more accommodating compared to like actors not so self-absorbed, and they’re willing to help and they can walk down the street without getting mobbed, except for JK Rowling and Stephen King

Erica: No, I do, I think that it is a really supportive, even if the answer is no. It’s in a really nice way. It’s never an unsupportive or critical way.

Stephen: Agreed. Agreed. All right. Erica we’ve talked a bit about advice. So before we sign off here, do you have any other advice that you would give to new authors listening to this podcast?

Erica: I would just say the best advice that I think I’ve gotten is write what you would wanna. and if you’re excited about what you’re writing, then people will probably be excited to read about it.

Stephen: Agreed. I like that. Nice. All right. Great, Erica, it was nice meeting you, talking to you. And we should have a chapter read when this goes live to add on so people can hear a little bit from your book.

And I think that’d be great.

Erica: Yeah. Yeah. I will get that ready for you.

Erica Schaef is a fan of all things horror and loves to write her own stories in that genre. She is an Affiliate Writer member of the Horror Writers Association. Her work has been featured in a variety of journals, magazines, audio productions, and anthologies. She lives in rural Tennessee with her husband and two wild children.

https://brigidsgatepress.com/author/erica-schaef

So this morning on Discovered Wordsmiths, I have Erica. Erica, how are you doing today? Hi, how are you doing? I’m doing on, yeah, it’s great to see you. Your hair matches your background. Yeah. Yeah. Good . Erica before we start talking about your book and things like that, let’s find out a little bit about you tell us where you live and some of the things you like to do besides.

Okay,

Erica: so I live in Tennessee in a rural area that’s about 40 miles from Chattanooga. So I have two young children, one’s seven and one’s five. So we like to we have a national park right near us. We like to go on hikes. We, I started a garden back in 2020, but during Covid. I started a little pumpkin garden, so I got into gardening a couple years ago.

Not that great at it, but we had a few things grow last year. We had one huge pumpkin, so that was fun. And what else do I like to bake, but I’m also not that great at it.

Stephen: Would you say, huge pumpkin? How huge

Erica: it was. I forget the, what the name of the pumpkin was, but it was something giant pumpkin, and it was like a norm, like my son could sit.

He said, said on that, and he was really

Stephen: proud of it. I’m sure they be. Love that. Yeah. , that’s a, that’s such a fun age for that type of stuff. it. Yeah, it really

Erica: was. And they liked to help. He had he would help me water. He would bring a squirt gun out while he had the hose and he would like squirt plants with a squirt gun.

Stephen: The water. Nice. Good. So with a family and things, why did you wanna start writing?

Erica: I started writing. I think since I’ve been a kid, probably since I was like 10, I’ve really enjoyed writing and I’ve always done it as a hobby. And it wasn’t until probably, I think, 2020 or 2019 or 2020 around Covid when I had some extra time.

And so my kids were at an age then where they would play on their own, but I would be in the same room as them, like keeping an eye on them. And so that was I had the opportunity then. to write while they’re like either outside or playing in a room. And I was like I would get ideas for something and then I would actually finish them through.

Because what I would do before is start an idea and then get bored of it and quit. So once I started finishing through with my ideas, I was like well, maybe I’ll try to send these out, see if they can get published. But that would be cool. And then so things started to get picked up.

I started writing short stories. . And so a few of those got picked up and then I started trying to do more longer form fiction and things like that. So probably the last couple years I’ve really been taking it seriously as more than just like a hobby that if it works. And if it

Stephen: doesn’t, it doesn’t.

Nice. Okay. And so you said you’ve written a lot of short stories. Are some of them out there that people could check out? Yeah.

Erica: Most of them are in anthologies or journals. There’s one that was in the anthology, Lovecraft and A Time of Madness, which is an anthology of short cosmic horror stories.

Nice. Based on what h HP Lovecraft might, sorry, my cat is known.

Stephen: That’s okay. had plenty of cats and kids and .

Erica: Oh, he just likes to touch him. Sorry. So yeah, so that, my short story in that was called Esca and they made that into a the publisher, Sentinel Creatives made that into a audio production, so they had to pass audio production.

And so that’s available as a standalone story on Amazon and

Stephen: Audible. Oh, nice. Awesome. Sorry. Yeah I’ve had my cat on lots of cats have been on the podcast.

Erica: Wanna be on his attention.

Stephen: Tell us a little bit about your book what it’s about and like the genre and things like that.

So

Erica: this Cold Night, it is a, it’s horror but it has some elements of psychological horror. It. Some less, to a lesser extent. It has body horror and a little bit of a jump scare factor. Not too much of that, but it’s set in modern times and it’s set in a country mansion. And it the core of this story, there’s flashbacks within this story, but the chords of the story takes place over one single night, and the main character is visiting a.

House, which is the country mansion after the death of a loved one. So it starts right after a funeral and then takes pla. The entire story takes place in this mansion over one night.

Stephen: Okay, so why did you decide choose to write horror?

Erica: That’s been my favorite genre since I can remember. My, my grandma used to read us stories from the, what was it for kids?

Oh. Those anthology stories for kids. can’t remember now. They were Oh, scary stories to tell in the dark. Oh, yeah. Okay. And things like that. So she would read that to us, and I always thought they were the most entertaining. I was always the most intrigued. And with that genre, I was always hooked.

I always wanna know what happened next or what was going on in this story. What was the, what was making that sound? What was doing? and we, so we would watch scary movies and it’s just, I’ve always found it to be the most intriguing, I think, genre for me. So I was always drawn to it. And then when I started writing, I, it’s fun for me to try to come up with ways to, to be, to frighten people.

So I try to think of what’s the scariest thing I could put in here? What’s the, what have I read that’s really scared me, that I could use that feeling in my own to try to scare somebody. So it’s really fun for me.

Stephen: Nice. Okay. Yeah. And besides scary stories in the dark, what are some of your other favorites?

Erica: Getting older ice Cream Lovecraft, obviously. I like Stephen King. The first time I read The Shining though, there was a part, there’s a part where the little boy Danny is in a, is in the hallway at the hotel and he is like looking at a garden hose. and that’s all he is doing. But the way it’s described is so frightening that I, it was a long time between then and when I finished the book because I was like this is two

So The Shining was a favorite.

Stephen: I’m trying to, that’s one of my favorites. One of my top,

Erica: yeah. And I’ve read a couple other Steven, which obviously were all good, but that one was like, that really scared me. I’m trying to think. The yellow wallpaper, that short story Charlotte Perkins goman.

It’s a short story. It’s a psychological. . Yeah. You should check it out. It is it’s, like I said, it’s psychological but it is really creepy.

Stephen: Yeah. It’s more classic. There’s a lot of good old horror

Erica: out there too. It is. And that’s a lot of times what I end up listening to. A lot of times I read it, but a lot of times it’s easier for me to listen cuz what I’m doing, whatever I’m doing throughout the day.

A lot of times that’s what I’ll end up listening to them. And I like the old, the older.

Stephen: Okay. And so is this book independently published or traditionally do you have a publisher?

Erica: Oh, so it’s a small publisher, bridges Gate

Stephen: Press. Ah, okay. Yep. I’ve had several authors from them. And where, so where all can they find your book?

And you have a website?

Erica: So I do have a website, which is just WordPress, Erica Schaff, which is e r i c a s c h A E. , and that’s on my social media. So I have a Facebook and a Twitter, which is the same Erica Sha. And then, so this book is on right now, it’s on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. And then through the publisher, Bridget Scape Press.

Stephen: Okay, good. And people that have read the story already or read your short stories, what’s the feedback you’re getting and hearing from them? Luckily mostly positive people are saying that it was which is what I was trying to do. People say it was unexpected and somebody said it was like a new twist on a haunted house, which is what I was hoping people would think.

Erica: Nice. Cause you have so many obviously haunted house stories. But I did wanna do something. It was a little bit different while still being in that category of. Of haunted house. So I’ve been really lucky to get really nice positive feedback for the most part.

Stephen: Okay, good. And if you had a choice for this book, would you rather see it as a movie or a TV show?

Erica: Probably. If I had to pick for this one, probably a movie. Ok. This feels like I said, it’s over one night with some flashbacks. I think it would probably work better as a movie if I had. .

Stephen: Okay. And do you have any favorite scary movies? Let’s see. I’ve watched a lot of, they aren’t movies, but the Netflix shows what is it?

Erica: Mike? Mike Flanagan, I think does with like Midnight Mass. That’s a good

Stephen: one. Haing on Hillhouse. The first one was good. The second one was okay.

Erica: Yeah, I think that one was based on the turn of a screw. Yes. Yes. I think if you, yeah, I was gonna, I think if you, it wasn’t as like surpri. I, it wasn’t, I wasn’t as drawn into that one, but yes.

As far as movies go, oh, let me think. Oh there was one that came out on Netflix not that long ago, that was behind her eyes. It was based on a novel by Sarah Pin, bro, I think I haven’t seen that one yet. Oh, you have to watch it. It’s really good. It’s one of the, it’s one of those, you don’t see the, I would say read it first, but then also watch it.

They did the movie, did a really good.

Stephen: Cool. And do you have plans for a next book? Is this the first of a series or is it a standalone?

Erica: This one’s a standalone and right now I don’t have any major plans for anything coming up next. I’m taking a little bit of a break where this winter season and maybe in the spring trying to start up something new.

But I have a few ideas, but nothing really started.

Stephen: Yeah I think horrors difficult to have a series that keeps the feeling going. It, they really lend themselves to standalones,

Erica: right? Sometimes you can have a character maybe that, I don’t know, that kinda like mysteries, how sometimes you have one detective who just goes through different maybe you could do something like that.

But yeah, it would be hard. .

Stephen: Yeah. Okay we’ve already talked about this a little bit some of your favorite books and authors in that. But do you have a bookstore you like to go to over where you live? I don’t, I, we have a Books a Million, which I do it’s, that’s an and then our, I really like our local library.

Erica: It’s really small and like the children’s section is really great. My kids really like it cuz it, it just, , the way that it has it set up is really great for kids. It’s at their level. Lots of colors, lots of things going on, and they have comfortable seats and it’s just a really friendly atmosphere in there.

Stephen: Yeah. I love libraries. I love promoting, pushing libraries. I’ve got an author event coming up in a little over a week at our local library. So yeah, always trying to encourage people. Use your library, go to the library. . Yeah, it

Erica: really is. It’s great cuz like even. Even if you want to try out a new author, a new genre or something, and you’re like, I’m not really sure I wanna commit to it, you can always just go browse, re take out a book and if you don’t like it, bring it back.

And

Stephen: so have you read scary Stories to Telling The Dark to your Kids?

Erica: No, I haven’t read it to my kids yet. I, we listened to a couple of this stories. My daughter’s five, so we listened to a couple of the stories on, and she. So I’m like, okay, maybe we’ll wait a little while. you go end up with kids in your bed all night.

Stephen: You don’t

Erica: do it too fast. But yeah, she she was a bit scared, so Yeah, I don’t, they like like I, I get some like Halloween themed books that are more spooky and they really I recently ran into the Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. Which I had never read before last year.

Stephen: And it was interesting. It was not what I expected at all. It, it takes a little bit to get into his style flow of writing. But the whole history of Halloween and all that in the book I thought was pretty, pretty interesting. Yeah.

Erica: A lot of them, a lot of the, like the Halloween theme books has something like that, like some kind of interesting information.

It’s not just. Not just scared not just to be spooky. A lot of ’em might a really cute lesson or something

Stephen: like that too. All right. Before we move on and talk about some author type stuff if someone came up to you on the street and said, Hey, I heard you wrote a book.

Why should I get your book and read it? What would you tell them?

Erica: I would say if you like horror and you like the haunted house kind of genre, trope, whatever you wanna call, you give it a try because I think I, I tried to make it unexpected. I tried to make it a little bit different of the backstory of why this house is founded.

So give it a try. See if you like. Great.

Stephen: Nice. Thank you. Appreciate you sharing all that.

Since Fern had been a teacher and now writes MG and YA books, we talk about working with kids today. She works with the Writers in the Schools program to still teach in a classroom and we discuss working with kids.

So we’ve got a great topic working with kids, teaching Kids, which you’ve got great experience with. I’d love to talk to you a little bit here, but let me ask you first what software and services do you use when you’re writing? Do you have anything particular that you like and would recommend?

Fern: That is so interesting. You I’ve looked at so many different ones that they’re out there. I write inward, to be honest. I just, when I’m a discovery writer, I tend to not, I have a lot of things going on in here, which, my writing coach and editor, he’s always could you please put it on paper so I know what’s in there?

But , I ha I hold a lot of what’s supposed to be happening in here. And so when I write, I just sit and start writing. Now when I revise that’s when I start doing a lot of plotting. So I’ll do things, with sticky notes and things up on the wall to try to see where the plot holes are.

And then I usually use Scribner. And the reason I like to do that is because I can take it from the word file, put it into Scribner, and then I can move things around. Yeah. Because in invariably there’s stuff that’s now out of order , because I didn’t necessarily write it as chronologically as I thought I did, so I love Scribner for that. And, I have friends that use Scrivener for other things that, they have a lot of plotting help and they have character sheet help and things, and I just really don’t use any of that. I just really love the ability to parcel it out by scenes and then be able to move things.

And then put them back into word ,

Stephen: basically. Nice. Okay. And is that something you’ve always done or is that something you’ve done different since the first book?

Fern: I have, usually like the the first book I didn’t really use Scribner. With the first book I ended up having to cut and paste on Word and, move to another file and rename it, and so that was messier.

That was messier. But when I’ve started using Scribner, it’s really been very helpful in that sense. But the general process of it is, has stayed the same in general. I’m just I just sit down and let whatever happens in the story happen. . And then later I bring some order to it.

And then I find myself, like right now when I’m wrapping up the revision for Gor to Offensive, which is gonna be book two I find that I’m having to thread some things in that happens toward the end. And so now I’ve got a thread, some hints in, because, you can’t just have, magic liquids show up at the end.

You have to like, put them somewhere else, so people are like, really, that’s convenient, so I, I enjoy that

Stephen: process. Nice. And what are you doing to market your books? Is there anything you do to get the word out, get people to notice your book?

Fern: One of the things that I do is that I hired a really great publicist Mickey Holson from Creative Edge Publicity.

He is a really great. Person and I just enjoy working with him. He gets a lot of wonderful opportunities like this one to get on podcasts and to do interviews. And he works with me with the Gales to try to get some editorial reviews ahead of time. And I have a wonderful social media advisor and her name is Amy Ravish.

She owns Abundantly Social and, she is magnificent. She understands a lot of the trends. She understands how to position things and where to position things for the best for the best visibility in social media and when to do it and how to do it. And so she helps me a lot with those. and and besides, the online presence and things, I also love Karina Sakowski.

She is my graphics person. She makes me beautiful pro promotional graphics to use. And then and then I also just love to be in person. I think. I think people like to meet you as an author and so I go to a lot of comic conventions and just local arts and craft fairs and just meet people, plus it gives me a chance to dress up, which I’m a big fan of

Stephen: cosplay.

Nice. Okay. So our big discussion is about teaching and teaching kids, working with kids. So you were a teacher. You decided to leave that because of various. Non-fun teaching things, , which I totally get. So tell me a little bit about what are some of the things you’re doing now working with kids or what you’re trying to do in that regard.

Fern: Sure. So shortly after I left teaching and I joined the Houston Writers Guild Board of Directors. And Wow.

Stephen: Let’s just jump right in there. .

Fern: Yeah. They were needing, the organization had started as a sole proprietorship. And so the lady that took it on, she turned it into a nonprofit, so she needed a board.

So I volunteered. I was like what the heck? And and then eventually I ended up executive director. I’ve been executive director of it for the last eight years. Wow. With a little break in between. And then, So as part of that, I met a gentleman in Nate, Jack McBride, who is, who was part of the Writers in the schools program.

And Writers in the Schools is a national organization and they work with local schools whether they are public schools or private schools. And they bring in a writer, a working writer that does either 12 or 24 week placements or different kinds of placements. And basically you go in. and you’re working with the kids for an hour each week, with each of the classrooms and you are doing writing lessons.

And they, it’s not connected to curriculum, it’s not connected to testing. It’s authentic. Just here’s what writers do, here’s how we enjoy writing and gives the kids the opportunity to experience, the actual creative process and how messy it is. And to be okay with messiness, because you don’t, you kids will ask me like how long does this have to be?

It has to be as long as it needs to be in order for the story to be told. That’s right. I just don’t know. I don’t know what the length of that particular story’s gonna be, my love, and that’s that kind of, just flexibility of don’t worry about it. Tell the story that needs to be told.

Is wonderful for the kiddos. And so I have been working with writers in the schools now for. I think about the full tenure of my time as the Houston Writer’s Guild president because I met him through a conference we were both at. And and I love it. I love it because it is literally all of the best parts of teaching and absolutely none of the not so great

Stephen: that I can understand that and that, that fits right along with one of the things I’ve been working on and I’m just getting started in this whole working with kids.

I have not been doing it as long as you, but. , I’m like, none of what I’m saying or doing is to take away from what teachers are teaching. I think kids need to learn their English, learn grammar, learn spelling, even learn sentence structure and all that. But the problem is that’s all taken out of context when you teach it like that.

Because until you actually sit and write a story and think of something from your imagination, some of that stuff doesn’t make much sense and they forget about it. So my focus isn’t on the core curriculum stuff. It’s, and not necessarily spelling, it’s the imagination and learning how to write a good story.

But then I’m also focusing on how they can use that in the future. Can they write stories their whole life, even if they’re an accountant or an auto repair mechanic. Yes. Can they use their storytelling abilities in business? So much so nowadays it’s becoming a big part of that. . So it’s a skill I think we’re losing in teaching our kids.

Cuz we don’t sit around the campfire telling stories anymore like they did even a hundred years ago. Instead kids are watching the screens all the time and parents don’t know how to help with that.

Fern: And there is an amount of storytelling in some of the video games that have been coming out.

And yes, there is storytelling. There is storytelling, but we don’t really focus on it and we don’t really highlight it to, to the, to an extent of being able to say, okay, kids, let’s look at, let’s forget about the game itself for a moment and let’s just look at the storytelling behind it. And, we don’t really do that.

And but to the point of, with the teachers, it’s very interesting. . One of the, when I started with writers in the schools, one of the things that they usually do is this very self-contained lesson, right? So you go in for lesson one and it’s a very self-contained lesson. It goes nowhere else.

Okay? I sh I show you how to do it. We do something together and then you do it, and then that’s it. It’s done. And one of the things that I have done with the way I do my program with writers in the schools, and I think they like it so far, so far they haven’t gotten rid of me. So I guess they like it is.

Create a continuity. So we’re, I’m doing the same thing I used to do with my kids, right? We are gonna create a world, okay? So first we’re gonna create a map. What kind of stuff is gonna go on our map? How is this gonna function for our world building? Okay? Let’s make up some characters. Let’s think about some backstory.

What has happened to these people before our story even begins? Nothing we’re about to talk about is gonna be the main story, right? And then we have lessons on, okay, so what’s going to be our story? What is gonna be the big issue that they’re going to be dealing with, right? And so across all of my lessons, we are building the story.

And then once we’ve draft. Then we go into revision. Because the reality is that as writers, 90% of our time is spent revising.

Stephen: And that’s where I, I love doing my best writing cuz I feel the story’s done now. I just have to make it better and improve and make it fun. And that I’ve come to really enjoy that part of the process.

And, yeah. Cause that’s where you

Fern: begin. Sorry. Yeah. But I to me that’s where you, that’s where you begin to add nuance. Yes. It’s threading in those little things that you hadn’t thought of, and then you start putting it together and building it for the audience, for the

Stephen: readership.

Yes. And until you’ve written, you don’t understand how to write and the revise and some of that other stuff, spelling doesn’t matter. Grammar doesn’t matter. That’s what I encourage with kids and homeschool parents and whatever. And I think what you said there is one of the things missing is that we work with kids to write, but they don’t really learn story.

They don’t learn the three act structure. They don’t learn the conflict and the rising to the midpoint. And then, the part where the hero’s journey. But that’s not the only framework. But they don’t learn the parts that make a story work and work well. Cause I know a lot of the groups I’m with, when somebody learns about save the cap or learns about the hero’s journey, they’re like, oh, I don’t wanna be constrained and I don’t, and that’s, you’re missing the point.

This is really what you need to do. And I think kids wouldn’t really question it if you’re just. This is how, this is the three act structure.

Fern: Yeah. And what you find, what I had found a lot, and even as a teacher, a lot of times as a teacher you’re doing these short little things where you don’t actually delve into a deeper level of revising or completeness.

A lot of times, we are encouraging kids to, they start stuff and they never finish. And and that’s not a great pattern to do for your life. You’ve gotta dig in sometimes and finish things. And I also find that the teachers are really surprised sometimes when I do a revision lesson, because we are going to, for example, let’s say we wanna elaborate because we haven’t really described, we wanna add some sensory details so that people can visualize things and all of that.

We’ve talked about it. So now let’s circle. , all of our nouns. Where are our nouns? How can we describe each one so we can visualize it better? What are some descriptions that we can give? What are some can someone smell this? Can someone touch it? What color is it? What shape is it? And so you can work with grammar points.

They gotta know what a noun is to be able to find the nouns, right? And so now we’re adding description. What do we call those words? Oh, the, those words are adjectives. Okay. So now these concepts of nouns and adjectives are not on a worksheet. They’re in their own work. They’re finding their nouns, and they’re adding adjectives to make their nouns interesting and their work interesting.

And you can do this with with passive voice. Okay, so let’s look for everywhere where we put the word. Let’s look for everywhere where we put the word felt.

Stephen: Still big problems for me. Sometimes , it’s

Fern: the problem for everybody. And okay, so now that we’ve found these words, how can we change this sentence to make it stronger?

Because look at how weak it is. She felt her heart beating why not Brenna’s heart beat faster? How much more intense that is than she felt. It beat faster, so we can begin to show them how to look at grammar through the lens of how do we apply it as a writer and how do we revise with it to make it stronger by looking at our verbs?

Okay. How many times do you have the word walk? 500. Okay. Let’s see, what other words could we use, that are basically the same thing, but that might help the reader see how they walked. Better. So I think that these are the points where we might miss out if we’re doing these little tiny snippet lessons.

And they’re cute. Okay, we did these snippet lessons and we have this cute artifact, but did we really focus on the writing process? Yes. Did we really, I love that. Push them to do more, to dig deeper, to have to create nuance for their stories. And I feel like that’s what I try to do with with my work with writers in the schools, is to make the kids go deeper.

I always challenge ’em okay a short story really should be about 3000 words long, or l or between three to seven K. , a good short story. That’s a sellable short story. Let’s at least try for one. As a kid. And I’m always surprised at how many go way beyond because now they’ve been challenged, oh, I dropped a gauntlet one K oh, Ms.

Brady Uhuh, I’m gonna go much

Stephen: further. And, that’s the thing. Not every kid is going to be a writer. Not every kid cares to tell a good story or is able to, and you know who they don’t. Yeah. What’s it matter? But the ones that really do it starts clicking with them and you’ve just changed their life forever.

.

Fern: . And even the ones that don’t want to, the, just the challenge aspect of it. I, so I’ve, I’m you doing third grade and fourth graders this year. And so I decided that, we w we always decorate our notebook covers with a collage, to reflect who we are.

And so I decided they were gonna work on a sonnet. Wow. For their poem. Now these are third and fourth graders, and so I was like, okay, A sonnet is 14 lines with 10 syllables. Okay. I didn’t really go into the stress and unstressed and the different types. Okay. That was a little too much.

That be too

Stephen: hard for me too. So

Fern: just okay, this is this what we’re doing. Okay. We’re doing 14 lines, 10 syllables. If you want it to be an exact sonnet, it’s gotta have exactly 10 syllables. But I was like, you guys are third graders. I’ll let you get away with like between seven and 10. You, I was amazed.

80% of the kiddos hit exactly 10 syllables on all 14 lines. They were. going to miss it. They, you could see them working it, you could see them thinking and I, we talked about filler words, like yay or woohoo. Little things that you could do to cheat there every once in a while when you can’t quite make those 10.

And they did it. And I had one lady ask me why didn’t you just do seven? I If you do seven, everybody could do it. Sure. But 80% of those kids hit that mark, and 90 plus percent of them came really close. The one, the next ones that didn’t quite make it would, they made like 10 lines or 11 lines.

If I had said seven, maybe everybody would’ve hit it. But what a lost opportunity for those kids who pushed themselves to the 14 lines.

Stephen: This is probably a whole nother discussion, and I’m sure a lot of people could weigh in on it, but we don’t always have to give participation ribbons, and we don’t always have to make everything simple.

So everybody feels good about themselves because sometimes kids need a challenge and sometimes they gotta understand if you’re not going to rise to meet the challenge, you’re not going to get the end goal. That’s how life works later. And I think that’s a whole nother psychological discussion about our schools in teaching.

But I’m not gonna lay all the blame on the teachers. It’s not their responsibility for some of this parents too whole bit more talking. I’m sure we, we need to have a second podcast just to focus on more of these outsider issues. But lemme ask you this. Have you, you probably know the online service.

Lulu, have you heard of that? I have not, I’m

Fern: not familiar

Stephen: with it. Okay. This is something you probably would like to know. Lulu is what could be called one of the vanity presses. They don’t get your books and libraries. They don’t put ’em in online services. It’s so you can put your manuscript and order books and have books to sell.

They haven’t I got you of that, called Lulu Jr. Which offers a kit that kids can actually, the one I got has pages and the kids write their story and draw the picture, and then they stick it in the envelope, send it in, and about a month and a half later they get a published book, a printed book back. And it’s not for sale online, but you got a code.

So relatives family can go and order that book that the kid wrote. And it’s one of the things I’m telling people about and pushing because if a kid can see that this story they wrote, They get an actual physical book, even though it’s not on Amazon or for sale all over the place. But to say, my gosh, I’m a published author, I have a book.

I think that encouragement is necessary sometimes for kids to say, wow, that was fun. Let me do this again. So it’s, yeah. And actually it’s

Fern: interesting you say that with Lulu, because Lulu Junior right. Is the one that does what? Yeah. And

Stephen: the product is, I story is what it’s called.

Fern: Cool. So one of the things that writers in the schools actually does is we do put together an anthology.

At the end of the placement, you gather the kids work, they pick what they wanna put in the book, and and then you compile it, and we run it through copy.com, which is a local. Printing company here in Houston. They have, they and it’s not like a book.

It’s not bound like a book. It’s, eight by 11 and it’s stapled and, it’s not like a book, but they get that feeling. And I think that is a humongous part of just inspiring kids to be able to say, here’s the work you did, and now we’re going to celebrate this book by having an author signing.

And guess what? You’re the author. So you get to sign all your friends’ books. Oh, love that. On your story. And, we talk ab and we have little reading and we do of like a book launch party. And so it’s really cool. And I’ve actually been trying to get the writers in the schools Houston group to like, try to do something with Amazon, maybe load it on Amazon, get a cup of copies, and, But this Lulu Jr.

My, this sounds like that might be the very wave to go to. But I hate to take it away from copy.com Of course, cuz I love those people. But it would be so nice if it was bound like a book, because there, there’s something about the moment, the first time that you hold your book in your hand and it’s got your name on it.

I don’t know. There’s something about that as a writer. Absolutely. It’s so amazing and I think that is one of the reasons why some writers. end up getting scammed sometimes. And because we are so eager to have that feeling that we don’t do our due diligence and we don’t take our time, and I think that’s of sad for our community, but, okay. And now I have a and now I have something to pitch to the writers and school people over there. Do it.

Stephen: Do it. Oh yeah, definitely. I got two things that what you said made me chuckle. I’m gonna mention to you, so one, I’m a computer programmer by day and I do development.

And over the last couple years I’ve been learning and working more with WordPress, which is an online framework for building websites and content, okay? . And the structure of it, this is my thought, and I need to develop this better, whether it means. How to use what’s there or creating a plugin that makes it do it.

But my thought was that a school internal network could have a WordPress site set up and each teacher could have their students with a login, and the kids could write a story in, the online thing and their school. And so each page they write would be like a chapter in their book, which is fine.

WordPress can do that, teachers can do that. But the part that I think would make it a little special would be that the teachers then would basically have a button to press and say, okay, the year 2023, my class of yo know third period class, gather all those stories, put ’em in order, print ’em out.

So it’s like an anthology book with all their stories. Plus then giving access to people on the outside to be able to come and log in to read. All the stories from that year’s class. Not necessarily, putting it out there for everybody in the public, but so you could get on and read your friend, your kids and their friends and stories.

So that, that’s, it’s funny you mentioned that cuz I’m like, that’s something that’s been on my to-do list to look into to work with teachers, what would work with this? Cause I know one of the core curriculum things is to use the internet. I think it specifically says, use the internet to write a story.

And I’m like, that’s not even a fully fleshed idea of how to do that. And I’m sure teachers are like, what do I gotta do? Lulu Jr. I thought was perfect for that, plus using WordPress and whatever. So that’s funny you mentioned that . Cause that’s an idea, something I’ve wanted to work on now.

Maybe I should go work on it this weekend. But the other thing that I really chuckled about this you said earlier was, , I realized that storytelling is in video games, but it’s a totally different way of telling a story. and I talked with somebody who was a narrative designer for some video games that are out there, some real games on Xbox and that, and I talked to ’em about how that works and what you do.

And I got his book and he has a, he works at a school that teaches that type of stuff out in California. But I actually do a workshop now to help teach and get awareness of storytelling and video games. And I use a product called Blocks Souls, which is kinda like a Minecraft thing, and kids can build levels.

But I focus on what’s the story aspects in the game. And we know we gotta rise to a conflict, but in a video game we don’t control that. And how is that different? So I’m actually doing a workshop that I’ve been, revising on. For kids storytelling in video games and as a career in the future, because the job title has only been around for 10 years, but there’s more video games now that need it.

And the companies basically say, we don’t care if you have a college degree. Do you have any experience? So kids can start , you know that now and get that experience. So I love that you said that because that’s exactly where my head has been.

Fern: It’s so interesting because, so writers in schools has the creative writing piece, which is what I’ve been doing.

They have I did a placement with the Society for the Performing Arts where we had to create a a performance, right? So we had to do a screen screenplay and whatnot. One of the years right before Covid, unfortunately. So it got shut down, so I didn’t get to do it all the way. was one of the programs they have is a gaming program where the kids can create a video game.

And so part of that placement would be, okay, what is this video going to be? Game being about what are the backs, stories? And, creating the storylines to this video game and then doing the video game themselves. And I’m happy that I didn’t have to do it , because I don’t know how I would’ve done the whole tech part.

To be honest, I was struggling trying to figure that out as I was just first, trying to get them to brainstorm ideas for their video game. But and then Covid hit and then, that was the end of that. But it’s a great way to help those kids who are not gonna be writers necessarily.

but who need to practice their writing skills because you do need them in every profession. You need to be able to write well. Yeah. And so here’s a very engaging way to do it. And I, and it reminds me of, when I was in the classroom, there was a local comic bookshop, and it was owned by John Simons, who is the gentleman who actually started Comic Palosa originally here in Houston.

And I remember connecting with him as a teacher and saying, Hey, let’s do something with kids reading comic books, and he was willing to donate some and have a little program and stuff. And I pitched it to my principal at the moment. And yeah, I was told that, that’s not legitimate reading material

I was like we’re losing out on, we’re losing out on an opportunity to hook some kids who are struggling.

Stephen: One of my arguments and. . I know a lot of teachers agree, but I, there are some that just follow along without thinking about, they’re like these are the books we’ve always told them to read, so that’s what they’re gonna read.

And I’m like, but if the kids don’t enjoy the books, if they can’t relate to it, if the book is boring, what good is it? Who cares? If they can answer some discussion questions, cuz more than likely last year’s kids told this year’s kids what the answers were. So nobody even cared about reading the book.

Get them to read a book that they enjoy and who cares if it’s the best book in the world. The most well-written, there’s a new author that I enjoy, Jeff Strand and he wrote a couple ya books that some of the feedback he’s gotten is teachers saying, I gave your book to my kids, boys that never read before, said, this is great.

Can I have another one? That’s more important than saying, oh, they read Catcher in the Rye and took a test on it. And I’m not saying don’t, oh yeah, read Catcher in the Rye, but don’t use that to hook them on reading cuz it won’t happen. Charles Dickens is not who you should be introducing your fifth graders to that are hesitant readers.

That’s why Goosebumps was so big when it was at the height of its popularity.

Fern: Oh yeah. And one of the interesting things in that dynamic of trying to get the kids interested in writing and reading and something that they will enjoy is that, we need to remember what are you actually teaching?

Are you teaching that particular passage or are you teaching reading skills? Because I find that a lot of times what teachers are being made to do with these programs is, okay, we’re teaching this passage. All right. The kids now fully understand this one selection. They can answer gazillions of questions.

You’ve given them vocabulary that goes with it. But can they transfer that skill to any reading material? And let me tell you, when you go to the library or you go to the bookstore, the books don’t come with a vocabulary list. Okay? You need to read the book, and you need to, and you find words that you might not know.

Like I love that about Dean Koons. He uses words that I don’t know, and I have a pretty vast vocabulary, not bragging, but I do. And so the fact that he always, almost always has at least one word, and I’m finding that with Stephen King as well, at least one or two words, that I’m like, Ooh, this is a new word for me.

Exciting. And I figure it out using my context clues, right? I don’t, why are we need to teach kids how to do this. And a lot of times we’re teaching a passage, okay this passage now we know what that passage says, but guess what? That’s not gonna be on the test. That passage is not gonna be on the test.

Stephen: And that harkens back to, I think a lot of people are saying this, that the problem is we’re not teaching our kids how to learn. We’re teaching ’em how to memorize things for that test and moving on. And I know my I had a stepson who was hard tr trouble with math and he did not like it.

I made him do math workbooks over the summer and stuff like that. What I came to realize was he wasn’t connecting lesson to lesson. He wasn’t building those lessons. It was this one and forget it, move on to the next one. And I tried to get him to understand, no, this is information you already learned here.

And that’s what he’s basically been taught his whole life is learn it to pass this test, move on to something else and whoop out, out the brain it goes. And I think, we would be much better off as a society if kids knew how to learn and enjoyed that process instead of, okay, now we’re going to hammer this onto you cuz you have to take three days of testing so we can see how well you’re doing

And let me tell you a new way of doing math. I know it makes no sense to anybody in the world, but this is how you figure it out. . Oh,

Fern: don’t even get me started on my relationship with math. Exactly. math is my strongest. Math is my strongest weakness. I can do it, but, do I like to do it?

No, I don’t. But and part of it was because of how my math classes went, and how difficult it was for me. But I do think that we need to give kids fun, engaging, but be careful not to go into activity. Okay. Because, don’t do something that is an activity because it’s fun. Do it because it will teach something, because sometimes then you to that direction, you’re still having fun, but you’re teaching. And that’s why, and I really quit teaching because I found myself year after year in the principal’s office, this particular one, principal, and having to justify why I did book clubs.

Why I did the interconnected, thematic thoughts across the cultural and stuff, why I was doing this and that. Why didn’t I do this, testing prep thing and blah, blah, blah. Why wasn’t I doing the program they wanted me to? And the reality is that year after year, I showed up with my scores and I said, here’s what they did when they were in fifth grade.

But see, this is what they did now, and they actually did more than one year’s worth of growth. Why? Because they liked it. Yeah. They were entertained. They wanted to read those books. They wanted to do the read alouds, they wanted to do these the thematic things because it was fun when we did the Knight versus Samurai, right?

I would have the kids, half of them would be reading books with nights as the protagonists, Western style nights and half would do samurai and we would compare and contrast how these two cultures. So separate, totally different, yet came up with very similar ideas of what a warrior is. And we would look at our own military, what do we think about our Marines, blah.

And then we would learn really fun, gross things about the Middle Ages. And at the end I would give them this test about, nights and warriors and everybody who had, an 80 or hire got knighted. And let me tell you, I’ve never seen children study so hard for to learn the pieces of what an armor is.

I, because they wanted to be knighted and the whole process with the little fake sword, they just loved it and it was engaging and it was fun. . And so they were there. And so we didn’t have problems in my room. We didn’t have kids having, fights and stuff or acting out very few.

It was rare for me to send anybody out of the room because they were having a good time, but they were learning, and we were reading,

Stephen: so I love that because again, it encourages something fun that they really wanna work towards. Kids don’t care about that letter grade on that paper, but to be knighted, that’s totally different.

And I know I got a couple teachers I know and was talking to that gave me very disgusted looks and changed the topic when I said if we want kids to enjoy writing, why don’t we let ’em write fan fiction? Let ’em write a Harry Potter story or a Star Wars story, and then teach them the elements of a story with something they’re excited about.

Oh no, we can’t do that. Why not ? If the goal is to get kids to write this will do, this is one way that can do it. Yeah I’m not saying our schools are horrible. I just think that there are some things that we’ve fallen into, some non-thinking doldrums that I think could be shaken up a little bit.

Fern: I think what we’ve, what has happened is there was this sense of, oh how do we know if it’s really working? How do we know if they’re really learning? And we started shifting to this mindset that we have to assess and we do, we have to evaluate, right? But how we evaluate needs to be different.

And we need to start looking more at, growth. Because technically, if you really think about it, if you take the fifth grade reading test and you make a 30 on it, okay? , if you make a 30 on the sixth grade reading test the next year, you have made one year’s worth of growth. Correct.

True. Cause it’s one year hard, harder, harder test. And yet we’re expecting these kids, if they were making a 30 over here, now we want them to make a 60 or 70. Okay. That’s more than a year’s worth of growth. So it might not be as it, I, it’s important to see, are they passing it, but more important to see, are they making a year’s worth of growth or are they making more, some of these schools that are quote unquote, maybe not failing or whatever, they might actually be making more than a year’s worth of growth with their kids.

It’s just that their kids came at such a lower level to begin with, that it’s so harder to get them there. So how do we go into those communities and establish. Early education programs that will give the kids enough foundational so that it, they don’t start off at a disadvantage, that’s, think we’re just not looking at

Stephen: it correctly. That’s another area. I would love to get into a school that has disadvantage or problem kids and work with the storytelling in video games and get them excited and see if that changes things for them and the whole No Child Left Behind thing is exactly what you just said.

They’ve gotta quantify it. , but the problem is, , you might have, out of a class of 30 kids, you might have three kids that will never do well with spelling, that will never put the commas in the right place. It doesn’t click with them, but they might end up being masterful storytellers. But we’re not even looking at that skill.

We’re not helping them with that skill. And the missing the opportunities, not only for the schools, but the kids, more importantly that the, that’s a skill that’s being overlooked with this quantifying, the every number and everything and storytelling. There can be some kids that have gone through school and don’t even realize that they could tell beautiful, wonderful stories and maybe be richer than Stephen King, but we don’t encourage it and we don’t know how to bring it out of our kids.

So we miss that sometimes unless they get lucky enough to stumble upon it themselves. .

Fern: Yeah, it’s a, it’s an interesting, I think that there is a lot of gr room for improvement and growth in our schools, and we need to shift how we look at and how we assess. But, unfortunately we don’t have the will to look at it, and to really dig in and say, okay let’s really go back to what real teaching looks like, and let’s stop making the teachers.

Cause I remember having to do, right before Christmas break we would take sample assessment and we would look at our kids, which, you know who wasn’t doing so good with main idea and who wasn’t doing with cause and effect and whatever, all the things. And we would create a note.

With, three or four small group lessons that hit each target. And we would put our little list of who had not failed to master, who failed to master that and what dates we were gonna do that small group with those little kids. And these were fabulous notebooks that we put together. And, where they ended up collecting some dust because at the end of the day, that snapshot has shifted as I move forward.

And a small group is it by nature supposed to be reflecting of that moment of education? I’m teaching you something right now. I’m looking at you. I see that you and you are not quite getting it. So I’m gonna release everybody else to go do the activity. I’m gonna pull you to me right now, and I’m going to reteach right now because I don’t want you to learn it wrong.

right? And and then we would work on that, and then we’d send them out. And we would do these things, these binders and these lesson plans and, six weeks or eight weeks out of small group lesson, that’s not how small groups work. That’s not effective. You’re asking us to do a lot of work so that we could present something so that you can show it off to somebody else to say, we’re working.

And at the end of the day, it’s not working, and so y it’s just, it was just too exhausting. And I didn’t really care for the whole conversation at the end of every year, it’s I’ve already shown you that my children make more than a year’s worth of growth. Let me keep going. I’m making these kids read, I’m making these kids right.

They’re excited. They don’t misbehave in my room. That’s a successful teacher. Why aren’t, why are you on my back? And that’s we run out we run out good teachers cause we exhaust them.

Stephen: Just gonna say that I’ve got a couple friends and family members that are teachers or were teachers and they can’t teach.

They’re just managers of numbers for kids and just, moving on. And I, you I know I learned a lot myself. I’m one of those learners that I’m better if I can read something. If you give me a book and I can read it. I’ve got it. I’ll figure it out and do it. And most of the time I was ahead of where we were in any class.

The teacher was slowing me down more than anything because okay, I already know this material, I’m to the next chapter, and we don’t have any real way of dealing with that in, in the schools. And you get the opposite then too. Some kids may take a little longer and the only vehicle we have is, skip moving up a grade and stay in the same thing.

So we could keep doing it the same way for you . And that doesn’t always work either. I know my kids went to a school here locally high school that they’re they’re new. They’re only like 10 years old. And it’s. Trying to do things in a different way. One of the examples they always gave was when kids were learning about the locks and Panama Canal in like history class, that in math class they had to figure out the amount of water being displaced and they, it does that.

They connected it, but then they also had to do a science project where they had to build a lock system and how that would work to move the boats. And they, combined things in projects like that. So it wasn’t, we’re gonna sit here and read to you the book and teach you the history. We’re going to give you a project.

And then the kids had to go research that on their own. When they were learning the the table, the elements, they weren’t just, here’s this element, here’s this element, here’s this and all that. They were putting groups of two and three and assigned two elements and everybody had to do the research.

Those groups had to research those two elements and then present it to the class. They may not have learned every element on the chart, but they know those two so well that they can know how to learn the others. And they heard it from their peers. And I just thought the system, the way they did it was a better way for a lot of kids.

Not every kid was good. As a lot of times the kids are like, this isn’t for me. I’m going back to my other school. And that happened a lot and that was fine. It is different, but I think we need those different ways cuz people learn differently. Kids get excited in different ways. For different things.

Fern: I think that’s the key is we don’t all learn in the exact same way. We’re very cre teaching children is not the same as creating a product. , these are human being. With very unique abilities, with very unique styles personalities, interests. And so you can’t just do a one size fits all.

You really have to customize it to the kids. And, that’s where doing things that are thematic and that touch on so many different styles of learning will help because you’re going to hit them as they as you go through different projects and you go through different things that you’re going to get there, because you’re not just sitting there reading and answering the questions.

And then the next day we’re doing some vocabulary words and the little spelling test it, we’re, we are engaging with the material on a much more intimate level, a more one-on-one level. And we’re having these discussions and I think that we lose the opportunity to really reach kids, yeah. And they’re bored . And when they’re bored, Then they act out and they do things they shouldn’t, yeah. And then we punish ’em, and then they get upset because they got punished because they were bored, but they already knew this or whatever. And or it was hard for them.

They’re struggling. They can’t make it so they act out so that they don’t lose faith. And so then we have a whole system of punishing kids. Instead of really building, learners. And I love that. And that’s a great tragedy.

Stephen: Yeah. I saw something just a while back.

Somebody said, how do we know our education system is the right one and that it’s really working because our current system has really only been around a hundred years, give or take. And it hasn’t been around for centuries. It’s still fairly new. So if it’s not working, we need to figure that out and we need to see what we can do to make it work.

And I thought that was profound cuz when you really think about it, it’s yeah, you’re right. We know how to make horseshoe because that’s been centuries of making horseshoe, but we’ve only been teaching kids in buildings in this way for a hundred years. . So an interesting thought that, I’ve thought a lot about that since

Fern: We need to look at, we need to look at some app apprenticeship ship programs, because that’s how it was done before, before there were classrooms and things, people apprenticed and they learned from masters and and doing a, an app apprenticeship style program with some of these things, even matching up a with a writer, okay, you, your interest is in writing or, whatever in matching them up with that would be great.

But I do think that where our system started going down was with the child, no Child left behind because then the focus switched from education to accountability and it was trying to fix a problem that really didn’t exist because kids were coming outta schools. They were learning, they were, there were more authentic teaching methods going on in those days.

And and I think that we ended up handicapping the system instead of actually improving

Stephen: it. Our culture tends to fix and change things by reacting in completely the extreme opposite direction of what it was. And none of, I’m not saying any of it’s necessarily bad, it’s just not always the solution because we create other problems.

And, we’ve, I’ve seen that personally with things going on, oh, this is a problem, so let’s go the exact opposite way to the extreme. And it doesn’t, it makes new problems in my opinion.

Fern: Yeah, I think

Stephen: so. I think so. Fern, we’ve been going on forever. This has been an amazing, excellent talk.

I’m warning you, I will probably be in touch with you because I’ve got a couple things outside of this that I may throw your way. With all the things we’ve been talking about we, we share a common type of idea. Before we go though I need to remember that there are listeners and we, I need to serve the people listening.

, if you had some advice you would give to like middle school kids or their parents and teachers as far as writing goes, what would that.

Fern: I would definitely advise for them to encourage imagination and creativity. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. If the story they’re telling makes no sense, it’s okay.

It makes story sense. And let them just of let their imagination go wherever it wants to go. A lot of times we try to bring order too soon to things. And also I would encourage parents to look into programs. There are some wonderful organizations. that are offering programs for kids that are after school programs that are, summer programs that will help the kids to, to reach their potential to, and or at the very least to find out whether or not they like it.

Because sometimes as a child, I remember I went through a lot of things as a kid that I thought I liked. I thought I wanted to be in ballet. I really did until I was in ballet. And then I didn’t want it to be in ballet anymore. . So sometimes you just gotta throw your kid into stuff and go, okay, you think you like this?

Okay, let’s give it a try, and then it’s okay if they just, okay, we tried it. It was not for me. And so I think as a parent, you gotta just give them a chance to explore who are we, I think that’s the biggest question children have is who am I? We don’t know.

We are finding out and it’s so exciting, agreed.

Stephen: Great. All right, Fern, this has been a wonderful talk. I appreciate you taking so much time. We’ve been on way longer than I usually tell people, so I appreciate that. Thank you. And when this goes live, I’ll make sure and let you know.

Fern: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. I enjoyed talking with

Stephen: you a lot. Yeah, it was fun.

Fern Brady is the founder and CEO of Inklings Publishing. She holds multiple Masters degrees and several certifications. She began her professional life as a foreign correspondent, and taught for 15 years in Alief ISD. She has published numerous short stories, two children’s picture books, and a couple of poems. Her debut novel, United Vidden, which is book one in her Thyrein’s Galactic Wall Series, was given a glowing review by Dr. Who Online, the official site of the fandom. Also available for purchase is volume one of her graphic novel/novella hybrid project, New Beginning. She has returned to the leadership of the Houston Writers Guild, with whom she served as CEO for four years previously. She co-hosts two podcasts – Author Talk and The Hot Mess Express. Besides being Municipal Liaison for Nanowrimo Houston, she is also a member of Blood Over Texas, Romance Writers of America, and American Booksellers Association. Fern lives in Houston TX with her parents and her talkative husky, Arya.

https://fernbrady.com

BRAZOS BOOKSTORE | Houston’s premier independent bookseller since 1974

Fern, welcome to discovered Wordsmiths today. How are you doing? I

Fern: am doing well. Thank you so much for having me here.

Stephen: And I love your background. I assume that’s a real background, not a fake background.

Yes,

Fern: this is, these are my real bookcases, which, I have not enough apparently, because, you can see that they’re starting to stack up on top of each other instead of, just in straight. They should,

Stephen: Is that Nancy drew up there in the corner, the yellow bindings?

Fern: No, the, you mean the golden ones? The golden ones The golden. It looks yellow. Yeah. Okay. So that is a really fascinating series. It’s a series of the royal princesses. Okay. And it’s it’s a historical fiction where people are imagining what like Cleopatra for example. Okay. It’s up there.

And so what would she have been like as a young girl before she Oh wow. Became Pharaoh before all of the things that we know historically have happened, what are, what would’ve been like, what it would, what would it have been like? And Maria Antoinette is up there and oh wow. Some of the Spanish princesses, some Japanese princesses and African princesses.

I It’s a really fantastic series to cuz it mixes a lot of historical things of great women who have done been royal women, in, in royal homes. Across the globe. But it’s fiction. It’s fictional. Nice.

Stephen: Oh, I love that. I didn’t even know about those. Great. I’m glad to look those up now.

You just added to my bookshelves, . I’m always happy to do that. Yeah. Oh, I don’t any help, believe me. So Fern tell everybody a little bit about yourself, where you live and some things you like to do besides writing.

Fern: I live in Houston, Texas, which right now is cold, but by the end of the day it will be 80.

So it’s one of those places in which, know, you have to dress in multiple. Yeah. Cold is like 58.

Stephen: Oh, okay. See the last couple ahead. Cause the last couple weeks it hasn’t gotten above the forties for us and Christmas, Ooh. It was in the negatives with a windchill of negative thirties.

Fern: Oh no.

That’s a tragedy down here. Okay. That’s the kind of thing we had that one winter where that February that we had, I don’t even remember. It’s just like my brain has blocked it out. But it was horrible because for one day we were super happy because there was like snow and we were like, oh, look, snow.

And then, it stayed cold and it froze and the powers were out. Power was out. I It was just, yes, no negative numbers. Down in Texas, that’s just like a tragedy. It’s like a tragedy,

Stephen: right? Sorry, go on. Keep telling us about yourself. .

Fern: Oh okay. So Houston, we’re from Houston, and actually started off as a journalist. I was a freelance journalist, a foreign correspondent for a Mexico City Daily Bulletin that published in English. Then I went into full-time teaching. I taught sixth graders language arts e l a, and the social studies. Everybody taught social studies.

And and then, I decided UK teaching was getting a little bit too too much into the testing mode and having to do a lot of things that really were just time wasters that, we made all kinds of binders that made no sense because we weren’t gonna use any of it.

And so I was like, why am I doing this? So I decided to step out and go into full-time te writing. When I hooked up with the Houston Writer’s Guild I met a lady that was part of the guild and she invited me. and I had always continued to write with my kids, I hadn’t really pursued it as a potential real career.

And until I hooked up with the Guild and I started attending conferences and critique groups and things and I was like, you know what? I’m gonna go for this. I’m gonna go for it. So I did. And that was in 2013. And since then I had a couple of children’s books published. I’ve had a lot of short stories published.

My novel in my crazy Thne Galactic Wall Universe has been published. And coming up next month in February, we’re going to be having a book, one of the Dragon and his kitten series, which will eventually combine with book three. United vi. So yeah, that’s a little bit about like the crazy world of Fern.

Stephen: Nice. Great. And we are going to talk on the second half for the authors a little bit more about teaching kids and working with kids. Cuz that’s something both you and I are doing. And I thought it’d be great to talk for the podcast and for my personal reasons also . You told us a little bit about when you switched from teaching, but why did you wanna start writing in the first place?

Fern: I have always been a writer. I, when I was a kiddo I made up stories. I played with my puppets. I had a a set of puppets and I made up little stories and I invited my parents to come watch the puppet show and I charged them for the popcorn that mom actually made. That was me.

And I’ve always just been a writer. I have like tubs of notebooks where I’ve just pour all these ideas and I went through a pirate phase where like a hi. I had a lot of stories where that featured pirates, I think because we watched a lot of Errol Flynn movies during that time at my house.

I don’t know.

Stephen: Show me I what edge, sorry?

Fern: It’s just a it’s what happened. I went through my pirate phase and I still coplay as a pirate cause I love pirates. Nice. But they don’t show up too much in the books, although they do actually show up in gort of offensive, which is gonna be book two, but, . But yeah, I just I’ve always written, I don’t remember a time when I have not been a writer.

I’ve always made up stories and put them on a p on paper and they just live in these notebooks in my attic and, every summer I bring one down to just look at some of the stuff from way back when and see what I was thinking and what kind of person was I back then. And, just flip

Stephen: through. Nice. Okay. The book we’re gonna talk about and feel free to bring in the other series and other books and series, but we’re gonna talk about United vi which is a unique title . So tell us a little bit about that book, especially the title.

Fern: United Villain is book one of Tyne Galactic Wall.

And I consider it like the main line series, right? It’s you know how Star Wars has the nine movies, right? And that’s the main, the Skywalker, right? Main line. And then you have all these offshoots. So that’s how I look at it in my world, is like Brennan and Amy, the Royal House on planet Jordan is the focal point of what is really gonna happen with the Intergalactic Alliance.

And so that’s kind what this book is. And it’s called United Viden because on planet Jordan, you have two continents. You have the continent of Viden, and you have the continent of part. Yet. Now, originally the humans who live on Planet Jo, they came from Planet Drooling and Planet Frater.

Okay? And they were colonists. And so there were humanoids, they were lizard like humanoids, living on j. En Viden and the colonists took over that continent. It’s like the best co land on the planet. So they moved the lizards to the continent of Parta. Okay? So the four Gor Tiv tribes have been living on Parta for now centuries.

And and when we open and united Viden, there’s a threat they’re beginning to unite, right? Which has never happened before. The four tribes have never united. They are always fighting between each other which is why they were so easy to conquer, right? They’re starting to unite and we know that they’re going to maybe a, make an attack on Viden.

King Decile, who is the head of the Kingdom of Dia, reaches out to the principality of Alden, which is the other kingdom on there and says, Hey, we need to unite, fight together. Princes always wanted to marry Brenna. , right? She’s the heir to the throne. And so he pushes for a marriage petal her father gives in, which means she doesn’t get to rule as queen.

And this, unfortunately, her father doesn’t bother to actually tell her what’s happening. He just tells her she has to marry. And so she feels like, wait a minute, has he always wanted Amy to be king? Has he, she begins to realize, she’s the only child maybe he always had this plan, right?

And so she does what young people sometimes do, reacts. She runs away, throws the kingdoms into a war because Amy was like, oh, you’re hiding her from me. Cuz you did try to do. Treating without her, the marriage. So they fighting and then, and so eventually Verna is wait a minute, I should not have done that.

That was dreadful. I threw away my birthright. I should fight for my birthright. I can make this right. So she comes back, but she comes back a little too late. And so United villain is all about how Brenna reclaims her birthright, how she redeems herself, and how she’s able to finally unite the continent of Itin, right?

With Amy to be ready for what is coming. Because little by little, as we see, the Gort tib are making strides towards being able to attack, right? So that’s what the book is about.

Stephen: Kinda. I was gonna say that sounds like a whole lot for one book. But it’s the start of a series, correct?

Yes. Yes it is. And what’s the age range that it’s targeted towards?

Fern: This is definitely for adults, like new adults in higher because it does have very very deep content. It does have violence. There is, a war going on. There, there are some romance scenes because a lot of the book and a lot of the series really is about Verna and her coming of age, and her managing her relationships.

And very specifically with Amy, who she has now slighted because she ran away from a marriage with him. But in the end, she has to forge a marriage with him. And so it’s all really about how does she manage that, and how do they come to terms with each other And are able to defend their kingdom.

And then of course, beyond just the planet, the alliance itself is in jeopardy, which is what we’re gonna see in Book two, which is gonna be out in December of this year. And and then from, so we’re gonna have a much wider scale conflict going on as we move towards them, figuring out how do they relate to each other now.

Stephen: Okay. And so what, you’ve got some other books out. What made you wanna write this book in this series particularly? Is there something, a reason behind it? Oh

Fern: yes. Okay. The World of Planet Join and the galactic wall that has 51 planets in it was born in my c. Like I said, everybody taught social studies and in sixth grade social studies is world cultures.

And we started the year always with, geographic features and then we were talking about different cultural elements and we went, talked about cultures around the world. And so since I was doing language arts and reading, we would read mythology from around the world and we would, read about Knight in Samurai and we would read, we would read stories that kind of went with some of the cultural elements we were learning about.

And so of course we wrote, right? And so I, every year had my students, my sixth graders create an imaginary planet. They had to decide where the land features were going to be and how do those land feature. Affect the development of different cultures on that planet. And we different government styles on that planet.

And so we would create, throughout the whole year, we would create these stories. We would create mythologies for our planets. We would create, what did our warriors look like in our planets? And so basically United villain and all of these stories that happen in Tyne Galactic Wall were born in a classroom.

I was making planets alongside these kiddos and writing these little stories with them. And so I’ve got like a ton of all these just short little pieces of stories that I would work with my sixth graders with. And so when I decided to step out and actually, begin to write as a full-time writer, I was like, I’ve got all this beautiful material.

Yeah. So this is what I’m gonna create here.

Stephen: Nice. And I love that as being the answer to the question of where do you get your ideas, . So that’s one of the best ones I’ve heard. And for me that we’re gonna talk about this more on the second half alluding again. But that’s one of the things I work with kids that I don’t think we encourage them and work with them to use their imagination to come up with stories and the variety of stories that can be come up.

And that’s perfect. I love that, that it fits in with my classical Dungeons and Dragons also where you had to create a whole world. A town. A country, and the politics or whatever that was going on in your campaign, which is, interactive storytelling. All right. Slight technical difficulty.

Fern: I was gonna say about the Dungeons and Dragons. I love Dungeons and Dragons. I play d and d I have a d and d group. We meet every week. We try to meet every week, but, sometimes that doesn’t happen. But mostly we do. And I just love that. And for me, with the kids, it just made sense as a teacher.

And I know we’re gonna talk about teaching later, right? But it just made so much sense to make everything connected thematically, so we’re looking at this element of what cultures in our world look like. What does cultural development in books that we have, right? The books that we that we are reading, the book club novels that we’re looking at and then writing them, and extending it into the writing piece.

And it just, I think that for the children it creates a really good way to hold information because it’s not just, I’m not just talking about geographic features. Now we’re talking about your planet. and what the geographic features do for your characters on your

Stephen: world. Yes. And you mentioned Star Wars earlier and it’s a great example what they’re doing now because, when I was growing up, we had three movies, , and then this is always my we had three movies and in one little sentence, Obon mentioned the Clone Wars, and that’s all we had for 20 some years. We knew nothing about. But as a kid with my friends, we got to talk endlessly. What are the clone wars? What did, what happened, who was, and the stories that could come out of that. So what you’re doing is very similar, that it’s not one story and that’s everything.

There’s so much more to the world and I, I love that and I hope it inspired and sparked some imagination of the kids, each person in their world has a story to tell. And I love that you used that for your series.

Fern: Oh yeah. And the, and Book one is dedicated to them. It’s dedicated to my sixth graders and because that was where everything was born.

And I think that, I like to think that there may be some kiddos out there that went through my classroom that may still have all of these stories. I hope so. Like I have all my attic full of the stories when I was a kid, and who knows, someday they might take ’em out, look at them again and go, Hey, I think I wanna pursue this.

And they might because there was some really good stuff, . We had a lot of fun and there were some really goofy ones. We had kiddos who made worlds out of candy, right? The whole world was made out of chocolate or something. And we had some really fun ones and then we had some that were, that really took it to like whole serious level.

You. And

Stephen: I love that even with the candy one, because okay, you can do that, but now you gotta stop and think how does everything grow? What, how do they manufacture things? How do the people, what do they eat? So you can, if you’re creative, that’s wonderful. That’s really push in the limits and your imagination and thinking.

I know there’s probably some kids that did it just cuz they thought they’d be funny. And then , they probably didn’t work as hard as I might have trying to figure all that stuff out, because to me, that’s all fun,

Fern: And it was entertaining because then they had to figure out, okay, so the mythology, right?

Mythology is all about, the early people. How did they make sense of their world, right? They had, they created parthenons of gods that that guided their world and they created stories about how. , know, how come there’s an earthquake? How come the sun goes across the sky . And so now you’ve got this chocolate world, okay, what are gonna be the myths about the chocolate world, and what are gonna be the gods of the chocolate world?

And so we had, it was entertaining as we went along, and I did occasionally have one or two that decided to can we just start over, Ms. Marie , can I just ? Can I just do a different planet? I’m like, yes, you can do a different planet. Go for it. That’s great.

Stephen: Great. So United vi we’re getting, we can probably sit here and talk forever, , but I, is it already out or is it about to.

Fern: United bid is out. Okay. It’s yeah, it’s on Amazon and anywhere where eBooks are sold. So you can order it on Barnes and Noble, et cetera. All the places that you can buy books basically.

Stephen: And what’s the feedback you’re getting from people who have already read it?

Fern: I have gotten some really great feedback.

I, I think it’s really cool when you have a totally random person that you don’t know reach out to you and go, I loved your book, and when’s the next one coming? I really love that really adds to the pressure of get it done, but it’s good pressure. But I’ve also had some really amazing reviews because Dr.

Who online which is the official like website for the franchise I followed them because I liked Dr. Who, and they followed me back apparently. And they saw my cover, and I did not know this, but they review books and they give book recommendations on one of their pages. And so it was very interesting.

They reached out, they’re like, I think our, I think your book would be something that we would be interested in reviewing. They explained to me if the, if they didn’t like it, they would just leave, let me know privately what they, why they, why it wasn’t gonna work, blah, blah. So I was like, okay, let’s do it.

So I sent them a copy and they loved it. Wow. They loved it. They gave me a beautiful review, which I promptly put on Amazon. Of course. Of course. And and they love, they compared it to Dune. It was, and I think my world is esque. Wow.

Stephen: Although that’s impressive feedback and nice accolade there.

It was

Fern: really cool and I think, it’s, you can see a lot of Star Wars and you can see a lot of Lord of the Rings and a lot of other stuff in my books, but I do love the very, they’re very social geopolitical in nature cuz I love all the intrigue and stuff. So Nice.

And I do have my power wielders and things. That’s like my best review. I was like, that’s my favorite review of all time.

Stephen: I think I’d be putting that review on everything I’d put out . Definitely. Cause if people like Dr. Who and they hear, Dr. Who says your book’s good. That’s your, there’s your niche, there’s your target.

So who’s your who’s your.

Fern: My doctor. Okay. I, okay. I really love Matt Smith. I’m sorry. I just adored him. Thank you.

Stephen: That’s my doctor also. That’s my favorite. My kids are David Tennon. But I also grew up, with some of the past ones. So Brady what number four is like one of my best friends.

That’s his doctor. And the only one I don’t really care for is number two. I’ve, watched some of the reconstructed stuff and I just couldn’t get into him. But the rest of ’em I’ve liked across the board.

Fern: Yeah. Yeah, it’s, there, it, the whole show is awesome. I just love the whole concept and everything, and, but for me Matt Smith was like the epitome.

that’s what Dr. Who should be,

Stephen: Matt Smith was the reason I actually got interested after my kids in the revamped stuff. It was, thanks to him. I thought he, he clicked with me very much. . Speaking of, if you were given a choice right now would you rather see your book as a movie or a TV show?

Fern: I think that my book would probably be better as a movie just because of the scope of the way that it wor that it’s created. It’s it’s very much about the relationship aspect and then there’s a quest aspect. But it could be a TV show. I think at this point, , either one is great because I feel like there’s so much interest in since Game of Thrones, and the Mandalorian and these shows. I feel like there’s a huge audience that wants to see it episodically. Who can, who might not like necessarily to sit through a really long film but could just enjoy little short snippets of it. Me, I prefer to binge watch because I like to see the whole thing.

I like to

Stephen: see the whole, I think studios, executives and. Watchers are discovering that sometimes having eight episodes that are a half hour long and that build the story, build the character, they can put things in it. And it doesn’t have to be flashy effects. It doesn’t have to be over the budget, over the top budget, but you can get story in there that you just can’t get the same in movies there’s a skill to make a movie, tell a story correctly without making it feel like something’s missing.

And you get that opportunity. With the extended TV shows we’re getting now, and I say extended, they’re only like eight, the 12 episodes usually, which is shorter than a normal season. The normal season is going away anyway.

Fern: It is. And then you’re getting like the next level or the next chapter in it.

The next season, but you are right about movies because like I have been reading. The Dark Power Series. Oh. And I had not read it. And I watched the movie Guns Slinger, and I can see why the people who read the books didn’t like the movie. I can totally comprehend because, they’re trying to literally, they tried to condense all these seven books into one film.

That’s, no,

Stephen: I love that the Gun slinger series. I thought the books got better. My personal comment feeling is a lot of people complained about the ending, so he wrote an epilogue ending and I feel the ending was perfect. So my personal opinion is, Forget about the epilogue ending. Just let it end the way it does.

And the movie, the problem was they wanted to do three movies with a TV show tied to it in between the movies. So they had this big, long 10 year plan, and then they’re like, oh, we don’t think it’s gonna make enough money and we’ll just do this. But it’s actually not retelling the story. It’s supposed take place after the last book in another world.

So it’s like a retelling from another universe. And I’m like, yeah, that’s kinda, yeah. So yeah, interest elbow is great, but

Fern: yes. And you know what was terrible is, I didn’t read the books first, which is rare. Usually I read the books first and then I go and critique the movies. But I didn’t, with this one, I actually first saw the film and I saw the film because of Idris Elba.

And Matthew McConaughey. Yeah. And so when I started reading Book one, the Gun Slinger. That’s who worsen my head. I’m, I know that the gun slinger is supposed to be white. He’s just not white in my head. I’m sorry. He’s just intra from that one .

Stephen: I think that’s actually perfect. I know in my books, I don’t really talk about skin tone color at all, and I leave that open even though the artist drew the pictures on the cover a certain way.

In the book story itself, I don’t actually go into that because it’s a fantasy world. And I actually, to make that point, I think in book three, I’m going to have a character that I specifically point out that her skin is greenish. And just to make that point, that use your imagination, imagine who you will.

And I think, yeah

Fern: and that’s interesting because like I do have skin colors and and I have black characters and I have some that are very much Asian characters that, or they have that flavor, but they’re in these other planets. So what I’ve done is take basically our cultures and mesh ’em together.

But I have a lot of indigenous people that are humanlike in the sense that they’re sensient, they have cultures, they have, family, they have societies. They’re not human, d n a, right? Because my theory in my universe is that human d n a would be everywhere. So we would find humans everywhere, but we would also find that there might be other species that would’ve developed into more of a, evolved into more sentient beings, right?

And so that’s the issue that we have in the, at the heart of United Vi, is that, the gor Tiv who are lizard like beings, humanoids. They have had, to deal with the effects of the colonizers, much like the indigenous population got stuck into reservations, right? In America. And so now they’re wanting to reclaim their home and they’re getting help from this cal, the Cal scene who destroyed their home planet and have become space-based society.

And so they’re, their physicality has changed over the years because they’ve been in space for so long that they started out with human d n a. We know that if you stay in space for a long time you begin to change, the humans would begin to change even if you like even with the astronauts, right?

They try to do all these things to keep themselves toned, but ultimately if we left them out there for years, they would come back different. They would come back different, right?

Stephen: And the last couple years, one of the things that. Just, I had to shake my head and got it irritated me the most was when Kenobi came out and they had the third sister Inquisitor and it was a black woman, and people like exploded and got upset about, it’s are you kidding me?

I’m like, first of all, the character was fantastic and , some of the things, the one scene where she’s doing parkour and stuff across the city, that was a fantastic scene. Wonderful. But I’m like, really? This is in 2022? This is what we’re getting upset about, that in a fantasy outer space, world of millions of worlds where we’ve seen ians, we’ve seen huts, we’ve seen woos that were gonna get upset because the inquisitor is a black woman. I’m like, come on, people. Seriously.

Fern: And that’s the, that was part of the ridiculousness, even with the other films in that they were like, oh there’s not enough women characters, really.

Come on. Star Wars was like Princess Leia. I think she was one of the very first I wanna say one of the very first iconic, strong female character leads we ever saw. And it came in a fantasy science, fantasy world. Because we can, and that’s the beauty of the science fiction fantasy world Yeah.

Is that we can actually explore gender issues and racial issues and socioeconomic and geopolitical issues. We can explore these in worlds that are not our own. So there is no confrontational to it. It’s here’s this right, here’s some lizard people. Okay, there’s lizard people on this planet. Do they deserve the right to have a space on the in and live amongst the human population?

and why have they been on these like reservation type situations, and, we can and what are we really exploring? The issues that we had with Native Americans, and the issues we had with as colonizers. So I feel like people who have those reactions are they’re reacting because something inside’s not.

There. I’m

sorry,

Stephen: that’s a whole long discussion on that. . Yeah. You

Fern: got some issues you need to work through

Stephen: And you gotta also remember that the Empire is very much a afraid of the other cultures they were enslaving all the aliens of. So yes, it made sense that everybody, there was a white guy in the empire. It was to point out the fact. That’s a man. I could talk Star Wars in the good, bad, and ugly for days. Let’s not get away from your book too far because we could probably go on, we, maybe we will sometime that’s an idea. .

Fern: I’m happy to do that. Cause I love me some Star Wars.

Stephen: Oh yeah. Alright. So Fern, do you have a website?

Fern: I do. My website is Fern brady.author. No. Okay. Fern Brady. It’s literally just fern brady.com. Okay. Yeah, because I beat the other Fern Brady at it. So here’s the funny thing. Every so often someone will message me about, oh, I love the show you did in wherever.

And I’m like, what show are you talking about? And they’re talking about the other Fern Brady. The Fern Brady. That’s a Canadian comedian. Oh, of Scottish descent. Oh

Stephen: wow. Okay. .

Fern: Yes. Yes. And it’s hilarious cuz she has some books out and and she and I don’t look that different. We have very similar looks and so that’s funny.

It’s kinda funny. But I actually beat her to the website. So www.fernbrady.com, that’s my author site.

Stephen: Nice. Okay. All right. So we’ve talked about a bunch of things that we enjoy. What are some of your favorite all-time books and authors?

Fern: Oh , how much time do we

Stephen: really have? , right?

Do you remember the U2 rattling hum live video thing they did back in the late eighties? They were all sitting there with the camera on ’em and they’re like not saying anything. And the one guy goes, so how much is film cost? He goes, oh, film’s cheap. It’s okay. Keep going. . So this is digital.

It’s cheap . It’s

Fern: cheap. Oh my gosh. Okay. So for me, the books that I love the best, CS Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia. I remember multiple times reading through all the series. Me Too. The Lord of the Rings. That’s a hard book to get through. But I loved it. I loved every, I loved all the di Digressions of the world building that he just, you know, because that’s Tolkin, right?

He was really more concerned about building these cultures and these backstories and all this. Then I don’t know that it would be published that way today. ,

Stephen: probably The ho the Hobbit and Fellowship I, I like a lot, but the two towers and the Return of the King, maybe not so much, honestly.

I’ve read the Return of the King three times and I still can’t tell you what happened, cuz my brain just kinda shut down. It just didn’t click with me. But Hobbit and Fellowship I like.

Fern: Yeah, and it’s, and you know what I think about those two books? . I really love the changes that were made for the film.

. Cause the books are masterpieces in, of, in and of themselves. But the films are masterpieces in a different way. They what they left out, the way they tweaked it made sense. I could understand why. And, from a perspective of creating a film and I think they’re just masterpieces.

I agree. and you just have to enjoy them separately,

Stephen: And the argument I give to people is that it’s completely two different mediums. Even a book, if you do it with a full cast as a radio play, there are changes you need to make for it to come across well from the printed page to what the cast does.

And sometimes things can be cut out for time. If you really took every scene and made it into a movie scene, it would’ve been even longer than the extended editions and it probably would not be as interesting. So people gotta and realize that they really loved the books and they put everything they had into it, love into it, to get it.

So the feel of the world that what Token was saying is what came out the most and they got the important. For the most part. There’s a few silly things, but , whatever. Oh, yeah.

Fern: Yeah. I think so. And talking about the books, even if thinking about my own book is I don’t think you could just directly go chapter by chapter, putting it onto a film.

I think there would be tweaks that would be necessary because, you’re talking about a completely different medium of, for the story to, to be told. . But like speaking of other authors that I love a Agatha Christie. Oh really? Agatha Christie. I

Stephen: love Agatha. She’s one that I have a hard time getting into.

Just Oh, interesting.

Fern: Yeah. Do you like Conan Doyle? Do you like Sherlock

Stephen: Holmes? Yes. Sherlock Holmes. I do love .

Fern: So it’s interesting because I find that people who love Sherlock Holmes tend to, not necessarily like Agatha Christi, and people like myself who love Agatha, don’t really like Sherlock Holmes that much.

Stephen: What would, there’s a point right there for authors write your story because there’s somebody out there that’ll like it and somebody that won’t. .

Fern: Oh, yes. Oh yes. And I think what made Agatha Christie for me more, more interesting than Sherlock was that I could go back and I could see all of the clues were right there.

If I had paid a little more attention here and there, I could have solved it. And towards the end of my reading her book, I started picking up on what she would do. And that made it super exciting. And for me, Sherlock Holmes was difficult because Sherlock sees things that only Sherlock sees, right?

You, the reader don’t get to see that. And so he tells you what he. Later, but I the way that Agatha would weave in the clues in there that you could actually pick up on, yes. And did I think that’s what draws

Stephen: me. I did get that from the books of hers. I did read, I saw that totally.

And I see where like Orient Express, I’m like, oh, every story that’s used, that type of thing. This is where it came from. I totally get that. And I think my part of it might be is you could say Agatha Christi is a little bit. Literary mystery where it’s more realistic. Whereas Conan Doyles, Sherlock Holmes was almost a little closer to fantasy mystery with Sherlock Holmes, and that’s probably why I like it better.

But also the way his mind thinks, reminds me a lot of MacGyver. And MacGyver was like one of my favorite shows of the eighties, so Oh, I

Fern: love MacGyver . Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s interesting that the dynamics of how her characters versus hi Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson’s characters. think they’re really cool to see how you can do really great detectives and they can be totally different, and they’re still really effective characters.

Stephen: And she wrote more than one type of detective, so Oh, yeah. didn’t stick with just her q p Perro she did Miss Marle too. So you got a bunch.

Fern: Oh. Oh yeah. And so I’ve got her and of course Dean Koons. Oh yeah. I love Dean Koons. And and I’ve only recently really connected to Stephen King because I’m not a humongous horror author.

I don’t like to read a lot of horror stories. And I always had the feel that Stephen King was much more gruesome. And and so what I liked about Dean Koons is he’s horror, but he’s really more suspense. And sometimes just weird. And I liked that. But but when I saw the Dark Power movies and I was like, oh my gosh, this is King.

How interesting he has this. And even in the prologue, in the introduction of it, he talks about how it’s very different from some of the other stuff that he writes. And yeah. So I think it’s, I could definitely follow him in this line of his. Of his writing.

Stephen: Kutz never wanted to be a horror writer.

He always fought to be a thriller suspense writer. But at the time, because King was big, they pushed him into that horror arena, which he never really liked. And he’s definitely gotten out of it and pushed to be thriller suspense. And the Stephen King is pretty much the exact same way. It’s only like the first eight books that are real horror based.

Everything since then is pretty much a thriller, maybe some supernatural elements thrown in here and there. . But they’re really not the horror the Shining or Salem’s lot and those types of things, they’re way different. I Cujo, it was a round hog, oh yeah. It’s not horror anywhere.

Fern: that was such a traumatizing.

Stephen: Yeah, the movie was, there’s an example of a movie that does not play every scene does that take everything out, but captures the essence of the book and portrays it on the big screen without having to be five hours long. So that’s a good example of, I think a King movie done well.

Fern: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And so those are some of the books that I love. And more recently, I’ve gotten into Rick Orden his series is very fascinating to me. The Percy Jackson, which they did a horrible job as, in the movies there’s a series coming out. Yes. I hope they do a much better job.

Yes. Cause the books are fantastic. What a one, what a captivating idea of what if the gods of Olympus were alive and were real. And what if they’re still around and. What if they’re still doing the same things they were doing and having half kids with humans and stuff. And it’s fascinating and it’s so much fun to read.

I just loved them.

Stephen: I honestly liked the Den books more than I liked the Harry Potter stuff. So I got into it more.

Fern: Yeah, me too. I, it was hard for me to get into the Harry Potter. I liked the movies. The movies I could really enjoy. But the books were hard for me to read. I don’t know why,

Stephen: ha I was reading the books to my kids and halfway through book four reading it to ’em one night they stopped me and said, daddy, w we’ve both already read this and finished it.

We’re on book five. So I’m like, oh man, now I gotta go read all these myself and finish ’em up. . So That is awesome. Yeah. . Alright, so Fern, do you have a local bookstore that you like to go to?

Fern: I really like Brazos Bookstore. Okay. Here in Houston we do a lot of events with them with women in the Visual and literary arts and the Houston Writers Guild.

We we have an annual Haunted holidays event where our members can come up with short stories that revolve around the holidays, that have some kind of element of haunting this to it, poetry, short stories. And so we’ll gather together and dress up and, we’ll, they’ll let us decorate the whole store and nice.

And we read and we have, we’ve had the, during the pandemic, of course, we had to go digital to Zoom, but this past year we actually were live again and in person, so it was really nice. And so I like Brazos and I like Blue Willow. My, the fav, my favorite one was River Oaks bookstore.

But. They closed during the pandemic. And so it was really heartbreaking to see that happen, yeah. Because they had been in part of Houston for such a long time.

Stephen: All right, so let’s finally close up talking about your book and a myriad of other topics that we seem to have branched out onto.

So anybody that likes what we were talking about, pick up Fern’s book because you’re going to like the book, but let’s if somebody came up to you there in Houston, said, Fern, I heard you wrote a book. Why should I get your book and read it? What would you tell ’em?

Fern: I would tell them because it’s fun entertaining, but also it encourages you because the real theme of Book one is that no matter how badly you fail, no matter what a horrible mistake you make, even if you make the most.

Terrible mistake that you could ever possibly make as a human being. You can come back from it. It won’t be easy, but you, there’s always a road back if you really, choose to change to try to atone. And that’s really what she does, right? She threw away her birthright she threw away her position, her authority, she abdicated, and when she comes back, she has to prove they had believed in her because of her birth, but now they have to believe in her because she has to show that she’s worthy.

And so I think that’s a really great read and encouraging for us, because I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my share of failures that I’ve had to come back with.

Stephen: No, never had any of that . Great. I appreciate that. Thank you much for sharing all of that.

Val has learned lessons about writing while she worked on her four books. One thing she’s learned, that we discuss in this episodes, is that it helps to plot.

She likes to writie thrillers, and one of her favorite thriller writers, Lee Child, gave some advice that has stuck with Val and she changed how she write because of it.

Roland is also back to discuss the latest news in the author world.

http://indestructibleauthor.com/

Stephen: Okay, so let’s do a little author talking. I gotta ask you about your why to Kindle Unlimited here in a minute. Let me ask you this though. You’re on your fourth book. What have you learned that you’re doing different now than what you did at the beginning?

The

Val: very first thing I learned was that no, you, if you, for me, it doesn’t work for everybody. For me, I’ll never write anything if I don’t actually sit down and. Okay. So when I first thought maybe I’d write, I thought to myself, okay, what will I write about what, who I decide. I decided I’ll gonna write a book, what will be about?

And absolutely nothing came into my head. And this had been going around in my head for weeks. And then I heard May Binchy, do you know May Binchy? Yeah. I heard May Binchy interviewed and she said, I’ve never write anything if I didn’t sit down on my desk and write from nine to five every.

I’ve never done nine to five. My, my stamina isn’t that strong. But then I sat down and I start, and I sat down and started writing, and I was amazed to discover that like words just came to me. . .

Stephen: Yes. I And that I totally agree with you. So I know a lot of people talk about writer’s block and you mentioned earlier about getting ideas.

My, I love when people say where do you get your IDs? It’s like, where don’t I get my ideas? I’m driving down the road and I get three ideas. I’m sitting here writing this book and I get an idea for this other book. It just, once you start that creative juices going, it seems. Not stop. I’m working on a Christmas story for my kids and I’ve been doing that almost every year and it’s, I was like, okay, it’s gonna be like all the others.

Oh, it’s gonna be a short little story. And now we’re up to 7,000 words , and it’s still going . So I agree. It just kinda keeps going. No, I

Val: don’t get writer’s block. I probably get the opposite. I write a lot of crap writer’s

Stephen: blog, then I ,

Val: maybe that’s it. I write a whole load of stuff and then I go back and I think, nah, that’s useless.

I have to get rid of that. But I’ve often listened to Lee Child being interviewed and I heard Lee Child and he said he never deletes anything. He said, because I’m a writer, not a. And I tried that. Once he said it, I thought, yeah, I waste too much time writing stuff that I later throw away and don’t use.

I said, I’m going to do it this time. I’m going to have a plot. But I don’t think, I think about a week later, I’ve written a page that was, as far as a God I just can’t work that way. I just have to keep writing and see what happens.

Stephen: Yeah. We’re gonna talk about writing plot here in a couple minutes.

More of a discussion. But yeah I, I know a. I’ve, everybody has to come to their own way of doing it. And sometimes you have to try and experiment other ways. And that’s where I’ve gotten, this, like I said, this Christmas story I’m working on now. Without even realizing it. started off as a, an almost dialogue only story where it was very little, everything else, but the story seemed to flow really well, and now I’m adding in the other stuff.

I’ve never wanted to write that way. It just kinda happened. I know a buddy of mine, Jay Thorne, talks about doing that all the time. He’ll write the whole book as just basically dialogue and then go back and fill the rest in. And it’s actually working quite well for me this time. So I’m like, oh, okay, we’ll go with it.

Val: That’s interesting because I don’t generally do that. I generally tend to write Page by page till I get to the end. But I had to change something and go back and add something to my most recent book. And I found it incredibly confusing. Like when I said I kept getting big stuff as to what was happening and where I was and it and all the rest.

And then when I got to the end and I send it off to my editor and. . I had this big reveal, and she, at the end of one chapter and she said, you said that already. And I thought, oh my God, I did . I mentioned it three times earlier without meaning to,

Stephen: So I got a few other questions. Let’s talk a little bit about our discussion on plot since we’re here already.

What software do you use to write. Word.

Val: I know nobody does that and nobody does that. But I’ve used Word, all my working in life, I’m very comfortable with it. A,

Stephen: actually, I’d probably say a good 70 to 80% of the writers I talk to use Word. Do they? Everybody hear? Use s Scrivener. I was just gonna say and this isn’t a dig or anything to anybody.

Most of the authors I talk to are newer. Actually having four books put you at the higher end of professionalism for my podcast. No dig against anybody. It’s just the focus is new authors, unknown authors, people you haven’t heard of. But that’s not to say that more professional authors use other stuff.

I personally like Scribner because of exactly what you were just saying. I just, I’m a database programmer by trade, so very analytical type thing. And I realized with word that. It’s all one big long thing and, oh wait, if I wanna change or move something, it’s just cumbersome. Whereas Scribner I kind put things on a corkboard with little synopsis and I can move ’em around, and then I go into it and I write the details.

So we were gonna talk about plot and that kind of fits right in. I don’t do a big outline. I generally have a, an idea of the plot. How do you handle plot?

Val: I did look at Scribner when I started. I got the free version and I looked at it and I thought, by the time I’ve learned that I’ll have written the whole book.

I’m not . And also because I don’t plot, I I don’t think I need it. The odd time I think it will be handy cuz I wouldn’t make the mistake I made there in that book. But I. Generally speaking, I feel I don’t plat. And if you do, and I think S Scribner sounds like it’s perfect for Plattered, but I’m not a platter.

My book generally starts to goes straight to the end. So I find word is fine, but no I don’t plat. Usually when I start a book, I know who the murderer is, I know who the victim is. Most of the time I know why they did it. I didn’t actually in one book, but most of the time I know why they did it. But that’s it.

Then I just start writing. So what I do is I start writing it and when I start to write it, I see it in my head like I’m watching a movie. So then, yeah, so then characters just start doing things and I bite

Stephen: them and I. I’m the Christmas story I’m working on. One of the reasons I think the dialogue type of beginning and why it’s flowing so easily is because I have all the characters in my head pictured very well, and they’re all distinct.

And I have a firm grasp. It’s almost like they really exist and I’m just kind sketching what they’re actually saying and doing. It’s played out in your head and a. I don’t, I know JD Barker talks all the time working with Patterson about intricate plot details outlines, where, each chapter is, here’s all the things going on in the chapter outlined out, and then here’s the sub things and everything is, 50 pages of outline to, for before you even write the book.

I I’m like, Away from that, I get an idea and I even using Scribner, I’ll say, here’s a scene, here’s a scene, here’s a scene. And then I fill it all in and it expands and it changes and that, so I, like we said earlier, I think authors really need to try these and figure out what works best for them. Not just, oh, that’s how does it.

So that’s how I’m gonna do it, even if it’s not best.

Val: Exactly, and when I started, I got really cut up in this whole plot thing. People say you have to have a, an idea where you have your peaks and your candles. What do you call those things? I can’t think of the word for them, they, you’re supposed to write

Stephen: to this.

The word’s gone, like the three act structure with Exactly. Rising action and Exactly

Val: I worried myself sick about that because I couldn’t figure out like, how the hell did I do this? And then I wrote when I’d written my book and I sent it off. To my developmental editor, and she said to me, because I give up, I just thought, I’m not even worrying about that.

So I sent it off to her and she said to me, now you’ve got quite a good grasp of structure. And I said, I have absolutely no grasp of structure. I don’t understand it at all. And she said for some people it comes naturally because they’ve picked it up from reading.

Stephen: I, I was going to ask you that. Do you mostly, or have you mostly.

Psychological thrillers throughout your life that you, it’s just like part of you now. ? No, I’ve read

Val: throughout my life, but I haven’t always read psychological failures. I’d say I, I was like 30, I think. I read my very first aga, the Priesty when I was a teenager, but like reading lots of them, I don’t think I started doing that till I was nearly 30.

Stephen: Okay. All right. And maybe this is why I don’t write. In that genre, cuz honestly I cannot get into Agatha Christi. I’ve read a couple stories and I’m like, okay, I’ve read enough. I, I read the big popular ones and I’m like, yeah, I just she doesn’t throw me. I

Val: mean, when I was a kid different things throw you, I actually wrote an article about that recently about the very first, the Christie book I ever read, and it was called, Let me see if I had the article, I would be able to remember his name.

The man in the brown suit. That was it. Okay. So I’d been going through my tortured romantic phase at that stage, and I went into my grandmother’s house one day and she found these books at the end, at back of a Cupboard, and she gave them to me. And one of them was this, and there was, it was written in 1927, so it was like, it was not a modern book.

But it was about this girl whose father dies and she’s left on her own at a time when women weren’t really supposed to, be doing much on their own. And she decided she’s gone off to South Africa. And I just thought it was such a lovely book. , it was a bit of a romance that she got to do all these amazing things as opposed to the women I’ve been reading about.

I spend most of the time dying in factories and waiting for Ben to come and save them before they dropped down to starvation. And I just thought it was like a breath of fresh air. .

Stephen: Nice. Yeah. I think the books and authors we read when we’re younger make the impact and the imprint on us, and a lot of what we do later stays close to that.

, I still pick up Stephen King and we’ll read him, and even if I book, I’ve read sometimes it’s like manam. I really feel like reading that again, , I think that’s the same way, but I will say, I read Murder on the Orient Express and I went, oh, now I see where the 500 derivative movies and books that use this similar plot came from.

She came up with this first. She

Val: was the first one to do that, so that was very unique at the time.

Stephen: Yeah. I agree. So I’m like, okay, yeah, if nothing else, I can say yes. I have read Agatha Christie, so you know, I’m not missing one of the classic authors , but you do better

Val: than me. I haven’t read Stephen King.

I have seen his movies, but I’ve never read it. Oh

Stephen: There aren’t too many movies that are that good with his stuff. I appreciate some of ’em at. Level, but a lot of his books, one of my favorite top three favorite books of all time is The Shining. I’ve probably read Really? I’ve seen the

Val: movie, never read the

Stephen: book.

Oh. The I do not like the Cubic movie that even though everybody loves it it, there’s actually a TV mini series that was on in the early nineties based on The Shining, and I thought it was much more accurate to the book and a better. Movie watching experience, then the cubic movie. So each of their own, Yeah. Maybe

Val: someday I’ll read, but I’m not really a horror person, to be honest. I don’t like Gore. It gets to well,

Stephen: well, a lot of his more modern books aren’t even really horror. They’re, they just touch upon a little supernatural, maybe . It’s the early ones that have the best horror in it.

Yeah. Yeah. Harry was hit. Do what? was Carrie not his? Yes, that was his first one. Place I remember. Yeah. . Yeah. That one I didn’t care for a whole lot. It was a shorter, thinner story but. The Salems lot, the Shining Dead Zone, Cujo Misery. Those were all, oh, I

Val: saw misery. I saw the movie

Stephen: Misery.

That’s one of the good movies, . So I like that one. Kathy Bates is wonderful and it says Steve Khan or James Khan. Sorry. Okay besides Book Bub, how are you marketing your.

Val: Oh apart from BookBub, I don’t really do all that much. I do different things. I started off doing Facebook ads, but what I found was I got sales from Facebook ads, but they cost me about as much as I was spending on the thing.

So I drop them. I do Amazon, but I don’t find it very successful. What I do is I put my book in it’s late here. My brain isn’t working properly. What do you call those things where you reduce your book? To to 99

Stephen: cents. Oh. Like some sale? Some, no, like

Val: the big ones free

booksy,

Stephen: those kinds.

yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Val: No, I do those about, I do one of my books there about a week before my new book comes out. and then I do my new book. And then after my new book comes out about three months later, I apply for good book Bob Dale. And so far that’s worked for me. If Book Bob ever stopped working for me, I’m gonna have to go up with a different model.

Stephen: And one of the things I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned on the last half, was you go wide and then you essentially pull it down and just put it in Kindle Unlimited. . Whereas a lot of times I hear authors saying they go in Kindle Unlimited first and then they go out wide. So why? Why do you do it the way you do?

Do it?

Val: because I want to do Book Bob. So if you do book, Bob won’t really consider your book. If it’s in Kindle Unlimited, I, they do some big people, but it’ll be very difficult to get your, to get a feature deal if your book was in Kindle Unlimited. So I figure by not having it in Kindle Unlimited and not having had any big sales in it before, that means it does better when it goes on a book.

Bob Dale. Okay. Right. .. Again, everything I do is build around this feature do, which I may not even get .

Stephen: Okay. And so how long do you leave them? Like I assume Apple and Google and Cobo or maybe, wherever else. How long do you leave them there and do you see, do you have good sales and then you see it decline?

Is that when you pull it out or how? How’s that? I don’t

Val: find that I have that great sales there. I do well when I do the book Bob Deal, but apart from that, I don’t find it just very well. I just want them there. So if anything ever happens, like they’re all up and if anything ever happens to Amazon, like they decide to close down my account or something, it would only take me a second to get them all live again somewhere else.

But I leave them there for the year because. , that’s like I do promos, even when I do promos. I think promos will better if you have more places that you can sell your book. So I leave them there for the promos and then I’ll do a promo, say the week before my new book comes out. And then when my promo’s done, I I put it back into Kinder Unlimited and I have my new book.

Stephen: Okay. Interesting. That’s definitely good to hear that you’re having success doing it a little different than a lot of other people do it. So for all the authors listening, like we said with plotting and writing, and so software, sometimes you gotta find what works best for you and know why you’re doing things instead of just that’s how does it.

Val: Yeah. People have told me it’s not a very bright way to do it. They say you’re relying on a book dog deal you might never get, which is true. But so far I’ve been lucky. So for me it works. At the moment. It may stop working. Yeah. Do

Stephen: you find, you’ve got people that have read your first couple books and now they want the next one, so you’re getting people ordering it because they’ve read it, they know it, and it’s building up through all of these couple.

I belong,

Val: I have people on Instagram who have followed me and read all of my books like from the beginning. So I have some people like that who are very good. Like they, they’d be saying like, I sent out my new session. They say, oh, I’m so looking forward to your new

Stephen: book, . Nice. Okay. All right. So let me ask you, Val, before we close things up if a new author comes up to you and asks do you have any advice?

I’m just starting out, what would you. Don’t have

Val: very high expectations. .

Stephen: Wow. Ok.

Val: have patience. It takes a long time.

Stephen: Okay, great. And let me, lemme ask another question before we get going. You write the psychological thrillers. Have you thought of trying any other genre or you just want to keep going with what you have?

As I

Val: said, I’m going to write I’m going to write a time traveler thriller, which is slightly different at some. I always thought what I’d love to do, but I don’t think I’ll ever do it cuz I don’t think I have the time. But I always thought what I’d love to do is rewr write a version of pride and prejudice from somebody else’s point of view.

I’ve always loved Pride and Prejudice. One of my favorite books, , so I always said I’d like to do that from the point of view of one of the minor characters. , that would be an awful lot of work because I’d have to figure out how people lived then, how people wrote, spoke then, would take probably too much work.

Stephen: That, yeah, that does sound like it would be some work, but if you love it, it does make I

Val: do, I absolutely adore that

Stephen: book. Yeah. Okay. I’ll put some links on that as one of your favorite books. great,

Val: but it’s very different from what I write. .

Stephen: Yeah. I, my, what I, my reading is way different from what I write.

All right. Val, I appreciate you getting on chatting with me today. I’m glad we got our tech problems worked out so we can get on. Oh yeah,

Val: thank you Steven. I really appreciate that cuz I was having nightmares about that tech .

Stephen: Oh no, we got you coverage. You’re good. It’s all good. I wish you luck and I appreciate you taking some time.

Thank you.

Val: Thank you for talking to me and

Stephen: Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you too. Even though the episode probably won’t come out until after Christmas, but Okay. That Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Yeah. So I was just gonna add that, yeah, happy New Year. Happy Valentine’s Day. It’ll be Valentine’s Day.

So have a good summer. Yeah,

Val: thanks Val. Okay, take care, Steven. Bye. Bye.