Chatting With Nutts - Episode #18 ft Steven Erikson

we're good yay what happens when you drop the computer which i did just before we went live i was gonna say everyone missed an amazing moment uh that was great yeah it was good i got to see your shoes which was cool uh oh right these fabulous slippers i was jealous they look very comfortable they're okay i mean all the all the the fur is worn off but apart from that i think uh the chat does know who you are uh some they're saying you're the greatest author of all time and i think that would be pretty on brand but i want to introduce everyone to the author of malazin book among other things uh he's written a first contact science fiction novel as well called rejoice which i think sounds very interesting by the way and i want to ask you about it but my guest tonight is stephen erickson stephen hi everyone i don't have the uh the comments on the side so the ones you call up are the ones i'm going to see yes so the pressure's all on you jimmy yes i have to be a good curator of comments and uh and get to everything and i know there's a lot of people uh that were really excited for you to come on but none of them were as excited as me so i was telling you before we went live that i feel like i've already had a conversation with you based on all the interviews and stuff that i've i've seen and i've read and i've studied up on uh and one thing i've noticed about you man is like you're so open for dialogue i love it yeah yeah the more we could talk about writing um just in general um the happier i am absolutely yeah i i think it's awesome because that that communication pipeline is not there with a lot of authors and that's fine like that's a personal preference right some people don't want to engage in that or they like to keep the veil up a little bit but just speaking from someone who makes content and talks to people i i really appreciate it i appreciate that you do these type of things no it's it's fun as well and you know i i have sat you know on panels and stuff where other authors were sort of like you say raise the veil of mystery yeah you know on the whole process of writing and i'm the complete opposite um i'd rather uh expose all the details of the process of writing um because i guess there's there's a part of me that wants to teach and hasn't really done a lot of that and um just to somehow convey the enthusiasm that that i have regarding um just just storytelling and the way the in the ways that in which we can do in which we can do that so i definitely want to talk to you about uh you mentioning that you are working on stories and so let's go there let's do it i mean one of the things that i i think i respect the most about you and most about malazan in general is the fact that you're very uncompromising and you have i feel like you have a vision and you do that vision and you do it your way and that's something coming from wrestling right coming from a pro wrestling background i was told to compromise a lot on the way i did things but i had very good information i was very uh fortunate to be in contact with people who made it very far in that business and i knew to to kind of drown out the rest and i knew what i wanted to do and i knew i was on the right track to do something i got a lot of awesome opportunities that way i feel like i kind of relate with you in a way obviously it's a different way of telling stories right but i never compromised yeah it's i don't know how i don't really don't know how um you know i and i know ap and canon and i have talked at length about this because you know often ap says to me well you know you can write a best seller if you want to write the best seller but you're not going to enjoy writing it and maybe has a point there um i really feel that i need to be very much challenged about what i'm working on um it needs to test test my limits um and that's that's just part of it and you know when you do things like moving into sort of deep characterization um one wants to find that that to be a different place an unfamiliar place because if all the characters that you write are familiar in the sense that they share your world view then you're not challenging yourself at all yeah um so to raise up characters and to explore characters who think completely differently um it's actually part of the reward process that i get for writing yeah i i really like that actually and thinking about getting in other people's heads and i think that's probably more important than ever right now in the world uh there is a lot of echo chambers out there and there's there's a lot of not being able to see the other person's side no matter how wrong we think they are uh and what that does i think is not only open up your mind to dialogue inside of your own head but maybe being able to step out of your shoes and see things from a different perspective and different perspective means everything and that's that's something you do in your books you make events mean different things to different people yeah and the truth of those events and i i mean i i i absolutely love your characterization and it's it was the biggest misconception i had going into malazan uh i you know the things i had seen said oh the characterization's different uh you may not get behind the characters as much and i i don't agree with that at all i have gotten so hard behind tatters sale in book one i mean this is gonna be no spoilers folks so don't worry you don't have to click off or anything but just for an example tattersall in book one i was immediately attached and it's not so much that like the characterization is different it's different than a lot of the things i've read but it's it's good like it's really really good well it's it's it's almost like shorthand for character um because i learned as a short story writer yeah that you know i applied that i applied it to novels so not knowing any better and um so that's just how i approached uh the novels as well that um the lines have to be important and they have to convey um a lot of information and and some of that information is not on the surface at all in fact some of that information may be going in the opposite direction to what you're seeing on the surface and and for me that's just a a blast it's it's it's where the process of writing becomes so much fun where where you know that you're layering things and you're setting things up for much further down the road um and that's that's part of the challenge i think yeah i i read today that it took you eight years to get guardians of them in public and that complicated too complicated and too many characters is was that the complaint yeah how interesting i you know obviously uh you threw us in the deep end uh but it's someone who did just read dune i i i know you you said uh in an interview that you lifted dune and then you kind of took that structure and put it in fantasy yeah i looked at the structure uh not not much else from doom but i certainly lifted the structure right you know the epigraphs that that sort of perspective of historical analysis looking back on events um i i took all that absolutely yeah i thought it was great and it's interesting just because you switched to fantasy that apparently that structure is confusing for people like and that it's an interesting distinction between sci-fi and fantasy and i i saw a quote where you said that you feel like sci-fi is very much about ideas and i was wondering are there any other fan is there any fantasy that you feel like are about ideas or maybe why isn't a lot of fantasy more about ideas um there are there's plenty i'm thinking actually more sword and sorcery which is you know an offshoot of epic fantasy and it's about historicity i think it's about history in the sense of uh stories set within a created world that is itself a common commentary in our world so i'm thinking robert e howard's you know conan stories um you know you wouldn't think that there was a lot going on there but he does have a framework you know he's created he created maps of you know i guess pre um ice age europe and and north africa or whatever right so it's as if you know before before the great flood as it were um and and that way he was commenting on uh the persistence of cultures and and civilizations and how they they rise and fall and this is the these are the civil civilizations that fell but then rose again in a new recognizable form that we recognize as our history so that's one way of thinking yeah and i think that that's actually i i love that i like um falling civilizations and the rebuilding of those um i saw someone say who had who's got i learned as a short story writer on the erickson bingo and i think it's i was surprised when i heard that um and and knowing that you came from i believe is the iowa writers workshop is that correct yeah well my undergraduate was here in victoria university of victoria and ironically i think i learned more in the undergraduate than i did in the in the iowa writers workshop um at the time the writer's workshop was very much everyone trying to write like raymond carver and unfortunately most most writers at the time there did not have the life experience of raymond carver so a lot of what i was reading was very much a kind of affectation of the style of carver yeah so very minimalist um quite glib in a sense that that the language was just something you'd skipped over and it wasn't really emphasized and certainly nothing in the way of heavy plotting of stories and so i was sort of really swimming against the stream when i was at iowa but it was two more years in which to write and that was more you know valuable than anything else yeah so you you're you're writing like short stories yeah and you're writing how do you become this epic fantasy you know i mean massive fantasy writer so and i know that the way your books are structured it does feel like short stories like this big tale but like when did you go oh i have something here like let's go this route like well that was mostly a product of the gaming i did with with eslamont with cam um we had just we built this uh very extensive um backstory and you know um through the gaming we we played out uh countless characters and you know their lives sort of took shape uh in the process of the gaming um so all of that was sort of sitting there and it felt like such a waste that it was just going to be you know ending up in the form of you know rotting pieces of paper with coffee stains on them and uh illegible note taking and all the rest you know stuck in a cardboard box somewhere in the attic um it seemed that it felt like it would have been for both camera uh a bit of a waste to just sort of let that you know be part of our protracted adolescents in our 20s um when we were you know living and going and and taking writing courses and doing archaeology or whatever um so yeah that was kind of the impetus for all of that and so the irony was you know even when we sat down to write the the film script of gardens of the moon um it never even occurred to us that we were starting so late in the story uh that we had all this this stuff that um came before i mean we even had a campaign that moved a couple of characters back in time to the bronze age for the melasma world where i redrew the maps um you know with different coast coastlines and all the rest yeah so we just had an immense amount of material but then we set everything into rogerstein which came late in our gaming um so even then i guess we we just sort of relied on the backstory but we're not particularly um compelled to start at the beginning right which which is one of the fun things i think about malaza it's like you're learning the hist it's being told as a history but you're also still learning about the history that does legitimately feel thousands of years old yeah well i mean i'm sure i'm sure both camera you know age tremendously in one night of gaming every now and then so yeah you you said the magic word which is bronze age you know we were talking before yeah live and i was saying how much of a big fan i am about the fall of civilization you know the bronze age collapse uh so i would be very interested if you would write the bronze age of molasses i would love to read that oh man all i've got left of that stuff are the maps in fact i think it's only one map it's one bronze age map of quantali so the original continent that our gaming started out on i would i would love to see that that would be yeah it's kicking around somewhere [Laughter] um so so you you wrote these short stories and then you turning into something more you have all this world building and stuff is there something that you could point to to say this is a good way to prepare to write something this massive because when you i write short stories i would like to write something bigger but it is very intimidating thinking about create one creating a war and you know an alternate world and on top of that going epic right um i suppose everything is is character driven um at least that's that's you learn that you know as a short story writer so you're taking your workshops and you're reading a lot and it's all character character-driven um but the narrative for a character's life um is is episodic i mean that's that's how we exist i mean we look back on it and we see our our own history as quite episodic so if you can view your exploration of characters in an episodic fashion and simply link them together one after another um you'll get your you'll you'll get your big stories um so a lot depends on on where your characters are coming from and one of the things that i remember and you still read it and people still talk about it in in when they talk about writing on youtube or whatever um in terms of giving advice to writers which is it's a statement something along the lines of write what you know um and quite often i think that advice is actually um either misdirected or misunderstood or misapplied um because if you if you think of it in in literal terms of writing what you know well if you're a plumber then you're right about plumbing right um and that's pretty limiting you know if you think about it that way yeah but writing what you writing about what you know is actually thinking of your life experience wherever you are in in your age and all the things you've done or haven't done it doesn't matter but whatever is there is actually your library it's your resource and you can take anything from there and transform it and and make use of it so you know you say you said you were in professional wrestling so it occurs to me that in terms of characters um you can just remember back to a dressing room you know where a half dozen other wrestlers are you know either getting out of their gear or getting into their gear or you know throwing about their bruises or and all the rest and you can take you know elements of their characteristics their behaviors their speech patterns um their physicality all of these things and pluck them and stick them down in a fantasy setting and turn you know your five favorite wrestlers from those dressing rooms um into a squad of soldiers traveling across the country yeah and so once you've done that you're actually writing about what you know because you know these people you you you know you've experienced life with them and now you're throwing them into a completely new scenario a new situation and you're just following along and so it is very um it can be intimidating if you're thinking well you know what kind of characters can i create you know say i'm 20 years old i've just started writing or whatever you've got you've got an endless supply because everything you've lived through is is your source material and all it takes is the imagination to take elements from that source material um and transpose it and sometimes mix it up um so for me um i never i mean i read a lot of um uh war fiction war literature um from all three of the major wars um and so i was basically uh rifling through somebody else's you know library of experiences yeah and and you know basically ripping off whatever i could but that by itself probably would not be as successful if not for the archaeology digs that i've worked on in really remote places and wild places where you know you crammed together with five or six other people and you're in the bush and like it you know it's rough it's a lot of hardship um in isolation and so that stuff is is you know i take that and then i take all that that vietnam war stuff and more literature mash it all together and that creates the malaysian marines um and it was the same for cam uh because you know he was on digs as well so you know we often were on the same dig so we'd be sharing those experiences and so there's a lot of there's a lot of dig reference inside jokes going on in our fiction that only he and i actually know about so well that's definitely a unique experience for you considering that like you know being a co-author in this big world like that has to be such a bonding experience yeah it is and we've never really we've never had problems with it we've never had arguments about stuff um awesome we just uh and whenever we meet up and you know he's living now in fairbanks in alaska um so we don't meet up that often and with covid we haven't met up at all but as soon as we get together we're just sort of back in that mindset and perfectly relaxed and comfortable and talking story and you know what he's working on next and where he's going to take it and that kind of stuff and it you know we fire each other up a lot when we get together that's awesome i mean and that chemistry doesn't exist in every friendship either right so the fact that you i mean you really kind of caught lightning in a bottle you know i know a lot of good dudes in wrestling that i could not work with to save our lives we just always had rotten matches we're never happy with the final product but then sometimes you get magic and yeah yeah but at the same time take some of those people and start writing from their point of view yeah right yeah because then then you're creating um aspects of conflict uh within the group and it's always you know it's one of the things that i found frustrating for example i'm going to go way offline here but about star trek the next generation was that everybody on the crew got along with each other far too well and you go back to the original series and you had arguments between spock and mccoy you had arguments between spock and kirk and they were valid arguments and they presented you know different ways of viewing you know whatever it is they were going through um so some friction in in you know whatever group you're writing about i think is is is going to be the most fascinating aspects of it yeah you know that yeah these people you you can't work with and nothing ever worked on you know in the uh in the arena or whatever um they will be very interesting you know in in the group that you create fictionally yeah and i've met some characters let me tell you yeah i bet you that's what i was thinking yeah i do feel like that does uh have an impact on some of the people uh that i write into my stories because i have traveled a ton and i i've been in the smallest towns in america and i've been in some of the biggest and i've seen all different types of of people and of uh states and towns and everything in between um and sometimes the the people that you meet in those situations are actually larger than life like they're bigger than solution and uh i i've definitely tried to lean into that a little bit but i've never thought about it quite the way you put it um and i was actually thinking about it today i was like if i really wanted to write a story i could write a story about a wrestler within a fantasy world but that doesn't like get me going but thinking of it the way you just stated it kind of transposing that that interests me that sounds like something i could do yeah i mean people you know we talk about varus similitude in a fantasy setting a secondary world you know those those details that feel authentic and real and sort of help anchor and ground the reader in that world well all of that stuff is what comes from that that personal library of experience so in that sense you know if you were to write a scene of somebody walking um on the moon of io well none of us have ever done that so what do you do well if you if you've ever walked on a frozen lake uh in the winter then you take the details that you remember from that experience things like you know the crunch of the snow underfoot maybe even the sound of the winds and of course you'd have to mute that because you're dealing with aisle a small a small moonlet of jupiter with almost no gravity and probably even more gravity coming from jupiter over your head yeah and transmission of sound would be different through your your spacesuit or whatever but you'd still have elements of it that you could actually take from your memory of walking across that frozen uh lake and stick it into that setting and it will add very similar to to that moment and sort of bring life to that setting yeah i like that a lot i've always said and i've always used sci-fi as an example it's like the best sci-fi takes all this futuristic stuff or big ideas and they tie it back to the human condition yeah i get tight back to human relationships i think the expanse does that like extraordinarily well um i also think it helps that it's only a little bit into the future really like i can see that happening which is cool yeah yeah this the expanse handles the physics of space flight really well so good it's so good um i'm a huge fan of that yeah um i like also talking about like conflict within groups and such and it kind of lends itself to this question that rhythm i asked which rhythmic has made some phenomenal malazine content folks if you're watching this and you haven't seen some of her uh her felson essay i thought was phenomenal uh go check that out but she said i just started midnight tides and i was wondering if the trio of brothers was inspired by the trio brothers and farseer i don't remember the trio brothers from farcier yeah she's i think she's referring to verity and and uh um so if there was inspiration it would have been subconscious i'm not i'm not conscious of it and that's why i always you know i'll throw in that caveat because subconsciously who knows what's going on you know who knows what internal thieving is is occurring and with everything you're reading or experiencing so i can't make the claim that it it that there was no uh influence but not consciously no and i know that i've heard you say before that you actually don't read a lot of fantasy because you don't want osmosis happening you don't want you know uh subconscious influences uh in your writing yeah while i was writing especially i i realized that i had a growing aversion to picking up a fantasy novel for that reason um and now i primarily read science fiction and um uh non-fiction yeah i i was that way with uh with wrestling actually i wouldn't watch anyone else i wouldn't watch other wrestling because i never wanted anyone to think that i was taking something or subconsciously you know taking something i do the book reviews too actually uh which is why when you finish a malazan book it's like the best feeling ever because you unlock all this ap and philip chase content content and you're like i can finally watch this stuff so i have to read the book and publish my video and then i will go seek out their talks with you um or just in general even like going and reading the wiki about some stuff is so rewarding you know obviously also the big high of finishing those thick books that you write yeah um but i know you don't read a lot of fantasy but uh you the way this conversation came up i thought was kind of funny uh and embarrassing for me but i'm gonna tell the story uh i had done a chat with this car uh which if you haven't checked it out definitely check it out it's really good it was two episodes ago iscar's a great guy and uh i get a comment from steve and i'm like they said if you ever want to shoot the [ __ ] let me know and i said well that that's a nice random commenter just wishing you know they they want to come talk that's cool you know and said robin hobb's great by the way and i said i love robin hobb didn't think anything anymore of it and then i got a message on twitter uh from a listener i actually don't even know who they are uh and they said did did you big league eriksen and i said what and they said you commented on your video and said he would have come on and you kind of shrugged it off and i was like no i didn't and then i realized because i'm an idiot that it was you and i tell if i you know oh i was so embarrassed and then i comment back and i'm like that's not enough and i'm like i'll talk to philip and i talked to phillip who then you know passed on my apology to you and then we got in contact uh so that's kind of a funny origin story of how this all came to be right yeah i know i i watched i watched you with with this card your act that was great i appreciate it really great conversation is phenomenal yeah and being able to rant about robin hobb with people is like one of my favorite pastimes because i read all of her books this year um which is crazy i'm technically i tackled 16 of her books and now i'm reading malazan and it's like i really did outdid myself this year um and then hearing you praise her is like oh it's almost validating in a way because i've just fallen in love with her writing so much oh she's yeah she's a great writer um when i was teaching some workshop stuff i actually used um i think almost the full first chapter of assassin's apprentice to discuss and analyze point of view control because her point of view control in that opening section is just breathtaking yeah because you are you don't even realize that the relationship and this is a bit spoilery but i won't go too far but you don't realize that the relationship between the boy and his dog is not a natural one it just it just slides in there it's just perfectly it seems perfectly normal all the way until that you know that one fantastic moment when the whole thing's torn apart um and i was just i was um absolutely amazed uh when i got to that section and i remember going back and saying basically to myself how did she do that and and then starting to deconstruct and it's just there there's a grace to her writing abilities um that makes us seem effortless but i know you know it's not effortless uh it's it's of course very deliberate it's very intentional um it's just so smoothly done that um it's it's fantastic so i i use that as an example when i teach yeah i i think hob was the first author this year um since getting back into reading as an adult that i was like okay this is like i know it's good but i don't know why and i wanted to know more about how she was doing what she was doing and that kind of led me down a rabbit hole of talking about structure and talking about uh you know that perspective control right um and there was the beginnings of the wheels turning and then i started watching ap's videos and then i started reading a lot in malazin and i'm like oh okay okay there's more to play here and the fact that you're willing to kind of show some of the craft in the process is is very enlightening well point of view is everything it is everything um and so the point of view you choose um really shapes the nature of the events and then once you've explored that then you can switch point of views and re you know re-examine these things from from a different angle um which then you know muddies the waters and uh i like having the muddy the water very muddy um when it comes to point of view when it comes to motivation especially amongst characters um i don't i don't i distrust sort of simplistic reasons for people doing things um so i i would agree i would agree with that as a reader um i i've now started to catch on to that when i'm reading i'm saying oh you know this is a little straightforward the motivations aren't nuanced at all and one thing that you do that i really really like and i wanted to ask you about it is because it's told malazan has told like a history i love the fact that you tell it from a side character's perspective of someone like amanda rake right and you because it's history we kind of idolize these people right the legend of someone is bigger even than the actual perspective uh and i know that you attempted to write a pov through rake and that you didn't in that you said it just doesn't doesn't work it doesn't work yeah do you feel that way still um well no i mean well actually maybe i do even the and amanda rake who shows up in uh the karkanis books uh i i don't think i actually go into that point of view i think i i keep it at arm's length um so for me it was more once i stumbled on on the realization that there are certain points of view that i simply cannot pull off that i mean i don't have that life experience there's no way to fake you know being alive for 200 000 years i mean what do you do with that right um so once i realized that then i realized i could make use of that and so by keeping characters at arm's length you you evoke a sense of mystery around them and then you can use the the secondary and tertiary characters who are observing that character to uh build on that and to build you know a almost a legend or a mythology around characters but also lots of doubt and lots of uncertainty um so i mean the character of tavor is the classic example of that exactly what i was thinking yeah and so once yeah once i sort of stumbled onto the fact that it was after gardens of the moon um came out that everybody started going on about rake and i was kind of bewildered i was thinking well i mean harley shows up um yeah he's he's he's a character that i role played one of the first fairy characters i actually wrote up uh uh rolled up um but yeah the the the excitement regarding rake um i have to go back and look and figure why is this happening and once i realized that then i realized that i could consciously use that for certain characters to create a certain effect and i immediately then thought of tavor it works so well it really does and i and i remember going through gardens the moon and rake being like the one like he's what i wanted to hear more and more about and it did dawn on me in fact that it was not a pov and i was like how interesting and then that's when i said this this is great characterization at least for me like i was like this clicks and i knew i was going to be in for a good time um well but but it's also a shorthand because you're holding a pointed view of another character say baruch somebody like that so when you hold that point of view you are creating characterization for baruch and then rake arrives and now you're doing characterization for both characters from one particular point of view and so you're doubling down and you know generally i think the reader doesn't necessarily pick up on that because they're seeing everything through the filter of baruch's point of view but that that filter has an effect and it then can either elevate or diminish you know the other characters or the response to the other characters so it's it's a nice it's a nice way to actually cram things in there short story style again point of view can do so much it can do so much more work than you think and it's not just about it's not just about creating the characterization of the character whose point of view you're using it's about creating the characters all around that character and then their relationships and all that stuff can all be done just through that one point of view i'll tell you when you say those type of things like talking about how much you're getting out of that one pov and how they view other people like that's very empowering uh thinking about writing and thinking about just just what i've done and so many times it's like okay i'm in this character and then we're done here okay let's go over here you know what i mean you kind of compartmentalize them uh and i don't feel like i'm i'm doing it right you know what i mean like i don't feel like i have the ability to to tie these things together but when i hear you describe it like that that sounds like i have all the power and all the it's exciting it's like really yeah yeah and that i it is exciting it's um it becomes sort of the coolest aspect of creating something because quite often what will happen is with that point of view character you'll need to throw some other people in there right just for them to play off of and then so you invent a few names and you throw a few characters in and throw a few details and then those characters just start coming alive um and becoming very interesting and then usually it's because they're interesting to the character whose point of view you're using but then they become interesting just from the writing point of view because you want to find out more about these characters and so you end up following the same journey that your point of view character does in terms of trying to sort of turn over all the leaves all the pages on these other characters and figure out where they are and what your relationship is with them um and then then you switch point of views and you do it all over again and it adds another facet to those same characters yeah and then you have a tree and you're just expanding out now and you know this is something that george r martin got criticized for for his last two books his people said he went too big and i i happen to love those books because he's branching out he's telling me about these minor houses and you know jamie lannister's walking around and talking to these people and you're getting backstory and jamie's talking about how he views them because the way his dad did and all this stuff and i know a lot of people think it's like meandering or didn't have direction but to me that's what made the world feel alive well yeah i would agree um it's one of those things where you have scenes you have whole threads your whole story plot plot lines whatever that may not go anywhere um or episodic events that just you know get left in in in your wake but they're all serving a purpose and that purpose is to to flesh out the world and make do you remember the film willow yes it's been a while okay yeah i mean yeah problematic film but there was one aspect that really made me sit up and take notice and it's when is it mad morgan val kilmer is he's he's up he's been imprisoned in this this hanging cage on a crossroads i think that's when we first meet him and um so our point of view characters are the hobbit stand-ins uh whatever they were um and they come up and they're having a conversation with them and then there's army rides past and it just rides you know from one end of the scene to the other it just rides past and they're all heading off somewhere and at that moment suddenly you realize that even though you've been with this particular point of view and you've been following the storyline and the found baby and all the rest there actually is a world outside off stage and events are occurring out there somewhere and they're going to have repercussions that come back to these characters that ex that is that's world building that is how you expand everything just by that one scene of him this army riding through because if you were to then follow that army well i mean if i remember the story line they get they get absolutely hammered and are in full retreat well that's a whole story in and of itself isn't it yeah but it's left to the imagination because we only see them later when they're in full retreat and only a few of them are left that to me that's the kind of stuff that you can pull off in fiction um that film because it's focused on the main character or characters it is so plot driven that it has almost no room for the extraneous side stuff the side quests the all the all those other events that are occurring that are that are actually thickening that world beyond the stage of what you're writing and so yeah i'm all in favor of uh you know all of those meandering explorations that the writer is up to because they're not just they're not just sort of you know it's it's not it's not masturbation i mean they're actually doing something worthwhile there right yes there's a purpose behind it there's a purpose behind it and um it may not be plot plot driven purpose uh that does not make it any less valuable um so i think maybe because we watch so much film and television which is so uh straight line focused uh in every scene has to serve the plot um that we've gotten out of practice of that idea of just wandering a landscape and seeing what's what's to be seen you know whether it's relevant or not i think that's a phenomenal point and something i've seen i've seen people say this before about malazin and people talk about the characterization being different all the stuff but i've seen multiple people say oh i just got back into reading you know maybe they read game of thrones and or song by fire and they said okay i'm gonna read something else and someone hands it you know malasana to them and they're fine because they haven't read a hundred books in a you know in a very personal uh this is they tell you know a lot of telling uh and basic storytelling which is fine that's totally a valid way of doing things uh but they don't have the preconceived notion that's the correct way of doing things and they're fine with it i think that's really interesting because a lot of people say oh wait to read a lot like you got to read for a long time and then you can read my lawsuit but i think you're right and i think you're you're right on the money with that we've we've kind of been trained by pop the popular things which again that those are valid ways of telling stories and that is fine uh you know we can critique them all we want but at the end of the day you can tell a story that way and that's that's good but it does happen to make everything else seem that it's going against the grain but it is also a valid way of telling a story like yeah it what it is it's economical and of course think about the pressures on filmmaking and television making you have to be as economical as possible that's 100 there can be no extraneous stuff and so if that's what you've grown up on then you know you open up a book and it doesn't even occur to you that um these these pages cost you know zero point zero zero zero zero zero one cent per page and so it's no real it there's no economic aspect to it to there being 50 more pages than there should be you know or 100 more pages or 500 more pages so um if if the mindset is well we're starting the story now so we got to fall into those deep ruts those tracks and run it all the way through to the end then that mindset's not prepared for a book that you know like war and peace is going to go all over the place right so but one of the one of the i think the the problematic aspects of that is that if they are not prepared for all that stuff they may often abandon while it's still out there fully expanded out there yeah and so they never realized that as far out as you go with the stories and side stories you are going to bring it all the way around and bring it to a single point at the end of the book yeah and so if they abandon part way through then yeah they will say well that you know this book just starts sprawling all over the place and all this you know all this stuff that doesn't really go anywhere etcetera and they stop reading halfway through and so that experience is a valid one for them because they never saw where where it all led where it all ended up yeah and i think obviously uh if we use the example of a song of ice and fire you know the fact that the next book hasn't come out uh i think people can now look back and say well forget all these plot lines you know we didn't get that so i think that also puts a lens on that example specifically um but i think what you're saying in a general sense is completely like that that's exactly right um i do want to point out that one more meme i need you says that was my exact experience speaking about how i said just jumping into laws and from the get-go and you have great conceived notions of what a story should be like so that's cool that someone's here that actually had that experience and um let me see if i can find this i thought it was a really good question uh yeah zan says given these type of concerns for tv and film do you have any desire anymore to go back to gardens of the moon as a script how would it be adapted is it adaptable in your mind um we lost the script um both camera we we have no idea where uh and i i suspect we'll we'll never find it it's with the bronze age stuff it's with the bronze age stuff it really is yes it's gone um but in terms of uh adaptability um we got very close um in fact we had a handshake deal that fell through um which probably turned out to be a good thing because it was um with the wine uh weinstein group so um yeah i think it didn't happen but yeah um so cam and i we met up in in orlando um when this was all sort of taking place and the contracts were getting ready and we asked ourselves well how how can we how can we think in terms of adaptation for this for a television series and the first thing that occurred to us that we needed we needed to pick up tavor's story and stay with it all the way through and so then we worked out you know some aspects of the storyline that we would have to follow um so she would be in the capital and that would be one of the the threads of the first season it's her experiences that eventually lead up to her becoming adjunct so there's going to be a lot of political intrigue a lot of uh stuff going on close to the throne of the malaysian empire which isn't in the books but we're definitely prepared to sort of at least outline what was going to have to happen there um it's very much uh adaptable but one has to realize that film and television are completely distinct media for books and so if you if you if you look at these things and go into them expecting you're going to get the book on on the screen that's not how it works it's um yes there's a lot of uh condensing there's a lot of conflation there's there's a lot of um merging of characters and there's different mechanics are are required um and so i would always view these you know the like what's happening now with wheel of time view it as um a new version of the story a retelling of the story through a different medium and so the story elements uh and the you know the broader aspects um will probably be a dear to but not necessarily the specifics because uh times have changed uh so even attitudes in terms of gender and all the rest it's all changed and one has to acknowledge the the presence or the present if you will for the audience uh the the cultural state that we are in at this moment um and that you know if you want to actually honor the books uh with an adaptation you have to pull in your present it has to be there to actually transform these books because that is actually what's honoring the books um so i would think um i am looking forward to real time i haven't watched any of it yet but i will um i think i think anything is is um is adaptable and um it's simply how you how you're going to approach it i i love that answer for a multitude of reasons um to hear someone who has a massive success millions of copies sold uh and obviously this is the story um that you and a friend have like co-authored like this world and for you to say hey they have to make some changes they gotta adapt it i think it is so important to here to hear this uh from an author well well the other the other side of it is um and i've thought about this if you know if um we do sell rights to this thing i may actually have to get my agent to slip into the um into the contract that ap cannon be hired as story editor let's go because there's i don't know of anybody better and i you know i know a lot of people who are involved in this um in terms of the ability to analyze structure and to analyze film and television and find out where it works and where it doesn't work there there's nobody better than ap and so yeah i would be very and so it can we'd be very very comfortable if if ap was sitting there uh as a story editor i i think ap i mean i think every single person and people are saying hooray for ap i mean uh in a world where micro interactions are everything 10 second video clips the fact that ap is putting out videos he's not doing a bunch of fancy editing he's sitting down and he's giving you i mean true like gold right and people are watching his channel is growing it's cool oh it's amazing and i believe you're the one who told him to start a channel is that correct uh me and his wife and yeah we were harassing him basically endlessly because he is a natural um lecturer like in in the best sense yes of the academic like the best professors you've ever had that's kind of that's kind of ap so um and it was just waiting i think waiting to happen and he just said it needed to um embrace the media form and and go with it yeah and and and he's done a great job i think he comes across very well on camera and ap has made me a better creator in a lot of ways uh we were talking after our podcast and he was talking about like what's a review and what goes into review and what's a reaction and i'll be honest i mean most of my stuff if you go on like youtube has redefined what a review is in a lot of ways i'm not breaking down well this is a third person perspective novel and the uh you know the mechanics of the book are or the tropes used in the book or a chosen one you know maybe you'll mention that but a lot of it is about the subjective personal experience that you had and i think that's fine i think that's a valid thing one of the coolest things that we do here on booktube is honestly you can find people that you align with or don't align with and then you can judge based on that i've had amazing conversations with people i disagree with um for instance allen from libra alexandria uh you know he does he didn't enjoy books uh four and five of a song i fire i argued my point and now at one point he's going to reread them so like that's cool right like that's fun um but ap really challenged me to think about what i'm doing here and what what am i trying to accomplish whenever i make a review and is it really a review or is it reaction and i think it made me feel um like a little vulnerable to be honest you know you you go on and you try to do your best you think you're doing well and someone puts in a different frame and you say okay well am i doing the right stuff am i am i doing a good job am i representing the material that that people have worked on very hard uh well enough and among the cross yeah i i it's a weird thing i mean when people think uh oh you know this intimidates me or this person intimidates me whatever when i think of it in terms of the favorite books i've read every one of them intimidated the hell out of me and i loved it for i loved those books for that reason i wanted to be intimidated because then you rise to the challenge or or you don't i mean you might fail and rise into the challenge but at least you try um yeah and that's i mean i would i would advise for what it's worth uh reviewers out there yeah by all means look at ap stuff and listen to what he's talking about and the precision of his language which is what he's you know really speaking to he's speaking to being be precise if you're going to have a reaction call it a reaction right don't call it a review because it's just a reaction um that that's useful stuff that's um stuff that um you know your your back may get up on it but that's fine because you know the dust will settle and something will come out of it that you you can make use of at some point or another yeah be able to have those conversations because words are important in a multitude of ways really um i i really enjoyed i read your ama on reddit that you do once every 10 years apparently yeah which i thought was funny i think i've got something coming up in december 21st something around there i'll definitely be on there i'll i'll be on there for that because i thought your ama was incredible um you have a quote oh well i'm making it a quote from you uh when someone asks you about like their own self-critic which is is something i identify with and i'll explain why in a second but you said about self-doubt you said i sacrificed the inner critic to the god of ambition and shouted down its ghost at every turn i loosed the hounds of failure and had them banging at my heels every moment of every day the inner critic has a place and a role the inner critic is there to make your work better not shut it down if it shuts you down kill it first off dude that's a amazing string of words [Laughter] i mean that got my blood pumping man so kudos to you well i mean yeah the inner critic is the thing is everything that is internal to us in terms of our mindsets has value we may not appreciate it um and we may not even understand it um because it's quite reactive in many ways um to external stimuli and all the rest but it all has value and so even the things that you know you don't want to think about and you don't want to um explore in any fashion for whatever reason because it doesn't make you feel good or it's um it can lead you to to strange places or unpleasant unfamiliar places um certainly all of those things they are free for you to explore and i think one i think it's kind of sort of self being self analytical in that sense but recognizing that you are free to explore all aspects of yourself including um pain including grief including sadness including sorrow um yeah including uh unpleasant memories including regrets uh all of these things especially for the for the artist this is this is your source that is your source and to shy away and to sort of um [Music] in any sense try to sort of avoid i mean avoidance is a big thing for all of us we avoid all kinds of things um but every now and then it's worth recognizing that um avoidance is is simply delaying something uh it's not a permanent thing and so you know to turn back and to to walk that ground again for an artist is is is where you will find i think the things that you really want to be exploring in your art that's where that's where it's found it's not found in the easy stuff it's like i often say people ask me for one line of advice to a beginning writer and my line is finish what you start because generally what happens is short stories novels you name it you start up and and you've got these ideas and you're really really excited about them and so you get on the keyboard and you're just ripping away you know one page two pages three pages and then it starts slowing down and then it starts turning into a grind and what needs to be recognized there is that those first four pages you already know how to do that it's the next 54 pages or 500 pages where you're going to learn something new let's go first four pages you haven't learned anything new um and that's why it is so crucial to finish what you start because that process once you're past the easy stuff is where you learn and once you complete i mean once you complete a manuscript or story or anything um the feeling you get from it is is indescribable and it makes you want to do it all over again so yeah you know it's funny you say that because um one of the things that i've had to overcome as an individual in my life is is finishing strong um i tend to temper off in life at many things and it's just that something i've accepted now that i've gotten older but i also accepted the fact that it's not permanent and that i can fix it yeah and uh when i i just wrote a short story this past year and i chose a short story for two reasons one i think the idea of like combining a bunch of short stories into like a longer like thing is very interesting um and then second i said i can finish this like i know i could do this so that's what i did and i wrote and really i think it's a borderline novella like it's somewhere between those two things but finishing it um i mean i think only 20 people have read it you know i didn't release it to the public i've released of my patrons and had a couple uh people who helped me edit it and stuff which i very much appreciate if you're watching um but even then putting the period and writing the end is one of the greatest accomplishments i've had in my life and i've done some stuff that i would label as pretty cool you know i've wrestled in in my tights or underwear in front of 10 000 people and i feel just as accomplished uh finishing a short story and it taught me and that was progress not just for writing but in my life i said look i can finish something i can do oh yeah yeah yeah it's validation and and there's no shortcut there's no shortcut to that validation and that's what makes it so valuable when you get there definitely yeah and it's a skill it's a skill to end something right like um finishing a book writing up an ending tying it all up or you know getting the the reader interested to pick up the next one or something like that is a skill in itself um i know people who struggle with the beginnings of books i know people who struggle with the middle and i know people struggle with the end but when you finally do it all even if one outshines the other it's just a complete project that you yourself have done and you've you've put an exclamation point on something that it will live forever technically and to me there's definitely a um like when i talk about writing and something that i really want to get into is there is an absolute selfish aspect of it that that piece of work is like immortalized it is ruthlessly selfish yeah it is um [Music] yeah it's it's kind of scary selfish um because you will loot your your you know all of your experience um in order to get that onto the page in some fashion or another um you know when i was writing told the hounds i was i was basically digging my way through the grief i was feeling at the time and putting it on the page and that's just it seems cold it seems mercenary um it seems as if you're actually feeding on yourself and bleeding in the process um but that's for me that's the only way i know how to do it it it it has to mean um [Music] as much as it does uh for me for the reader to actually get anything emotionally from it um i have to i have to plumb those depths first yeah and that that's a pretty emotional thing it is it's hard yeah i think that um so at the end of my story there's a letter written from um someone who has passed to to someone who has to now take a responsibility over and when i wrote the letter um i thought about if i was saying bye to like my best friend and it's like it's emotional talking about it right now man like yeah you know i went to a very dark place and i was not in a very good mood that day um but well we go to those places but we go to them in order to come back from them right and that's that's part of the storytelling process um it's part of you know we're all we're all you know the main characters in our ongoing narrative and and um i guess the more that that that character that that self can can experience um i don't know it's almost as if the more ballot everything seems or more no not valid the more worthwhile all of these things are uh even even the things that you know we'd rather not happen to us or rather not experience um but it pays for the writer for the artist it pays to go to those places and um to go back to them if you have to um like you know 20 30 times in the course of your life you go back to them i mean how many writers are end up exploring one aspect of the human condition for their entire careers yeah you know that's not uncommon and it becomes an obsession it becomes something that you just you got to keep throwing sort of lobs of clay uh wet clay at the invisible rock and you just keep circling that rock and you're throwing and throwing and throwing yeah i know that you said midnight tides was the easiest book to write as far as it just wrote itself what was the hardest book to write and like what was like the hardest time in your life to write um you would think those moments of you know personal grief and all the rest would be the hardest times to write no not at all they were my my salvation they were they were my my bridge through over it all or not not over through it um the hardest ones to write were hard because of structural reasons right so um memories of ice stretched me lengthwise and in terms of story uh it's epic well it's it's you know i mean it's my third one and it just it stretched me let's put it that way um yeah i ended up using muscles i didn't know i had with that one um bone hunters was a challenge structurally because it's basically two novels i just finished it did you yeah you're you're a madman it's it's yeah it's two two novels and follow light was extremely um probably i mean if you would ask ap he would say that that was my toughest the toughest hall for sure yeah yeah yeah i i think it's interesting you said that the easier times is when you are feeling uh some of the harder things in life and i can agree with you more uh i get most the time where i finally get myself to sit down and write something is on my worst days uh yeah i'm really thinking about you know what is this all about like what am i thinking of and you know someone who does this really really well and i know you'll agree uh because i i think you've you've had some influence on this person and it's r scott baker oh man i just finished the prince of nothing trilogy and you were talking about going to uncomfortable places i mean he he goes there in spades and sits there and builds a campfire and tells you a couple tales um but i i get it i get what he's doing and he goes into some um really interesting views on not just life and he and he's obviously into philosophy and whatnot um but i that that kind of stuff like gets me motivated to write like to see someone go to those uncomfortable places and make it make sense and tell a really good story for some reason just resonates with me really yeah yeah um i i actually i felt like his work and then reading your work around the same time it was like i was bouncing back and forth between ideas almost and it's just how they're explored in each different and the different worlds is fascinating to me yeah yeah i mean our world views views are fundamentally different yeah you know i've sat and talked with scott um yeah we're coming from two very different places for sure yeah and i i would say that you're more optimistic that's a bit of an understatement i would say yeah just the wee bit man just a wee bit i saw you say that you uh that your younger self was more hopeful um and you don't necessarily think that your younger self is wrong uh but you you feel bad for your younger self um um i don't know if i feel bad for myself maybe the phrasing was um i can't remember the exact phrasing but you were talking about how your younger self was more hopeful and you don't necessarily think that your younger self was wrong um i think the word was pity i felt like i felt like you used the word pity maybe pity yeah i must have been in a in a dark place at that moment um well you were on reddit so that would be well that would be pretty dark yeah no it's i just recognize the younger self as um has had as as possessing elements that i'd no longer possess you know on both sides of the leisure um certainly there was more uh i guess more energy for for driving towards sort of the biggest the biggest thing i could imagine the 10 book series um and i i you know i i was i was in a hurry in this you wouldn't know it for the size of the books but there was a kind of almost desperate need to get the 10 books done and i just i i had the reserves of energy and creative energy to do that um and so i look back and yeah it's it can be hard to recognize you know the person who actually pulled that off because you know the older one gets the less or the uh the fewer reserves i think of energy that one has yeah something my grandpa used to say to me was when you have the itch scratch it son and uh and you had the itch and i relate to that in a lot of ways um talking about like you're not necessarily even like the same person you know the same things and um like i think it back whenever i was uh doing wrestling and i was burning the candle at both ends i was getting where i was sleeping i was working full-time i was in school online and i was traveling you know four or five days a week and wrestling as much as possible and i was just a savage and i was obsessed with with the ambition of being something that i was not supposed to be i was never supposed to make it i was never supposed to be able to do these things um and oh man it lit a fire underneath me yeah and now that that that guy is gone he's not here no you know that doesn't mean i'm not motivated to do things or whatnot but that like killer mentality is totally gone and in some ways i'm happy uh because that version of me was very selfish um yeah yeah you certainly have to you have to find the right partner to to survive that kind of stuff right so yeah absolutely yeah i i've been very fortunate on that that regard i took took a lot of time for myself and now you know being older and whatnot it's good to kind of give back would would you say that you felt obsessed with writing whenever you were writing the main 10 yeah absolutely but that obsession started long before that you know those those 10 books um it it it started yeah it started pretty early on um and it took me coming here to university of victoria for my undergraduate um dropping out of the archaeology side of things um yeah it took one a couple of teachers to sort of really open up in terms of how they described writing to really open up the possibilities and the potentialities of of uh storytelling because up until that point i was you know i think one of my first short stories um the point of view was absolutely perfect but entirely accidental right i had no idea what you know what the [ __ ] i was doing um but i i had my instincts i guess and i stayed with that and you know i remember sitting in that workshop the first you know when the story is being discussed and my teacher just starting to discuss and tell everybody else about point of view control as being you know um perfect and you know when you're being critiqued in these workshops you're not supposed to say anything so i didn't say anything so you know you you just basically sit there and look as if yeah i knew exactly what i was doing but you know the truth was i didn't and but it was an educational process where when he started talking about it i realized that oh so that's what point of view control is that's what point of view is that's what consistency is and so just so many writers um i think even to this day um are still instinctive in in their writing they know they know what works and they follow it and they can trust their instincts um because bear in mind that that creative writing programs that's a relatively recent phenomenon in terms of english literature in terms of literature um so how did all these people before the workshops uh figure it all out right well they just they did they figured it out they didn't need the programs they didn't need somebody else to tell them but these days we have that and you know you know even people like ap and and what he's discussing yeah it's extremely relevant to the writer very helpful not just to the reader it's it's good for the writer for sure to listen to that stuff um as someone who who doesn't have you know an undergraduate degree in english or creative writing or anything like that and someone uh you know one day i'm going to capitalize on my obsessive personality and i'm going to dive super hard into writing yeah um what what would you recommend for someone who doesn't have the traditional sense of education at a university or something like do you think going to these workshops is a good idea obviously well workshops can be good um but you have to go in there you have to go in there into a workshop first of all being completely aware that they are your fellow workshoppers and your instructors are not your audience um unless you want to be writing short stories about creative writing and structures teaching creative writing you know i mean right um that's sort of the the downside of or the the literal extreme of writing what you know and we get a lot of that we get a lot of contemporary fiction that you know is written by a professor and the characters are our professor and you know they're working on a novel and the character is working on the novel and yeah it's like you know they don't go very far the imagination doesn't reach very far um but that can be quite successful so anyways they are they are not your audience and so you have to take your critiques with a huge grain of salt and sift through the things that you find will be useful to you and dump the rest yeah and you know if you think about in those ways then you're spending a lot of money for maybe not very much you know at the end of the at the end of the day but those things that you do take with you um and the fact that you're reading everybody else's works and you're seeing you know the areas where they are struggling and then you're listening to the the um to the teacher and hopefully a good teacher um who basically describes why you know these struggles are occurring and what needs to be addressed and how do you need to look at these things yeah um so you learn you learn sort of just through the entire environment that you happen to be in but the second thing a a workshop um like clarion or something like that is really useful for is that you you one tends to go into these things feeling like a fraud right and and feeling guilty for actually taking time away from other things to work on a short story or a novel and all the rest yeah um because you know we've got jobs we've got families we've got you know domestic necessities and all the rest and so it becomes this guilty pleasure that that you are taking time away and it feels selfish like you say it feels extremely selfish yeah um but you take a workshop and then there you've got an institution that is giving you permission to write that by itself actually can be more than anything you get out of the workshops is that this is what you're here for you're here to write so right right and um that takes a lot of pressure off i think in a lot of ways uh it removes the guilt from the process which can happen um you know i wrote gardens of the moon and couldn't get it published for eight years i feel pretty bad for for the six months in which i wrote gardens on the moon you know until i got a publisher yeah because you know i could have been doing other things could have been writing other things so yeah eight years a long time yeah it sucked yeah uh how did you um you know how did you kill the inner critic how did you how did you how did you uh keep going during that um sounds so arduous yeah well i was writing contemporary fiction at the same time um and that's that's the other thing is that if i don't write i become difficult to live with so it's better that i write um yeah even if the stuff never sees the light of day it's just better that i write um so i continued writing i was doing all kinds of jobs um really soul-destroying jobs and and so the writing stuff was kind of the uh symptom or emblematic of the dream that i that i was aiming for which was to one day become a full-time writer and so that was the goal i'd set for myself and yeah that you know you get knocked down a lot um and i was getting pulled in the direction of contemporary fiction in canada where i was getting canada i got a count on a council grant major grant and then i was getting other grants lesser grants um and the expectation there is you you you run the get the grant circuit and and then you eventually get a job at a university teaching creative writing and you become part of ken lit whatever that is and you know you're happy if you sell 500 copies of your books um and i was i was being pulled in that direction and a part of me just really recoiled at the thought um and so we moved to the uk uh and the novel i took with me was a novel a coming-of-age novel set in northern well set just north of winnipeg um in canada and it occurred to me that that kind of setting would feel exotic to uh british readers so i thought i had a better chance of actually getting it published in the uk than i did in in canada so i took it with me and that's how i got my agent and then i got that book published and then of course the agent immediately asked well what are you doing what what's your next book right because right yeah and so i cleaned up gardens of the moon and put it in his hands and i guess the rest is history so wow yeah yeah i mean that's a long um tough journey and uh i i couldn't really imagine the the mental like hurdles you have to overcome uh to keep on that road um i i went to wwe which is like the highest of highs right for for pro wrestling and i got told no six times i went for six different tryouts and uh admittedly on the sixth one i think i was like maybe it's not gonna happen you know maybe maybe this isn't gonna happen but for me uh i would say i was fortunate enough to know that making it uh was something else entirely different at that point so i was very lucky but i remember man like going and giving everything and being like i was on a good run and had a good showing and they don't even have any feedback for you like you're not even getting good feedback at some points and you're just like i guess i gotta just keep showing up i just gotta keep doing it yeah and those are some of the hardest nights of my life uh in the car you know 2 a.m driving the 12 hours back to wherever i was going for the next show and just being like okay i guess you know back to the grind it's all worth it it's all going to be worth it one day but you know you say that but there was a lot of times where i didn't think it was going to be worth it yeah yeah it it you get knocked down a lot um yeah you just pick yourself up and keep going um i don't know it's it's strange because i didn't i didn't sort of get everything started up and running uh in terms of writing until my 40s so i felt i felt late coming to coming to the game that's actually really encouraging to hear because i turned 31 in two days and uh i'm just like you know is this too late because you hear about people taking 8 10 12 20 years to get a book published which maybe that's not what i want out of this i don't i don't know um but i certainly would like it sounds good it sounds really well yeah that is the other that's the other thing is is one can get in the trap of reworking one book for 10 years and it's a trap in two senses because say you get it published um you've spent say five six years on that novel or ten years on that novel it's a pretty polished novel by that point right yeah um and then they say well you've got 18 months to produce the next one whoa you know so you're not prepared for that um so i would certainly recommend you write a novel um print it out stick it on stick it on the shelf in in your office and start the next one and maybe five months later four or five months later pull the other one down and go through it because you'll be a better editor at that point because you've been working on the new one right exploring new ideas and new ways of saying saying things um and and do your revision from that point onwards and so you've you're always every i mean every book that i delivered to the publisher i stopped thinking about because i'm already thinking about the next one right so one of those yeah one of those potential traps um is to continually rework the same work uh endlessly yeah um because you will by virtue of reading and re-reading and rereading and reworking you will suck the freaking life out of it you know and so you'll lose the joy of writing the joy comes from from new stuff it comes from you know what what you discover on the next page um that's where that's what keeps you going um believe me it's no fun doing a copy edit or an edit or that kind of it's no fun it's just it's how do you say that because like that's exactly my experience in the short story oh dude like i even i remember telling my wife i was like i think i was on like the third like round of people reading and giving me some editing to do you know because i'm not gonna go and buy it you know pay an editor to do this whole thing for this kind of like experiment right um i was on like my third round of edits and i was like i am ready to move on folks like i don't want to read about dimitri and this stupid sword anymore like i just he's dead to me i don't want to hear yeah you know or i want to continue the tale right yeah yeah but and of course the thing is by creating that temporal distance um from actually working on the thing and finishing the story you acquire a new level of objectivity because the thing that you're working on at the moment you've poured your heart and soul into it so it's personal yes it's very personal and that's you know that's why in workshops uh for first people who come to workshops for the first time delivering that first story is terrifying because it's like you know you peeled your own skin off and you're handing you know your your flesh and and bones for other people to pick over and it can be you know it's it's it can be terrifying uh so workshops that's one thing that workshops are good for they teach you you learn to have a tough skin a tough hide that you can take take the blows and and um and not be overly bothered by them so that establishes a kind of objectivity and a kind of distance from your work which is really really useful because let's face it um even if you get published uh people out there some people are going to hate it yes definitely and they're going to say you can't write and then you're going to say this that and the other and it's just if you don't have if you don't have a tough hide um that could be pretty brutal yeah that's something i did earn and in the wrestling yes i'm sure you did yeah so like it's actually funny because uh on booktube you know i'll get a thumbs down or something will tell me i'm an idiot that happens all the time and i'm just like that's fine this is way better than when people used to like say i looked fat on at a certain you know i mean just like just destroy me yeah i mean you can think i'm an idiot that's i know i'm an idiot that's fine but i will say with writing there are times where like if there's a certain line or a scene someone's like i don't like that and i'm like i like that then you gotta you have to say am i being prideful and this is obviously my short little experimental experience but it's it's funny hearing you say these things because it's like exactly how my inner monologue has went in my head uh as i've written stuff yeah yeah and sometimes the lines you love the most are the ones you eventually cut because they just didn't fit so yeah that's how it goes so yeah i mean we can we can sort of hold on to these things and you know the editor has to tear it out of your hands kind of stuff um but usually it's it's for good reason um so it's it's that's why i think it it's good to have uh always projects on the go just keep going it's momentum more than anything else um i remember when there's a story from i don't know who it was but he was an editor at uh publishers and john gardner um american writer who wrote grendel and various other books he showed up um on a motorcycle with a a backpack and walked into the office and laid down you know this much manuscripts and the editor basically went through them and said well this is a short story this is a novel this is a short story this is a novella and just split them all up but you can't do that unless you've got that pile right you got to have that that all that paper you gotta have your stories done like there's no shortcut you gotta write it you gotta write the stuff that you're gonna write and just keep going and let it pile up you know it's um it's all gonna be useful at some point and and not uh me not editing as i went was huge uh when i said this can and sometimes i wrote stuff and i was like that was trash like it just straight trash and i'm like this my this probably won't even happen in the final version but let's just spit it out there and see what happens and sometimes that would work out sometimes it wouldn't but um yeah it's something like not getting too caught up in the moment yeah just and just letting it roll and letting it roll yeah yeah very much for me um part of my process is i don't i don't think about word count daily word count or daily page count uh some days i get three paragraphs done some days i'll get 10 pages and it all evens out in the end so that's so interesting to hear because one of the things i i kind of wanted to highlight this because um you know a lot of people give brandon sanderson a lot of credit and kudos to him he writes a ton and he has a system and he's he's basically a robot i think but yeah you know you're you're someone who is very active like you did not take a long time between the malazan books and these are not they are not short books and they're also not simple books i mean they are so intricate uh just layers upon layers upon layers so kudos to you i mean when i looked at the publication dates between the books i was so impressed i was i was ripping through um i was think about five months five and a half months per book um but you see it it's all one story right it's just it physically cannot be put into one volume believe me i tried just recently um so it's like when you're writing a short story you know where the ending is and you want to get there don't you i mean so you become yeah you're driven to get to that ending well i was driven to get to the end of the ten book series because i had seen i had scenes there that were in my head from like book one yeah i don't want to forget them right so they haunted me and i just had to get there i i liked what stephen king said about ideas and notebooks and people said do you like you know write down your ideas and he was like i feel like notepads are uh making bad ideas like eternal or something along those lines he's like if something's a great idea it will it will haunt me it will literally drive me mad until i write it and if i keep thinking about i know it's a good idea and or at least that he has the ability to write something uh that he thinks is quality within and i love that i really love that and it's interesting to hear that you had like the idea of this and mapped out because one uh there's just so much that you've done with these books like it is wild um i reading it fries my brain sometimes i can't imagine writing it but um i hear about you know the gardener that that kind of lets things roll roll to them as they go and then you hear about like the architect type of thing and it seems like you have a firm grasp on where you wanted to go with the story if i had had to have guest i would have never guessed that about you i would have assumed that this grew on you over time no i knew exactly where it was going but i did not take notes in the sense of um pulling the narrative through from book one to book nine i wanted lots of room for spontaneous invention and creation yeah um because that's what entertains me as a writer uh you know if i've taken too many notes and i know too much about it again some some of the fire disappears i want to be surprised you know in scenes um and where they're going um and you know there's i can think of a number of eventual sort of fates and particular characters that i did not know was going to happen until i got there or i could start to sense it coming um certainly reaper's gail is a good example of that one just started last night yeah i won't say anything more i'm so excited i sensed something was coming and i just had to let let it arrive organically um so leaving that kind of room um i mean the writer has to entertain oneself in the process of the writing um and so if i think if you if you overthink it and if you over diagram it and all that kind of stuff um that creative process um you've used up half the tank right you you've enjoyed creating the maps and all the rest and the diagrams and and character lists and plot points and all the rest but now when you start to write the story you've only got half a tank right yeah um whereas if you if you just be really this is my process anyways it's different for other people but um be very cursive and very very vague in your in your your notes basically i do a lot of character lists just to make sure i don't forget people and i do anyways or they swap genders between books and weird crap like that um but i leave a lot a lot of room and uh because that's without that room then i'm i'm not being entertained by the story of kelly yeah and if i'm not being entertained nobody else will be yeah i mean i think that that is the portion of writing that interests me the most and gets me most like fired up is the improv like improv right while you're writing and figuring it out and like you're kind of living the story as you write it and i remember hearing like george r martin talk about that and it just it inspired me in some way it like a light bulb went off in my head and i said that sounds so fun to go in somewhere else basically you're writing the story you would like to have read yeah yeah exactly like someone else who had written but nobody else did so you're writing it yeah yeah and i i hate drawing so many parallels between me wrestling but like i mean you've you're an accomplished author and that's the only thing i've ever accomplished in my life so i'm going to continue to make these parallels good it works it works um but you know in wrestling you know we have an idea what's going to happen in the ring right like we got to go over we know who's going to win but for me uh in the way i was here wait wait wait wait a minute are you saying that stuff is just choreographed and fake don't tell anybody oh man you're gonna you're gonna piss alabama off real bad yeah yeah my whole world view is just crumbling you know it's a moment isn't it okay yeah i always said if you need someone to fake kick ass i'm your guy i'm i'm the dude um but you know in wrestling you know people some people plan out every single step of the match to the t i'm talking to the t like how you take your steps and stuff crazy right for me i was i was trained in a very old school manner where you listen to the audience and as you're wrestling you're creating the match like you might know where it's going but how to get to that ending is wide open and you'll be working with someone and if they're properly trained you know you can say oh man they really didn't like that you know literally in the match i'm saying this to my opponent right you know having a headlock and i'm talking crap to the audience and in between yelling when they're booing i'm like all right they didn't like they love that more of that more that you know and we're we're creating the story on the fly and to me those were the matches like when i did that for an hour with someone one it creates a bond with the other person that i you know some of you guys haven't talked in seven years that i still hold dear in my heart because we made a story that night that was amazing but two that's that's the fun like that's that to me that's the talent and the art of that performance and for writing i feel very much the same way i think if i planned out every single little thing i would just completely lose motivation and i think that's why when i got towards the end of my story and i knew how it was going to end i would say i lost a little bit of motivation like towards the end and i think my end is kind of rushed to be honest and some people did tell me that when they read it and i believe them because because i wasn't as motivated i wasn't i was beginning to think about the next story that i wanted to figure out as i went so i resonate a lot with what with what you said there yeah uh when did you finish a story oh it's probably been about two or three months ago since i put the the final cap i think i actually did make a slight edit um one of my patrons read it and she gave me some feedback and i went back and and jogged some stuff down um it's one of those things where when i when i go back and read it there's parts of it by bothering me but i'm not sure if i'm good enough to fix those things yet if that makes sense when did you last go back to reread it uh probably about two months ago two months ago yeah probably yeah i put it away for eight months don't read it don't think about it write your next story that's that and you know that that's what i think i want to do too because i have a story that's been on my mind for about five years and i just have always felt like i wasn't good enough to write it and i'm starting to realize that it doesn't matter you won't know until you write it right fair enough fair enough i mean i think that so i mean that's a good question for you though like when do you become good enough like do you ever feel good enough no no no that's a that's why and the longer the longer you you know you've had the more years you get um i look back on because i have to go back i had to for the goddess not willing my latest book i had to go back to some of the other books and read some stuff yeah i read like the opening to house of chains and things like that um and it was a strange feeling because i looked at it and said i think i was a better writer then than i am now and that that's a hard thing to deal with as well so um it would be one thing to look back and and wince and and cringe um and there are there are elements in some of those books like gardens of the moon where i really wince and cringe i basically the writing style of gardens of the moon was heavily influenced by the fact that it was being published in the uk and um my editor at least wanted some elements stylistically to um resonate with with english readers and so like the use the use of lad and lass for example um that was never that was never part of our lexicon it became part of it initially in gardens of the moon um and we were both because we'd both gone through masters uh in writing with cam and i we were of the he said she said school similar to what you know stephen king talks about in his books um and i have to sort of make changes there where um i put a lot more sort of active aspects in terms of what's framing the dialogues and it became then a process of slowly training my editor to back to my style of the yeah that's it and it took me a couple books to get there um so there were sort of outside influences on on how gardens of the moon is written stylistically um that were not originally there and and so you know parts of me would love to go back and just fix all that and then get rid of some really clunky lines and that kind of thing but um yeah yeah like short i'll tell you what man uh that was one thing uh you know going through now the first six books i thought your dialogue improved vastly with like each entry i felt like the character voice got stronger and stronger and stronger um and now hearing that that's part of the editing process like i would have never known that well not the dialogue well that aspects loud and last and things like that right um but the descriptives to the dialogue yeah i mean they're they're they're it's descriptive heavy in gardens of the moon that's not my style but it was perceived as um uh i guess a way of pulling readers in um right more so than than the style i was using and that's a judgment call and you know i i have no um no regrets in that respect um you know the editor i got is is still my editor in the uk and i mean that's an extraordinarily long and wonderful relationship and it's a great friendship um and he's the guy who took the chance you know when nobody else would yeah so you don't forget these things yeah you never forget those people either never never never never um there is people in the chat are just saying they heard you say that you felt like you had declined and uh they respectfully disagree uh well and and philip actually says that he believes that the god is now willing as a masterpiece i mean i picked it up i i'm not gonna read it until after the the first ten because i know there's some total hounds all down stuff that's could be spoiled for me a little bit no not really you don't think no because i'll i mean i'll read this right after reaper's game yeah no i don't think it's anything no no there's no toilet hound stuff um actually no it's it's not it's actually so minor within told the hounds that you probably wouldn't even remembered it you know when you get to the house so well then that might have just changed up my tbr because for one dude the art on the cover phenomenal and uh baron from your brain on book said can we acknowledge malazan has the best titles and fantasy how are you chosen and that that's something i actually wanted to bring up your ability you and cam's ability to name things immaculate like it's so good and and i see of a guitar in the background uh and i'm gonna ask you about that in just a second but i think the first ten of your books or the first one of my laws in here in the main series could just be a heavy metal like album like song names i mean it would be amazing like the house of cheese that's so metal dude like like if i if i started a metal band tomorrow i would just scramble the books and pick up one and be like oh we're reapers gail that's that's what i would call myself yeah i had the titles before i had anything else they're so good before even the books were written um i had gardens of the moon i mean obviously because that was the our film script title which is pretty you know pretty strange title um it's god it's so good i i liked it and it it felt different from from everything else out there in terms of fantasy um because it's it's a poetic illusion uh that's set within that world within the malaysian world so that was quite it felt quite different um and dead house was was was it was in his house that we had gained you know around and in um so it had its name already um and then yeah a lot of the other titles are very much thematically oriented even though they're they're um um i mean they're not abstract in that sense i mean maybe they are a house of chains maybe but anyways it's metaphorical references i think for the most part um and i know i even got questions on the god is not willing and and uh but that does that title just it insisted uh that it be there so i just gave up and i actually don't really have i don't think i have the second and third titles well i have complete trust in your ability to name things at this point man i really do like the god is not willing may be the best book title i've ever heard it's a weird one isn't it it's so good it's not i don't know how you know is it even grammatical um i'm not the person that we can ask ap tomorrow yeah exactly but from uh from a uh consumer hype perspective when i read that title and i saw the art i was like and i had to get it also getting a hardback of any malasana novel is like a novelty like i have to have it well um yeah the the cover was interesting because that i think we went through maybe five versions um and uh the basic form was was set up i suggested what i wanted and then i did a mock-up actually on photoshop and then steve stone took that and really just transformed it and gave that wonderful color tone but we had a multitude of color tones running in possibilities and i kept writing back to steve saying um beef her up beef her up she's got to be bigger she's got to be bigger and i don't mean just tall i mean she's got to be a substantial yeah bigger up there and um i almost sense i was really twisting his arm on that one because he kept coming and she was gaining you know maybe half an inch with each version you're pushing the limits yeah i've just kept going um but um i know people ask what character it is and it should be clear i'll say it now for people who read it of course it's tanglewich so i don't know but that's i don't think i've met tingle witch yet no you haven't no you'll meet and you'll meet tanglewich in the book i'm pretty i don't think it's not a huge spoiler it's not yeah it's fine yeah we're going to end everything well the thing about this book that gets me so fired up one i love reading recent works like seeing you grow like over the first six has been amazing and the fact that i'm gonna finish the ten and then you know i'm gonna do cam's books and then everything that you've written you know in addition to this i just love seeing the recent stuff but i like the fact that this is after the main 10. i think that the world living on and doing things like so many times we get prequels which is great i love prequels but it's like the go-to and people don't write i don't want to say a sequel but just like hey the world has moved on a bit and these things are happening it's still alive and it's someone that's a fan of the world that that's awesome that means it's still alive in my head you know so that's like one of the most intriguing pieces about this book i think well cultures and civilizations continue to evolve right they're constantly changing um and one sort of sub theme of god is not willing that it's not spoilery because it's all thematic is about cultural appropriation because you have all kinds of new religions are springing up 10 years after the events of the 10 books and they're being plucked from everywhere and they're just being adopted you know all over the place because that is what cultures do they if they don't they're they're dead you know they they are a dead culture they need to um appropriate and they need to adapt it and and absorb um aspects and change um so that that's one sort of element that's sitting underneath all of these things which is not to actually um denigrate the complaints of cultural appropriation because there are some very very valid complaints um with that respect yeah um but from an anthropological point of view it's is very much a case that cultures cultures will appropriate that's what they do it's part of their dialogue with with their world and when they come into contact with other cultures that dialogue expands and so the characteristics and details of that of um how the culture then redefines itself which it's constantly doing our culture is constantly redefining itself well yeah and cultures also almost get deified to a certain extent or or like of legends right um yeah yeah and yeah and there's a huge risk of mistaking um or rather resisting cultural change for reasons of nostalgia like what we grew up with um we then sort of we sort of um elevate as is that is the definitive definition of of my culture is you know what it was like when i was growing up and you look around of course and you're older and everything has changed and you go wait a minute you know what happened so and you know it's it's again part of a very complicated um argument and discussion but there is that aspect of it to the goddess not willing which i don't think's been discussed yet but probably doesn't need to be either so scratch that no i think i think that's fascinating um one of the things in history that i find really compelling is the fact that the roman empire you know we talked about the dark ages like after the roman empire and a lot they're they're i don't know how factually correct this is so any historians in the chat don't murder me uh but basically a lot of people say that dark ages are almost exaggerated because people put the roman empire on this pedestal and he said look how good the romans were and then we fell from grace and like there's like a conflict where people say you actually didn't lose everything like it wasn't as bad as they made it sound it was just that they were glorifying the romans um which again i don't know how true that is but that's like one of those things that i find fascinating yeah it's certainly something that can be argued both ways i mean certain elements of um technological knowledge was lost you know building architecture um plumbing plumbing yeah yeah all these kinds of things uh concrete for example roman concrete is better than our concrete it's crazy yeah it is crazy isn't it so there is that aspect i suppose but then yeah there is the whole self-identifying ethos of uh having a golden age in our past so in other words a fall from grace which kind of justifies the misery that you happen to be living in at the moment right so and then so it's almost like a mythologized nostalgia yeah yeah and then the further back it goes um the less it adheres to reality in any respect yes so then it becomes symbolic and um so that symbolic stuff can can be pretty powerful in terms of identity self-identification for sure yeah and also as a propaganda machine to get back to what was great right um yeah absolutely i mean i'm gonna ask you this question this is this is my like pet question here um so on your facebook you shared an article from the atlantic and it was talking about proof that possibly there was a civilization on earth prior to what we know as humanity today uh and it was it was basically examining what would that proof even look like or evidence look like how could we you know quantify that someone may did live here before our modern age of humanity and i would just want to ask you do you do you feel like maybe there was something here on earth before us um it depends on what you mean do you mean like geological time we were talking 20 million years ago are we talking 50 000 years ago in terms of civilizations let's let's go further back let's say like 20 million years um i don't know there are some anomalies that simply cannot be explained so they're and and they should not be ignored but they tend to be ignored because they don't fit the paradigm um and and that's not unique to archaeology i mean science establishes paradigms all over the place and you know um defends them to the death and resists uh changes to those paradigms so it's not just it's not unique to egyptology or archaeology or anything like that but it does exist in egyptology and archaeology and various other things there is a dogma and it is uh self-refereeing and and if you don't join the club you don't get the grants uh you don't get the permits even the excavating places so you got it you got to tow that line and that's just the nature of of there's a lot of things involved especially with egypt because there's national pride yeah attachments um egyptian ancient egyptian um architecture and art and all the rest um to that concept of uh egyptian self-identity and fair enough um and of course that would create huge resistance to the notion of a pre-egyptian uh civilization and that the egyptian civilization simply built on on top of and you'll get that in in the uh in peru as well with the inca for example right where it is patently obvious to anyone with any common sense that we have layers of inca building on top of pre-existing cyclopean architecture that is not incan right it predates it and it's it in fact it's one of those cases of um technology of building styles and methods actually deteriorates as you get closer to our present and that's very unusual in archaeology there's the um the notion of called superposition which is that that which is lower down is older and that which is lower down is usually more primitive than that which is higher up because that's what's higher up is younger younger in the sense of closer to us yeah um and there's a lot of sites well cusco as well but i mean sites all over um machu picchu as well where you're looking at the the foundational architecture and building methods are far superior to what followed and um you know in in in a broader sense that's that shouldn't be surprising because um you know the classic example would be the dark ages in europe that that saw the loss of uh roman style architecture and right building methods um so it's not like there's no precedent for it but it's very clear to me that that we have a precursor civilization with remnants um that are still existing and are not being recognized as such and that's kind of frustrating oh certainly yeah because there's so much more mystery to us to uncover like we're not done we're not done as humans uh digging up what literally digging up our past uh so yeah of course it's frustrating uh and i think all this stuff is immensely fascinating um especially the idea that there could be a notion or there's irregular patterns to suggest that maybe 200 million years ago or whatever 20 million years ago that there might have been something else you know that was uh king of the earth for lack of a better term we would not find almost any evidence of it that's the thing right it it the slate gets wiped clean um in such a way that anybody's sort of thinking well why aren't we finding you know um all kinds of things uh in deep strata yeah and well there's you know there's immense pressures there's content tectonic movement there's all kinds of things going on there's erosion um the likelihood of finding stuff is extremely low uh especially technological stuff um because quite often technology if it's not made of stone it is subject to deterioration over time including you know metals and all the rest stones one of the few things that actually survives um so we wouldn't find it do you think there is in 20 million years from now that every piece of existence of our civilization could be wiped out yeah that's incredibly humbling yeah we wouldn't find a thing and not only that i mean the strata of our presence would be mostly hydrocarbon at that point because the plastics would have reduced back down to harder carbons so who knows i mean maybe the oil that we're all pumping out of the ground is is what's left of a precursor civilization of 200 million years ago yeah that produced plastic that's so wild yeah i i find this stuff to be fascinating it's actually like something i would love to um like even just like the the ending of ages i think that all that stuff's really interesting um like one of the settings that i've always wanted to tell a story in and i'm not sure if it'll be in my in my next story or not is uh the idea of somehow in the world in a few in the future that we no longer have this advanced weaponry and we go back to more of a medieval approach which i know medieval setting uh you know it's it's the thing right um but it it was inspired to me by mid world from stephen king's dark tower and the fact that you're you know you're kind of this weird western almost token like air of world of midworld but you'll see like a road sign for iowa and you're just like oh like that's the connection and i find that fascinating to think about like the fall of a civilization and then having to relearn these skills relearning how to everyone has to ride a horse uh everyone has to have a trade right being a blacksmith now is a common thing again and uh i don't know i find those things fascinating i think they're very challenging to write um because there's a precedent for it in the past so you have to do an immense amount of research to make sure that you're portraying it right uh so that part is intimidating to me but it's nice because you don't have to really reinvent the world no no no uh i don't know why why would you find that intimidating i mean it's you don't have to immediately you don't have to perfectly copy uh european medievalism um certainly yeah to recreate a medieval um hierarchy and social structure um and not only that i mean why would you i mean it'd be more likely to be something a lot more closer akin to the japanese version where you have strongholds um that are constantly warring with each other yeah so that's a different kind of medievalism but it's it still operates under sort of same loose you know structural guidelines but yeah um and so if you've got two great discernible variations on uh the medieval social structure then there's nothing to stop you from creating a third one and a fourth one and a fifth one that's actually very true how about i tell you my biggest hurdle sure how do you get rid of all the guns dude the guns i feel like you have to explain where all of the weaponry went right there's no more guns there's no more bombs like they've all been how do you explain that well rifling is is a pretty advanced technology um even if you were to sort of not to mention producing bullets and firing caps and all the rest yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of um fine work that has to be sort of perfected for that kind of thing it'd be more likely that they would go back to something like um musket musket ball and basic powder and unrifled barrels and that kind of thing because that that's a bit more straightforward um flint should be much more readily available than for example steel that's fair yeah so if you want to spark your musket then you're going to use gunflint yeah um no it's high tech guns are high tech yeah and that's my idea is like detecting the world so you know let's say this is earth but ten thousand years from now or a thousand years from now and my idea would be that the history of that event is mysterious but i feel like i would have to explain how that happened to say this is on earth where where did the guns go so like what event would have happened to get rid of all those existing things in the world but do you leave that up with the mystery can you yeah you can i mean the idea would be once the infrastructure breaks down once organization breaks down um then your your your long routes for the trade of raw materials minerals ores all the rest that all breaks down um and then the machines that make the machines then break down because you don't have the oil or you know whatever um absence of lubricants i suppose you could you could render fat for that kind of stuff but at the same time a lot of this stuff works on on on fuel that's you know probably not uh hydrogenerated or or nuclear or whatever so you're just gonna get the things that work the things that make the machines work to make the machines uh will disappear yeah and then the skill level will immediately disappear right um you know somebody who knows how to handle um high-end um steel presses and all the rest why would they hang around non-functional high-end steel presses waiting for somebody to somebody fire it up you know all over again no they're going off finding their family hitting out into the bush so that skill then becomes lost and once you lose those skills um everybody's starting at scratch yeah yeah i guess it's not so much an event but a cascade cascading effect of events that then lead to people having to do things that they don't go to a to five like you said nine to five and and you know keep shoveling coal into the oven and such and such and such and then yeah yeah nobody's gonna do that when the apocalypse hits no they're not gonna go to work yeah and you know guns bullets ammunition yeah there's massive stockpiles but uh that stuff's not you know unless it's stored properly it's all gonna rot away it's all going to um break down and um you know be fairly lethal in terms of i mean you don't really take you'd be taking a big chance sticking a 100 year old bullet into a you know an m16 and and aiming it and firing it and not getting your face blown off right well that is so part of my i thought about like in the story if uh the people in the story find like an old military cache and you know it's like a relic and an art like what is this thing you know and then like you reintroduce fire like oh my goodness could you imagine the power swing that would happen then between these small king like that's kind of an idea that i've rolled around with in my head um but you know you you actually made it seem a lot more approachable talking about like this process is breaking down stuff that that's a really good point yeah but and you tied close to points of view of you know people and they only know what they know limit that you know as much as you want you as the author know a lot more so in terms of describing things that you know we would all recognize yes the characters don't yeah and that's always fun to read for sure well the idea in my head right was instead of the magical sword it's the magical glock you know what i mean it's like oh this like you know this this thing was made by elders and yadda yadda and it's like oh yeah well that that i guess in this world that is magic almost like it is yeah well i think i mean mark lawrence has done some of that hasn't he oh has he i actually have not read any mark lawrence yeah that's post-apocalyptic stuff um uh terry brooks chanera stuff is post-apocalyptic as well um david brooms the postman would be um i even like the film i really like the film actually have you seen the film no i have not but i'm very i love anything i haven't seen it i love anything a post-apocalyptic though even if it's like trash i gotta wash it i love it yeah i mean the postman is it's a bit sort of jingoistic by the end of it but it's actually it's a cool story bryn's a good writer and um i liked it and i like the fact that tom petty shows up in it oh well i'm in that sounds amazing that was really cool postman all right i'm gonna watch it i'll watch it this weekend had a really good question in chat and i wanted to bring it up he said i don't know if this was talked about previous but is there anything unique about writing stream of consciousness versus normal prose and dialogue the knight being in high being high and the healthy dead healthy yeah healthy dead was hilarious i don't remember the night being high in the healthy dead um yeah i don't know if i recall that stream of consciousness is is a a different approach it's um you have to get into a very different mindset to run with it um so yeah it is quite it is a different thing um yeah you're kind of operating on not necessarily obvious points of connection as ap would use um he loves that phrase points of connection but um yeah it's basically removing the obvious points of connection in in a in a monologue or a dialogue um so they're skipping across stones um that you didn't know were there and so they're bouncing all over the place so stream of consciousness yeah yeah i think one has to sort of fall into a particular frame of mind for that and then just run with it until it runs its course um uh i guess well virginia woolf would be the best best example of the most perfect brilliant sphere of consciousness writing so it's a good example um if people are interested in that kind of stuff yeah as opposed to james joyce yeah yeah interesting um i think ruth and bad has your answer the night was high after there was a rust leaf in his handkerchief uh it was from an ambulance or poor race it's a poor rhys so that that is why the knight was high i guess right i don't i don't recall this it must there must have been more than rustly though it had to be yeah russ leaf is the malaysian equivalent of tobacco so ah so maybe a little buzz that's it yeah i know he would be i don't know there had to be more in it but it's a man support rhys who imbibes every known chemical in the malaysian in order to stay sane i don't know if you've read any of the bokeh lane corporal roach novellas but i i have not i'm saving everything for like post for the post 10. slightly different flavor yeah much more serious for example i will uh i will definitely be into it i i did reunited knives which i enjoyed yeah uh the atmosphere of that book is phenomenal and also my favorite setting well derogatory stand is pretty sweet uh like the gas being under the city and the blue glow i mean one of the best settings in fantasy of all time but i'd love there's something about mala's city man i i just well it's interesting um cam is very very good at evoking um dread and atmosphere in his stuff and i think he really he he got a version of malaya city that wasn't around before in a sense in terms of the fiction uh by that point um and derusha stan is also his creation so well kudos to him i mean yeah i was just talking to this one in my uh patreon discord the other day uh that the roof stand like actually might be the best setting in fantasy um oh i don't know i think lankamar is pretty good for its first libraries um faffer and grey mouse or stories lancor is pretty cool well he's not here no [Laughter] no unfortunately uh yeah um we had a first time reader uh she she just picked up the book she loved gardens the moon she's like i can't stop thinking about this and derozan stan was one of the things she pointed out she said i just it's alive like i can feel it i can see it and i'm like yeah that's that's like that rake tatter sale like those are the things that pulled me in and the thing that i've told people who get into this and i told her this i said if the curiosity is driving you instead of really frustrating you then you're in for a grand old i think you could still graduate from frustration right and i think that that is still a viable path forward in malazen but if from the get-go like i was with guardians of the moon if the curiosity is getting you excited the sky's the limit i mean the sky's the limit because memories of ice shatters the glass ceiling of what i thought could happen in this world i mean it went above and beyond uh and then i would say that you did that again in bone hunters to be honest with you uh bone hunters is one of the best books i've ever read uh and you're right yeah and it's funny it's you mentioned memories of ice if you think about it you've got that house well you've got gardens of the moon and it's it's it's climax dead house gates kind of ups ups it a bit and the memories of ice takes it about as far as i felt it could go and which is why i inverted things with the fourth book completely you know flip it because you can't just sort of keep doubling down on these things it's like you know marvel comic movies you know i mean how do you just keep lifting that right right there's a point where it reaches absurdity so i have to go back the other way i'm so glad you said that because that was going to be my next point house of change is a not a soft reset but it's a soft reset in some ways like you cannot go 100 miles an hour and continue at that point you are going to crash yeah so you're better off throttling back down and finding your spot to ramp back up i say this all the time with i know i keep bringing up a song of ice and fire but i defend it to the death because i just have i love it but uh some people said oh man storm of swords is so good and then if he's for crows like he just starts meandering around and after the the conflict and i'm like that's the point though like you can't just constantly have a red wedding every book uh or every scene or whatever you and also like you can't kill everybody like you have to keep some people alive uh to continue to tell the story i think um but i thought house of chains was like the perfect uh i don't even say a ramp down but changing gears would probably be the better way to say it um i also felt like and may and you could tell me maybe i'm way off here but like i feel like the tone of the series kind of changes around book four um obviously you know we get a single pov which is huge right like that's it that which i've read is your response to people saying that you can't stick with the pov and i i admire that telling people to shove it and proving them wrong that's been my whole life i love that vengeance is a wonderful thing uh i'm only kidding but um i felt like the the tone kind of changed a little bit like i got a different aspect of milan like i thought i had it all figured out is what i'm saying and then like you came at me with something totally different and then midnight tides felt totally different and they really are they're tails like they really are tales of the lawson book of the fallen yeah well house of chains is where is where i finally got to tavor as being a central element of the story i think um as she picks up the the uh the remnants and and begins the march so that sort of you know of all the tracks that we're running um to step into those ones by the fourth book it was time and then i realized that um i was i was already on the track that would take me to the end of the series and that was not the case in the first three books yeah because they take you in different places um and then all i needed to do was with the fifth book was to give us the last major setting which is the uh the midnight tides um letheri uh continent so um so in other words yeah you think constantly rising action going for the first three books classic trilogy set up actually yeah and then that quick drop off and then it inverts for the next one which is kind of like a breather and then that sets you for the new thing which is self-contained like a little island it's so good and then then once that island has been explored then we pick up from the fourth book where we've left it at that level yeah and begin the ramp up again so yeah yeah a it's like a structure i know it's a slight detour but we're still like if you have like a plot meter it's still moving forward but on the road you're kind of taking a little detour um which i liked it it's funny you said house change is like a relief in some way but i cried at the end so i don't think that well not a relief but it it it wrecked me yeah it big it personally it's everything could is condensed back down to the personal right onto the field um and hopefully echoes a lot of the iliad in the sense of the individual heroes stepping out in front of their armies and engaging to decide the battle yeah um so i wanted those aspects um to sort of be there and to make it personal i think you did a very good job of that um joanna says house of chains affected her emotionally for months she loved the different approach oh good i i agree it very much resonated with me um like i reread things and i was just like oh like someone tell me that you can't feel for these characters because i felt every bit of those uh very dramatic scenes uh towards the end um that i thought were just uncovered and unveiled like they unfolded before me um and i'm not a very visual reader but i feel like i visualized that scene uh there's a specific one i'm thinking of i'll tell you after yeah you could probably you could probably guess it but well no i'm a very visual writer i write in almost i guess cinematography cinematographic yeah that's it i'm tired anyways um yeah i am i in a sense i'm describing a film that's playing out in my head yeah well that definitely comes through because i thought gardens of move was pretty cinematic and in the end of midnight tides there's a specific scene with a ring what the coin rolling in oh bro i mean i mean it was awesome i want to see that like if i could if as a fan from what i've read from the first six like if you could say hey you could adapt like one thing i would like to see midnight tides on it on a big screen um in fact when i saw dune that was like the thing i thought of um because so often dude you know we get a lot of tv shows like it's it's tv shows are very hot right now game of thrones happened will times have witchers happen all this stuff and and i feel like the theater became like less of an option or people kind of forgot how amazing cinema can be yeah and you know dark tower um you know some people like it but critically it was not received well uh and then you have dune and dune for me reminded me what the cinema is and what we can get out of that experience and i think midnight tides like when i left the theater and i was thinking about this i said man midnight tide's on the screen that would be excellent like that could be big or thinking about gardens of the moon and seeing the beginnings and the siege of pale and the fallout from like oh man it's an option like i don't know i would love to see it yeah yeah yeah my if i were king of the world and the richest person i mean what i would have done was um i would have uh how did i set this up i would have signed actors for five years and i would have um how did i set this up i would have made all 10 films released three a year i guess for three years um or was it no was it my ten a year what did i what i had this plan it was this crazy crazy plan i saw an ama you wanted two different directors oh yeah that's that's a bit more recent yeah because that would get the 10 books done because one of the the the issues that we're facing now is the payoff actually to the series is in books nine and ten primarily which is one giant novel so you know when people are pitching well we'll do the first three seasons we'll do gardens of the moon dead house gates and memories of ice that's kind of missing the point it's like you know they might be interesting um and fun yeah but so my thought was yeah you you two complete distinct um productions and so one does books one three five seven and nine and the other production team does two four six and eight and ten and that way um because you you know you got some crossover characters but you don't necessarily have a lot of it yeah um and you can certainly um where you've got i mean there's ways to to sort of work out where people are at any one time in terms of filming um but then you would have you'd have um the entire series and you released two films a year a year so you're looking at uh or two seasons if it's a television series yeah you're looking at getting it all done in five years because it seems like uh five years is is like the max that people will sort of stay with something like this maybe seven if you're really lucky but generally it's five yeah or usually it's three um so it would be a bit of a i mean look at the expanse look at the challenges it's had sort of going into its next season and it's so good and you're thinking so good wanna just commit to the damn thing and let's get it you know completely done and um then you've got it it's part of history it's part of legacy expanse is a very interesting adaptation because sci-fi tried to rebrand itself back in the day this is like right when the expanse was playing pilot and sci-fi says we're gonna start being serious like no more sharknado like we're gonna make some heavy-hitting stuff here like and it's like okay we'll see and they outbid bezos for the expanse because bezos apparently personally wanted the expansion and scifi was like we're gonna put all of our eggs in this basket and they had a couple other things they put big money on all of them failed but the expanse so they brought back sharknado 80 or whatever it was and expanse just like started collecting awards and obviously they eventually cancelled it because they couldn't fulfill the budget and bezos was like yoink thank you so much well and i hope that continues i hope he stays with it i mean he's personally a fan it probably will so yeah and that's that's a good thing because there seems to be this this real especially say with netflix uh bailing too early on stuff two seasons and you're you're generally done yeah um i mean amazon and this is i i don't know how true this is but i i i read it online so it must be true uh bezos apparently is a huge fan of reading fiction and that's why he did like man in the high castle like he personally wanted these things that that he enjoyed story-wise to be adapted and expanse is one of them but so is man in the high castle um and if you look at their content almost all of its adaptations like they have the boys which is like a comic i'm not familiar with it but oh it's good yeah i've heard it's excellent it's excellent invincible is now on there so it does seem like amazon is very much the we'll adapt what you know what we enjoy in real time i mean people thought that was unadaptable for the longest time and yeah no such thing no such thing everything is adaptable um i do i do remember now my original plan was turn each each book into a trilogy and but release um ten films a year that would be in other words what what we what we've seen especially with television is that television has taken and stolen the best from film right uh the cinematography um the shooting methods um yeah uh the spectacle uh camera angles all kinds it's taken it's stolen from film and brought it onto our televisions well it would be nice for film to steal something back from television and that would be the series yeah so um that was sort of my original idea was that yeah you'd want you know premiere nights you know almost once a month where people would line up to to to see the next episode and then of course you would have your your theatrical releases but then you could also have your extended versions and yeah you know and so basically you're dealing with you've got three novels done plus the first episode of the fourth one each year uh right so one one two three and then the opening of the fourth and then you roll it into the next year which keeps people coming back and you do it for three years i like this idea it only costs billions upon billions upon billions of dollars why not yeah well it's interesting because tv shows now we're getting budgets uh like the lord or i should say lord of the rings but the tolkien show is supposed supposedly in like 500 600 million dollar range it's like you know a big movie isn't that much it's crazy so maybe you're on to something though like well i mean the other thing is you know whatever you whatever your output is initially in terms of sets and costumes and all the rest uh you reduce costs if you stay in that world the longer in the series yes right that's so true the longer the the tax write-offs are whatever right so [Laughter] those are those are very important when you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars they love them um so you would would you said if that was if you were king of the world so do you prefer cinema over tv then i think i think it would be i mean i think you can get these novels into into trilogies of films um but at the same time um i can easily see it going the other way as well but i would still make use of the theater so that you would have the television series but uh uh you would have the opportunity for people to go and see the premiere versions of those episodes at the cinema yeah with a few things added in you know added scenes or whatever yeah so just to sort of create a buzz that that's uh more of a social one where people go out for it and um and then you know be cool to push cosplay and all that kind of stuff you know so for the premieres be a lot of fun but like i'd say it's it's it's pipe dream stuff right now yeah but it's still fun to think about and you know cinema does need to do something like that like dune is a is a paddle board like bringing it back to life in some ways did you see dune no yeah okay i would i would love to hear your take on it because yeah i was gonna go this week but i i i came down with this like cold so uh still recovering i thought you're gonna say it's because you had to do this and i was going to be i was going to feel like no no i i also i wanted i wanted to sort of i would go at you know early afternoon yes the imax just to reduce the crowds it's been playing long enough now so it should be okay yeah it was my first imax movie ever actually oh really yeah and man i mean it's the best theater experience i've had since return i mean it's just silly it was so good i've been using that phrase a lot tonight um one thing and i you know i hear you talking about cam and i hear you talking about the relationships between people and books and stuff i think you're one of the very best when it comes to writing duos two guys two girls whatever it might be but two people or even maybe a small we'll expand it out to a small group of people no no no no you're right you're right um and cam as ken pointed it out early on he he always can he get con he gets concerned over these things he says are we doing too many duos i think he said asked me that many years ago and i said well you know cam and i would we'd be the only gamers like i would game and run a game for him he would turn around and run it for me um so there was just two of us so the duo dynamic which we actually brought from our archaeology days because we shared a tent on the bush and whatever um so yeah we we we were we were duo out there we did you know really stupid things out just him and i so that that aspect sort of transferred its way across into into the gaming and from the gaming into the novels wow that that was mike i was going to ask you if your relationship with cam inspired your duo yeah absolutely oh that's so awesome yeah i mean cotillion dancer and kellenberg i mean that was you know sort of the classic where i played the npc i played dancer and cam had uh not called kellenberg at the time called dr wu um who was he who became the emperor and so you know cam's writing that stuff right now in his uh pass-through ascendancy um books so that was all yeah that was all gained that's amazing to hear i i that's exciting because that is something and and philip says esselmon is also brilliant at those do as i'm a lost thing so obviously it's a it's something that's given back to both of you when you're writing well i i think we're both being nostalgic when we do when we return to that right because we're we're remembering our experiences gaming and yeah you know fiddler and hedge were examples um uh just lots lots of them uh and amen and lady envy actually were duo for a while never showed up in any of the books but there's hints of it uh in the books i i immediately think of acarium and mappo uh yeah well actually that was fiction no that's pure fiction that one i i i love that duo by the way um i was sold on that i mean you have uh you have pus in the mule i mean you know we're talking about these uh these characters and and their names change so often over the books and it's something that you would have to be asleep while reading these somehow to not notice the name changes what what does this symbolize like why why the name changes in the books which ones by example well i mean i was thinking maybe if it was just a broader thi i didn't know if it was a broader thing right well in some cases it's uh very longivious characters very long-lived characters um and so the perception of them may change and so how they are identified changes um i think sister of cold nights and night chill and that kind of stuff that that's just evolution of and and contraction of names uh that are still they mean the same thing they're just different you know different expressions of the same thing and generally um and then if somebody wants a you know wants to put away their past and they'll assume a new name yeah um which doesn't always work like with strings and fiddler so yeah yeah not too imaginative a leap on his part was it i i enjoyed it well it's something i noticed and i did feel um like absolutely comes to mind like there's people who who take on different names and their identities change but i also did notice ones that that weren't big leaps and or or necessarily an identity change so i didn't know uh what those what the driving force behind those all were if there was just one central or if it was for multiple reasons sounds like it's multiple reasons yeah i would think so yeah yeah i mean that's actually one of my favorite things i know at first i was like can we just stick with the you know i'm getting confused but then you it's almost endearing especially whenever the person is then referred to by their old name and like you kind of get nostalgic for the character and i love that that's that's that depth that you don't get in all in a lot of other series um that's something robin hobb actually does as well throughout 16 books she changes names and uh specifically um with fitz you know yeah i mean he goes by he's many uh different things to different people that is core to our human existence we are we are many things to different people right um zan had a question for you and it says are there stories you gamed that never made it into the books that you wished you could have fit in or stories that you intentionally would never write yeah lots lots um in both cases um yeah there's i mean we're kind of limited in our energies in our time um and so there's a lot of stories that um that we played and had lots of fun with that may not actually translate well um and then there's there's other aspects that we left enough gaps um for you know uh either one of us to move into if we wanted to we felt so inclined and that's when when cam said he wanted to do you know the beginnings of the empire um it was all there for him to to jump in and and go with it and as far as i know i think his ultimate intention is to bring it all the way up to the siege of pale and gardens of the moon so that's thrilling that's pretty cool yeah yes i mean talk about rounding it out i mean that oh yeah i can't wait so so there you've got things like black dog um and the mottwood uh campaigns of northern ghana bacchus which get referenced all through the series um and because cam and i gained them so you know we know them well so he's he's slowly working his way i think to that so you'll meet the modern regulars again and various others that's extraordinarily exciting that's so exciting um i have a bit of a um a selfish question i would say um and it pertains to writing in general um you're someone who's trained in short stories what are like what are the keys would you say to a quality short story like the sequence um focus focus on on one one thing and then pack everything around it um i think sometimes people try to sort of fit too much in there because um there could be the mistake of thinking i mean how many people read short stories these days you know it's not that there's not that many yeah um so if your entire reading experience is novels and then you're thinking well i'm gonna write a short story and then you try to fit everything that fits into a novel into a short story it's not going to work right yeah the form is is the wrong form um so quite often what defines or separates the two is a novel allows those side quests and those that leisure time to take a breather um and so it's it's something where you're not you're not just doing your basic steep bell curve right it's it it's doing this kind of stuff because you have to alter the pace and you have to um mix things up and and do that a lot in the novel even though you're slowly rising you know to to whatever final scenes you're dealing with but with a with a short story it's if you diagram it it's got to be right it's got to be one line right um no lips and no dips and valleys and that kind of stuff yeah um so focus i think is is pretty crucial and less is more you know if you can pull it off in seven pages as opposed to 17 then you've done a good story so yeah that's solid advice uh less is more i think in life that's actually to be honest uh that that's something i i was taught in my early adulthood and it has saved me or made me um save myself from embarrassment quite a few times um that's interesting i i would say my short story definitely suffers from uh being a novel that that's a short story i i think that that's a valid uh issue with what with what i wrote to be honest interesting i had a scene i wanted to write and it was about a king uh so it's it's inspired by robert baratheon from the song of ice and fire you know he kind of was past his prime and he and he never got back to that well mine is not so much about a person going back to their prime but making a last stand um of seeing the snakes in the grass but instead of them getting to him he starts chopping off their heads it's something i wanted to write and it resonated with me for for many reasons but one of the things was i just thought robert baratheon and his heyday sounded like a badass and uh i loved the history of the what happened between him and rhaegar and all those things i said well i'll try to write a character kind of like that not exactly um certainly inspired by have you read david gemmell i i started legend this year and i need to finish it um i've heard that gemma writes some just tremendous stuff one of them he writes yeah he writes the he explores that idea a lot um of uh aging characters aging heroes um rising up for one last stand i love that and of course i'm sure martin read gemma you know there are inspirations coming from all over the place uh in all of our work um but gamble gemma pulled that one off really well so have fun with that yeah that'll probably be my my bag that'll be my cup of tea because i i there's something about you know it's it's like rocky balboa like the movie you know i i was like this franchise is still going but then they got me they got me with the first rocky balboa when he comes back to fight the young gun it's just and i'm a sucker like a big boxing match it's like pacquiao's back and i'm like he might do it is he really he he finally retired he fought a couple uh months back and he lost and he officially retired and he did not look great no what about triple g is he is he still going you know it's a triple g a try i love triple g and he got rid of my favorite my favorite boxer dude he got robbed in the canelo i swore off boxing after that and then i watched it again because i'm a coward but i was so mad when they were so cynical it was so cynical do you remember the commentary for that fight and how trophies it was they said they literally said this they say triple g is winning when it comes to everything about boxing but canelo is winning the story and i go is this pro wrestling or is it boxing the fix is in i know oh yeah oh yeah it was in all right but it's because triple g was older and canelo was more marketable that's exactly it and then they they pissed around with the rematch and the next time they fight you know triple g is two three years older and then canelo squeaks one out on him and i'm just like you know i hate this sport yeah i know i'm with you on that one i go back and forth because i've seen yeah i've seen and i i used to watch friday night fights with um teddy atlas when he was you're commentating yeah i remember there was one fight that was fought somewhere down in florida that um atlas was screaming at i think through his microphone when the when the decision came in because it was so patently the opposite of what it should have been he was spitting matt i've never seen him so mad it was great to watch you know paulie majnani are i always mess up his name but he he reacted that way for tyson fury versus deontay wilder one did he yeah because he said yeah you know tyson got knocked down twice and he came back from the dead he's like but if you look at every single other round he destroyed deontay wilder in that first fight it should not have been a draw but they saw they saw this right i mean they got three fights out of it so they got three fights yeah which is i mean just absurd i mean i've watched all three and i love tyson fury i think he's so charismatic and you know talk about saving us the cinema saving boxing is tyson fury uh canelo is also a tank i mean he's well he's he's suspiciously more of a tank isn't he you think a little weird hmm yeah it's uh it's it's interesting i know people hate fully mayweather a lot but watching floyd mayweather like humble young boxers with just pure skill i mean your skill i loved watching mayweather fight man i mean he's you know it's it's one of those things it's not gonna attract the bar crowd that wants you know blood and guts no but you can imagine you can imagine the frustration of the fighter fighting him because you can't hit the guy right you could not hit him no and he's talking smack and you know he's talk smack the whole way up to the fight and then he just makes you look like you've never boxed and these are these are top one percent athletes in the world but he never would fight triple g and that would have been an amazing fight yeah and he and he and he did duck pacquiao for a while i think yeah you know pacquiao was also a little you know he wouldn't take a drug test and stuff he said whatever boxing's such [ __ ] but i'm glad that you're a triple g fan because yeah absolutely fan he's uh he's a pleasure to watch i also like lomachenko uh he lost his last fight he might have thought since then but he lost against a really talented boxer uh from the bronx uh but i like lomachenko triple g those guys you know the the sweet science guys yeah um of course i like the bruisers but something about like a purnell whitaker or are those guys man they were just so talented um i love mma as well i've watched mma and books are like my two things like those are the things i really rock with uh and i'm sure the 69 people watching are just like what in the hell are these guys all right we're already down to 69 we should probably what is it two and a half hours now right yeah i think i think we can eat supper somewhere yeah yeah i i hate to keep you on and uh take up more of your night or anything this has been a pleasure dude i mean it's been a blast yeah man i i i feel like i said i felt like i had already had conversations with you and being able to ask you certain things and i didn't even get to ask you about coincidences in life and how they play and determinism and all this stuff so wow yeah that's a whole different subject there i got i got a lot more in the uh in the chamber uh so if you ever want to come back absolutely obviously um but yeah what a chat everyone that was in chat thank you so much i appreciate i always say there's three there's always two guests i have my guests and then i have my chat um and you know if it wasn't for all of you that spend your friday nights with me uh i'm sure that you know what it never came across steve's screen so the fact that uh we were able to to have you on is uh kind of an achievement for for the show to be honest so uh i just i want to thank you man for spending your time with me tonight that's been good fun yeah absolutely man well everyone next time you can ask about the guitar the guitar the pain i mean i got a lot i got fencing questions i literally wrote a bunch of questions but all right we'll do it again man yeah we'll do it again everyone thank you so much i appreciate you hit like and subscribe you're subscribed but hit like on the video it helps people find it after the fact i have a patreon it's optional but always appreciate it and uh thank you thank you for being here and i hope i see you again real real soon and remember to always keep turning the page

Channel: The Fantasy Nuttwork

Views: 17,424

Keywords: Chatting With Nutts - Episode #18 ft Steven Erikson, steven erikson, malazan book of the fallen, chatting with nutts, steven erikson interview, the god is not willing, steven erikson podcast, malazan podcast

Id: bGmIw_NR8OQ

Length: 159min 48sec (9588 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021