Speaker 1: Tale of the Manticor bonus material an interview with Paolo Bacigalupi.
What follows over the next thirty minutes or so is
not an episode of Tale of the Manticor, and it
will not take the place of a usual episode. It's
just some bonus content. Recently, I was contacted by a
publicist from Penguin Random House who asked if I'd be
interested in having an advanced copy of novela by Paolo
ba Chigalupi. I was delighted to receive the email, partly
because it meant Tale of the Manticor had achieved it
no visibility that a major publishing company had found it.
My first inclination was to reply with a thanks, but
I don't really do book reviews. But then I reconsidered it.
Why pass up an opportunity to talk about writing within
New York Times bestseller I bet this author would have
buckets of wisdom to share, and I could really learn something.
Tale of the Manticore may not be structured in a
traditional way, but it still shares many of the same
elements with the novel format. So I said yes, received
the book and started reading it. Paolo Batchigalupi's talent was
obvious right away. There was rich world building going on
in Navla. He also had a flare with characterization and
dialogue that I really admired. So I requested an interview,
and a few weeks later I found myself in conversation
with the author himself. Paolo was a real pleasure to
speak with. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much
as I did.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome, and I've got with me a very special guest.
It is Paolo Bacigalupi and he is the author of
several books. He's an award winner, He's what a hugo
a Nebula, and his novel The Wind Up Girl was
named as Time magazine one of the top ten books
of two thousand and nine. Wow, a New York Times bestseller.
Thank you so much for coming on the show. You
are the first real novelist I've had on the show,
and I'm excited to get into it and talk about.
Speaker 3: I'm excited too, No, this is fun, So thanks for
having me.
Speaker 2: So let's maybe begin with You had mentioned before that
you have played role playing games in the past.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so why don't we talk.
Speaker 2: A little bit about that and a little bit how
you got into writing. Just to kind of introduce my
listeners to you and what you're all about.
Speaker 4: Tell me about your gaming experience.
Speaker 3: So I grew up with it.
Speaker 5: I think I had the you know, sort of the
Dungeons and Dragons basic set, the little box that keep
on the border lands in it, and and that was
like around fourth or fifth grade.
Speaker 4: Was when I was well, you were in the right place.
Speaker 5: Yeah, oh it was, and it was it was sort
of this eye opening thing. And I remember all my
friends and I always played Hobbits when we were that age,
so you know, played a lot of D and D
that way, and then kind of spread off and went
into Girps. Played a lot in Grops and sort of
that was sort of interesting to me because it was
such you you had that opportunity to sort of mash
up rules and concepts and stuff, so you run a
cyberpunk plus horror and vampires campaign or whatever, and it
was like amazing. You know, that was just a whole
other kind of twist on it. And originally I started
out as a player, and then later on I started GMing.
You know, it's interesting, like when I was growing up
I did not think of myself as being a novelist.
I didn't particularly have that as a goal. I didn't
have that as as a direction. But I definitely remember
crafting campaigns and thinking in terms of like what the
emotional arc I was going to carry my players through,
and you know, oh, and then there's going to be
this moment where there's going to be a big reveal
or oh this is going to happen and that's going
to really shock them, and so you know you could
kind of see like looking back, I can kind of
see there as like, oh, I was building these storytelling muscles.
I was building this sort of like idea of you know,
this sort of created world that other people would live in.
And I remember also playing what was it Warhammer Fantasy
Role Wow, and I like that one because there was
always this great critical hit damage table and that just know,
somebody lose a limb or whatever, and that was sort
of like this moment where like the storytelling aspects. And
I was listening to your podcast and it is interesting
how you know there are these moments where something would
click into place and you're like, oh, right, like just
the dice rolls tells you things. But then there's this
other set of implications. There's storytelling implications, and there's emotional
implications that you can wrap around that dice roll. And
seeing those sort of critical damage tables in Warhammer was
kind of another one of those kinds of like my
head sort of expanded a little bit. I remember really
distinctly this moment when my players they had raided this
sort of beast men's layer and they were just being
really stupid about it and they were making a lot
of noise and the beast men all woke up, and
I was like, they're getting punished, Like, they're getting punished
and they're stupid here, and so they ended up barricaded
in the kitchens and down in this you know, down
in this subterranean space, and they were like so like
you know, and all the beast men are just pounding
at the doors and just breaking through and they're going
to die.
Speaker 3: And I was like, this is going to be, you.
Speaker 5: Know, a good moment for them to realize that you
don't to storm the castle all the time.
Speaker 3: And they were like, wait, wait is there aren't aren't there?
Speaker 5: You said there were fireplaces here, right, and you're like yeah,
And they're like.
Speaker 3: How big is the chimney.
Speaker 5: And suddenly they're like examining the chimney and I'm like, fuck,
I know exactly what size this fireplay roasting?
Speaker 3: You know, large animals at this place. Of course, this
chimney is large. Like fuck, they're gonna get away.
Speaker 5: Sure enough, they make their climbing roles and they crawl
out like singed, but like you know, taught a lesson,
but also like you know, you had this moment where
it was that organic quality of like, oh, yeah, we're
collaboratively doing this game, and there was that delight in
both sort of like creating this setup and having their
story play out and then having them find pass through
that were bigger than the ones that you'd imagine.
Speaker 3: For them or whatever. And that was that was the delight.
Speaker 5: That was like actually the beginning of my storytelling career
and the beginning of all of that stuff.
Speaker 2: And then I was just gonna ask you said, you
weren't originally going to be a writer, No.
Speaker 4: So how did that? How did that happen?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 5: So, my parents were hippies and they lived a very
sort of non traditional lifestyle, and so one of the
things like you when you're a kid and you're rebelling
against your parents. That you know, especially when you live
with hippies, is that you think, I really want.
Speaker 3: A stable life.
Speaker 5: And so I sort of had this mindset, like when
I was going to college and everything, that I was
going to get a job, I was going to make money.
Speaker 3: I was going to find a house in the suburbs.
Speaker 5: You know, there was going to be some structure and
there's going to be some organization, and yeah, very very
My dream was actually to live in a cul de
Sact with the rolled sidewalks, you know, where.
Speaker 3: I would because when I was a kid, Yeah, anyway, that.
Speaker 5: Always seemed like bliss, you know, like, oh, these beautiful sidewalks,
you could ride a bike on it, instead of living
out in the countryside where like it was really hard
to ride a bike keeping over the dirt and the
stones and everything else.
Speaker 3: So I studied Chinese language.
Speaker 5: Actually, when I was in college, I moved to China,
lived there for several years, worked in business over there,
and really I very much intended to go into business
and for that to be my center. And then there
was this point when I was working in Beijing and
I was working for this Chinese company and we were
helping foreign companies break into the China market, and I
just realized that I just did not care about, you know,
the outcomes, Like the living in China was amazing, and
everything that was happening in that time, this was in
the early nineties. Everything that was happening in China was fascinating.
The economic changes, the prosperity that was growing, the political opening,
everything like that was fascinating. But I really did not
care whether Coke beat out Pepsi and Tanjin. Like that
was not you know, that was not soul billing. So
I came back to the United States and I became
a programmer for a while, just in the early days
of the Internet. And so I became a programmer and
web developer and got into that for a while, and
I was really fascinated again by like the technology, the
promise of it was fascinating and extraordinary. But that also
like there was this point where I was working for
a consultancy in Boston, and I just you know, and
there was a sort of parade of marketing executives that
would come in and they we'd be building their different
kinds of marketing websites, and I was again like deeply uninspired,
so I yeah, so I started writing on the side,
and it was like this really this very secret little
project in the beginning where it was just something I
would do on the weekend. And I don't even remember
like exactly why exactly I started writing, like I remember
this kind of poking at it and that this was
like my little secret thing.
Speaker 3: And I remember I had a book.
Speaker 5: I can't remember how I ended up with this book,
but it was a book on how to write a
novel in fifty two weeks.
Speaker 3: It was like the Weekend Novelist.
Speaker 5: That was the title it, okay, and it was like
this thing where it was like and I think I'd
had times in the past I'd had some idea that
of trying to write or thinking because I was a
science fiction reader. I was a science fiction and fantasy reader,
you know. That was the other component of my sort
of like storytelling life. Was like my father was a
science fiction reader, and I grew up reading science fiction
and fantasy. And I had stopped gaming while I was
in college. It got harder and harder to sort of
to keep a game together, and we were all doing
different things and sort of like that was that was
sort of the moment that I kind of fell off
the map. So yeah, anyway, I started playing around with
stories and started figuring out, oh, this is how you
make characters, you know, put a character, you know, how
to create a character, not just you know, in a
role playing setting, but like in this other sort of
inhabited space where you're going to have one character and
then you're going to have another character written on the page,
and then you're going to put them in a room
and figure out how to create conflict between these two characters.
You know, how this character want something that that character
won't give them, you know, and then here's the beginning
of your plot idea, and here's the beginning of conflict.
And it was was a weird thing was I was
such a heavy reader. I mean I was reading all
the time, and yet somehow I think I was experiencing
stories as these still in the in the in the
textual form is a holistic thing. It was sort of
hard to pull apart the threads of like how did
that thing get constructed?
Speaker 3: And so I had to learn.
Speaker 5: A lot about just, yeah, what that process was in
text of creating story and making that a lived in
space for a reader as opposed to just narrating something,
which very naturally. We narrate stories to one another all
the time. Let me tell you about that time I
launched the bottle rockets in the science library, you know whatever.
We can tell those stories really easily, but somehow like
writing those things down, you know, changing points of view,
things like that.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of a lot of listeners of
this show they're creatives as well, and many of them
have their own podcasts and shows, and I bet half
of them are writers. Yeah, and I'm curious to know,
and I bet they would be too. How did it
go from you are doing this thing on the side
on the weekends, even in secret, to now I'm published?
Speaker 4: How did that happen?
Speaker 5: Well, the first thing happens that I realized that it
was the most interesting thing that I was doing with
my life, and it was the only thing that I
really actually cared about. And then there was a point where,
because I was doing programming work, I was actually and
I was very frugal, and so I sort of had
stored up this war chest of cash and I was
I got really pissed off at my boss one day
and was like, you know what, I'm just going to
quit forget it.
Speaker 3: I'm out, and I'm going to go write a novel.
Speaker 5: And this was sort of like something that had been
bubbling in the back of my head and then suddenly
it was just sort of right directly ahead of me,
and I was going to do this thing. I was
going to quit my job. I was going to write
this novel. I was going to spend the next year
writing it. It was going to it was going to happen,
and I committed completely to it. I did that. It
was this sort of science fiction novel set in a
set in China. I actually went back to China and
did some more research there.
Speaker 3: But I wrote the book.
Speaker 5: I actually managed to find an agent and it went
out to publishers and it was rejected by everybody. And
that was the beginning of a very long process where
you know that you have all of the ego, and
you have all of the drive, and you have all
of the follow through and yet like the universe does
not give any fox and and so that was like
this beginning of like sort of trying to batter my
way in and trying to figure out, like how does
the publishing industry work?
Speaker 3: You know, what did they want? You know?
Speaker 5: The first the first rejections I got were really like
the rejections were along the lines of, like, this is
really well written, this is way too dark for us commercially, Like,
we just don't see the commercial value of this. We
see you know that it's artistically functional, but like you're
not commercially valuable to us. And so that was the
beginning of like, oh right, it's not just like do
you make something that's skillful or heartfelt. Like you're also
having this conversation with this giant manufacturing industry. You know,
they're thinking in terms of like can we sell ten
thousand units of this? Can we sell one hundred thousand
units of this? And it's like, okay, so what do
you need to do in order to like sort of
satisfy your creative storytelling desires and figure out a way
to like make them happy and feel like this is
a sellable object, and you know what's the win win
in there?
Speaker 3: A lot of people talk about like the sellout. You know,
oh they sold out, they did this.
Speaker 5: It's like and I think that there are clever paths
through where you get everything you want and they get
everything they want. But you have to like think that
through and you have to recognize that there are real
desires and real needs on the other side of that
negotiation kind of.
Speaker 2: So was it more of a case of you chain
your art in certain ways or was it a kind
of a persevere until you find the right publisher who
gets your thing as it is?
Speaker 3: All of the above?
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 5: I mean I wrote four more novels and all of
those were rejected. And so, like, you know, at each stage,
like you're writing a book, you're testing something out. You know,
each stage you're like, okay, this is why I got
rejected this time. Okay, So you know, the first you know,
feedback is like, my novels are way too dark.
Speaker 3: Let's try to put some light into this thing. I
think I'm okay with that. Actually, sure, I get that.
Speaker 5: Okay, so I'm going to adjust some But I'm also
like maybe getting feedback about you know, maybe I was
originally thinking I wanted to be a science fiction writer,
and somebody says, you know, actually you can't really make
much money in science fiction.
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, maybe I'll try historical fiction. So
I take attack.
Speaker 5: At historical fiction, and then later on I tried a
literary fiction novel, and then after that, I did a
sort of a mystery slash western novel, and each one
of those things, you're sort of learning different things about
the craft of writing, you know, the literary fiction one,
you know, everything becomes incredibly lush, linguistically as you're working
on it, you know, And then you're writing this mystery
slash western one, and everything becomes very spare and tight
and quippi, you know, and you're experimenting with characters, with
you know, voice, with all these different things every step
of the way. And eventually, I think all of that
stuff ended up gelling. And by the time I came
back to science fiction and started really being settled with it,
I was really burned.
Speaker 3: Out on writing novels. But I started writing short stories.
Speaker 5: And that was the beginning of my actual career, was
that I started writing short stories and they started to
sell almost immediately when I did that.
Speaker 3: But it was almost like, I mean, I think I
was like.
Speaker 5: Eight or ten years in by that time, where I'd
been just you know, trying and trying and trying and
trying and learning and learning and learning and learning.
Speaker 4: That's amazing, amazing.
Speaker 2: This is a kind of a good segue into novela
because this is the first of.
Speaker 4: This kind of novel that you've done, Is that correct?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: This is straight up fantasy, yeah, like you know, and
it was like Italian Renaissance like world like like all
those kinds of things. Yeah, this is this is utterly
different from everything that I've done before.
Speaker 2: Why this why this kind of alternate reality medieval slash
Renaissance Italy mixed in with.
Speaker 4: I'm feeling it's like a very low fantasy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, the magic is pretty like subsurface. Yeah, yeah,
for sure. When I started novel, it was actually this
sort of creative play project for me to just try
to do something that was very different from everything else
that I'd done and felt like again it was a
secret project.
Speaker 3: It was back to secret projects.
Speaker 5: You know why secret I have a stronger voice and
a more fearless creativity when I'm not thinking I'm going
to give it to somebody, huh. And I remember, like
when I wrote wind Up Girl, so wind Up Girl
blew Up and it like got all these awards and everything,
And I remember the headspace that I was in when
I wrote that book, and it was like, anytime you
feel uncomfortable, go further. Anytime you feel like this is
too and saying push it harder. It was like do more,
go bigger, go harder, you know. And it was just
absolutely like everything I could put on myself on the page, everything,
Like if I had a moment of hesitation, it was
like go there, and it was it was fearless. And
part of that was that I didn't really expect it
to sell either, because I'd already had four other rejected novels,
so like, eh, you know, like hey, great, you know
you could just hammer away like it was just a
thing broke. Yeah, And you know, and after you've been
published and after you start getting reviews, and after the
good and the bad, the good the good responses like
make you sort of like desire to sort of make
people more happy by following up and doing similar things
that they liked. And then the bad responses you're like, oh,
I feel bad that they don't like this, or I
feel like hurt that they don't like this or whatever,
and so you have a sense of feeling of wanting
to shy away from the things that they didn't like,
and so that can really mess with your head. If
you're not deeply centered in your own creativity, that'll mess
with your head. Yeah, so for me like working in secret,
and at the time, I honestly I wasn't actually even
sure I was going to keep writing, and so this
was an experiment also just in the idea of whether
or not I wanted to be creating anymore.
Speaker 2: I think I get that now because you must have
been faced with massive expectations, and so I can totally
appreciate wanting to do something where it's very private and
just for you. I think that also sort of explains
why the lore in this novel is so rich. It
feels like you lived with it for a while. Is
that safe to say? I lived with it for years?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, No, it was delightful to make it because you know,
every time, like I'd be going along and I'd suddenly
be thinking, like I'm making up the language, you know,
and suddenly I'm making up Okay, what kinds of words
are these people going to speak? And I'm going to
use this sort of like bastardized version of Italian and
I'm going to make up my own words, you know.
So there's michiada to mark the face, or there's Facio
Kiato and Fachio scuro, you know, people being visible on
their faces, like their intentions being visible on their faces
are hidden and all of that like was like all
that was creative play. And then the same thing like
suddenly you're like wandering off into like what are.
Speaker 3: The philosophers in this world?
Speaker 5: And oh yeah, we're going to talk about sopros now
and what does soapros think about like the function of
man and nature? And you know, now we're going to
do a whole section philosophizing and now you know, oh wait,
actually there's the Smith of Aristhaea, And actually I kind
of want to write about the god Colliba right now
and how he talks with Scuro and talks with Amo
and like how they all get along and you know,
and you're just roaming about and because you're not thinking like, oh,
this has to fit some sort of a structure, this
has to fit this exact size of a novel, You're
just like this is interesting to me. I'm going there now.
And I would let myself go. If there was a
door that seemed intriguing, I would just let myself go
through it. And more and more and more and more
stuff kept getting created that way.
Speaker 3: It was so much fun.
Speaker 4: It's awesome.
Speaker 2: It's very rich, and it's a fun world for me
to be sort of like along there with you as
I'm reading it. In world building, yeah, you tend to
go bottom up or small to big, or do you
do the opposite thing. Maybe another way to put it
is do you make a map and populate that map
and then play in that world, or do you make
a town and then just sort of expand on that
as you need to breathe out.
Speaker 5: I've done it both ways, and so when I start
from the micro, it almost always starts from the.
Speaker 3: Character and their point of view.
Speaker 5: And you know, it starts with a character something they need,
they're doing something interesting to them, you know, something they need,
something they want, something they're frustrated with, whatever, and starting
with them at that micro scale, and then slowly, slowly
you build out the world around them kind of and
that tells you things and you find things, and then
it kind of starts to like, let you populate the
rest of the space. So with NOVELA, the example of
that is that the very first line is my father
kept a dragon eye on his desk. I wanted to
write about dragons in some way, and I didn't want
to write about dragons in a traditional way, and so
I was like, Okay, I'm going to play with this
idea of a fossilized dragon eye. But then it like
because there's that moment where it's like, okay, so where
is this Who is this man who keeps a dragon
is on his desk?
Speaker 3: How powerful do you have to be to keep a
dragon ee on his desk?
Speaker 5: And it's like, Okay, he's going to be this really
powerful merchant banker and he makes all of his money
from the trading of things, but more in promises and
he never fails to collect on a promise. And okay,
so that's who this man is. That says this kid's father,
And then who's this kid? And you know, the kid
is soft, the kid is sweet, and the kid likes,
you know, to play with his hound lazy and so okay,
so now I'm starting to get a little bit of
the kid, and from that, you know, I start to
build out that oh, this kid likes nature, he likes
his animals, you know. Okay, so now I'm going to
go spend some time thinking about the nature of the
place around novel as well as thinking about what does
this merchant banking world look like? Oh, and that's where
you know, suddenly the novel as a people are obsessed
with Fachio Kiato and Fachio scuro and you know, who
can you know bargain best when they sit across the
plank from one another and each thing becomes a sort
of a stepping stone out and the world gets bigger
and bigger and bigger and big around you.
Speaker 3: That's how I did novel. It was like that.
Speaker 4: It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 2: And one of the questions that I'm burning to ask
is when you make any of your novels, including Nevla,
do you know the ending when you start this?
Speaker 5: Is?
Speaker 4: This is something that has always fascinated me.
Speaker 2: I think I read as a kid that Stephen King
just starts writing and that.
Speaker 4: Always like really boiled my blood. How is this possible?
Speaker 3: That was this possible?
Speaker 2: How can you get to a satisfying conclusion? And all
of the sort of advice books you know, like Blake Sheldon,
is that the guy that did save the cat? Or
like a McKee, they would always I think, say, you know,
you do the backwards design thing, so what is it
for you?
Speaker 4: Do you know that end scene or that redemption moment?
Speaker 5: I don't what I'll do is I'll tend to write
my way into the story, like multiple times though, so
I make an attempt to write the story, I make
an attempt to get a hold of a character, like
I don't know what's meant to happen with Davico very
in the early stages of the scene.
Speaker 2: Are you writing it like or is that? Is this
a skeleton of jot notes?
Speaker 3: No, I'm living with it because for me, I have to.
Speaker 5: And I'm okay with throwing away words like I throw
away a lot of works. It feels so dangerous though,
so like I've actually become incredibly comfortable, and this is
not how other writers I know work. One of the
things I've realized is like, in order for me to
believe in a world, sometimes I'll have to write it
a couple of times just to kind of get the details,
you know. And so that first sentence in the second sense,
I don't even need to necessarily keep those I just
need to reassociate my way into this world enough that
it starts to make some sense to me. In one particular,
very sad case, I wrote an entire novel and then
threw it all away because it was like, oh, I
actually didn't understand what the heart of the novel was
until I'd finished it all and was like, there was
actually only one sentence in that novel that was any good,
and so I kept that sentence and sort of centered
on it, and then wrote another novel based on that,
and it was like, ah, now you've found it.
Speaker 3: But a lot of times I'll.
Speaker 5: Do yeah, I mean it's about I mean, like I'm
not like, I.
Speaker 4: Know it's so admirable.
Speaker 2: I mean, you must be extremely disciplined in your methodology.
Speaker 4: You must like write every day.
Speaker 3: Do you have a thing I am consistent overall?
Speaker 5: I mean, obviously, in order to generate hundreds of thousands
of words, you have to eventually be showing up and
writing things. When I was working on NOVELA, I was
actually trying a completely different thing, which was that I
was just writing five hundred words a day. And it
wasn't necessarily even on NOVELA. It was on anything like
just sit down and write five hundred words. So as
long as you sat down and you made words, good words,
bad words, doesn't matter. But like just the showing up
oftentimes meant that like you would get going and then oh,
I accidentally fell into a thousand words who knew, like
I actually had a scene that I found or and again,
much like secret project stuff, I think that like setting
that bar really really low and the expectations really low
and the requirements really low, means that like you again
can play, and the more loose you are and the
more playful you are, the more likely you are that
something interesting is going to happen. So I tend to
find my endings. That was like a long answer to
a very short question.
Speaker 2: It's it is endlessly fascinating to me. How maybe it's
because in my own brain, I can't keep a story
a third of the size of yours in my brain
from beginning to end. I feel like it wouldn't be
possible for me to hold it all in there. So
I'm just kind of in awe of people who can
do that or even just find that ending kind of organically.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think, I mean, I think with writing novels
in some ways there's an advantage because until you present
it like you can endlessly sort of swirl it around
and things like that. I think, you know, with the
kind of work you're doing where you're doing an episodic,
structured thing where you've got to reveal certain episodes and
then move forward. I think that, like you know, I've
worked with some friends in television and working in television also,
like you know, we sit down and like plot break,
like this is going to be the episode, and this
is going to be the things that are going to
have to happen in that episode, which is going to
move the characters into this kind of a situation in
the next episode. And that's a much more deliberately structured
thing top to bottom. This is where the finale is
going to be, and we know that we're building that
on you know, multiple levels all the way through, and
it's absolutely a structured, you know, sort of architectural object
top to bottom, long before you're even starting to put
any text on the pages.
Speaker 2: And that's there's a promise I think with a novel
or a TV show or a movie, that it will
have a satisfying end that makes sense.
Speaker 5: Right, and I'm allowed to just kind of keep circling
and circling and circling in the mud for like you know,
in some cases with novel, I've been circling in it
for years and so eventually I've gotten to the point
where here's the object, right, Okay, I found it, you know,
and then you.
Speaker 2: Go back and you sort of like remove all the
Chekhov's guns that didn't fire.
Speaker 4: Is that is that kind of the idea?
Speaker 5: Sort of Yeah, it's a little uncomfortable to me right
now because novel is coming out and I'm working on
the sequel, and I'm like, shit, if there's anything now
I haven't laid out, Like now I'm starting to feel
a little more hummed in.
Speaker 3: I'm like, okay, that's now canon. Now you're fucked.
Speaker 2: And the farther you go in, the more you have
to dig back, and the more you have to dig back.
Speaker 4: Amazing.
Speaker 2: What is one work of fiction, book, a movie, even music,
something like that that is kind of like it changed
you or it's stuck with you. You know, there's sort of
life before this film, this novel, this song, and then
life after if you have that.
Speaker 5: So it's actually hard for me to pinpoint like a
specific thing. I mean, there are moments that I can
say this was a light bulb for me or whatever,
you know, So like if I go back and I
look at you know, Robert Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy,
that was a light bulb moment for me where I
suddenly was reading a big book. It was like a
three hundred page book, and I was reading it cover
to cover and I couldn't stop reading it, and I
was deeply engaged with it.
Speaker 3: I was probably in about third grade or fourth grade
or something like that.
Speaker 5: Oh, and the sense of immersion and the engagement with
the character and things like that.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just a keystone book.
Speaker 5: And it's not a coincidence that later on I ended
up writing an entire novel that was basically, you know,
a sort of a monetized version of that story because
I cared about it. I remember this moment when I
was reading an Ursula le Gwyn novel. I was reading
The Dispossessed, and there was a light bulb because I
was reading this book and.
Speaker 3: I was like, wait, it's not just fiction.
Speaker 5: It's about an idea also, And you know, duh, I mean,
Ursula Lea Gwinn writes big ideas.
Speaker 3: But it was it was a new tool set that
opened up to me. Suddenly. It's like, not a story
didn't necessarily just have to be a story.
Speaker 5: It could also have other you know, meaning layers that
are stacked on top of it and that suddenly was
another world. And so you know, I can sort of
go back and look at all of those things, but
you know, to pinpoint one is very, very difficult.
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, this one mattered for these reasons.
Speaker 5: But I mean I would just as much say that
John Norman's Gore series trashy as all get out, Like
there's nothing like, you know, like nobody would say, oh,
this is socially a morally redeep excitor like that.
Speaker 3: But the guy wrote adventure fiction.
Speaker 5: Tarl Cabot's going to go out with his sword and
he's going to win a woman, and like you know,
he's going to fly on giant tarns, these giant hawks,
and he's going to fly around and he's going to
battle other cities or whatever. And that's just as influential
like that those things are like and possibly more so
because they kept re engaging.
Speaker 3: Me with the idea that reading was a joy. It's
not a chore, it's not a job. It's not it's
like it's actual joy.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for joining me. This has been
a real pleasure for me.
Speaker 2: And thank you for being the first like novelist to
come on the show and be interviewed.
Speaker 4: I have no skill for it, I know that, but thanks.
Speaker 5: This is fun, No, this is really fun to do,
so I appreciate the time. And yeah, it's good to
chat about this stuff.
Speaker 2: So right, love on where and how and when can
we get novela.
Speaker 5: Novela is coming out on July ninth, and it's going
to be pretty much everywhere your books are sold. It'll
be online, it'll be an ebook, it'll be an audiobook,
it'll be at your local independent bookseller, and yeah, it
should be everywhere. It's going to be releasing simultaneously in
the United Kingdom. It's going to be translated eventually into German, French, Italian,
which I was really delighted about, and check Polish, you know, Ukrainian,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: So yeah, everywhere.
Speaker 1: A huge thank you to Pelo for joining me for
this interview. His new book, Novela, will be available in
stores as of tomorrow. If you're the kind of reader
who enjoys low fantasy, political intrigue, and rich flore I
think you'll really like it. I certainly did. Thanks for listening,
and also you in the next episode of Tale of
the manticor the story We're Chaos roles.
Speaker 6: It's been seven years since the mast Court fell and
the Empire began dying its final death. Once a member
of the elite Imperial Special Service, now turned bounty hunter,
Sejean Luchale fights for survival in a universe full of
turmoil and confusion. She's use her wits, her Las pistol
in the power of the Void to face the growing
tension in the Casstin system. This is Steve Morrison of
the Errant Adventures podcast, and on this new season, I'm
using the tabletop RPG Traveler to bring to life my
own space opera setting full of bounty hunters, religious celts,
and people struggling to survive and find joy in the
dying lights of an intergalactic empire. Join me for this
new adventure and welcome to Book one Meridian. I'll see
you out in the deep.