 My work here on YouTube is supported by viewers Please take a look at the link in the description below and visit my page at 50th Street where you can become a sponsor So how's this for a book title, huh? I found this at geek girl con last month here in Seattle a local Author by the name of Matt Youngmark had a table set up with all of his books It's about an angry foul mouth 15 year old girl who hates everything and everybody her name is Arabella Grimsbrough She's waiting for a friend of hers to meet her at the mall and the friend never shows so she kills some time by Allowing a mysterious woman at the mall to give her a demonstration of some sort of new virtual reality thing and Arabella ends up getting stuck in the book version of the world of Oz and she's like all the rest of us Well, most of us She's familiar with the movie, but she has no idea what is supposed to happen in the book and it's apparent that she Is going to have to act out the book She's very unhappy about it as you can tell by the painting on the cover great cover painting and She says so Over and over the book includes an introduction in which the author gives you an exact count of how many times the f-word appears To prepare you and the book was just great fun from beginning to end for those of us who have not read the book It's going to be every bit as much fun as for those of us who have and I have read the original book And this book was reminding me about all the bizarre things that I had forgotten over the years And the the original book is really bizarre and Frank Frank Baum wrote a lot of them not just one Enjoyed this so much that I went to another local craft show where the author was going to appear just to buy the sequel And I took a little time to interviewing and here's that interview. All right, everybody You've seen my review of the book and here's the author Hello, I've never done this before by the way. I've never interviewed an author. Nice This is new territory At first I think the question that everyone's gonna have is why Just start from the beginning it's an excellent question so For the for the father-in-law to Wizard of Oz that is that the book we're doing? Yeah, okay Just make it sure Like a couple of years ago. They had a TV show on NBC called Emerald City and it was a retongue of the Wizard of Oz right all right And it was very different it looked I never watched it But the commercials made it look like kind of Game of Thrones and Oz or something anyway commercial came on I thought and I was like that's so dumb who would do Oz Oz is done to death Why would anybody even do it? I remember thinking the same thing and then I thought if I was gonna do it I would do and then I had an idea that I fell in love with and I was like just take that take a new character a Modern-day 15 year old girl with like a foul mouth drop her in instead of Dorothy tell the original story out of the public domain But from her perspective and of course she's from our world so she can call out all the bullshit like me She's seen the movie but hasn't read the book so she's like wait a minute This isn't like the movie what's happening and when it goes off the rails and does something different today break it Yeah, it was so I thought I could write it pretty quickly and have a lot of fun with it And it worked out Arabella is basically She's basically me without an edit button like the first thing that comes into my head when something stupid is just a swearing cousin So it's fucking terrible, but then I think no that's uncharitable. Yeah, I should bring myself in She doesn't think that she does the thing that differentiates you From other people who would have these kind of thoughts is that you follow through and you wrote the book, right? Well, then also like my wife and I had a baby a couple years ago, and I'm a stay-at-home dad now So our kid was about two And I was not getting the time to write that I thought so I was like what's the series that I could write kind of quickly and get to Market quicker and because these books that's a series that's the third one's coming out soon But because they kind of are patterned after the old school public domain books I could skip the plotting stage entirely Righted just writing them so that was appealing as well Yeah, I thought you made a good choice in making them like novellas instead of instead of trying to pad them out Right, right, right, and that the odds book is actually about 5,000 words longer than the original Wizard of Oz This padded a little bit the original Wizard of Oz is for 40,000 and eight words and 40,000 words is the cutoff for a novel So I think he had a contract for a novel. Yeah, I feel like he was just trying to get to his word count Okay, so I've read the original right I read like the first 24 books in the series I read a lot of those yeah, and they were weird they get weirder to they do But I remember thinking that the first book was different even than the other ones that bomb had written It was even simpler. He wrote it like a fairytale, right, right, right like a lot of the charm I just like I was surprised when I was going through because I didn't read it until I wrote it I read it and I played a game with myself and went through it each chapter seeing it from Arabella's eyes So each chapter I would read and then write so I could be fresh like what new horror is this To be surprised with it reading your thing Was was reminding me of the original book because it's been 25 years since I read the original I had totally forgotten how the tin woodman, right? I forgot it was woodman. First of all, I forgot how he had decapitated 40 walls, right? Yeah, yeah, I forgot about how the scarecrow broke the necks of 40 crows I had totally forgotten about giant spider. I somehow I've forgotten about that I did remember that the first witch was not Glinda, right? I did remember that when I try to explain to people first of all I tell them that bomb himself wrote 14 books and they're like what yeah, they're like 14 And then the other people continued it after that. Yeah, and then I tell them that when I first started reading them in the early 90s They were like 80 official books in the series and today there's more than a hundred Wow, and and I tell them about the books that Ruth Plumlee Thompson wrote after After bomb died and how weird those were the reason I was saying that I thought You made the correct choice in making it novella link rather than trying to pad it out is because as enjoyable as it was It might have started to get old. Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, like I want to keep the keep the pace fast Right and kind of get through it because you know some people are reading it They are already familiar with the story and going through it right well Well the real inspiration is because I watched the movie over and over and I was a kid and really affected me, right? Like it was when I was a kid. It was on TV every year Right this was before you know even VHS. I remember watching it every year. It was Easter, wasn't it? They would show it at Easter every year on the networks. Sounds right. Yeah a city in Canada was Toronto or Montreal I don't remember which but every year as soon as the movie ended as soon as the Wizard of Oz ended on TV There would be a massive drop in water pressure all over the city because people would wait to go to the toilet Right, right, right. They wouldn't even leave the TV during the commercials obviously When you wrote the end of the first book you intended to make another one Yeah, where at which point did you decide you needed to make another one? I day one I already knew that the second book was going to be John Carter world Okay, like when I had the idea it was immediately like and I could do more and the second one will be Edgar Asperos and I had never read those books either But my older brother was really into them and I kind of I saw the movie and I knew about him a little bit Right in that book was a whole different experience because it's not for little kids, right? It's more I mean it's an adventure book so it's really for teenage boys. It's much more complex Yeah, and it's much more like you know like living through it is a lot more harsh Yeah, so it's a very different because she has a lot more kind of rail against because there's like there's some bullshit I was but there's a lot of bullshit on Mars, right? Yeah, I read that first the first Mars book about three years ago Oh, yeah, and I was astonished at how good it was. I was expecting it to be more Sexist and racist than it actually was like it was pretty sexist and racist Yeah, but I was expecting more. I was expecting words right right because this is a guy who wrote Tarzan Yes, we're the natives are literally gorillas, right and then they're conquered not just by white man But why by white baby, right, right, and and I'm like, you know, this could have been so much worse, right? So I guess I was coming from coming to it from a little bit Yeah, I'm not gonna talk about the third book. I'll let that I'll let that be a surprise It comes out in about a month. Okay So you decided to do a short story about Sherlock Holmes. Yes, so she I haven't read that yet The short story comes in between books two and three. Okay, and it's just it's from the shorts from the Speckle band, okay, it's based on and she just yeah in between she thinks she instead of winding up in another novel She winds up in a short story and it's it's free if you go to my willing mailing list at youngmark.com So to sign up for my other mail definitely you can check it out for free I'll definitely tell them about that. Were you familiar with the Sherlock Holmes stories before a little yeah And I had a hard time trying to figure out which one was the perfect story But I fixed the feckle band because a There's like a whole thing with like Sherlock and Watson in a dark room and I like thought it was a perfect opportunity for like makeouts And b I mean Sherlock Holmes kills a guy with a snake at the end. So that's you know, really spoiler spoiler alert Yeah, I haven't I haven't read that one. I've read a number of Sherlock Holmes. I I remember in high school reading The hound of the basketballs we read hound of the basketballs and I remember thinking at the time You know this Sherlock Holmes character. He's really not doing any detective work Right. He's just making stuff up right and and so recently I decided I was going to review some other Sherlock Holmes things So I read some of the others like the sign of four and And the study in scarlet and I was like this is exactly how I remember in high school He's not really doing any detective work Um, so I'm imagining that was your take on it as well Like in the speckle band like they someone comes and says come help me I'm afraid I'm gonna die So he goes out he and Watson got to her home and like hide in her bedroom Like waiting for something to happen that night and just a bunch of stuff happens at the end Sherlock says Well, these are all the things I noticed to solve the mystery, right? Right. So yeah, it's not I mean the plot isn't super compelling, but it's like a 10,000 word story And Arabella's in there going like she's just kind of trying to bullshit her way through it And uh, yeah, it's really fun. Okay So here's here's my pitch for the Oz book. It's a It's a retelling of the Wizard of Oz with a modern day 15 year old girl instead of Dorothy She's got a foul mouth and a bad attitude doesn't take any crap off any munchkins So it's like reading the Wizard of Oz. I've been a way more f-bombs Don't buy for your kids unless your kids swear because they they don't know that well when they're done She can call out all the bullshit that's in the 100 year old book, right? Because it's written in 1900 it's very charming, but there's a lot of bullshit in there And she can like kind of be like your guide to the world of Oz She goes the whole book thinking i'm not going to kill a witch just because you say I have to kill a witch, right? But the witch is genuinely awful and she's like, yeah, the minute she finds a bucket of water is bam Yeah, I knew I haven't read the second book, but I'm going to And I'm wondering is does there end up being some explanation about how she's in there? What the second book no no she starts to learn in the third book she's some things so there is so there is An explanation of sorts. Um, she starts to learn more Okay, so there's the third book ends the first the original trilogy and whether there's more after that It totally depends on sales But there's not just fair warning by the end of the trilogy. You're not going to have an explanation for For you know, what's behind all okay when you're reading a book series or watching A movie or television series and you're always saying I want an explanation I want an explanation and then when you get it you're like, oh, I hate that and there's that there's that concern as well So I have the explanation already in my head but like I don't know if it's I don't know if it's ultimately satisfying or not. Yeah, but it is what it is So yeah one day one day we'll find out. Yeah, okay. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to talk with you Thanks for interviewing me. Yeah, I enjoyed the book. I recommend it to you all as I've said already I hope you buy and enjoy it. Bye. I'm mad. Okay. 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