 And welcome to Church of the Chair, where we celebrate all the things we do while seated. I'm your host, E, here today with my co-host, Chad Lutzke, and we are working on a collaborative novel, tentatively entitled, Planet Caravan. The whole point of this is to show our collaborative process, in case people are interested, confused, intrigued by how this whole thing goes down. Also, it is for anybody who wants to just hang out and write with us, or do your own creative projects, whatever that might be. Or if you just need something to keep yourself busy while you're at work today. Anyways, so what I'm gonna be doing today is I'm just gonna, I'm jumping right back into it, right back into writing. I got another scene I wanna do. And then Chad, I believe, is still gonna be working on layering and building up what I've already put up there, which is kind of the routine we've fallen into so far. And while I do wanna express this for anybody who might be looking at what Chad's doing, or seeing how much things are changing, this is a completely, I love this process. It's almost like working with an editor in real time. And it's not affecting my momentum, whereas if I was editing myself going along, it would affect my momentum. Because I would be going back, getting stuck on certain things, and being shit, being like shit. Now I don't even wanna write the rest of it because I gotta fix this part. But with Chad doing that behind me, I am finding no problem continuing on. I'm also finding this a very unique situation because I know it's going to happen for the most part. And I am still having a hell of a lot of fun. I am not a plotter in any way, shape, or form. I usually hate the process. Once I get done outlining and plotting everything, no matter how thin that outline is, I always end up going, well, I know the story. This is no longer fun. Let me move on to something else. Good morning. Good morning, Joe. Let's get this bread. Yo! There you go. But I also wanna let Chad write his own stuff. So that's a bad thing. Oh, there's plenty in there. This is true. Like I said, I figured, we were talking about this yesterday. When we get to the carnival, I was telling Chad, for those of you who missed it yesterday, I was telling Chad, Chad was worried that we needed to come together so that the carnival stuff, that we plotted it properly. So we weren't like, I don't know, double doing scenes or whatever. But I thought it was, I thought the chaos would be good. Just having him write a scene where he goes and does this, and then I write a scene where he goes and does this. Different scenes showcasing the theme of freedom and acceptance and all that, how he has free reign to go and do what he wants to after coming from a very insular life, both with his mother in a good scenario. He didn't get out much, that kind of thing, they were still kind of on the poor end. And then going and living with the cracked out uncle, the Charles is going and living with them. And once again, having that very insular experience, going from that kind of constricted environment to wide open, even so much so that he's allowed to get himself in trouble. He's going to do things that might have set someone, maybe the Ferris wheel man that we're gonna use as an antagonist inside the carnival, whatever it might be. He's allowed to do these things where he wasn't allowed before. So it's a whole, literally a whole new world for him. And I think it would be cool to see him just go off and do little stuff where even when the other author doesn't know what's going to happen. It's gonna be interesting when one of us is doing that and we have to come back and say, okay, there's a character here that's becoming a big deal. You never know. I've written characters where there's supposed to just be some kind of funny little thing. And the next thing, no, the side kick through the whole rest of the book. Yeah, you never know, man. It happens quite, it happens a lot. I'm thinking about it. I can name at least five books right now that I've written where that happens, where a character comes in and you just let that character be who they are. And all of a sudden, you have almost a second main character, or that character becomes the fan favorite, as it were. Yeah. So it's gonna be great. So, and that's another reason why it's like just go off on our own and see what kind of shenanigans happens. And then we can meet back, when we've meandered enough and had enough fun, building up everybody in the carnival through showing, not telling kind of thing. Then we meet back to get back onto the plot. I'm interested in how it goes anyways. Whether or not it's gonna work or not, I don't know, but I do love that theme. I do love that structure. The very constricted environment going into a super open environment and not only the fish out of water stuff, but just the feeling of finally having that freedom. Yeah. It's almost like, what was it? I think Caroline, the movie, how the real world is very dull and drab and muted colors, very monochrome, that kind of thing. And then when Coraline ends up going to the other world, everything is so bright and beautiful. But that's the scary world. That's where the other mother is. And I'm not saying that's what we're doing here, but that's kind of like the same theme. Also Wizard of Oz, going from the very plain world that Dorothy knows, the sepia-toned environment to this wonderful wacky world of Oz that is so bright and colorful. I really like stuff like that. Or you take someone from inexperience into all new experiences. And I think that's another draw of the whole Carnival story is it's not something, I mean, we all have a, there's a mystique to it. And we all have an idea of what a carnival is. It's just a traveling show comes in, provides entertainment and leaves. But to the people that live that lifestyle, like the old school, the ones who just stay there and make a career out of it, it is literally another world. They have their own justice system. They have their own, it's almost like an indigenous tribe. And that's, it's an outsider thing. And unfortunately over the years, Carnies have gotten the reputation of being not just the outcast, but being like criminals and deviants and all that stuff. And that's, they go to the carnivals to hide and seek out their victims. When in all actuality, it's half true because most of the time it is a situation where it's the only job that they can get, but it's usually not crimes that really, might be stealing or drugs or whatever it's not. I don't wanna say victimless crime, but because robbery, but what they do, they end up with the carnivals because the people working and running the carnivals either believe in second chances because they were there themselves or second, third, fourth, fifth chances, whatever. Or they understand that they can take care of these people in a different world, in a different way than society can and give them a chance to be somebody instead of being a pariah. And there are some, I don't wanna say ring leaders, but people who run these shows who take advantage of that. But there are more good ones that I have found than bad ones. So, but that reputation, just throwing that out there, that reputation is sometimes true, but most of the time isn't. These are just people who are trying to make it in life and they are outsiders, outcasts. They don't get along with society as a whole. And that might seem funny because they are literally dealing with the general public, but it's no different doing that job and working with people like that than it is doing retail. It's literally the same thing. You're just dealing with people. Anyways, but I wanted to clear that up. There's like, these people are dirty, nasty, whatever. No, they're just like, and also when you go, unless they tell you differently, when you go to like a fair carnival or whatever in your local area and they ask for food, they're not asking for food for charity. Unless they're saying that they're collecting canned goods for a certain charity, you're literally feeding them is what you're doing. They collect canned goods so that they have food while they're on the road. That's where they get the vast majority of their food. So when you go, if you have canned goods to spare, definitely take your canned goods. You're helping somebody out. Hey, Vamp, hey Paul, how you doing? Come on in. Oh, if for, so everybody knows, we're at just over 14,000 words right now. Look at this thing grow. Look at it grow. I'm gonna share my screen here in a minute. Okay. Just letting them know. Trying to, oh, this is an 89. They wouldn't have done that. Nevermind. Hey, what season is it? I know Cassidy has to wear a coat or Bethany tells him to wear a coat when he goes out to a shoplift the first time. But what do you foresee this being? Fall or winter or we don't even really know. Is it Southern? Yeah, I think it's Southern. And I was thinking at the top, maybe like to start the whole book off. Maybe we should put the South comma 1989 because we had talked about whether or not we're, I don't think it's best that we do use a date. As far as, I don't know. Yeah, we did do the, I mean, it could be, I haven't spent very much time in the South, so I don't know. That's what I was gonna get at. Cause if we're doing, if we're doing cold, it's either January or February. It starts to get cold in December, but usually it's still in the 70s, 60s and 70s. But don't you have just cold off days like every place else? Mm-hmm. Not really, like when- Like say in April or May or something like that? You have like a- I mean, it's cooler, like we get breezes, but that's pretty much it. It's still about, you know, 70s in the spring. Coat weather around here is pretty much only January and January and February. Though you'll see people in December because they're used to the heat all year round wearing a coat. I mean, we could, it could be a cold snap, but then we'd have to, I don't know. I also don't know what the weather was like here in the 80s. So I can talk to some people around here because from my experience, the weather has changed drastically just in the past 10 years here. We used to get like more seasons than we actually do now. Now we don't have a fall whatsoever. It goes from peak summer heat to cooling off maybe 10 degrees directly in the winter. So we go like nobody ever wears coats during Halloween. Thanksgiving get-togethers is not a coat function. Every now and again, there's a fluke and it'll start cooling off like mid-November, but for the most part, it's usually hot in a, yeah, here's Tim. Tim lived in Alabama too. He's like, yeah, we have two seasons. It's either burning apocalypse or freezing. And that's because we have such a drastic change in the weather. It goes from sweltering to cold, like almost literally overnight. I've had situations where it's been 80 degrees one day and then 59 the next. So that's the severity of it. But I was thinking, you know, if we're doing, but if we're doing January or February with the coat, then the carnival wouldn't be in town. They wouldn't have that. That's their off season. So I'm wondering if we want to put something like, it's an unnatural, unseasonal cold snap has come through or something. I don't know. Or we could just make it a comment from somebody saying, you know, how it's too, you know, he's worried about getting caught because like when, when, when, Oh, no, wait a second. The only reason he's taking the fucking coat is because he wants to pack it to shoplift with. Yeah. I'm creating problems that don't fucking exist. Okay. Never mind. Yeah. He's waiting outside the window and he could, he could make some, you know, have some thought about how he's worried that this person's going to realize he's wearing a coat when he certainly doesn't need one. It's funny you talk about all this weather. I, the last time I was South was driving through Tennessee, Georgia to Florida. And I think it was late. They're very early spring and we were freezing and all the pictures that we have from that trip were all wearing winter coats. And I remember, I remember standing in line at, well, Disney World and yeah, we're freaking bottled up and we're from Michigan. So it's not like we weren't used to, you know, the cold. It was freaking cold. And I was like, this is Florida? That's, that's, that's, I cannot, I cannot express how odd that is. Yeah. Because I think we usually go to, when we did go to like Universal Studios and Walt Disney World, when we went down there, we would go in the end of December or January because, you know, it's still warm enough to enjoy, but it's not, you know, but it's usually the, you know, after Christmas is when we would go. It's also the like, pretty much the off season. It's not as busy because it is technically colder than, you know, it normally is. But yeah, that's when we usually go. I mean, we go to theme parks at the end of December and early January, because of that, because of the weather. You know, you're not standing out under the heat of the sun all day and it's not sweltering. And like Tim said, the other day was 95 degrees and raining. And when it rains here, it does not cool down. It only gets hotter because of the humidity. It's like walking through fucking suit. Yeah. It depends. Sometimes it'll, it'll cool down 10 degrees. And then sometimes the rain, it depends on how long it rains, I should say. If it just doesn't rain for very long, it just makes it worse, man. And it gets real humid. I think a lot of people have misconceptions about, about Michigan and they think it's like, I think they think it's like Alaska or something. We normally don't, if we don't, if I don't, if we don't see snow until like Christmas, that's not uncommon. And I, it's been, I remember once it was 80 degrees on Christmas, but I mean, that's, you know, that's just, I think just like anywhere else, you have gays that are like, wow, okay, this is weird. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. The main reason I'm asking is I wanted to handle, you know, what the weather was like while he was out walking because he's by himself. I guess I could do something else, but I also wanted to give some kind of feel for what it feels like this day that he's out looking for Cassidy. I was just thinking about all that weather. And I was like, I was thinking, we should, we should make it hot in this place that they're living. Like just kind of like Uncomfortable. Yeah, miserable. Like there's, they don't have AC so far. We haven't mentioned, but I was just right in, that's exactly what I'm going to use. That's exactly what I'm going to use. I'm going to have him walk out of the sweltering house. He's already dug, dug the hole. He's taken a shower with his clothes. It's a very funny scene. Anyway, I thought it was anyways, but he's taken a shower. He's cleaned up the dog poop in the room and he's heading outside to go look for Cassidy after a weird Mac and forth with Rita. And he's heading outside. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to, I'm going to bring it. It's, I'm going to talk about how much cooler it is coming from the inside, the sweltering environment going into the outside with the breeze. So that's, that's how I'm going to use that. Just to give people some kind of, something to root them in place. I got to run the restroom. I'm probably into taking a break too. So I'll be back in about 10, 15 minutes. Okay, man. Oh, do you want to show your screen or you just want to go off? I might as well share it. Yeah. Just give the people something to look at other than my chair. And y'all pretty face, it's not that y'all pretty face ain't enough, but you know, we've got to give these folks something extra. They're spending all their time with us. I'm in a mood today, man. I told you I'm in a mood to scream, hey, ought to be bonk. I think I'll let y'all watch Chad for a while, give him the anxiety he deserves. Kidding, love you, Chad. Let's see what you've been doing up here. Oh, you've been busy. Oh, not really. I read most of that. Nevermind. This is all new. This is? Yeah. Maybe not the first line. Oh, okay. All right. That's what I was. Okay. You can take a shit on the floor for all I care. Unintentionally foreshadowing what happens in my section that I just got to be writing. Sorry. Not saying the Cassidy shit on the floor, but there is shit on the floor when Shane wakes up the next day. Oh, you're still using some of my stuff. That's cool. Oh yeah. Yeah. I tried to as much as I can. I mean, I know things have changed a lot after we talked about, you know, whether or not they should mention Cooter. Gotcha. So yeah, I'm coming in here and I'm trying to read through it. I'm trying to grab Paul's stuff. I wouldn't. I wouldn't gonna be a bit upset if you just, you know, dinning on without it. Like I said, I'm just laying foundation, brother. I'm just glad you like some of this stuff enough to keep it. I guess, I don't know. Maybe it's self-deprecating, but I'm not used to this. I'm not used to collaborating with someone. I mean, either collaborate with people who are leagues better than me who end up rewriting the entire thing. Or I collaborate with someone new who doesn't know anything. So I'm going back and rebuilding their stuff. I'm not used to people keeping anything that I write when I collab. So. Well, what's the sense of collaborating if it's, you know? Well, I mean, it's, that's kind of what I'm getting at. You know, I just, it's, I guess this is the first real collaboration that I've had, like, you know, building off of each other instead of just going our own ways or being just completely, you know, torn down and rebuilt. So, because I've had, like I said, I've had it both ways. I've had it where someone has taken what I've had, completely gotten rid of all of it, and then rebuilt using what I had. Just saying what I said, basically in their own style, their own words and whatnot. And then I've had people where I've had to go back and rebuild their stuff. And I try to use as much as their stuff as possible, but no one's ever done that with me. So it's just a, it's just a completely new experience. This goes to show you never know what you're walking into when you do a collab. Yeah, that's very true. No matter how much you know the other person's work too. Oh, sorry. That's some kind of joke. What's wrong with Duane? Sounds like Duane. That's what the fuck's wrong with it. He's trying to make it out of your ass. Can we, I'm sorry. That's why I changed the name, I changed the spelling of the word Duane, so it was more Duane. Yeah, that's even funnier. I don't, I actually don't know what would be funnier here, is like you trying to name my kid after your ex, or you trying to name my kid after my daddy. It's just a hammer home though, anyways. Anyways, this is so fucked up, man. Fucked up. I forgot that that was his dad. Yeah, I was wondering, because I didn't know if you had him call, read him mama, because you'd forgot, or if everyone in the house just calls her mama. Anyways, it doesn't matter. Fucking daddy, yes. Dark and beautiful. Oh my God. I wanna go back and say, hey first, I ain't your mama. Second, long as that asshole don't come knocking on my door, asking what? I'm gonna throw that in there, you can delete it if you want to. Oh, it's so much fun. Duane, now I can't say it in my head any other way. Duane. These people give me the fucking heebie-jeebie, man. God, damn it, no. I don't wanna read about them fucking, I'm going away, I'm running at my tail between my legs. Yeah, I think we've established a very dysfunctional, a very unhealthy household here. You've got that fucking right, Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's funny that you bring that up, Alec, because I saw the ridiculousness of what Musk named his child is even more ridiculous when you hear his responses during interviews and what they call the child. Because they don't call the child any of the sequence of letters or numbers or whatever the fuck, they call him something completely different. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head and I don't wanna quote him incorrectly, but they don't even call him by his binary code name or her, I don't know which one it is. But I was also, there's something going on right now that I find hilarious. So Jack Smith subpoenaed, and this isn't really political, this is kind of like a side to all the stuff that's going on, but Jack Smith subpoenaed Twitter for Trump's private DMs, which they can legally do, but Twitter has been fighting them tooth and nail to try, they keep losing and they were slapped with a $250,000 fine and a couple other things and they finally decided to give it over, but they were begging the Jack Smiths people, begging them to at least let them tell Trump that they had been subpoenaed and they're like, no, you can't, that's part, we will find you again if you do that. You're not allowed to tell him. And I just find it funny because there's interviews with Musk who says that he voted for Biden. So I'm unsure why this whole thing is even going on because Twitter obviously does not care about people's privacy. And I just find the whole situation just utterly amusing. Yeah, they've handed them over, but there was a lot of fight going back and forth. They handed them over and now of course Trump knows because it's been made public, but he didn't know when they handed it over. Yeah, that doesn't mean he's gonna, he also endorsed Trump, but he said something about what kind of person would I be if I didn't vote for Biden? That was one of the quotes from the interview. It's online if you wanna go watch it. It's a very interesting, very interesting. They asked if he voted for Trump and he's like, no, no, no, no. Like what kind of person would I be if I voted for Trump? I 100% voted for Biden. And then he gives his reasons. Wait a second, for real? Why is Google Docs telling me to change Flyer, F-L-Y-E-R to Flyer, F-L-I-E-R? I don't know. Yeah, it's an advertising circular. F-L-Y-E, it's obvious. That's what I'm, anyways. Ignore, thank you. Cornstarch, has anyone ever cut their drugs with cornstarch? Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep. That crap gets wet. It makes that, you know. The oak leg or whatever, but you're not making it wet. When you have the Coke is a dry product unless you're doing like a speedball or you're smoking the rock. But if it's in powder form, it's pretty much, that's for snorting. I meant once it gets up there. Oh, once it gets up there? Well, yeah. Yeah, you've got these globules of cornstarch. 100%, 100%. It is not a fine product to consume. But yeah, but yes. Oblique or non-Newtonian fluid, that's what it's called. When you add cornstarch to water and you apply any impact whatsoever and it turns into a solid. Yeah, Google Docs does have a strange spell check. It also, well, they fixed it since the last time I did it, but I had horrible lag even with fiber less than a year ago when I tried it. And now it's like, it's perfect. I'm having no problems whatsoever. And there was a weird glitch at one point when I tried it where I would type a letter and it would duplicate that letter multiple times. With no rhyme or reason. Okay, I just finished cooking a smile. Okay. I have a feeling you're gonna change most of that. I did something and I have no idea. I guess I'm planting seeds. Hey, Annecy, how you doing? I keep clicking on the wrong fucking tab. Let me go back up here and read your finishing move. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, Jeff's good people. I just wanted to use it. He's one of those guys that get a odd rap because of the stuff he writes, but he's just like Edward Lee. They're both good people that they write the most atrocious shit. Even though Jeff Strand is funnier than he is horrifying. He's just really weird and I like weird. I think I'm missing maybe one that I can find but that's everything you did. I know you wanted that from first place. And then he sent me the new ones on Friday and he stopped me on Friday. I would say Friday. Yes, I just got the other ones. I can't miss how to cook for you guys. Did Alec leave? Is that what happened? Anyways, have a good one Alec, but that's the case. I'm gonna send Chad this video. He had a brain. I don't know what I'm talking about. I think I'm missing maybe one that I can find but that's everything you did. I know you wanted that from first place. And then he sent me the new ones on Friday. I just stopped him on Friday. He said Friday. Yes, I just got the other ones. Wait a second. NC Jeff Strand signed with Scholastic. Scholastic? Scholastic. Scholastic? That's a word that I hate. Not a company I hate, but a word I hate. It's like Jurassic. Jurassic. I always want to say Jurassic and I know the difference. People used to pick on me so hard in school when Jurassic Park first came out because my, I'm just, yeah, I'm better at saying words like that. Like across, if I don't pay attention, I'll say across. Even my own family picks on me. And I'm talking about like shell in my kids. Pick on me about that one. It's a cross, not a cross. I'm like, how long y'all know me? Like the kids, your entire life, have I ever said anything properly? Do you know if World War III should, if we should be using numerals, Roman numerals? Supposedly according to style manuals, if it's dialogue, you're supposed to write it out no matter how large the number or no matter if it's Roman, noodles, noodles. Roman noodles. No matter, no matter, no matter, yeah. No matter if it's Roman numerals or not, you're supposed to type it all out. Dude, does everyone follow style manuals? Fuck no. So if you want to do the, I'm just, I got traditional brain, traditional publishing brain. So, one of my, This is a dialogue. I'm just referring to the scene that you wrote. Recassities could sleep through World War III. I guess we can switch it back. So I probably just did that out of force, I have it. Three looks weird. Seeing the number, or seeing the word three looks weird. That's fine. As long as it's, well, even if it was dialogue, I don't think it would hurt changing it. So that's not something I'm gonna be like, no Chad, don't fuck it up. That's just my own brain. Yeah, if it was dialogue, I would spell it out probably. Trying to decide whether or not I'm going to, I mean, we're all in hour 48 into this. I've already written three pages. I'm trying to decide if I want to calm down or not. If I want to, like, I don't know. If I want to just push forward. But I also, I need a heads up if there's like a scene you specifically want to write because I am just fucking booking over here. I wanted to write the graveyard scene, which I did. And I'm guessing you probably see clearer in your head, him meeting Shanna. And that would be, I don't know how many more scenes you want after this because posted Bill's chapter is when he goes out and tries to find Cassidy, runs across him in a field, but before that he finds the poster and then I have them heading home now. And that's pretty much where that chapter ends. And I don't know if you want to go directly from that to him going out to the carnival or if you want some more buildup in the house between now and then. It's hard to say because I'm so freaking sick of this house. I'm sick of these people. I know, I know, so am I. That's what I'm wondering if we want to just go ahead and get him out there and have a positive interaction, a positive moment, other than the graveyard scene, of course, a positive moment finally because we're already a novelette into this book. So something to keep people, something that people are like, this fucking book's depressing because that's bound to happen. And the chapters are just short enough that it's going to keep people reading. They're like, something good needs to happen soon because this poor kid's getting the business. Anyways, when you finally catch up on what I've written, I have, don't even ask me what the fuck the cornbread scene means. Rita is stumbling around the house the next morning after, well, after he's done digging and he's taken a shower, she's like tweaking as she walks through the house coked out or whatever. And she's looking for her cornbread that doesn't exist. So I don't know if you want to keep it or not, but it's in there. And I don't know if it's like a seed for cornbread meaning something else. I have no idea, but it's there and you can do what you want with it. So, yeah, I think I'm gonna, yeah, I think I'm gonna take, I don't know if I'm gonna take a break and come back and write some more or what, how far have we gotten today? You've written quite a bit too. I have, but I did, I did kill some stuff that was, you know, all that the cooter talk, like because we decided we were doing it in a different way. But I've also added four pages. So, so our word count is, you know, we'll show it differently. You know, I probably killed, I don't know, maybe four or 500 words, but maybe 400 words. Well, I replaced that easily, easily. So I'm not a bit worried about that. I think I wrote about, I only wrote about 600, 600, 700. Okay, we've gotten just under 2000 written today. So over 2000, considering I took about 400 out. Yeah. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, I'd like to, I'd like to be able to jump ahead. I keep meaning to, and even though I'm dabbling a little bit every day, I would love to be able to just, you know, knock out a big chunk of this, you know, like revisions or whatever. Especially now that I'm at a point where, you know, because I had to, I had to write most of, well, the day before I wrote the entire Grave Matters chapter and then had to write about half of the coconut smile since we switched things up. And I had to do the, you know, go Travis or common home and all that crap. And then pulled as much as I could that it was still applicable to the new direction with Cooter. But now I'm caught up, I think, in a linear sense. Yeah. Where lights out. I think I also need to go back and read from the beginning just so I get the, I'll probably do that off stream. Go back and get the full breadth of what you've done all in one go now that you're happy with all the way up to coconut smile. Cause that's a big chunk of the beginning. Make sure that we're on the same page as far as what's happened and what hasn't happened. I'll add your screen back on there. Yeah, I'm gonna take a break. When I come back, we'll talk about what we're gonna do next. I'm excited to get to the carnival too. I got, I already got like five or six. No, it's five. I got one, I probably won't end up doing it, but I got like at least five scenes. Just the random people. I even have a scene for boobs. So it's just kind of like a seed at this point. See what it grows into, but. I think the end of the first act and all of the second act will probably be the most fun to write. Yeah. I agree. I already feel this becoming a book that I don't want to end because I know we're gonna get into the carnival and we're just gonna have a fucking blast. This is so much that you can do with that and still be up 100% original because no two carnivals are the same. Yeah. I love that shit. Anyways, I'm gonna take a break. When I come back, we can either talk more or we can write more or whatever the fuck you wanna do. Okay. And from this catapult creator that Matt sold out for one month. That's the one Matt. Turning my camera off so I can have some lunch and you guys don't have to see me eat. But I'm still here. Okay. Sorry about that. That damn trash service picked up our can literally like took it away. I freaking hate that. Thinking it was someone else who hadn't paid their bills. So I was on the phone with them and the lady was like, I see you're paid up, but they didn't take your can. I was like, my can's gone. I don't know what the hell I need my can back. So please come get my damn can. Then bring my can back. And she's like, okay, well I can have it out there in the next couple of days. I was like, you're gonna make me sit out here with trash piled up on my porch. For the next couple of days, we go through a lot of trash here. Anyways, but... Yeah, that's happened to us before and it took them, it took them, cause they kept forgetting. It took them weeks to, I mean, I don't know how it is over there, but we can just put our bags on the curb, no problem. But we don't really want to. It has to be in a bag. If we lived in the city, they pick up, they do curb service. Like once a week they'll even pick up like branches and just piles of shit. They bring a truck out with a little crane and scoop. But out here in the country, I mean, my nearest neighbor is like half a mile away. I don't have anybody around me. So I don't know what, but then again, my mail gets, there's County Road 51, which is what I live on. And then there's County Road 57. And our mail always ends up going to the address, the same number address on 57, even though a seven and a one doesn't look anything like each other. And then we're always getting it. They never deliver the 57 mail to us. They only deliver the 51 mail to 57. So I have that issue. So I'm wondering if these folks with the trash service went and picked up the one, or were supposed to pick up the one out on 57. I don't know what they did, but anyways. So she said she'd have it back out tomorrow morning. Because I was fussing with her about all that. But yeah, I just, like, I live out in the middle of nowhere. I shouldn't have these issues, but I still do. I grew up in the country and it was fun when I was a kid, but man, when I became a teenager and I stayed with my girlfriend, she lived closer to the city and then I moved to Denver. And I was just like, man, I've hated the country ever since. I'm not a country person. Michelle wasn't until we got out here and she realized how much we were left alone. And we've had some, we've had, oddly enough, in 2020, we had issues with the Klan. But we had gotten flyers in the mailbox. Usually happened every fall when they do, around here, even though they're designated as a terrorist organization, my city allows them to have a parade. So one day every year, they have a parade downtown and they'll pass out flyers. And federally, it's a crime for them to pass out flyers, but my city doesn't really care. They just consider themselves, they consider them another organization. But then even the citizens of this city have complained because they don't mail out them. They don't mail them out. They leave them without any postage in people's mailboxes, which is again, a federal crime. So that stopped in 2020. And then they started plastering like Walmart parking lot or whatever, they would leave it underneath your windshield wiper or whatever. And they started doing metallic, not metallic, magnetic, not stickers, but magnets that just slap on people's cars with like either their symbol, I don't know how to explain it, but they got a certain symbol for the Klan. And then there's white's rights ones that they're putting on people's cars. Anyways, but we've had issues with them, literally coming onto our property, had to run them off. And when we first moved in, I came by myself because it is the country and I know how people work around here to meet the guy that I was buying the property off of. I went by myself. I didn't bring shell in the kids. So they had no idea that I was married to a black woman and I had mixed kids. And got the property, took care of all that. About a week later, Labor Day comes around and people have started the people that are around this area. You know, of course, they've seen us out in the yard and whatnot, moving in, so on and so forth. Labor Day weekend, we get a string of pickup trucks and they're coming down this way. So it's the driver's side that's facing us. And the outside of the windows, there's a rebel flag on one, hanging out of the driver's side window. The next car back has the KKK flag and then another flag in the back on the side. So it's facing us is what I'm getting at. There's another rebel flag hanging over the wheel well. And then they go down, they disappear down the way a bit and then we start hearing pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And I'm like, I call the cops and they're like, well, if they're not on their property, on your property, there's nothing we can do about it. I'm like, if they're out here shooting from their trucks, come and do so, do I have, did you see them shooting from their trucks? Like, okay, I know who I'm dealing with now. So that literally the week after I moved in, I went out and got a shotgun. And that's how I chased them off the time they were actually on the property. Cause I have a tree line, my driveway dead ends in my property. And then I have a tree line all the way down my driveway is 500 feet long. And I had this basketball court up against the tree line. I'm sitting out there smoking when it's about dusk. And I look up and I see this figure in the trees. So I bring, and I posted all this to Twitter when it happened. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, yeah. And the dude's just standing there in a hood and all. And it looks like some kind of like, you know, fucking Sasquatch kind of thing or whatever. But I can see when I look up, I can see what it is and it's a white hood. I'm like, well, fuck this. I got my shotgun, she'll call us the police. And I let one off into the air and we didn't hear anything else. But before that, I think they were having like some kind of rally or something on my property cause I have 250 acres and the, you could hear it. And when I posted just the part that you could hear, it sounded like, you know, like a coyote or something, something screaming off in the distance. Yeah, I watched it. Yeah, but what I heard was like melodic singing, like almost like gospel music or whatever. So I think they were having some kind of rally or something out on my property. Didn't realize that, you know, somebody lived out here or maybe they did, who knows? I don't know if they were trying to scare us off or not. But for the next three months, after that happened, we went, I let my niece and her husband who's a cop stay at our place while we went out to New Mexico to try and find a new place to live. That was completely busted. The only thing we could find were scams. It was absolutely terrible housing market even back then. So we came back and well, I'd been in contact with my niece and her husband while they were out here. And damn near every night for a week, three trucks would come up to the end of our drive and sit there. Finally, the third night, my, not, I guess, nephew in law, I don't know what to call him, but my niece's husband goes out in his uniform on the front porch with his hand on his gun and they turn around and they take off, never came back again. So I don't know if they think now, they haven't bothered us since and I don't know if it's because they think a cop lives here now or what, but anyways, they're scared off. But that has been the only problem I've had living out in the country is that. And of course, mail service is gonna be wonky out here, especially with the clothes addresses. But yeah, it's been a great experience out here and Shel loves it. The only thing she doesn't like is having to drive 30 minutes into town just to go to like Walmart or Toadal, we don't go to Walmart. We go to Target or to pick up food or whatever. Can't get pizza delivered out here. But other than that, man, we love it out here. And nobody bothers us other than that one scenario, nobody has bothered us since. I had a weird situation where this drone came over my property and once again, unless it's a very, very high end drone, there's no way they could have got all the way out here because like I said, I got 250 acres unless they were somewhere near. So I went out looking and I found this pickup truck parked in one of the access roads to my property. To give you a little more information on the property, I own 250, but only 200 and no, sorry, only 20 acres of it is inhabitable because of paper mill runoff. The guy I bought it for, I bought the entire piece of property for $50,000, all 250 acres for $50,000. And I didn't realize why it was so cheap until years later, he didn't, the old man, he's dead now, he died of cancer. But when he sold me the property, he didn't tell me that the paper mill had paid him off for the pollution that had killed the other 230 acres. And it wasn't until I tried to sell the property that I found out that I couldn't sell it, the EPA wouldn't let me sell it until it was cleaned up. And I'm like, well, shouldn't I be able to sue the paper mill or whatever? So I contacted the paper mill, the paper mill was like, no, we paid out, almost said his name, but we paid out the dude who was already dead at this point. And it was around the same time that he sold me the property for $50,000. So he literally took the millions, like 1.2 million that he was supposed to use to clean up the property. And just fucked off, sold the property $50,000 and went off, I don't know if he was dying then or not, but you know. Would you buy that much land for it? Do you hunt, can you hunt on it? No, I was actually planning on putting trailers out here, like clearing out land and making one big trailer park or something, you know, for like a low income families, what not. You know, charging like $300, $400 a month for two bedroom, one bath trailers, maybe a little bit more for a bigger trailer. That was my plan to have some kind of retirement income that would come in. And that was literally a whole reason. I wanted to do something, you know, get people affordable, sustainable housing and maybe even start like a garden community thing, not like a cult compound or whatever, but you know, just have something, you know, maybe a little playground or whatever. Because my son had this idea when he was five years old, he said he wanted, when he grew up, he wanted to buy a hotel and turn it into free housing for the homeless. So I was like, okay, well, I just got this big advance and this property is only, you know, $50,000. Let me grab this up and then I can, you know, take care of all that. And then after doing that, royalties and everything started getting worse and worse until finally I didn't have any contracts or anything. And I just had the lawn name and my graphic design work that I was working off of. And I was paying the bills and we had a little bit left over for entertainment, but it kind of just all fell through because I wasn't getting the big checks like I was. So it never happened. And I never went, I never traveled deep into my property because it's a lot. And you just come to find out that most of the land out here, like I said, 230 acres are literally not inhabitable because of the paper mill runoff. And I was wondering, because half the fucking forest is dead. It's just white trees sticking up out of the ground. Also a little bit of the horror fan in me kind of liked the creepy aspect of that. But like I said, come to find out. The EPA wouldn't even let me offload this until I got cleaned up. And the only way that I could offload it is to sign a paperwork that said, and I have no idea to this day how the hell this dude got around all this. Because as soon as I went down to file the paperwork to get it sold, that's when it all hit me. I have no idea how he was able to do it. I got the deed and everything to this property. But anyways, nobody stopped it from happening. And the only way that I can do that, that I can sell it is if I clean up this property. So I'm stuck with it. Unless I put in there a waiver that tells the person who's buying it that they have to clean it up when they purchase it. So, and I went through all my paperwork. Nothing in there says that I was responsible for cleaning up this mess. He was 100% responsible for it. I can't find any of his family. I couldn't find anybody. I don't know if he died alone or what, but yeah, he's gone and I'm stuck with this property. But the EPA even threatened to come out and claim the land without paying me for it because it was never cleaned up. So I had to send in all these documents showing that I purchased the land off of this guy. I can no longer contact the guy because he's passed away. And the only reason I found that out is Facebook. It's like so-and-so died this day, whatever. I just went looking for his name. Anyways, so we're stuck. But other than that, I love it out here. I said all that just to get around to, I love it out here. I love not being bothered. I love not having neighbors because I'm a city boy. I grew, I was born and raised in the Englewood, California. I lived deep in the projects and I even lived on the street where they shot Friday at one point in time. That's Compton, but anyway, so we moved around a lot. And I like noise. It's really hard for me to get to sleep without noise. So I literally have to have like, white noise going on in the background when I go to sleep. Sometimes, I can't do that in the wind. I usually run the ceiling fan and I have this little thing called a tornado. It's this little powerful fan that's about the size of a Bluetooth speaker. I run that and that's noisy, but I don't do that in the winter, of course, and I want a free shell out. So I usually listen to white noise to get to sleep because I'm used to just the constant noise of traffic and all that stuff. But once again, other than all that, I love living out here. And also some nights, it is so loud out here just because of the crickets, the frogs, the coyotes, the birds, what have you, it's usually hella noisy. So we'll like crack the window in the fall and I'll let that noise do it for me. But it's funny that even in that sense, we're opposites. Like you grew up in the country, I grew up in the city, I now live in the country and you now live in the city. Well, yeah, but I get the best of both worlds. I am exactly one block from one of the busiest streets in town, but I live on a lake and there's woods right here. So we get deer and cranes and geese and all kinds of crap and raccoons in our yard. So it's like, it's weird. You would never know that I'm a block from this road, this busy road because you can't really hear it. And then of course, the, you know, like we got two windows in my office and I lived like on the corner of a lake. So one window I see like the big lake and then out the window behind me is I see the cove, which is, and then just on the other side of the cove is like a $3 million house. So my neighborhood is really, it's quiet. It's not, you know, it's nice. We got good neighbors. That's cool. I've had nothing but bad neighbors and landlords. Oh, I'm sorry. I just saw you reverse century. I don't know if you're still in here, but the novel's going very well. We are adding about right now, we're kind of averaging 2,000 words a day. So it's blazing along right now. Yeah, that sounds gorgeous, man. Yeah, we love it, man. Perfect. Right across the street from me is a hunting preserve. And there's, I think it's another, I say right across the street from me, but you'd have to go down 500 feet to the road and then on the other side of the road, because on my entire road, there's only, there's really only two residents and it's about a three mile road and there's us and then there's the hunting lodge that's across the street. And so it's basically only us two out here, but when I was living down the hill, because I had put, there are three trailers on my property. There's the one my mother lived in and then we lived on the one there and then I had one up the hill that I was gonna start renting before she died and we decided to just move up the hill and sell the property. And so that I got two empty trailers that we keep up down the hill that I could be renting out, but I don't know if I'm gonna move, you know? And I don't wanna screw someone over. So I got that down there. But anyways, when we lived down the hill, I used to be, it was right by the road. My mother lived in the one by the road that ran this way and then we had a trailer that runs this way. So it was like an L and we were able to see the property across. And in the fall, when the trees are thin, you can see they're late and it is absolutely gorgeous. Some mornings I would just sit out on the porch and I'll have a cigarette or whatever or have my coffee before I started smoking again. And I would just sit out there. Now here's something for you. And you can choose to believe it if you want to or not everybody I tell this to just kind of rolls their eyes and doesn't believe it. There is a white, a large white creature that lives out here. It is capable of bipedal, is capable of bipedal, but it also walks on all fours. Everyone around here has seen it at some point in time and it's usually in the fall. And you can see it walk along through the trees. We've seen it up here, we've seen it down there. We don't know what the fuck it is. I'm not saying it's supernatural, but it is capable, it's almost the size of a polar bear, but it's thin and kind of shaped like a deer, but it's capable of walking on its hind legs. So you can do with that what you want, but I swear I've seen it and everybody else in my family has seen it and people who have come over to this area have noticed it. There's also a legend of a cougar that roams these here hills I've never seen, but people around here swear it's out there. Do you have a publication date in mind? We're probably going traditionally published with this one, so it's gonna be a while and it'll probably change drastically after the, once they get there, not drastically, but that's why I'm not too worried about sharing stuff like this because it'll change as we go along and publishers do frown on work being out there before publication, but we can do enough to it that it'll be different from what you guys end up reading by the end. I gotta call my wife. Okay. So no, no publication date in mind, but we do have options. I got at least two publishers I have inside people with and yeah, so we'll shop those and if push comes to shove, we might go with a small press, but the whole point of this is to get a little bigger readership for the both of us. How many pages does your current state of novel accumulate to? About 40. We got roughly, it says over here we have 42, but we got a couple of end pages of what's it called? Notes and plot points and whatnot. Like here, I'll share my screen and show you what I'm talking about. I'll be right back. Yeah, you're fine. So here's the body of the book and keep on scrolling down, down, babe. Oh, so it's quite a bit. It's actually six pages of notes. So we got a later scene that'll probably end up getting trashed because I think he's written all over it and it's completely different outcome. So let me go ahead and get this. Actually, no, I'll leave it just in case. Just in case. Then we got some notes on the characters, some plot stuff, quality of life and the characters who everybody is. And we got the carnies, some dialogue that's gonna be used later on and then an outline that we got to chapter three with but we pretty much broke all that and made them smaller chapters. So we are several chapters in, 14,000 words in, about 32, no 36 pages is where we're at right now. And I think I'm done writing for the day. Hi, I think I'm done. Let's see here. I'm definitely gonna be working on this Sunday before game night. So it'll grow even more even after tomorrow. I'm just not sure where I wanna go next because I wanna leave the Shena meeting for you. I could just jump ahead and do some kind of, I don't know, I don't know, some kind of interaction sequence. But I do need to go back over everything that you've read and digest that, make sure I have the right timeline in my head still before I get too far. I definitely don't want you to have to change a bunch of shit in these newer chapters. And I think I'm on the same page as you, but we'll see. Maybe we should take the whole weekend off so that I can catch up. Yeah, try to get through some of this thing. I'll let everybody know that'll actually help me quite a bit. I'll be able to have two days off in a row basically. And it's not about having a day off, not writing. The writing part is fun for me. It's the being present and active in front of other people that can train me even if I'm not doing anything but writing. So I have every single day I have awakened and I've been like, I don't want to do anything like this past week. And then I get in here and I got great output. It never fails. My worst enemy is my own fucking brain. Because I'll be like, it's the same way with exercise. I didn't exercise for the longest time. And any time I did, I felt great afterward. But then my body's just like, ah, no, you don't need to do all that. You're fine. You're not dying. You don't need to lose weight. You're not sick because of your weight. Whatever. You like eating. Well, if I'm going to continue eating like this, then I need to exercise. That's a whole conversation I had with myself. I'm like, if I'm going to continue, and I've lost a considerable amount of weight twice in my life. I was 410 pounds. In fact, if you look up images of Edward Lorne, one of the very first thing that pops up is me at my biggest. My 400 and 410 pounds. And I look at that picture and I'm like, holy shit. So I dropped from that all the way down to 330. And that's when I started my YouTube channel. Then I got back up to 350. And now I am down to three. I can't get under 300 to save my fucking life. But I've lost another 50 pounds. So I'm right at 300. And I can't, all I want to see on the scale is 299. That's all I want to see. I'll be happy. But no, that's just me ditching. Random. My wife, she lost, I mean, she's not real big. She just, you know, she's at three kids. And so she maintained some of that baby weight for years and then tried vegetarian diet. And that helped a little bit. And then did a keto diet and that's what did it. Yeah. So she's- Oh, keto will melt it off of you. The only problem with me is I'm not in a good mental place if I don't have carbs. Because I associate food with pleasure, not food, not fuel. So anytime I'm in a bad mood or whatever, I want to eat. And I'm usually in a pretty weird, if not bad mental place. So I'm always eating. No matter how good life is going, there's always that little voice in the back of my head going, oh yeah, you know, this is going badly over here off to the side that you're not paying attention to. And then I hyper focus on that and I forget about all the good things and I end up binge eating. But yeah, it's a fucking struggle, but keto is amazing. It'll melt it off, but not if you're addicted to food. Like if you just like eating for the joy of eating and you like a variety, especially the carb side of things, yeah, at least that's been my experience. Because I did for a week and I dropped some pounds, but nothing has worked better for me than intermittent fasting and fiber. Loads of fiber, eat whatever the fuck I want and only eating whatever I want for a window of about four hours. So now I don't do true intermittent fasting because I have cream in my coffee every now and again. And then I might have a banana if I get hungry just to keep my focus up. But for the most part, I binge eat, but I eat quite a considerable amount, probably about two to three thousand calories in a sitting when my maintaining calories should be about 22 to 25. And it also corresponds with when I take my gummy. So I'll take my gummy about five o'clock and then I'll binge eat for four hours until I finally pass out. But I have actually lost weight doing this. I've lost, I think the last 40 pounds is because I've been doing that. So other than the cream in my coffee and an occasional banana, I eat between five and nine and then I don't eat any more. I get up, have my coffee, just do the whole routine over again. But the way I work, it makes sense to do that. And that's why I tell everybody who wants to lose weight, you need a, if you're going to do a diet at all, you need to be able to do it to where it already works with your schedule. Don't change your schedule to start a diet because that's first, it takes 21 days to build a routine. So you're gonna have three weeks of anger or whatever while you're getting used to it and adjusting to it. So it just naturally worked this way. And all I had to do was work during the day and not have time to eat. And that was pretty much my lifestyle anyways. But I wasn't eating anywhere near enough fiber. Now I take a fiber supplement. I have berries, I have chia seeds, flax seeds, all that stuff. So damn near anything that comes, this is TMI. Everything that comes in goes out, you know? It's, and that's all, all our bodies are, you know? If you are, if you live a stagnant lifestyle, but not stagnant, but sedentary, thank you. Sedentary lifestyle, then you have to eat a little amount of food because there is that maintenance fuel, you know, that you need just to keep running. But if you're active, you can of course eat more. And it all depends on your lifestyle, but what you're doing, I'm never gonna be skinny. I was fat when I was born. I was, I think 11 pounds, 12 ounces. They had to cut me out and pull me out with a crane is how my mother, they had to cut me and pull you out with a crane is what my mother used to say. But I was huge, man. I mean, I was a big chunky motherfucker and I was that way throughout my entire life. So I'm always gonna be big. I just don't have the, I don't have the metabolism. I don't have the genes. I don't have any of that stuff. I have to fight to lose weight even when I'm in a calorie deficit. My body just holds it. And the whole point of keto as I know you're aware, but anybody who's watching who cares, the whole point of keto is to make your body burn fat instead of sugar. So since our body turns carbohydrates into sugars, you cut out the carbohydrates and the only thing left over for your body to burn is the fats because the protein's going for other things, building muscle or whatever you might have you. I've also fasted, because I'm such a big dude, I've been able to fast for upwards of a month at a time and not feel a bit bad. I felt like I had the flu like the first three days. They call it sugar flu or something like that. And I was hungry of course, but after those three days, I wasn't hungry at all. And that's what kick started this whole journey for me. And I'm not, this isn't advice for anybody, but this is what I did. I just, I quit eating for a month and I was just drinking water. Literally no food for a month. And I dropped, I think 30 pounds. Of course, most of that's just water weight. I dropped 30 pounds and then when I did come back and start eating, I only ate at night and I've been doing that ever since and I've kept the weight off. So everybody's gonna be different. Everything is gonna work differently for people, but I know personally that my weight loss journey, calling it that sounds funny, but my weight loss journey is all, was constantly fucked up by routine, by having to change my regular routine to make this work. And the only way I found that it finally clicked was when I made the food routine match my daily routine. Tim, that's a long answer. So let me ask Chad, do you have anything you wanna interject or say before? Cause this is gonna be another long answer and I know I talk over you all the fucking time. So, no, sorry. You were trying to tell me about your wife and here I was like, oh, I did, I only realized I'm doing it after I've done it. I apologize, it is not on purpose. It really isn't, it's me trying to solidarity. You know, it's like, well, I have a story like that too. So I'm sorry, is there anything else you wanna say? No. Okay. So, Tim, the whole reason I started, the whole reason I did the 30 day fasting to begin with was because a doctor told me, and you know, I love a challenge. I've told all my viewers and everything this, if you do not want me to read a book or if you want me to read a book, the best way to get me to read a book is to, A, not tell me to read it. I will do the exact opposite of what somebody tells me. So my doctor told me, flat out, so the best way to get me to read a book is to tell me you hate it. That's honestly the best way. And people do that to me. I know they use the reverse psychology because they told me after I've read it, it's like, I was hoping you were gonna do that based on what I said. So, but I went to the doctor. I was 410 pounds at my heaviest, like I said. And I went to the doctor. The doctor was like the only, since you're disabled, you can't exercise, you can't do anything. The only prayer you have at all is to have a gastric bypass. Now to give a little more back history is I was working med surge at the hospital when I hurt my back to begin with. I worked there for five years. We took care of 90% of the people that came through on the floor were gastric bypass surgeries. We had a 40% mortality rate. Let that sink in. 40% of the people who had this surgery died of complications or died because they didn't follow the rules after. 40%. And that's not even high for gastric bypasses. So I took care of plenty of people who either passed away on the floor due to complications. I went in one time and I'm telling this story so that you understand where my headspace was at. It's a pretty gnarly story. So if you're grossed out by gore and stuff like that, I said, she clicked away now. I walked into this woman who had had a gastric bypass about six hours earlier that day. I came in overnight, I walk in and I have to pull the covers back to get to her arm. And it's kind of dark because I don't go in flipping on lights like some nurses do. I came in to do vitals. So I pulled back the sheet and my hand instantly warm and wet. So I flip on the overhead light and she's kind of coming awake in the bed. And I'm like, ma'am, are you okay? Is the first thing I did when I noticed that my hand was covered in blood is I look up at her to make sure she's alive. And she's like, yeah, what was wrong? So I pulled back the rest of the blanket. I automatically throw it back over there. It's like, I'm gonna get the doctor because her staples had come undone and her guts, everything on the, that should have been on the inside was on the outside, laying in her lap, laying on top of her in the bed. And they, from what they could figure out because she literally had a bloody finger and a staple off to the side, something in her sleep or whatever, she had worked one of the staples out and then the rest of them, just kind of like a, you know, popping buttons on a shirt. You only really need to get the first one and the rest come really easy. The whole thing just popped right open. So her guts were literally laying on the outside of her. And she's, and she's like, she's scared just seeing my reaction because I couldn't help it. I'm like, I need to call the doctor. So she throws the blanket off, sees her guts sitting there and just starts screaming bloody murder as you might imagine. And on top of that, she looked dead when I first took it on the lights. It was, because she was so pale. She had lost so much blood and her eyes were fluttering open. So I don't even know if she like did it while she was awake, lost blood and passed out or what, I don't know. But they were able to save her. But what really stays in my mind any time I think about a gastric bypass or stomach surgery is I remember that scene and I remember that 40% mortality rate and all the people that I had to push down to the coolers. Because we didn't have more, we had a cooler and then they would take people from the cooler to the actual ME's office, which was across the street. So those two things hit my head when my doctor told me the only chance you have is surgery. So I was like, okay, so I started researching. There was a YouTube channel called The Fasting Fat Man who was hyperfixated on this dude who didn't eat for a year and a half and managed to survive. And he was a super huge dude. He was like 500, 600 pounds and he just melted away to like 200 pounds over the course of a year and a half when all he did was drink water, eat nutritional yeast and have supplements. So this Fasting Fat Man, he's still on YouTube but I think he's starting to gain his weight back now. He fasted for almost a year and I was following his journey and I'm like, I don't think I can do a year but I'm gonna try a week. I got through a week, had no problem. So I went a second week, third week, fourth week and I did an entire 30 days before I decided, okay, I'm gonna try eating something. And when I came back to it, I started with broth and I went up to salads and I just picked back up to that point. My whole plan was when I came back, I told myself my stomach will have shrunk and I will be able to eat as if I've already had a gastric bypass because eating too much is gonna hurt because I'm not used to it anymore. Well, my body doesn't work like that. I used to be a little more background on me. I used to be a professional eater and I was really good. I could eat upwards of 30 pounds of food in one sitting. And it's my stomach would just expand, expand, expand. I'm also missing that gene or whatever it is that tells you you're hungry. It's, I'm missing that completely. So I can literally eat from morning, all through the day and night. And that's how I used to eat. I used to eat like three or four buckets of chicken by myself. I'm talking fried chicken, KFC and well, churches because churches had the $5 Wednesday deal. I'd go down and get two or three boxes of chicken and I would eat them by myself. And I would eat candy bars by the bag. Like I wouldn't buy just one candy bar. I would buy an entire bag of like the mini Snickers, eat the entire bag at one time and have like three or four, like 32-ounce glasses of milk while I was eating those. Yeah, the burrito, my short story, burrito is based on that. And I used a lot of the stuff that I did, like the insanely hot sushi challenge. I actually did that. There was numerous contests I won because I just couldn't get full. But then my teeth started going bad from all the drug use and just no maintenance over the years. It really hurts to brush my teeth. So I lost considerable number of teeth and I still have nothing but shards up top which is why you guys don't see me smile all big and wide for everybody. But I couldn't eat like that anymore. I was literally breaking what little teeth I had left trying to eat as fast as possible. So anyways, and that's how I got as big as I was at 410 because I would eat 20 pounds of food during a competition and then I would go out for dessert afterward. Even after eating that because I wanted something different, I still wanted to eat. Yeah, anyways, that's all my history. But that's the story, the doctor told me there's no way that you can lose weight without a gastric bypass. So I went out and I proved him wrong. That was her wrong, sorry. I went out and proved her wrong because I was not going to end up with my guts on the outside and I was not end up because I knew if I ever had that surgery that I would start eating like that again when I got out. There was no offensive butts about it because I would see people like me that would end up dying a couple of weeks down the road because they would eat and they would either bust their lap band or it would become shifted or they would have constipation to the point of they'd be coffee ground emesis. If you know what that is, they'd be throwing up their own fecal matter because it couldn't get past the point where it was supposed to so it would just sit in their gut and rot. I got horror stories for years that I could tell you guys about gastric bypass. So those two things kept me from doing it. And also I am incredibly stubborn. I don't know if it's the way I was raised or what but the quickest way to get me to do something is to tell me not to do it or to tell me I only have one option and I will find another option. I don't care if it's harder than your option, I will go out and I will find another way to do what you don't want me to do. That's a little bit of my mental health or lack thereof. Anyways. So you happy with this, Chad? Yeah, I am. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, it makes just to get, like I said earlier, it makes us to get out of this house and away from these people. I literally can't take any more, man. I can't, like I was reading that section where the grunting and everything and I was like, I don't wanna, I don't know. I'm scrolling, fuck this. No, I'm done with these people. So I'm right there with you. And if we hate them that badly, this is gonna be affecting literature. So to be as pompous as, to be as pretentious as I possibly can, this is gonna be affecting literature. So. Yeah. But yeah, I'm having a blast. The only thing that I'm tentative about that I'm sitting here, I'm like, let me say this right. I feel like I'm double working you with every chapter that I write because I know you're gonna change it quite a bit and I know you wanna get going and move ahead, but it feels like I'm slowing you down. So if that is the case, we need to figure out something to change that because I'm not cool with that. I want you to be able to do more than just. I don't really see it as slowing me down. As you can tell, I'm a slow writer anyway. I can probably pull off max, maybe 900 words in an hour if I'm totally focused. Unless it's dialogue, then I can, if it's dialogue for some reason, that has me the most focused and I enjoy doing that. And yeah, but coming up with descriptive things and how are they feeling right now? What's in the room? Oh, that's right. They already, like I had earlier there, I was like, dude pulls a cigarette from his camel box or his pack of camels. And I'm like, wait a minute. He's, I think he's already smoking, you know? So, but yeah, it takes me, and I just have the tendency to, not really just write it out, but I have to kind of feel it so that I can, like what would this person really say? How would they really, really feel in this thing rather than like, I think a lot of stuff that's written, even in popular film, a lot of stuff is like, it's not written authentically, it's written. I think, let me see if I get where you're coming from. It is all purposely to drive the plot forward. There's no like emotion to it. No, like, instead of giving somebody an authentic reaction, I don't feel, I feel like a lot of writers compare what they're writing to something that they've seen before, like a movie rather than an authentic reaction. And I've given this example many times before, but I don't know if we've talked about it. The movie Redditary, the most disturbing part for me in that movie was when you've seen it, right? So I don't know. Oh yeah, I fucking, yeah, it's one of my favorite movies now. Well, when the kid, spoiler for anybody who hasn't seen it, there is, when the kid accidentally kills a sister, to me, his entire reaction from the second it happens till the next day is that's a real reaction to me, but I think in the wrong hands, somebody would write like, it's like on a subconscious level, they would be like, how would this be in another movie rather than how would this be in real life? But yeah, that was why it messed me up so much because I was like, I can, this kid's in shock. He will not even look. He's in complete denial yet. He knows exactly what he just did. Exactly, but he cannot bring himself whereas another writer would have him turning around and screaming, oh my gosh. And it's like, that might happen, yeah, but what happened with this kid, that's real. No, I agree with you 100%. So when I write, I try to think like that. Like, instead of books I've read or movies I've seen, like how would this really, and unfortunately for me, I've had some pretty hardcore traumatic experiences to draw from. So there are certain things that I could, like what the kid went through, that I can put myself in those shoes and be like, yeah, I, this is an authentic reaction. So, and that, I think that part of it slows me down because there are certain things, meaningful heartfelt things that I want to make sure that I get right rather than just, and you want to get there naturally too. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I don't know, I've got a big problem with, none, whatever the word is, non-genuine reactions that people have and it's like, you don't know what you're doing. You just, you got this from watching a movie. You think that this is, you know. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, there's a lot of that kind of dialogue in South of here where people just react, you know, instead of like carrying on conversations, it'll be like an awkward, yeah, and then they'll be on to another topic, you know. Also, people don't talk usually, people, like with me especially, so I have a lot of people getting cut off in my dialogue because that's how it naturally happens in my head because I'm like, this is where I would cut them off or this is where whatever, I would interject my own feelings and thoughts. People rarely talk in full sentences. Like, you know, there's a, and the only way to really learn how people talk is to go out to a place, maybe you're not comfortable being and watching people interact. If you're trying to write people that are uncomfortable to be around, especially like villains or whatnot, you go and watch, you know, go to a waffle house at three o'clock in the morning on a Friday or Saturday and watch the drunks ramble in and hear the kind of crazy shit that they say. Or if you're trying to build up an emotional scene, that everybody has lost something in their life, you know, whether it be a toy, a fucking animal, family member, whatever, and they teach us in acting classes also, is that's what you draw. Again, I harp on this a lot, but that's what they mean by write what you know. It's not, you know, do not write doctor stories if you're not a doctor. That's not what they mean. Write what you know literally means to put your own experiences in it, but make it fit into the story naturally, you know, and build off those things, especially for slice life kind of things. But the best way to learn how to write dialogue is to listen to people, to actually sit there and listen to how they go from one conversation to another without a segue, how there's awkward silences, and the awkward silence, you don't have to say that they sat in an awkward silence for so long. You could have people fidgeting with their fork or, you know, keep picking up a glass but not drinking from it, wiping the condensation off with glass, you know, pulling a paper towel out from underneath the glass, putting it back down there, rattling, you know, just moving the food around on their plate. That's the kind of stuff that builds a scene and not you telling the reader that, and it's also how you lengthen your projects. If you're one of those people who's like, I could never write a novel, sit down and learn how to write about shit that doesn't matter and make it interesting. And how you do that is you take the point of the scene. You take what you would write normally, like he sat there in awkward silence. How else can I say this to denote to show that it's now awkward and the silence is heavy and all that stuff? How would you do that? Now, if it's not all that important, then maybe yeah, it's like the next couple of minutes were awkward before I said, whatever. But if you're building a scene and you're building like tension or uncertainty or whatever, you really wanna hyper focus on their affectations, you know, their gestures and things like that. I got all that stuff, not from a writer, but just from life experiencing, life experience managing restaurants because one of the things they hammered home was body language of your customer. Like if a customer is standing like this with his arms crossed over in the corner and he's got an ugly expression on his face, you go out and you talk to him. You're not saying, are you doing all right? Everything okay? You read body language. You can tell so much without saying a word. What is it saying? A picture is worth a thousand words. It's true without the picture. You know, a person's just the way they're standing can denote an emotion that can give you an entire paragraph of what that character thinks is going on just by the way they're standing there. And you don't have to say the customer was pissed. The guy stood over there with his arms crossed, looking like he smelled the worst shit ever or whatever, you know, anything like that. And I think that's what the beauty of Chad is that he can do that shit first try. I don't do any of that shit first try. I am all, I basically write these books like scripts. I will be like the room was cold. He got up and walked across the room. He reached into the drawer. That's how my rough drafts usually go. And then later on, I will take out all that by rote nonsense and I will go in there and I will fill it with emotion so that we're dealing with the characters, the emotions and reactions to things other than by descriptions of the actions that they are doing. That's how I do it anyways. Chad seems to do it as he's going. Which I don't really prefer, but I can't stop doing that. I'd rather just get it out, get that sense of accomplishment that, you know, the book is done or that, you know, because that's the hardest part is just getting the whole thing out. And then once you have it done, you're really motivated to run through that next draft. But yeah, so for me, you know, with it taking so long to get there, it's kind of a drag. I just, I just word vomit. That's literally what I do. And Chad's dealing with that now. That's why I kind of feel bad because Chad's dealing with my word vomit. Just me, like, okay, for instance, let me read you guys something. There's only three of you in here, but let me read you guys something that I have no idea what the fuck this means, none whatsoever. Like no one's cleaned up the dog shit by the time I got it, I get out of the shower. So that's the first order of business. I grabbed three plastic grocery bags from a bag of them, Rita keeps under the sink. I double up one and use the third as a makeshift glove. Rita is buzzing around the house, darting here and there, shooting outside only to come back in a second later. She steps over me on my hands and knees, scooping poop, grumbling expletives that she and meanders. You seen my cornbread, says Rita. I don't know what the fuck the cornbread has to do with anything that was just the first thing that popped into my head. I crane my neck to find she ain't talking to me. She has her head in the door of her room, speaking to whoever might be inside. She's picking at her right arm, really digging in. Bloody fingers pull away and rise to her face where she sniffs at the tips. She catches me staring and wags her red fingers at me. Did you see my cornbread? She asked me, what? Is you deaf now? Have you seen my cornbread? We don't have any cornbread. My voice raises at the end, rises, not raises. Rises at the end, like I'm asking a question. You ain't never no help. And then it just goes, it goes from there. Like there, I have absolutely nothing in mind for this fucking cornbread. Nothing, but I don't know what she's going to say. So I just, the first thing that pops into my head, I get it down and I move on. And so many people, what Chad does is amazing to me. Like I can't do that. I have to have the entire picture full and done before I can go back and rewrite it to what he's been doing, which is he's been going over stuff that I know in my head needs to be rewritten. And he's already rewriting it and making it shorter, succinct, getting to the point quicker, getting rid of most of the by-rope stuff. And that's just like the run down, the listicles as I call them. It's like he walked into the room, he sat down, he did this, you know, that kind of thing that's boring to read. And Chad's been doing, if you guys haven't seen it, is Chad has been going and changing all of that to keep everything in the moment, to keep, to get the pertinent details out and move the fuck along. And he's also going back and changing stuff because we're two different minds and we're seeing things two different ways. So he's going back and blending them together. And I've given him free reign to do so because I know how I write to begin with. I know that I'm probably going to go back, I would have to go back and rewrite the entire chapter. And now I don't have to do that because Chad's got it. But I'm still going to go back and read and write and put maybe some more spins on certain things and whatnot. But I don't do that until the project, the rough draft is done. So, and that might annoy Chad when we get there to the end, but hopefully you bear with me because that's my process. And it probably isn't, honestly, it's not going to change much because I've been going through and reading everything you've changed. And I've been like, okay, yeah, that's much better. You got to the point quicker, you've done everything. I've had no problem with anything Chad has rewritten or written. So I'm in awe as far as that's concerned. It is going to be interesting because once I get to know with Chad, I'm going to be working with Derek Jones who's a longtime member of the channel and he's never written anything. So I'm going to be working with him through a brand new first pass of a book, collaborating together. And that way I can show people who might not have written anything because me and Chad have experience at this point. We both know what we're doing here. And to work with someone that has no idea to go from working with Chad to Derek. And the important thing that I'm looking at when I go to work with Derek is not imparting on him my style. So I need to let him be him and let him find his own style. And if I find him mimicking me, I'm gonna be like, okay, we need to slow down. We need to work on this because you do need to work on your own style also. You know, don't go in this purposefully trying to mimic me, find your style and then we will go back and blend everything together. So right, like you want to, that kind of thing. And it might not happen. I don't know, it might not. But it's going to be interesting working with someone who's never done this at all. It's cool that you're doing that. I could never do something like that. I would have no interest. I would like to collaborate with either somebody who's on the same playing field or way above me so that I can learn and make. But I would never want to be in a position. I've been in the position one time where I had to carry somebody and it wasn't very fun. It's just for a short story. It was my first collaboration but that's the point, to make sure that I don't have to carry him. Like I find stuff like that engaging, challenging, motivating even to work with someone and not be the crutch. To specifically go into it, saying, look, you're going to have to pull your own weight over here and I'm going to show you how. So that's what interests me about the whole thing is not molding someone like a mentor kind of deal but to force someone to be good, to force someone to find their own style and learn at their own pace, their own time and to make mistakes publicly. You've got to be willing to make those mistakes and we're going to be doing this the same way we're doing it. So everyone's going to see his mistakes right off the jump. It's going to be bad grammar, all different kinds. I'm fully prepared for all that but at the same time giving a safe space to do that where if people come in here, picking on grammar or whatever, I'm going to get rid of them because at the same time, people need to realize that this is a very individual task. Even though we're writing together, we're not writing the same thing at the same time. So it is, you got to be comfortable being alone for long periods of time. You got to be comfortable writing the worst that you have ever written and knowing that this is all practice until you publish. It's important for writers, if the people who want to be writers who have never written to understand that this shit does not happen overnight. And I'm not telling you anything you don't know but just anybody watching is that you're going to be bad but that's the point. You fuck up, you learn from your mistakes, you grow and you move on. And Keelan Patrick Burke said it the best and I've been using it ever since he said it but I've always been like this even though I didn't say it, I didn't think it like he said it. And he said, if you are happy with the last book you wrote while writing the book that you're now writing, you're not growing. So you are also going to be, you were going to look back into the past and be like, okay, I could do that so much better but you also have to learn to let that thing be what that thing is. At that time in your life, leave it alone and move forward as much as people like watching remakes and all the other stuff. Most people like also like, not most people, there are people out there like me that like watching the evolution of an author. And that's why I go from like the first book all the way to the last book. If I find an author that I like, I will read the first one all the way to the newest one because I like seeing how that author has grown over time. And if there's no growth, I give up on it. It's like, I don't want to read the same thing over and over and over again. And that's why I like people like John Connolly and let's see here. Who's another, well, John Connolly is the perfect, he's like 21 books into his Charlie Parker series. And every single one of them, he does something different. He has grown as an author even though they're all pretty formulaic as far as length and what happens. He's done some experimental stuff in there. And I love seeing that. But just know anyone out there who wants to get into this, you are going to be bad at the beginning. If you think that you have a gift, even if you do have a gift and you're a natural storyteller, you are going to hit speed bumps. You are going to make mistakes. It is okay, learn from them and move the fuck on. And most importantly, shut the fuck up and write. All the complaining on Twitter that I see or that I used to see, I don't have time to write, but yet I see you got a 92 tweet thread about how you don't have time to do anything else. You could literally be writing while you're bitching on Twitter. My buddy Jason Cavallero, you know Jason Cavallero? No. He writes reviews for poor drive-in. His Twitter handle is pawn or a pinhead spawn. Oh, yes I do. Yeah, we were gonna, sorry, I didn't know his real name. He was gonna do a drum track for a project I was working on. Anyways, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah, we were actually, we had started, I had written a song, recorded and then I recorded everything, vocals, all that stuff. And then I recorded a drum track that had that I'm not good with drums on the garage band drums. So a lot of it was just trial and error and a lot of happy accidents. The other time I got done with it because he was supposed to play drums on it and he did send me a couple of different versions of it. But by the time I got done with doing the drums, I was just like, you know what? I'm really happy with this, but eventually we're gonna do something else. But yeah, I love Jason. He's a great guy. And he reads, the dude reads like 200, 250 books a year. Yeah, I know. I asked him how and he said, well, from starters, I don't watch TV. Yeah. And so it made me think it's like, yeah, we are, our lives are really, you know, it's like, yeah, we're all busy, but there are some things that if you eliminate it, you probably be surprised how much more free time you have, whether it be watching TV, YouTube, you know, just browsing on social media. There's a, there's a couple of notes to that, couple of additions, if you will. We get, we as authors and creative people in general get stuck on the process and technicalities. And I love highlighting a couple of different things. First off, J.K. Rowling, as much as she's hated right now for whatever, J.K. Rowling wrote the entire first Harry Potter book on napkins with a pin. She would go to a coffee shop. She was homeless at the time, had a child. She would go to coffee shops, sit there and use the napkins out of the napkins to dispense her to write Harry Potter and whatever that first one is, the philosopher stone or whatever. She wrote that on napkins. I tell the same people, tell this the same story that I tell people who want to start a YouTube channel. I was like, if you have a phone and a camera, and even if you can only upload at 140p, you can still start that way. It does not take a writing laptop or a desktop or even a pen and actual ruled paper. John Irving to this day writes 800 page novels on printer paper. Brian Boyer writes novels on his telephone. There you go. So does my buddy, Linton Bowers. So that's what I'm getting at. There is no standard way of doing this. There's standard ways to submit. So you would eventually have to put it into Word or print it out in certain format or whatever. That's getting more lax nowadays than it used to be, but for the most part, write wherever, whenever you can. Caroline Kepnis wrote the first you book completely on her lunch breaks. 100% on her lunch breaks didn't do any work. She didn't have time any other time. She was working so much. So you got Rowling who did it all on napkins was rejected 300 and some odd times before she finally found the publisher. That's another inspiring ass story. Same with King and Kerry. He got rejected multiple times and he just kept them on his, on one of those spikes that you put on your desk and like a, what is it? Like receipt spike or whatever that you see. On his wall actually. Oh yeah, on his wall. I'm sorry, on the wall. He had them all on a spike. But anyways, so you're gonna get rejected. You don't need to wait until you have a viable option to write, and read whenever the mood strikes you. Unless of course you were like in the middle of work. But if you, any time that you have and we all make sacrifices for the things that we love if you're not willing to make the sacrifice to give yourself time to write or make time for yourself to write then it's not that important to you. And I would say maybe take up knitting or another hobby. That's, people call me cruel for saying that but this isn't for everyone. This is a very lonely job. You spend hours and hours by yourself questioning yourself. And that's where imposter syndrome and the mythological writer's block. Writer's block is a thing you do to yourself. I have never suffered from writer's block. I don't know if Chad has. Some days parts come harder and you said no, no you don't. Yeah, I don't believe in writer's block. Right, exactly, neither do I. Writer's block is a construction of your own brain. It is you telling yourself that there's a reason why you can't come up with the words today. And when those things happen, that doesn't mean don't write. What that means is you write and then you fix it later. And if you were completely burned out then yeah, maybe take a break. But if you're just sitting there stuck on one line that you can't get right that's where your writer's block comes from. Your writer's block comes from a place of insecurity. You're like, I can't do this, I can't. There is no can't in writing, period. I've said this my entire career, there is no can't. You can do whatever the fuck you want. You can write however you want to. And as long as you get that done, eventually you're a writer, okay? Well, you're a writer anyways, even if you don't get it done. But there's something to be said about the completion of a project. That's why I say, don't share your, here I am streaming us writing. Don't share your unfinished products with anyone. Don't let anyone read because you wanna know if it's any good. What you do is you finish it and then you take it to people and then you work on it. You don't be like, hey, will you read the first 10 pages of my book? I always tell everyone no. There's a couple of reasons. But the main reason is you shouldn't kill your momentum because you're in your own head. You are the one fucking this up. Stop it. Just finish the work. And some people like, that's easier said than done. Not everybody's head works like yours does. It's like writer's block is a construction. It is not real. It is something that an author who couldn't get past a roadblock in their work came up with said, I'm blocked. I can't think of anything else. And you know what they're not doing at that time? They are not writing it out. They're sitting around thinking about this fictional thing, this writer's block. And I do know that the only people that I've ever seen suffer from writer's block are people who probably shouldn't be writing. I know that sounds terrible, but that is the truth because most of the natural storytellers that I have met have never once had an issue with an idea, you know, never. There's always something. And even when there isn't something, they have so much life experience to draw on. And yeah, anyways, but what I'm saying is if you got people out there publishing books at 15, 16 years old with no life experience, you can think of something to write even if it is just a fictionalized version of your own life like I did with the day's end or Chad's done with numerous books of his, where it's just your life fictionalized and made, you know, all that much more extra so that it's entertaining to me. But yeah, sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice, even sacrifice while you're writing, kill your darlings. If you have what you think is the best line that's ever been written, delete it at least once. If it's good enough, it'll stay. These are just little things that I've done myself and I don't actually suggest you do that, but because I've literally made and I went back and rewritten an entire book because of the last paragraph of a book. The last paragraph I wrote made everything I wrote before that obsolete, but I literally rewrote the entire book to make that final paragraph work because it changed the entire book, the themes and everything into something so much better. So I went back and rewrote that entire book and sometimes that's what it takes. One good line will send you on a journey of 1,000 miles and focusing, especially focusing on character, well, if you're looking to lengthen your stuff, focus on your characters more because usually what happens with stuff, when you're stuck on lengthening your stuff, you're only writing the action and the pertinent details. So everybody likes a little slice of life every now and again. If not literary fiction wouldn't be a thing because that's all slice of life and themes. And then once you've built up that character, then bring in the drama, then bring in the action, then bring in all that stuff. But anyways, that's my, I'm gonna step down off my soapbox now. That's more than two cents. I was about a buck and a quarter, but anyways. Yeah, I'm a big believer in, it's sad, but yeah, the first thing that you write is, you're gonna hate it one day. And the first book I released is Foster Homes and Flies. I haven't gone back and read it, but according to reviews, it still holds up. And I've read it enough times to still be proud of it. But before that, I had released a collection and in that collection was a story that I wrote author notes for each story too. And for one story in particular, I said that this would, this was my favorite short story I've ever written and it probably always will be. This was in 2014, I think. That's not even in my top 40 short stories I've written. And I don't even like that collection. I don't think it's horrible. It's just not, you'll never see me talking about it. It still sells a little bit, but I never advertise it, never promote it. I did do a revise and expanded edition where I went through every single story and I used Blutsky 2.0 to go through and make a little leaner, tighter, and then I added like two or three short stories that were more about what I am today. So I don't hate it, but yeah, it's kind of funny looking at back. There's so many of these stories I just can't stand and they just feel like filler to me. To build off of that and just to agree with you, when I got done writing Bayes End, it was the first book under the Lord name I had been published numerous times before, traditionally even small press and some indie stuff that went nowhere. When I got done with Bayes End, I was like, this is the best thing I've ever written. Everybody's gonna love it, got it edited, put it out. Excellent book, by the way. Yes. Thank you. And everybody, it was such a warm reception for the first Lauren story. And then I got to I think like a year or two went by and I had written a couple more books since then and nowadays I consider that my worst book. And then you have people like Chad, he's like really good book, you know. Books are gonna mean different things to different people. Just because you don't like something does not mean that just because you look back on something and think that it's bad does not mean that you're not gonna find fans for that that people still don't not accurately honestly love it is what I'm getting it. So Chad can tell me great book, he loves it, whatever, same with South here, great book, he loves it. But I know just personally that I've grown since then but I also have to constantly remind myself that he's being honest with me, you know. He likes these things even though I've moved on and I've grown or what have you. And I look back, like I still feel to this day that Bayes End is the worst thing I've ever done but I'm also now reminding myself if that's the worst thing I've ever written and published that ain't too fucking bad. You know, if that's the worst, if that's the worst of my output, I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing really well. And I do love the Lorne character arc of every single book feeling different than the last one. Even the stuff that was in the Bayes End series are they're all written differently. There's different, because I grew with each and every book and then you have the offshoots that don't tie into that at all, that story at all that are wildly wildly different. Like South of Here reads nothing like anything else Lorne has out there, period. And I love that. And that's kind of why I was happy which is letting him die because you go from Bayes End to South of Here, South of Here being the last publication and there is such a huge growth in just those 10 years that I was perfectly fine letting him go because I didn't think I could get any better than South of Here. It was not come full circle, but it was just constant growth. And if people got used to, and that's another reason why South of Here, I don't really promote it all that much. And it just kind of sits there first off because it's offensive as fuck. It's not for everybody. And I've somehow gotten lucky so far where the majority of people like it. I haven't got a single negative review for it yet which blows my mind. But it felt like the perfect place to end because it was just as obscure and everything as the point where I started. So even though I got good using Dark Souls Speak, I got good during that entire time. It was still, I started with a very down to earth realistic story and I ended with a down to earth realistic story. But if you read Bayes End and South of Here, back to back, it's two completely different authors. There's absolutely nothing in Bayes End that you're gonna find in South of Here and vice versa. So while I still started and ended my career with the same kind of small story, there's so much growth in between there that I'm just proud of the whole character arc. I like Lorne being the author that he was and now moving on to my, what I'm calling my John Irving era. That was my Stephen King era. Now moving on to my John Irving era where it's all family saga stuff, like these long epic stories that take place over the course of 50 to 100 years. And that's the kind of thing that's really drawing me right now because nobody's really doing that outside of the literary fiction genre. They're doing it, most of the stories are very tight stories in very confined places and the only place you're finding stuff different than that, like I said, is literary fiction. Like Cloud Cuckoo Land takes place 500, the chapters jump back and forth 500 years apart. And stuff like that interests me. Stuff that's just wildly, wildly structured. I'm also a big fan right now of no structure whatsoever where it's just, you just experiencing a story. Anyways, but that's how much we change. That's my point there. We change a lot. And if you look back on your stuff and you're like, that book sucks, it's fine because you're still, but you need to believe the people who tell you that they enjoy it. You do not need to look down on them or think anything bad of them. They are enjoying the story for what it is. And with it- And don't get down on yourself too. If the book that you love isn't the book that everybody else loves because you'd be surprised at how many Wallflower is, I did not expect still to this day, the reception I've got for, first of all, the shortest book that I wrote with probably the bleakest ending and the most unoriginal out of all of the ones that I've written, I feel like Wallflower, that story's been told before. You know, basketball diaries, I mean, dude starts drugs, training about drugs, whatever, you know? It's been done a million times, but man, and the emails still that I get, you know, everything from, you know, this has helped me stay sober or to consider this or this helped me reconcile with my junkie brother. We haven't talked for 10 years. I read this book and we just sat down with a family and I showed him this book and we were, and it's like, dang man. And it's like, all I was really trying to do was I was, Mark Matthews was putting together one of his anthologies. I think it was the first one that he did, his drug books that he did, because he's like a drug counselor and he's been in the program for years. So he likes that like drug horror. I was writing it for that. I was wondering why he was, it seemed like he was obsessed with that thing and that's not a slight. I just noticed that a lot of his stuff had that in there. Even though we've been in an anthology together, I've had no contact with him. But he gave me, he linked in my deadline because I had some revisions I had to make and I thought for sure my story's going in here and he rejected it. And I was like, if he said it needs this or something like that. So I was like, all right, man. Well, thanks for, I appreciate the extension, but I'm telling you right now, you're gonna wish he'd put that book in there. And I was joking with him, you know? I said, this is gonna be the one that got away, Mark. And he's like, you're probably right. So I revised it and more and added something. I can't even remember what I did to change it, but I'm thankful, I'm so grateful that that book didn't get put in there because collections don't sell well and it would just be a book stuck in a collection. One of my, the saddest things I've ever written, the strangest twist upon her lips is a novella that's stuck in an anthology with Bob Ford and John Bowden. The Crystal Lake books that have been coming out with like the three authors, which is really cool. I was grateful to be invited. I'm thankful it's out. I'm proud of all three stories, all three novellas. But at the same time, it's like, nobody's really read that and it drives me crazy. And I mean, when I get the rights, I'll probably release it myself, put a cover on it. And I've got another Lusky novel. I'm pissed off at you because that title alone should have been a standalone. It should, I didn't even know it fucking existed yet. I remember talking to you a long time ago and you talking about it and me absolutely loving that fucking title. And now I'm mad at you. Like I'm legitimately mad at you because it not only is it out there and I haven't read it, but it's also stuck in there. And I got nothing against Ford or Bowden, but and it's stuck in there with them and not getting the release it deserves. Yeah, I'm mad, I'm mad. Well, like I said, every story in there is very good. Bob and my story and Bob's story are closer in relation and they overlap with each other with some of the characters. Yeah. John's isn't quite like that. So ours is kind of seamless where it's kind of like the outlier, but it's still beautifully written and very, very eerie where ours is more like, well, mine's just straight up real life. Yeah. And then mine, you've seen Love Liza before? Yeah, that's one of my favorite movies of all time. This is my Love Liza. Nice. This is a, yeah. Guy's fiance kills herself. He can't bring himself to read this letter. Yeah. So he tackles a bucket list that they had created while they were both doing heroin and it's full of some strange stuff. So he just goes out and tackles this bucket list and then it gets real sad. Let me say something before we move on or before we leave about Wallflower. So for those of you that don't know, I was an addict on heroin from 97 to 2001. And one of the first things I said when I finished reading Wallflower was, oh, Letzky's obviously a heroin addict. Either he's a former junkie or he's a current junkie or whatever. And I think that's one of the very first conversations we ever had was me asking you if, at least that's how my mind remembers it, asking you if, or how long were you on heroin or whatever, because I just assumed it was so well written that the only thing that is above it in your catalog for me is Skull Face Boy. I have a very close relationship with Skull Face Boy because it reminds me so much of my childhood, just kind of being off on my own, a lot of the time, not even friends, just going from place to place, even if it was just in my town. There was a lot in my town because I lived basically in an annex of LA. So I could walk for two miles and be in a completely different area. Like I could go to the hood one way. Actually, I live in the hood. I could stay in the hood. I could go to West Hollywood. I could go to fucking Hollywood. I could go to Los Angeles proper. So many different North Ridge was a bit further away, but I could get there and I traveled all over the place. And so it felt, I'm just, I'm biased. Have you written better things since then? Maybe, I don't know, but I'm biased with that one. That's my favorite. But Wallflower is a close second, but I would never reread. I've read Skull Face Boy like three or four times now, but with Wallflower, I'll never read that again because he got it so right that it was triggering for me. It took me, what is it? Like a hundred pages, 120 pages? Yeah, that's true. It's like 18,000 words. Yeah, so. It's very short. I read it in a sitting, blew right through it. No, no, I didn't, sorry. Skull Face Boy was the one I read in the sitting. Wallflower took me like three or four days to read that much of it because I kept having to put it down because every single scene reminded me of something horrible that had happened to me. And of course, the way it ends, I'm a huge fan of Bleak Endings. So the way it ends, I'm just like, fuck this book. Fuck this book, fuck Chad Lutsky. I don't ever want to read this shit again. But I couldn't lie and be like, this isn't powerful fiction. It's just powerful story period because it was so realistic. And I think I asked you, you said you got most of your information from message boards or online stuff? Yeah, there was a message board where people were, they were romanticizing it and they were giving tips like don't use this brand of tinfoil. It's bad for your lungs, use this brand of tinfoil. And I'm like, are you guys listening to yourself right now? And then I watched lots of videos of people nodding off and read lots of descriptions of what it feels like and stuff, but yeah, a lot of message board stuff. I love like the best worst description of what heroin feels like is what Quentin Tarantino told John Travolta. He said, get a fifth of tequila, drink the entire thing, and then go float in a pool. And that's what heroin feels like. That is the best worst description that I have ever heard anyone. But and why I mean the best worst description is because it doesn't feel anything like that because when you're drunk, you kind of realize that this situation might be dangerous kind of deal. But when you're on heroin, you do not no danger. There is no danger. You can fall asleep in the middle of a fucking road. And now, I've seen drunk people do about the same thing. I had far more self-awareness drunk off of an entire 24 pack of beer than I ever had with just a little amount of heroin. It completely numbs you. There is nothing to be felt that you go to a completely different place. There is no reality. Reality doesn't feel real. And wherever you are is a good place to sleep. And I never had that happen with me when I drunk. Blacked out places. But the thing about heroin is you'll not off and you'll still be aware of everything that's going on but it's kind of like a surreal dream-like thing that's going on, like you'll hear voices and those voices will stick to you. Of course, there's always the waking up instantaneous withdrawals when you wake up. For some odd reason, no matter how long you sleep, it can be five minutes since your last hit. Falling asleep kind of, it sucks because the more you do, the more you not off and the less you enjoy it, that's why they call it chasing the dragon. You never get that initial high again. And you'll, but you want that high. So you take more and you take more and you take more. And the more you take, the more you're on the precipice of literally on the precipice of death. You know, your breathing slows down. Your mind kind of, even your vision tunnels because your body literally cannot process what is happening. And it's shutting everything down. So every time you see someone nodding off, there's like very good chance they're dying. But, and usually what you end up dying from though is like choking on your own vomit because you get that swirly sensation. And if you try not to black out right away because you know if you do, you're gonna end up getting sick. There's just so much unspoken stuff with heroin addiction. But you got all the pertinent details right. And it was still this day I remember, I could like see the wallpaper on the wall. I could see the needle. I could, everything was so well done. And that same defeatist nature that you finally are just like, fuck it, this is my life now. Because regular life does not feel anywhere near as good as this. So yeah, 100% that book fucks me up. I will never read it again. It's not something that I enjoyed reading, but it is powerful as hell. And it is the closest thing I have ever read from someone who has not done the drug. And so that's very impressive. Whether you looked up upon it or you did your due diligence, whatever it might have been because there's people who research this shit for years and still get shit wrong. And you can fail. To be fair, you know, I'm no stranger to addiction myself and though I've been a recovery for years. So I'm very familiar with the lies that and how you can manipulate yourself just like with, I can't remember his name, Christopher or something in the book. Whoa, well I only tried this kind of hair one. I guess it's bad. I need to, I haven't tried the real thing yet. So I'm gonna, you know, and I still haven't got it. Well, I'm gonna try the real thing now. And then, oh, this guy says that, you know, and then just that, you know, I'll stop tomorrow and all that kind of stuff. And just you're just, you're chipping away at this thin ice and you're knowing it. You know, the whole time you're just deep down and you're making excuses. A lot of Broad Street bastard deals with a lot of that because Jax is in the middle of his 12 step program. And he's trying to, but he knows he's taking steps toward relapse. Yeah, the thing, another thing is that nobody ever talks about. The reason why addicts promise that they're gonna get clean is because we associate the high with how we want to, with how things should be. We think that while we're high, that, oh, well, you know, I'm in a good mood, you know, this is the way I should be. You know, people deserve to be happy, you know, and I'm happy and I feel tremendous. You know, my inner thoughts aren't kicking my ass. So I'm gonna give this thing up. So we make all these promises when we're in a good place. And then when we come out of that good place and we don't have the drugs for a little while, we're right back to going, it can't be that bad. If I feel so good while I'm on them, at least for me, I guess I shouldn't talk for all addicts, but at least for me, that's what it was. It was when I was high, I was in a good mood. So I didn't make promises as much as I really wanted to do it, you know? I really truly didn't wanna have to do this stuff to be happy, but I see is affecting my family or whatever it might've been. And I'm like, okay, well, I feel this good right now. If I can carry that feeling with me and remember this feeling while I'm sober, but the thing is when you're sober, there is nothing on your mind except for that thing, except for whatever your addiction is. And even to some extent with me, food, there's nothing on my mind more after five o'clock in the afternoon than eating. That's what I wanna do, that's my routine. That's when I'm happiest, when I'm sitting there eating and I forget all about how much fun I had writing early in the day or how much fun I had making videos or whatever or how I could continue to do those things and not eat myself to death. None of that stuff crosses your mind. It's only about the addiction. It is 100% focus on that because that is what we, that is what I convinced myself is what should be my normal state of being. I'm broken, the drugs fix me, so the drugs are friend. If friend shape is friend, so anyways. But yeah, I'll let you say, you did a fantastic job with the book and I've never, ever, ever read one of your stories and thought, yeah, this wouldn't happen. I think you just get humanity right, period. And that's what draws me. You're kinda like Hiraduka Minakami and I've compared you to him before and people have looked at me weird, but it's getting the stuff that isn't talked about constantly right. And like I was talking about yesterday with him winning the worst sex scene for that sex scene taken completely out of context, no one writes awkward very well that I've found. And no one writes it as well as he does. And that's why I compare you to Hiraduka Minakami because you let your characters, if they're awkward, you let them be awkward. If they're, whatever they are, they just are. You tell it plainly, kinda like Kormak McCarthy too. You don't make a judgment call. You just say, this is how they are and I'll show you some examples of how they are and that's how they are. I don't agree with it or disagree with it, that's just how the fuck they are. And I wish more people would just allow their characters to be who they are instead of reminding us secretly in the novel or the book or short story that the author doesn't think that way. But where we've come in modern day, you have to, and I've had editors force me to add in something to make it obvious that that was the character's thought and not my thought. And I hate that. If anybody reads South of here, you're not gonna find any of that shit in South of here. Which you're just gonna have people being people. And that lets the reader decide. But unfortunately, a lot of readers nowadays are going, okay, this person thinks this way because the author thinks this way. When any good author is going to be able to either mimic someone they don't like or is gonna be able to nail, perfectly get right something that they don't like. And usually they get it right because they have focused so hard on not being that thing that we know all the signs, we know all the red flags, all the warnings, all that stuff. And we know what to stay away from. But we know that. The character doesn't know that. So we will just throw all that stuff out there. And it's funny because in South of here, I use the T word for transsexual. I use the T word several times in the book. Yet the character who is thinking the T word is attracted to transsexual. So it thinks there's nothing, I think there's one line, it's like nothing hotter than a chick with a dick. I think is what is what's said there. And that alone is offensive. That's not something I would ever say in regular life. I don't use the T word. Obviously I'm stepping around it now because my oldest is trans. But on top of that, I never liked the word much anyways because it was a very dismissive. It's used as a slur. But in the book, 100% the character would use that. The 100% the character would call a Hispanic person by the SP slur. There's several things in there. You have to let the character be whoever the fuck the character is gonna be. And if the reader is gonna get stuck on something and think that that's the author, that's the reader's problem and not the author's problem. I believe that wholeheartedly. And another thing, there's some other writing advice. And Chad might honestly completely disagree with me here. So I'd love to hear what you have to say before we go. But if you write something and someone, whether it be a beta reader, or if it's already published, a reader, if only one person understands something, you did not do anything wrong. If like 900 people completely missed the point what one person did without your input, without you telling them and talking to them, one stranger got the point, that's those other reader's problems, not yours. If you get one thing right, that means you put enough information in there that it could be found, but the other people just chose to ignore it. So I don't know how you feel about that. I know a lot of authors are like, accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. You need to make sure that as many people understand what you're getting at as possible with me, I don't feel that way at all. Yeah, well, 900, I do agree, but 900 to one is a big number. But yeah, I mean, just like with Skull Face Boy, some people get that, okay, he's got a skull for a face, we don't know why. Let's go, they get that, you know? You don't need to know, it's not important. This is the story. Some people are like, well, how does he drink water? How does he drink, you know? It's like, just let it happen, man. This is a world that's being created for you. Jump in the car and take a ride, we'd leave that. Let fiction be fiction. Who gives a fuck? Exactly, I never once in that story, did I even focus, I saw him, I saw Levi playing in my head with the Skull Face. I didn't think about drinking, I didn't think about any of that shit. I was just there and down for the ride. Of course, I was also on a huge binge of bizarro fiction. I had just met Gregor Zane and we'd become friends and he wrote the, still to this day, I've never read anything as wild and professionally written as Gregor's stuff. He reminds me very much like Jeff Vandermeer, well, he will go to the wildest fucking places and take it seriously. I respect the hell out of that. It's not gonna get him a huge fan base, but I respect the hell out of that. And he goes, have you read any Chad? And I'm like, no, I've seen him around in the community, but no, I haven't read anything. He's like, he's got this book called Skull Face Boy. I said, what? He said, Skull Face Boy. I said, does he have a skull for a face? He goes, fuck yeah, he does. I was like, okay, yeah. So I went out and I got it, fell in love with it. I never once, and maybe it was because of the binging, but I would like to think, I've read it at least three times so far. And every single time, never once do I question about the face and I just let it go. In fact, my favorite part is the part out behind like the path that he follows out behind the house. I think it's the, what is it? Oh, I don't want to give any spoilers, but the, I don't want to talk too much about it. But anyways, there's a thing where he walks out into like the woods and there's a stream or something. Oh, with Chick who may or may not be aware of. Yes, well, I didn't want to say that, but yes, that's it. I didn't want to say the W, I didn't want to say werewolf, but I'll let you spoil it. Anyways, so that part, it just, it was that part is fucking magical. And I get excited every time I think about it because you, I don't like it. Once again, I don't want to give any spoilers, but that scene, I will read that scene sometimes like when I'm walking by your books on my shelf because they're all together, I'll see skull face because it's the thickest one out of the entire group, even if cannibal creators are very close. And I'll just pick it up and I'll flip to that because I have the page marked and I'll just flip to that scene and I'll just read that scene because it's just the way it unfolds and the mystery of it all. And it's still shocking even though it's not like fully unveiled or whatever. Just that scene is brilliant. And that's one of the things that, and that's why I, when my review for it, I was like, this dude is like Haruki Minakami because he will tell you something, give you enough information to figure it out on your own and then fuck off to another scene. And that's my favorite type of story is that. Now, do I do that in my own stuff? Like half the time, I usually hold hands because well, at least 50% of the time, I'll hold hands because, and this is gonna sound terrible because I know my audience and I've seen how they've reviewed certain things and certain things that they've completely missed. And that's why it was important for Salta here. I didn't do any fucking hand holding. Like I wanted to see how much I could get away with as far as how much I could leave off the page, like the bloody panties, there's several different scenes that go absolutely nowhere that have a purpose in the book as warning signs for other things that are coming. And just complete, and every single review says, I'm still trying to figure out the panties. And I love that, but like two people have gotten it. Two people understand where I was going, what I was setting up. And it was all character development, Pritanya. It was 100% all that, it didn't really go any farther. But I was setting up that she was not everything that James was seeing on the surface. So. Right. But anyway. I really like these sessions, not only because we get our writing done and everything. And it's another thing to show people that just because we've gotten 2000 words done today, let's say 2000 words. And we have still had time to shoot the shit. We have done our day's work. We have chat in between working yesterday. We did a huge like hour long discussion right in the middle and still ended up with like 1600 words. So the point I'm getting at here at the end is you can find time to write. It doesn't have to be a whole hell of a lot or it can be a whole hell of a lot. But manage your time, sacrifice something, maybe stay off Twitter for a day and use all your words on your book instead. But eventually you'll be able to do it all. You'll be able to write, stop, do something else, come back, write some more, stop, do something else, come back, write some more. And it's that continuous process until you're done. That's it. And that's why a lot of writers quit is because it is the same process over and over and over. What keeps us coming back is the new characters, the new stories, the new experiences, the new adventures, all of that stuff is what keeps you coming back. And it's lonely as fuck out here, but every now and again it can be a collaborative process. But for the most part, get used to being alone. Anyways. Yep. Facts, as the kids say. Facts, no cap, that's a new one too. That's probably the whitest I've ever said that phrase, but no cap, bet. Anyways, all right, so thank you guys for joining us. It was an absolute pleasure again. Whoever's left in here, I'm not sure, so I'm not gonna say goodbye to anybody in particular. And I'm not even gonna ask Chad this time if he has anything else to say at the end because he never does. So until next time, throw him under the bus anyways. Until next time, all hail the chair. See you Monday.