 Well, one of her offices was done in Mexico, when she arrived, she will introduce herself in a little video. But I want to thank everyone here today. This is our first session of Tuesday's panel entitled Glorious Blank Age, which probably doesn't need much introduction. But what we will be having here is an open forum discussed off writing habits and ways of approaching getting the job done. Have a seat, y'all stand. Oh, good. I'm first in the United States. Well, I just want to introduce the author of Glorious Blank Age over here on the right, very richly paid with his feet. Actually, do you guys want one? Yes, ma'am. No, this is for now. We're good. Honestly, if I sit down, I can't see past the first row, so I need to stand. Well, I'm with them. You're in chair. Just in case you can else stand. See, I'm committed now. You are. You don't have to stand if you don't. I need to stand if I can. That's what you do here. Today, you're all in the choice. Now that I have it, I'll take 50 hours. Now everyone wants to sit. Let me first introduce Mark Hanna. He is the author of Military Short Stories, the tri-system of authority, ability to talk, ability to act, and the novel to aid. And next, we have Les Johnson, who is a physicist and author and a principal investigator with a near-and-earth, asteroid, scout, solar, television and NASA. George C. Marshall, and I'm using all of them. This is part of this. No, I'm not. When I was five, we'll see how it goes. This is Les's latest novel, Mission to Mephanie, which was published in January of 2018 by Vane Close. He's also the author of multiple popular science non-digital books, including a recent movie, recently released. Graphene. It's the material that's going to change the world. Trust me, it's amazing stuff. It came out in a certain way. It's called Graphene, and it's a strong sense, and it's a reversal theory of that little revolution. It's going to change everything. We have Sette Sette, who was born, raised, and also since then, has been a singer, songwriter, and has written for KB.com. Her passion has always been long since then, but in her career, the chemistry, trilogy, and beyond. And, last but not least, Concentreato, who does work in every facet of the publishing industry. He's a co-designed writing anchor since the past 15 years. He has been writing for professionals since 2011, and his most recent novel, Lovetti for Boys, is due out August 18th. And so, what I would ask you all first is just, if you could, in brief, walk us through a day in the life of being a writer. Okay? I get up every morning about five, six o'clock, and that's naturally, I don't set in the alarm or anything. I get up, I have my coffee, I watch a show, goodness to a morning, I don't know if anybody else watches something, too. After that's done, and my coffee's done, and I feel like I can get out of it, I check out to the office, which is outside of my actual house. It's like a shed that I convert into an office. And I sit out there anywhere between one to six hours, right, and that's all I do. No internet, no family interaction, no friends interaction, nothing. Okay, well my day starts at 5 a.m. I go to the rec center, I swim three laps, and then I do my dives off the high dive dive board because I love the water. Water really gets me going, really gets me motivated. So when I get in contact with the water, I'm ready to go. So I leave there around 10 o'clock, and that long I have classes, and it's pretty good, I love it. I go home, I have two grandbabies I have to deal with. Right now I'm on my A's. I've done all the writing that I'm going to do for the next six months, and then I'm going to get back into that. In the chemistry, it's science fiction meets fiction. Because today, you don't know what's fiction and what's nonfiction. Everything is so intertwined that you're going to be living in fiction. So, that's my day. Basically, like I said, I'm on my A's. When I was writing constantly, I would get up after I swim from home, and I would write about three hours. Because sometimes my mind gets so full of everything I want to write, I have to take a break. So I wait until the next day and it's the same thing. And that is the end. Well, the first thing I'll say is if I had to become a poet, if I were being a time writer instead of my day job, I would be eating dog food. Because my looks aren't suddenly quite that well. But they do fine. I love my day job. I work in a space. But I'll tell you, that's good my enemy isn't for the writer because I have a very demanding, but fortunately I travel a lot for my job. And what I find is I do worse of writing on airplanes than with others. And so for me at home, it's almost impossible to write. Unless my wife's gone, the kids aren't home, it's deserted. I'll tell you, the best days are rainy days. If it's a rainy morning and my work schedule's not too demanding, but typically most of what I write is fit into my spirit. And if you're wanting to be a writer, chances are you're having to do something else to earn your money and your day job, and you're having to fit this in where you have time. And I would love to tell you, I get up at 5 a.m. writing. I wake up at 6 and go to work, right? But I would say that when I do write I am incredibly productive. And one of the things I found in terms of finding time to write is finding out how you spend your time. And if you think of time as money, and you do a budget at how you spend it, you'd be surprised how much of it you don't spend productive for. That's just my opinion. I don't know if you've been to any of them, speaking generally. You know, I found that I had a lot of time that was not productive. And so I didn't buy down time like anybody else. I got a binge on some network shows. But for me, why waste all that time flying from beers to JPL, right? I mean, that's four to six hours to the airport and on the plane. Oh my goodness. You know, no distractions. You just kind of tune out what's there and you can write. Hotel wings. I can write. So a day in the life for me is not consistent. It's sporadic. And I fit in the right, you can write. And I'm more along those lines. I retired from the military in 2015, and actually it took a year off. And I would spend all the morning writing and then in the afternoons jumping a bike, going down to a hike, binge Netflix, whatever. Now that I've gone back to work it's very similar. I try to set aside a couple hours because and I'm sure we'll get to this later and I'll tell you my goals of how I write. But I pick a couple hours sometime during the day and I'll, you know, I'll join the day. Obviously one of the things that I'm up to is for most people instead of having to stage on it. You don't live in a time where a page message is not a thing. In a traditional sense I don't have much in effect on people. But we're looking, yeah. But for sponsorship, I won't put you as a character in the book. I'll kill you. I'll just say it with him. I'm just going to go and say your good-bye. I think that's one thing I've been real talking about a little bit, but it's one thing I hear a lot of people want to be a writer and work to do it is finding that balance and finding the time to do it and I guess is there other ways is there ways beyond just you know, you get to walk into is there ways like you help psych yourself up or like approach against that and be somehow transferable in some way. How many of you are trying to write a book? I don't want to do that. You're shocked. Three pieces of advice. Right. Read read your genre and write. But I want you to look at it like this. Okay. After you've got all your storylines and you've got all your little plot twists and you're like, oh man, I don't love this, right? It's such a goal. I want to write 90,000 words. Yeah, I can do this. Set aside whatever it takes an hour, two hours, three hours whatever it is and write a thousand words a day. Now think about that. A thousand words. In 90 days, your book is done. Set that goal. As you write, you're going to get faster and your words are going to become clearer. It's like exercise. You want to be a runner, you run. You want to be a swimmer, you swim. You want to be a writer, you write. You get better at it. But if you set that goal, I'm going to do a thousand words a day. I'm going to do 2,000 words a day. I'm going to do 500 words a day. I'm going to do 300 words. Do 500 to a thousand words a day. In 90 days, your book is done. And next year, you're up here. Instead of out there. Set that goal. When I was a child, I was a cautious kid. Oh, yeah. My mother was like, so why? Where? Who? And what? Those were my questions. So when I write, those are the questions that I ask myself when it comes to a story. You've got to ask those things to yourself to establish what type of book that you want to write and your character in this situation. Who, what, why, how, and where. And that will help you set up your book this way. Just remember those five things. And I always got my answers. And then when I started writing, I asked myself those questions. And I was always a metaphysical type of person. When I was small, I couldn't be no more than two or three years old. And this was a time I am 64 years old. And this was a time when thank you. Everything was standard. And I hadn't started school yet. And my mother would always prepare me to take a nap in the afternoon. So I'm laying in the bed and I can remember this really well. When I woke up, my body was in the corner of the room, looking down at myself in the bed. I remember just as plain as that. So that prompted me into getting into a metaphysical aspect of life. And it is there. But here's an etheric realm, and there is a reality realm. The Matrix, Terminator, all those things. We're living those today. Even though we don't see them, we're living them today. And with the who, what, why, how, and where, if you're into science fiction, then that's what you're going to ask yourself when writing school. The most important thing for me, like I said, beginning with this routine. If you're going to do this, people like you, you don't really have a routine. You get in where you can fit in it. With me, I can't do that. I have to have some kind of routine, some kind of daily schedule, every single day. And if I break that schedule, I actually feel that. So that's even more motivation. It's almost like an addiction. You get to do it every single day. You get in the habit of doing it. It's really bad. It's just like any other addiction. And when you build it, the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the easier those words come. Another thing he touched on was read your genre. But I would say also read outside of your genre. There should be aspects. Any good book has all of the genres. All aspects. Of course, you want one central theme like sci-fi or horror or romance or whatever. But you want to add little elements of each one. Like humor, all that stuff. So it makes an entertaining story. That's my opinion. How much of writing another question out here is that to you? Found the thing squatting and storyboarding and I guess what do you think the story's going to be about and how it's going to work versus what actually happened down there. So that's how in terms of how you all handle squatting. Well, I learned my first fiction books were Collaboration. Visions and Ethny is actually my fourth novel that is the first solo novel. The other novels are written in books. I wrote a two book series with Travis Taylor that we've ever seen in the rocket city of Red Nancy. He's a crazy man. Really smart guy, really good friend of mine and we were both he's an engineer and I'm a scientist so you might imagine that we fly our novels. So we know basically the story arc by the time we start writing we write it up and the characters don't always go along with what you think you're going to do because these people become real. And so sometimes they do things. You can count them on and you're working with a co-worker and you know and you do that but generally speaking they plot it out. Well, after I had I was actually contacted by one of my idols, Vin Bova you know he actually wrote one of my short stories and I published it and he said less would write a novel than me. I mean come on. You're pretty good. You're pretty good. I actually wrote a book with Vin. I was ready to sit down and talk the whole thing out with Vin and he's supposed to call it Pantser. He writes from the seat of his pants. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to collaborate. I have this big idea it's going to be a Mars mission and something goes wrong on the world. Yeah, that was what it was. Why don't you get something started and we'll go from there and it's like that. And so basically I wrote that book and before I did edit I read some of my favorite Mars books that he'd written and I also wrote a book he wrote called Write Science Fiction That Sells and I don't even think it was a co-op but he's like Vin Bova, right? I want to make sure that my writing style is compatible with this. I actually had to alter a little bit about writing but so I ended up working that way with him. So for me, when I came back to writing this book I applauded it because I thought we're comfortable with a plot and knowing what's going to happen. And speaking from beginning to end but again as you get into it things diverge from what's happening. For instance, my new character as I was writing it I realized he was on the office of space and when I realized that I'm not going to flee from that I'm going to embrace it and so that's what became, that's what I realized is by protecting this was on the office of space and I didn't even realize it when I was writing it. So he came along. And I'm a little bit of a prose actually in my layout. Especially when you're dealing with historical type stuff. History's thick but getting my assassins back there and putting them all back. When you figure out how to get them back in time you'll be like kind of seen though. Anyway. But no, I do try to applaud it but like I said once the characters take over they're going to go over here and then they're going to come back over here and eventually they'll come back to the story but let your characters go. And one thing I found on this one one of the subplots in this is a lot of presidential stuff like presidential assassination. And I was trying to figure out how my antagonist walking this certain president. Turns out I've already written a chapter and we fought together they already had a history I didn't know of. And so the character went dude I know this guy. I'll take care of it. And then he goes over here and kills the guy and I'm like cool. But those public pieces they don't fit. Let your characters let your characters go. You can always leave it on the bedroom floor later. It's astounding how well they put together. The stories really do so I'm a complete cancer. Everything that I've ever tried to plot in 2011 when I actually took this writing career seriously. Everything that I've tried to plot I have not been able to finish because I lose the joy of discovery. There's no there's actually no reason for me to continue telling the stories when I've written out exactly how the story is supposed to go. So whenever I write all of my rough drafts are I sit down and start writing. I have no idea. I still have intricate plots. And usually those are there before the rewrites. So I've done very very little as far as fixing things to make things fit around one of my most intricate twist endings is a novel I wrote called Life After Dain and that ending was there from the very first draft. I didn't have to fix it at all. So I'm a firm believer like Stephen King said these stories exist and we are unearthing these stories from somewhere. I don't know if it might be the metaphysical like she's talking about or what it might be but these stories exist. So it's like a choose your own adventure now or the war in the places around them. That's what they want. That's a chance to write. Once you realize if you can do absolutely anything with that page it helps a lot. There's no rule. I try to plot things out and I get all bunched up. I would do that. Just write through it. My motto is it's all practice until you publish. It's all practice. It's okay if a novel doesn't work. It's okay if you get stuck. It can be the most simple fix. It can be the most coincidental fix that you can find. It's the easiest thing to blow through it. It's all going to be able to look in retrospect. You better write something in Chapter 20 and go back to Chapter 3 though. There we go. Yes. I swear if there was ever a camera on me while I'm plotting now they're going to love this. Because my whole vein is plot twist. I want to keep you going holy blankity blank blank and flip the page. That's my job. So many people get stuck on it has to be a certain way. Especially with plotters that I've been talking about. It has to be this way. If you don't allow your characters to evolve and naturally react to situations because when you're plotting you don't know how to build that character. That character is going to react differently than you hopefully if you're building a living person and not just a part where you cut out a character. That person is going to have their own thoughts, feelings and another aspect of it is most good writers also. They know how to embody somebody else and they can perform those things so they can get their characters to act the way they should. But never get stuck. If you ever feel writer's block coming on I suggest taking a break and working on something else or pushing through with that and just getting it out on the page. Just getting it done because they can go back to it. That's the first, second, third, 16th draft support. That's what the editing process but the rough draft it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be done. Well in the chemistry the plots in the chemistry I had to go to the future to get back to the past. What I did with my plots is I worked out things where you would never think that everything is interconnected. Everything in the chemistry is interconnected. And it's not hard to write it all. If you know where your main character is going if you focus on your main character that's basically the one that would be carrying the story for me, for the chemistry. I had to do five novels to get to the end point where this was all leading to plots and all. And each plot has something to do with the first or the second plot. It's very easy to do and you're right, you have to be an actor. A lot of times I act out my own character and on my website if you go to the HOC and the DLC those are my hero characters and those are my demon characters. And each and every voice that you hear is my voice. I get all the voices. The main character that everybody likes is Bring that woman to me. I would make them bow down to my face. There is no way I should get off. There is no way I should get off. There is no way I should get off. But when you go to the website it's a little good. I would just improvise. A word real quick on dialogue before we move on. If you want to write realistic dialogue the best way to do that is to actually read out loud to yourself. I want to do that. And even your narrative in one step of your editing process should be read and rebooked to yourself. Out loud so that you can pick so many more areas that way. So many more. So many more. Exactly. You want your stories to flow naturally and the only way to tell if that's the case is either read yourself or have somebody read it to you. Luckily my wife will do that for me but I know not everybody has somebody that can do that for them. So read yourself. Have you ever been writing a character while sitting in a character on children's bed? Because at least for me when I'm going through the rough draft I have the scene moving on to the next and then in the editing process I'll add some details and I go back through the dialogue and go this guy doesn't use contractions and here he says can't. So he changed that style and this one I had a character that was very formal and was always Mr. Cutter or you know what. So once you pick on that idiosyncrasy go back through and make sure it's consistent. Think of Yoda okay go back through and try to figure out that dialogue. It hurts the brain. But it's very consistent. So that's one thing you do you make your readers do your editors do make sure the guys got brown eyes in chapter 2 and blue eyes in chapter 7. All of those things must be consistent. But especially the dialogue. Read it out loud and say okay this guy is angry. Hi how are you? That's not angry. You clench here. So make sure that it's actually conveying what you want. You're directing me. You're the screenwriter, the director, the lighting, the costume, the actors, you're everyone. You're the production company. No animals were harmed. Those poor novice gave up their hide for themselves. The novice. They still don't own themselves from the novice. They're coming to intimidate a lot of people who want to be writers or do the editing process. I think that is scary. When the realization comes that that's got the children just sit down crackin' nuffles and talk about those great guys. Right drunk and it's so no. That's him in the way actually. And it's really important. I don't know about you but let me notice that a lot of New York has best-selling authors. The more best-sellers they sell the bigger and the bigger the book and the less tight the story gets. They came all the way. And they're all out there, right? And what made a lot of these writers famous is they really had good editors. Exactly. Because they helped them stay on point, keep it focused. But when some writers get really big it's like, I'll just go to a publisher and I'll tell you this. As I've done this I have people look at my books and give me edits and you do grammar chapters and you re-read it yourself and you find mistakes and you fix it. But having somebody who is not only a punctuation in grammar editor you could think of your favorite cousin who would write something later. I have four stops and some of these are double or triple quadruple in the editing process. As soon as I finish rough draft, I put it away for six months. There's no advantage about it. It's put away for six months. I come back to it, I do a first draft and maybe I need a second draft before I send it to beta readers. They're not going to fix anything typographically, they're not going to fix anything. Hopefully they can get through it. It's not too bad. All they're looking for are plot holes and inconsistencies in the plot and then when that comes back and I'm happy with it maybe I send it to one last person to make sure they don't find anything. It'll come back and I'll send it to the content editor. The content editor will actually not only will they look at the same thing that they look for but they will look for story structure and they will actually go at it with the red pin and chop it up and say this fits better here, this fits better there that sort of thing. After that's done, it goes to the line editing. Notice the guys who go to make sure that everything makes sense that my writing is as clear as possible. They fix errors, whether it be grammatical or whatever it might be. They're there for errors. They're there to chop up the manuscript also. The very last ones, very last eyes of a proof reader. Those are the ones who read the final document for little typos or whatever but they are not to change anything big. That should have been caught already. If you are fixing sentence structure then you're on the wrong step of the process. But that's the four that I use. I don't know how you got it to work. I know one. I'm very similar. Go ahead. What I'm just going to say, what I do is I write a chapter every two weeks. I don't read no more than a chapter every two weeks and once I proofread it myself and I look at it and I'm saying oh okay, it's okay. I send it out to California. I have a very good friend for the pharmaceutical area. She's really good at doing grants. She's really thoughtful. She's got a medical book like this. I send that out to her and until she proves it and reads it and corrects everything for me she'll send it back. That's my only aid that I do. Make it simple. I'll finish the rough draft. I'll go through it a couple of times. Adding the details. I don't necessarily put a lot of details in it during the rough draft. I'll go back and change dialogue. I'll put a lot of the scenery and care for details in it. Once I go through it a couple of times it goes to the data readers. Now I have a point. There's usually three to five. Most of them have very good plot points. I had one of the characters nailing up a sign. I knew what the sign said. I never wrote it down. So I did all of these. I knew what the sign said. They looked for those kind of things. I knew what it said. One of my data readers she goes ahead and she's finding random players. I'll go through it twice. I go through it a third time. At that point I send it to my publisher and her editor goes through it. At least four times someone has gone through it. I'm going to differ with you just a little bit. I'll go ahead. Don't. It works for you obviously. It works for you obviously. Don't get caught in the circle. You write a couple of chapters and then you go back and you start editing. Because there is a vicious circle because it's never perfect. It is never going to be perfect. Finish the whole thing and then edit the whole thing. If you get caught in that circle it's very hard to get out of it. It kills the momentum trying to stay away from it. Now it works for some people. You said you plotted all five books at one time where you can start working. For someone like me that's still discovering the book that's not going to work. I don't know if I'm going to have to if that person is editing the first two chapters those first two chapters might not even be there in the final draft. He was saying it kills momentum. Especially if you're a panther that just sits down you're a discovery writer. I don't suggest doing it that way. But it works for her. She got a question back. We have a question. I heard Brandon Sanderson say like 19 books in a row because he didn't want to edit it. How do y'all how do y'all get overlayed when you're here at one time I have to tell you I'm editing an anthology full of fighting books right now where I'm getting various writers who put stuff in. And editing I really love the editing I actually like to do really hard. And so I can understand why you don't like editing because you're on the work critic. You are on the work critic. But you've got to do it. I love that it's a necessary deal because I'm taking a good story whether it's mine or someone else's. If you're the writer and you send it to me to edit my goal is to polish this thing up to make it absolutely best to convey it because I want you to be successful. My process is it takes me three years to get a finished novel. So by the time I'm finished with that rough draft I let it stay so I forget it and I write something else. I have a three step process as far as the books are concerned I always have one I'm editing one I am writing well one I'm actively editing one I'm actively writing and one that I am actively ignoring so I have one set off for six months I am editing one and I'm writing one so my process while I'm working during the day that one to six hours is to edit old material and then I'm going to ignore that other book that's sitting in the door or wherever it might be. Well with my chemistry series I started it in 2007 and I didn't finish it until this year. So that's how long it took me to write all the five books in 2007 to 2018. It's about a year for the rough book. A rough draft a year on the rough draft pretty much a year on the first draft took a few months to get me on that so I come to 18 I'm sorry nine days to 27 days that's not as long as I stay on a rough draft but I'm like huge. I bare bones right at first and then I build through all the editing if I'm going to roll I'll finish the novel in the rough draft and then another three months of editing so I can last year I completed the three books last year this whole series in one year granted the first one was half done I put it aside four years ago because it was not where I wanted it to be picked it up added some stuff I wrote in high school boom it fit. But something you mentioned a while ago the first couple of chapters may not even fit it this book the way I had envisioned it ended up being chapter three so the start of the book ended up being a third chapter because I started it completely different and the last thing I wrote on this one was the prologue it was missing something so I added a five page prologue that changed the entire dynamic of the book in five pages and so don't be caught in the editing loop unless it works for you well in the chemistry the first book starts at chapter one hundred it's one hundred chapters so what we're doing with counting backwards that's why I had to go to the future before I could go to the page and some other things also don't go the way you wanted to go because I had a short story for a collection and as I wrote it it started exceeding the short story and so I had to put that aside because I had to put the short story and then I wrote something completely different see that's the problem I have a like themed anthology that I got invited to or just as soon as they say hey you got a story for us I have a problem with that because I'm a panther I never know whether or not that thing is going to be a short story a piece of flash fiction a short story, a novel ed, a novella a novel, a series of books I never know what it's going to be so I can never say that's one of the problems with writing the way I do is you never know how long the story and I'm going to put this aside and it will be a book proposal about a cure it is a very different process to me anyway between writing a novel and a short story I just edited yesterday a friend of mine said I'm open call for military short stories I had one I sent it to him and he goes tweaking so I spent a couple of hours yesterday tweaking it and we were submitting it so we'll see how it goes I'll spend more time editing a short story than I will with the novel it sounds funny but the reason for that is a short story you only have a certain amount of time it's usually word count that you're looking to hit whether it be three thousand words or five thousand words they have to be perfect you don't have any time for character development every single word everything has to count you can be angry over here for a little bit and describe this person's past in 1987 or whatever and then come back to the past you can do that kind of thing with a novel but with a short story you want to get to the point as quick as possible and get the story out especially if you're writing a genre short fiction it sounded like there was a time when you had something and you read it and you were like this is not really working with a lot of the rest of it and you sort of took it out chapter two didn't go with the other kind of thing my question is at some point where you're writing something there's something and you go back chapter two will work well in this book well for this it's a lot of history since they're time travelers I can have them go in any which way I want it the way I had originally started with the assassin was in his a hotel where I'm flicking through the channels watching his work on the TV going I did that, you know that kind of thing so that's the way I wanted the whole thing to start I ended up putting it in chapter three as a case study somebody studying what you did you still get all the history but it's just changing the diameter but as far as when I sit this one aside if you're bored with it sit it aside just like he said sit it aside to start working on something else when I came back to this one I knew I had a a decent story that just wasn't where I wanted it to be I reached back 30 years to literal crap I went to high school pulled the characters up some of the old stories read Phantom I got a three book series out of it for stuff I wrote 30 years ago I was going to comment on that I call the process cannibalism because what you're doing is you're re-purposing material never throw anything away even if something you think is hot garbage throw it away, set it aside you can cut it out, you can always change character settings, any of that stuff if you have good material, good material that does not mean it's going to fit in the piece it just means it's good material so set that aside, never throw anything away even if it's just a scene if you wake up from a dream and go, dude that was awesome you'd write down the scene five years from now you'd be writing a book out of it I need that scene pull it out, boom don't throw anything away it's the same thing with everything those of us who don't use manual typewriters it's easy to say it's the same thing until your computer crashes that's my paper yes ma'am going back from the editing process one of the biggest problems I have is that in Wallsville and then I continue and I'll start writing I don't know who this person is I do research backgrounds are important but it's not necessary to put all of it in the store it's not necessary to rub a draft if you want to make a note for yourself need research move on just don't commit to anything in the book that requires that research because when you get to a point if you've written something that you were forcing that square line to a round hole you're going to stop writing at some point you're going to be like, ah, I'm done this is garbage I can't do but as someone who's a plotter equally important plotters who are characters and so I create character sheets for the principal character for the background, why they are the way they are and but again when I was writing the missions I had to revise that because of the way the character was so I had to go back and adapt to that but I think it's important for me because I want to know who they are and that's why you actually get stuck the environment isn't important because how your character is interacting the environment that could be some other conflict or whatever else but don't don't let it stop your process, like he said I'll go back through all the time I'm 15 chapters into it I'm going I'll go back to chapter 2 and make a note hey, make him do this and then I go back and I just keep going so when the editing process I see my note, that's when I do the research that's when I add it because in chapter 25 I can go back and go no, no, no, no, no and change it again and again I can't comment on that though because when I was doing the book Rescue Note with Ben Boca I had written the characters into a corner and I couldn't figure out how to get them out and I saw a way to get it out and it would require a character to do something it's almost like an out of character it would be out of character but what I did is I went back and rewrote the character so that it was no longer out of character because I really loved that event and it turns out that's my time to make a cry but it was that saved the story and kept it moving but in order to get that character to have that happen it was this big gap-riching moment I had to go back and change the way it worked at the beginning and then rewrote the character through the story that it consists of your characters will evolve and if you've got it, this is my character it's going to stop let them evolve with the story because sometimes the story evolves with the character yes, yes, yes you're not the same person you were 20 years ago life has changed you let the story change the character and vice versa you really have to wait on on stopping like I said, anything that kills the momentum you want to stay away from if you know that having to research something is going to kill the momentum for that scene if you're having fun going back to which I can't remember which one you guys said if you're bored, the reader's going to be bored there you go you really need to lock on to that because if you're getting bored a scene but also at the same time if you are having a blast with the scene nothing needs to be stopping you no character research anything like that get that now dinner no kids, nothing you keep going the end of the world outside burning stone and any of that somebody will take care of it I'm sorry I'm sorry thank you thank you if you're interested in any of the books we are all upstairs please come by and talk to us what can we do with both signings we'll put it later on fans will be here for the rest of us come see us everybody else upstairs they're very approachable if you stick around for a few more minutes we're going to block another offer panel just drill it depends on your name seriously if anybody has any questions just come by stop and talk to me come on by and I think those are for sale