 Hello Library Lovers and Newspaper Readers and those of you who are both. I want to welcome you here to the San Francisco Public Library and our Carrette Auditorium. Thanks for those of you who are here in person and thanks for those of you who are tuning in via Zoom and YouTube. I'm Michelle Jeffers. I'm Chief of Community Programs and Partnerships and this is one of our favorite partnerships, the Total SF Book Club with the San Francisco Chronicle. We're here for Charlie Jane Enders in case you're confused why you're here today and our book, Victories Greater Than Death. Before we begin, let me give a land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramitush Ohlone peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramitush community. Thank you. Let me also highlight a few upcoming events, but my slides have moved around a bit. In March we'll be celebrating Women's History Month with her story, which aims to tell women's stories both historical and present day. In fact, next week we'll kick off Women's History Month with this American life journalist, Stephanie Fu, launching her new memoir, What My Bones Know, in conversation with Esme Weijin Wang, the author of the collected Schizophrenias. Then in April we'll have Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Natalie Diaz, discussing her book, Post-Colonial Love Poem. I know you all love book clubs and the title is our Library Book Club for March and April. Finally, we're just coming to the end of our more than a month Black History Month programs. I hope you enjoyed some of those programs this month. All of our events are supported by friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Big shout out to them and be sure to buy a copy of Charlie Jane's book that they're selling in the back of the room if you're here live in person. Now let me introduce you to our host to kick off this amazing book club. Heather Knight is the, they really need no introduction, but Heather Knight is the San Francisco Chronicle columnist. She covers everything from homelessness, quirky San Francisco stories, and a lot of politics. In fact, she believes in holding our politicians accountable whenever she can and tells fascinating stories about this little place we call home. Peter Hartlum is her co-host. He's a former paper boy who's worked at the Chronicle since 2000. He covers Bay Area Culture, writes the archive-based Our San Francisco Local History column, and together they co-host the Chronicles Total SF podcast and co-founded its Total SF program to celebrate the wonder and whimsy of San Francisco. We're so delighted to have them here for the program and I'll let them introduce our featured author Charlie Jane. But before that, I want to tell you that we will be doing questions live in the audience and on Zoom. And if you're live in the audience, we're going to ask you to write your questions down and we'll pass them to Peter and Heather to read and answer. So welcome everybody to the tonight's program. Thank you so much for coming out tonight for our fourth meeting of the Total SF Book Club. The second one to happen in person. We're so excited to be here tonight. I got to just shout out everybody watching at home on Zoom. We have found our nice clothes. Heather and I, it took a while. We're not used to it. We're not used to it. We're not used to it. Everybody who could be in their sweats right now, we're a little bit jealous. And we're going to give away some trivia and prizes. But first I want to introduce Charlie Jane Anders, who we're just so excited to be in this partnership with. Victory is greater than death is a book today, but that is one of the 500 books we've had in the last year. There have been. From you. Back of him here. And Charlie Jane is going to sign all of them when we're done. Even greater mistakes, a short story collection, and never say you can't survive, which is a book about writing, getting through hard times by making stories up. I'm just a great San Franciscan who supports other writers, supports independent bookstores, supports all that is good and literary in this city. Charlie Jane Anders, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. And I wish to point out that I also support all that is evil and literary in this city. I think I don't really discriminate. I don't buy into any kind of like manikin dualism when it comes to, to literary in us like, you know, I go beyond good and evil in my, in my, in my literariness. Well we believe that libraries and independent bookstores are purely good and we want to give a special shout out to the San Francisco public library and Green Apple books who are our partners in the total SF book club. And the theme of our trivia quiz tonight is libraries and bookstores. So that's a hint for your answers. And we have some very exciting archive photos from the San Francisco Chronicle in top of the line Ikea frames. Not the 99 cent frame. We got like the 399 frame because the chronicles do an all right. We also have stickers too. We have a collection of, Charlie Jane, what are, what are our stickers here today? Yeah. I commissioned an artist to do artwork of some of the characters from my book from victories greater than death. And so we have some stickers of Tina, Rachel, Elsa and Yato the Montha. I think we actually ran out of Yato the Montha at a certain point. So you might not get Yato the Montha if you don't answer the first couple of questions. So there you go. And I want to note that library employees and my wife are eligible for prizes. So let's just get that straight. Michael, would you mind handing out the prizes? Thank you. Wait, why aren't you on a skateboard right now? For those at home, this is Michael Lambert, the head of the library and a very good skateboarder. So first question, which famous San Francisco bookstore is celebrating its 55th anniversary this year and sits in a building that survived the 1906 earthquake and here's a hint, the same building previously housed a family's house, a candy shop, a men's clothing store and a fur shop. Any guesses? San Francisco bookstore. You're right. Correct. I love Green Apple books so much. They're such an amazing local institution. I didn't realize they'd been around that long. That's amazing. Yeah. Wow. Which famous San Francisco bookstore opened in 1953 as the nation's first all paperback bookstore, although it now sells hard covers as well? Yes. All right. Which book by Chanel Miller was the most borrowed work of nonfiction from the San Francisco Public Library in 2021? I bet you know, Michelle. You can shout it out. Yes. Correct. I think you should ask the next one, Heather, because you have written, I think, three stories on this. There's a new statue planned for outside the main library to honor a writer who lived in San Francisco as a teenager. Who is she? Yes. Yay. Wow. Which branch of the San Francisco Public Library is the oldest? Park Branch. And fittingly, for a library, it's on Page Street. The Park Branch is the answer, and it was built in 1909 for just $27,000. Which could buy you nothing in San Francisco today. Which two library branches sit on the cable car lines? Uh-huh. And? North Beach? Yep. Good job. Woo! Chinatown and North Beach are the correct answers. Okay. Shortly before his death, Alan Ginsberg gave the last, his last public reading at which Haight Street independent bookstore? Haight Street independent bookstore. Okay. Yep. Yes. Book Smith is the answer. I think we have one more. Sure. Let's see. Which one? You want to ask your comic book company question? Yeah. I've got a story coming out on this tomorrow. San Francisco Comic Book Company, the city's first comic book store founded in 1968. I walked by there the other day. Just 200 square feet on 23rd, and, oh, I almost gave away the answer. Helped spark the careers of Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman was headquartered in which neighborhood? And I almost blurted it out myself. Which neighborhood? Uh-huh. Yes. Woo! I said 23rd Street. I did blurt it out. So when I first moved to San Francisco, I used to go to that comic book store because they only shut down about 10, 15 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And I had no idea how historic it was. It was just like this weird hole in the wall where you couldn't actually find any comics because there was just like piles and piles and piles everywhere. And it was like this just weird cranky cave of like, you know, mold and comics and stuff. And I had no idea that it was this historic location until after it had closed and I was so mad. Comic book stores are so clean now. I know. Like, because I remember when I was going to comic book stores in the 80s and 90s, they were all, what is the word you use? It's very accurate. Like just mold. Caves of mold. Yeah. And now they're like super clean. You go to comics experience and like you could eat off the floor there. Yeah. I don't know if I'd recommend that. I'm going to go to that store and see some stuff. I'm not sure. Okay. I would eat off the counters in comics experience. Okay. It's definitely cleaner than the archives at the Chronicle. Okay. Now that's a shot. That's a shot against me. Well, we'd love to kick things off tonight with Charlie Jane. If you could read a passage from Victories Greater Than Death. This is a book about Tina Maynes, a seemingly ordinary teenager who's really the clone of a famous alien hero whose fate is to save the universe and defeat evil. No pressure or anything. Yeah. Worthington Garden Party is a game my mom and I invented where we go through the mall looking at things we could never afford to buy. And we pretend that we're planning a fancy garden party for the Worthingtons who don't exist just in case it wasn't already obvious. My mom puts on her scariest hat with the carnations and the pink ribbon and I wear bright apricot capri prance. And we drive to the new shopping center over on the ridge side of town. The kitchen store has this red chrome machine that turns fresh fruit into a decorative fountain. And you can program it to spray a few different patterns. I don't know, my mom says, in a very serious voice. The Worthingtons are quite particular about their juice formations. We wouldn't want to have a fruit salute that lacks proper parabolas. My mom says the words fruit salute with a straight face. Yes, yes, I say, I mean the Worthingtons. How many times have they said they prefer their papaya juice to really soar so many times? My mom nods gravely. Yes, the Worthingtons have strong opinions about properly aerodynamic papaya juice. Over in the corner, the salesperson is hiding her giggles behind her hand. This is the mom I've been missing lately, the one who decided that she and I would treat everything like a grand, ridiculous adventure, the two of us, against the universe. Even when we went camping and set fire to our tent and got ourselves menaced by beavers, the beavers were really terrifying, I swear. I always knew that you were going to be taken away from me, my mom said a while ago. I thought about taking you off the grid, maybe trying to find people to train you in survival skills. But I decided it was better for you to just have some good memories of your time as a human being. However long that actually lasts. We keep moving through the mall, along marble floors that are so shiny, I see a murky ghost of myself in them. We gaze upon shoes in a riot of colors that cost nearly a month's rent. These kid leather saddle shoes with peacock feather heads all around the sides might be just the thing to help the Worthingtons launch the season. Mundane, my mother proclaims, squinting at them. Frightfully mundane. The only thing we actually buy at the mall is a basket of truffle fries, which we eat in the food court. The smell of rich oil and spices, they smell of rich oils and spices, but they taste like regular French fries, just a little sweeter. My mom chatters about the book club she keeps missing, and I let myself breathe. It's OK. There's only humans around these parts. Then I look away for a second, and I see a pale giant standing near the video game store. He's watching us. His lip curls upward, and he pats the ugly gun attached to his dark tunic. When I look again, a second later, the pale man is gone. I love the Worthington Garden Party. It's so specific. Was that inspired by something in your life? Not so much, but I feel like there's a lot of stuff in Tina's kind of backstory, and there was kind of more in the more extended version of her backstory that I had to whittle down for the actual book. There's a lot of stuff in her backstory that's inspired by my kind of love of pranks and my love of disruptive individuals, and I sort of like, if you want to get me to identify with a character or root for them or be in their corner, turning them into a prankster who kind of goes around causing disruptions in the face of privilege and conformity is always a surefire way to do that. I think we talked before about how when I moved to San Francisco at the dawn of time, the first thing I did was get involved with a cacophony society and get involved with a bunch of other groups of people who were doing just weird disruptive things to try to kind of shake things up, and that's always been like a thing that I really gravitate towards. And actually the funny thing about Worthington Garden Party is that as I mentioned, we had to whittle down a lot of Tina's backstory because my editor kept being like, we got to keep the plot moving. We got to get Tina up into outer space where she can fight bad guys by like the 30th or 40th page because the reader is not going to stick around for a lot of Tina on earth kind of waiting to go into space. And I cut out Worthington Garden Party from the book. It was gone. And then we were going to print. And one of the other editors, I think actually both of my editors came back and said, can we please put Worthington Garden Party back in because I missed it. That was the right decision. I feel like it anchors us to Tina in a way. And it's only like a page. So I was like, sure, yes, please. So actually I was really happy we were able to put that back in. I love that scene. Do you remember anything else that you knew in your head about Tina that didn't actually make the book? Oh my god. I mean, so much. I mean, there was like pages and pages and pages because I tend to overwrite. I'm very much one of those writers who writes very long and then just has to cut things down. I live for the day when I'm finally like George R. Martin at the level where I can hand in a book that's like 10,000 pages and just be like, boom. I'm going to give everybody frickin' repetitive stress injuries, try to even hold this book and turn the pages. I'm going to make you all suffer from my art. But I'm not at that point yet. So I don't know. I mean, there was a lot of stuff about Tina and like the politics of her school and like the teachers and the teachers she liked and the teachers she didn't like. And one thing that was a big theme that I think is still in there but there was a bigger theme in the earlier drafts was Tina getting into fights at school trying to defend other kids from bullies and kind of starting to realize at a certain point that kids don't always want you to step in and be their savior and be like the white knight who's going to protect you from bullies. And I feel like that's still in the book as it is. But it was a bigger thing that I kind of had more space to develop in earlier drafts. And it kind of plays into later in the book when Tina is often spaced trying to defend people from evil aliens. And it's the same thing of like you don't always, it's not always best to just defend people from the bad guys. The best thing is to help them to defend themselves maybe or to help them to feel empowered so that they can do their own fighting. Yeah. Kind of. Cool. I got to ask writing a book like this as I'm reading it, I'm having all of these mental pictures of what these figures look like. And then you're in this position where people are reading the book and starting to send you in artwork. We have a few examples here. I want to go through the examples and then ask you just how exciting is that to see people who are readers turn your world into something physical? It's super exciting. And it makes me realize that, first of all, that I'm really bad at describing. Because that's always my weakest point as an author. Oh, I have the power, Charlie James. So these are actually artworks that I paid someone to make. These are not fan art actually. I think we're going to get to some fan art in a second. But I hired this amazing artist who my friend Maggie Tokuda Hall had hired previously. And we did artwork of Yato the Montha and Elsa and Tina and then Tina's best friend Rachel. And it was super, it was great. Because again, I'm terrible at describing things and people and stuff. So we could go back and forth with the artist and be like, no, no, no. Can you make this character a little bit more this, a little bit more that? And that way, there was artwork that people could look at if they wanted to know what the characters looked like. My previous novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, people were creating a lot of fan art of the aliens in that book. And it really made me realize that I had left the appearance of the aliens open to interpretation. Because we got a lot of really amazing, cool, different pictures of what those aliens look like. And there were one or two that were very close to how I pictured them in my head. But there were also somewhere I was like, yeah, I can see how you get that from what I wrote. Because I like to just throw in a lot of weird details and then let people kind of paint a picture in their head, I guess. But yeah, I love how bright and happy that artwork was. And I feel like this artist, Laia Rose, who I think is in Australia, did this artwork on their own. And I love how it turned out. It's so gorgeous. Laia gave me permission to display it tonight. And you can kind of see that, I think, Laia was drawing on what Inez had done. And again, that's why it's so great to have some official artwork that people draw on. But I just love it. And I love that part of what I love about this artwork is that it really captures the love between Tina and these two other characters. Like Rachel is Tina's best friend. And they really support each other and hold each other up. And neither one of them would be able to make it without the other. And there was a lot of hugging in the book. People always ask for permission before they hug, FYI, because we're modeling good kind of consent. But and then Elsa is this character that Tina meets who comes up from Earth separately, who is just this kind of spiky, snarky hacker from Brazil who is a travesty, like a transfeminine person. And they end up falling in love. And it's just, I love it. It's this beautiful relationship. And you can see that Tina has these wildflowers on her sleeve, which Rachel drew for her. Because Rachel is a wonderful artist. And part of what I came up with is that in the Royal Fleet, which is this kind of space navy, you can have whatever picture you want on the sleeve of your uniform. Because I wanted to get out of that thing of everybody has to look identical. And everybody has to be kind of, you know, it's not that kind of situation. People can have some individuality in how they appear. And I love those flowers so much because they're just so kind of like joyful. There's a lot about like holding on to joy and creativity in the face of like, terribleness, kind of. Well, this is the first book in a trilogy and Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak is the second one and it's coming out in just a few weeks. So that's exciting. And I was wondering if you can describe the writing process. When you're writing a trilogy, do you know the entire plot of all the books from the get go or do you just kind of go one by one or how does that work? So this is my first time writing a trilogy. And I'm learning a lot as I go. I'm learning a lot about what not to do, which is always my process as a writer. I always kind of figure out what not to do after I've already done it. So, I mean, I sold the trilogy with a very detailed outline which I then, you know, tossed out the window pretty much immediately because that's how I roll. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff in Victories Greater Than Death where I sort of got to a certain point and I was like really trying to give, like especially some of the supporting cast as much of a life of their own as I could and like Elsa who you saw, you know, holding hands with Tina in the previous picture. Elsa, you know, I really wanted Elsa to have her own aspirations and her own journey and not just be like swept along by what Tina and the other characters were doing. And that really changed my plan for books two and three. Like it ended up being a very different story because, you know, the easy thing would have just been to have all the characters kind of following Tina around all the time. And I didn't want that. I didn't want to do that. So, it was a complicated process and there definitely have been times, I literally had a conversation with my editor when we were finalizing the second book where she was like, yeah, I really wish we could go back and change this one thing in the first book. But oh well, it's already been printed. Can't change that. We're just gonna have to live with it. We're gonna have to like dance around it a little bit. The second book, it wasn't a major thing. It was more just like certain things that you established in the first book. You then are just, you have to live with them. And you know, this is a thing. And like, I'm sure there are authors out there who plan everything meticulously and know exactly what's gonna happen in the following books. But I tend to just be a little bit like, you know, a seat of my pants. And luckily I can now say with some confidence, I've written the third book. It's now being revised. I have a fairly high degree of confidence that there aren't like gaping logic holes or like, you know, holes in this. But it's definitely a process. It's a lot of like figuring stuff out as you go. And I think next time I'd either write a duology instead of a trilogy, or I try to write like all three books in one go and then go back and revise them just so I have a more control over the whole process. But you know, I always make a mess. Like, no matter what I do, I find different ways to make a mess every single time. It's just ridiculous. I doubt that. It doesn't feel like a mess though. And there's a juggling act there that I really admire. You have these teen characters who, you know, they have their own little dramas and special things and developments going on. We're kind of, you know, is Tina gonna ask Elsa out? And at the same time, there's these genocidal alien villains and a galaxy at stake. How is it to juggle those two things? Is that hard to do as you're going on? Cause as the book is going on, these two different things feel almost equally important to me as I'm reading it. Yeah, I mean, I feel like that is, if there's one thing I kind of believe in as a creator or whatever, and also as a reader and a fan and stuff is that you have to stay anchored in the personal and you have to like, like I live for that kind of like big picture, little picture contrast where, you know, and this was a thing in all the birds in the sky to some extent, it was a thing in, it's been a thing in pretty much everything I've written where I feel like the larger the kind of backdrop and the larger the stakes and the larger kind of the ideas being thrown around, the more you have to stay really rooted in the small and the personal and the kind of emotional. And that's just a thing that you have to do. And for, I think that's one of the things I love about young adult fiction specifically is that young adult fiction does that so well. My favorite young adult books are the ones where there are huge, huge things going on and like the fate of nations or worlds or whatever is 100% at stake, but at the same time, love and family and like the search for identity and the search for meaning in your own existence are still just like super important and super like pressing. And I feel like if you lose sight of the personal, you just don't have anything anymore. You just have a bunch of like, objects flying around going pew pew pew at each other. And like it's just not interesting anymore. It just, it loses all of its juice. And I feel like you just, I don't know. I mean, I'm always very relieved when I can kind of drill back down into the small and the personal. I feel like it's just, it kind of makes, it gives more meaning and more depth to the other stuff, if that makes sense. Well, you know, the, it's not a utopian situation. I love when these Earth people are coming up and discovering that the spaceship does not have good food and it's a little bit beat up. On the other hand, it is utopian in the way that everybody, at least on the spaceship is asking for consent. They introduce each other with their pronouns. I'm wondering with your YA readers, if there are readers who see that and feel seen and contact you about it. I've definitely heard from a lot of people who both of those things are like really important to them, especially right now, because gosh, there's just so much, there's so many ways in which young people are kind of, especially LGBTQ young people are having their bodily autonomy challenged and having their right to their own identity challenged. And so, you know, it just felt like, I can't even remember how I arrived at this, but I felt like as I was writing it, I was like, well, okay, you're in space, you have this like universal translator thing, which in the book is called the every speak. And, you know, of course, why wouldn't it make it so that you know people's correct pronouns? And so I actually am pretty careful to clarify that for Tina, the main character in Victory's Greater Than Death, when she meets a new person, she hears their pronouns spoken out loud, but some people just kind of magically know your pronoun when they meet you. It works different ways for different people because it's sort of, the translator is sort of a little bit telepathic, and that's how it can translate any language into any other language. It kind of knows what you're trying to say. And so it's like, well, getting someone's pronouns wrong is a form of misunderstanding. So of course, we're not gonna have that. And then in the second book, I clarify that even if you set out to get someone's pronoun wrong intentionally, if you set out to misgender someone on purpose, the translator will decide that this is a misunderstanding or a mistake and just correct it before anybody else hears it. So it's impossible to misgender someone, which I thought was like a really good thing. And it's just like, oh yeah, we're not gonna have that. And the consent thing, it was just, as I was writing, I was like, you know, I personally really like really modeling good consent, and I feel like, especially in fiction, and the idea that like, if people are gonna be hugging or holding hands or touching in some other way, other than like, if there's a fight scene, people don't ask for consent before they punch each other. But for like, other kinds of touching, people ask first, and it just, it's very, hopefully very natural and very unobtrusive, but it made me happy, made me personally happy to write it, but I definitely feel like I've heard from a lot of people who feel like this is a really positive thing that they feel, you know, seen and supported by, because I feel like we just really need that. Like, even more than when I started writing this book, I feel like now people really, really need this. Like, I think we have another reading. Yeah, we'd love for you to read it again after you have a sip of water. Okay. Have a sip of water, though. So I was actually gonna read a tiny, tiny, tiny passage from the second book, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, which comes out in, on August, on April 5th. So yeah, like a little over a month now. Okay. Naetha slips through the ring of thorns, like they're not even there, and then she's standing right next to Rachel. You're going to be okay. Naetha says, whatever happens here, you will be okay. You can't know that, Rachel says. We all lose pieces of ourselves. Naetha shrugs one big purple shoulder. It's part of being alive. Things slip through your fingers, no matter how tight you hold on. Sometimes you get them back right when you've given up, but they're never the same as before, even then. Sometimes they're gone forever. But maybe your real self is whatever remains after you've lost all of the things that you thought were you. That's the worst inspirational talk I've ever heard. Rachel hugs herself, even though she's not cold. So how does this work? Oh, shoot, I lost my place. Dang it. Stupid phone. Well, I guess I could stop there. I was gonna read a little bit more. Let me see if I can just find my spot again. Shoot, dang. Okay, I might've lost it. I'm sorry. That's all right. Good to get a sneak peek. Yeah, okay, sorry, I'll just stop there. I don't even think we have the galley at the Chronicle yet. Oh, I don't think they're not doing print galleys this time, unfortunately. I think they're gonna send final books in them a couple weeks, though. Yeah, very good. Well, we have a little archive trip through the archive, if you wanna look back here with me, of little history of independent bookstores in San Francisco. Ooh. That is on the lower left-hand corner in, we talked about in 1853, the Shasta Bookstore, which became BookSync, but that was up in Shasta County. Catholic books on the bottom left-hand corner, thanks to our friends at OpenSF History and Western Neighborhood Project, who found that that's the first independent bookstore in San Francisco in 1956. I think we're looking up Kearney here. Yeah, and then years after that, the Paul Elder Bookstore, which is right here, I think it's, the more I read about it, the more I think it's a really special place in the city. This is a 1907 picture, it survived the earthquake, and Paul Elder not only was selling books, but also became a publisher, publishing a lot of local authors, and also had artwork. So you would walk in there, and it was not just a place with a bunch of books on the shelves, but there was sort of this leisure reading experience that when I think of what I love about bookstores in the Bay Area is you get a different experience when you go there. So that's from 1907. That's City Lights in 1957. You can see that's Allen Ginsberg with Howell there, and we have a lot of photos of him. He actually applied for a job at The Chronicle, we just found this out. He didn't get hired. He didn't get hired, he applied to be a librarian, and it's in his papers, the application, and he did not get hired, later, a few years later wrote Howell, and then got in a couple arguments with The Chronicle, and I think it turned out okay by the time he was gone. That's City Lights in 1966, and again kind of setting the template for bookstores in San Francisco, a place that's a community. I think it's something that bookstores everywhere are like that, but the Bay Area is really special. Man, I'm getting goosebumps. Yeah, so that's 66, and then that's your comic bookshop we were talking about from 1971. That's Gary Arlington who opened the first comics-only shop in San Francisco in 1968. Didn't know what else to do. He had a trunk full of comics. His parents died and they lost their house, so he had to do something with them, so he opened up a shop, and that turned to publishing. Right around this time, he told us that behind the counter, that was where all of his contraband comics were. Oh my God. The comic code was still a thing, so Robert Crumb and Zap Comics and those type of Zap Comics, and all of those were under the counter, and then he became a publisher, and Art Spiegelman came in, Kirk Hammett from Metallica came in, and it just became this really influential place that I think a lot of other comic book shops were modeled on it. There's another photo from 1971, a little pay phone on the wall. Look at those pants. Do those pants have leopard print? They're very cool. Yeah. Oh my God, I want those pants. All the cool people were hanging out at the San Francisco Comic Book Company. I just included a few other photos here, as we're going through. That's Isotope and James. I always mispronounce his last name. It's either Syme or Simmy. I pronounce it Syme, but I'm not sure. Yeah, but really unique place that's in Hayes Valley, and here's Dog Eared Books, where I believe you have signed stock there. Is that correct? I hope I do, yeah. Yeah, but I just like thinking about those early stores, city lights, stores like that, and how they influenced a sense of community, a sense of uniqueness, a sense of almost artistic independence in our comic book stores and our bookstores. And here's during the pandemic, that's Bird and Beckett. I'm just showing a few from the pandemic because I think the bookstores were heroic. They really were. I think, you know, going into it, I thought, how many of these are gonna be gone? And they quickly got online. They quickly connected with their communities. We lost very few of them, and I'm hopeful that is, I believe, oh, I wanna say that's Books Inc. Looks like Books Inc. Yeah, and, you know, walking out and handing people their books and the community bonding, and now these bookstores have, they have better online situations set up. I think people are gonna be more hardwired to pre-order from their indie book store. So, and there's Green Apple, our partners here. But, oh. Star Trek, Peter. Oh, that's a surprise. It doesn't have to come into everything. Shh, you weren't supposed to see that. I was gonna ambush you with that. I wanted to ask you about indie bookstores, and I thought, you know, the indie bookstores were inspiring. I thought it was really inspiring that you stood by them and you spoke out a lot, and you were thinking about independent bookstores over the last couple of years. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm always thinking about independent bookstores, and I really do wanna underscore, I mean, we're so lucky to have such a beautiful library as well. And like, we need to support our public libraries, and we need to like show love for our public libraries, but I also feel like, you know, we're uniquely lucky here in San Francisco to have such a wealth of independent bookstores. I don't think, I've never, it's been a long time since I've been to another metropolitan area that has as many amazing, like just beautiful, rich, such a rich ecosystem of independent bookstores as the Bay Area does. And I'm really passionate about trying to protect that because I really feel like it's a crucial ingredient in what makes San Francisco, you know, such a wonderful place to live. And to what keeps our fueling, our like literary scene in general, it's part of why we're able to support so many authors and so many, you know, so many ventures because we have so many bookstores that are kind of helping to keep us all going. And you know, I've been to places where they, all their independent bookstores had gone under, and people are just, it's a really sad thing to visit a town with no independent bookstores. It's just, it feels really desolate. It feels like just something has been lost that is just really essential. And you know, so yeah, I feel like I've been, I guess it's been about a decade now that I've been really thinking more about trying to help local bookstores hang in there just because I feel like we all need to do what we can. Like in 2012 was when we did the first bookstore and chocolate crawl, which I'm really eager to get back to doing as soon as we can, as soon as everybody feels up for having like a big, we was basically like get a big crowd of hundred or so people just marching from bookstore to bookstore eating chocolate on the way. And like just going into bookstores and buying as much stuff as we could carry and like just, you know, having that be the event. And like, I love author readings obviously, but I love also just going into bookstores and browsing. And I feel like a lot of people made new friends on the chocolate and bookstore crawl. I've heard that people like had new, like met people that ended up being their new best friends, which makes me really happy. But, you know, and during the pandemic, during basically the spring and summer of 2020, we did, I and a group of other people, it was definitely a team effort, did some readings for local bookstores called hashtag we love bookstores. And you can see, I think a lot of them are on YouTube now. If you look at, look for just, there's a we love bookstores YouTube account. And we raised about $60,000, $63,000 for local bookstores. And it was definitely a labor of love. It was a lot of work, but it was really, really fun. And yeah. And tell me too, what do libraries mean to authors? I don't, the more I talk to authors, I start hearing it. And I know with our book club that, you know, so many books cycle through and sometimes they get worn out and they buy new ones. And as far as the libraries and their role in supporting authors, is that something you've seen with? Oh yeah. I mean, I feel like libraries are just super essential for everybody, but especially for authors, I feel like it's really a matter of accessibility. Like, you know, apart from anything else, like I feel like libraries do help to like, make books available to like lots of people. And you know, I know publishers love them because they, a library might buy like a bunch of copies of a book if it's a book that they're excited about. But just from an accessibility standpoint, like I always feel like I want my books to be available to as many people as possible, regardless of their financial situation, regardless of, you know, their ability to get to a bookstore or to, you know, do whatever. And I feel like I know that there are people who've discovered my books because they weren't able to go to the library and find them. So I feel like as an author, I just am so grateful whenever a library is helping people to access my books. I feel like that's a crucial thing for authors in particular. But, you know, libraries helped make me into a lifelong reader. They helped, you know, connect me to a world of books and reading and imagination. And so I really don't know if I would be here writing books now if it hadn't been for libraries when I was a kid too. Victories includes many dire moments, but your characters never lose their optimism. Coming out of the pandemic, knock on wood. Do you have any optimistic thoughts about San Francisco or how are you viewing the city overall? I mean, I feel like the word that always comes to mind with San Francisco is resilience, right? I mean, we've survived fires and earthquakes and plagues and just everything. I feel like San Francisco is a city that always comes back and it's a city that, you know, partly because of things like, you know, that we have these institutions like so many bookstores and so many great libraries and so many great sort of cultural institutions and museums and, you know, just art spaces. I feel like there's a lot of, you know, even with everything that's changed, there's so much stuff in San Francisco that just supports creativity and supports expression. I feel like, you know, I do have a lot of optimism for San Francisco going forward. I feel like we did weather the pandemic and like you said, a lot of bookstores, you know, we really didn't lose hardly any. I feel like I can think of one bookstore off the top of my head that closed during the pandemic, but I think that that was one that was probably already kind of gonna close anyway. So I feel like we're hanging in there and I just have a lot of faith in this city. Can I go to the last? Yeah. All right. Well, first of all, we have a surprise video. It got tipped off a little bit because of my finger here, but it's a video and then a question slash an ambush for Heather, who is not a Star Trek 4 fan. Do I have to play? We could just act it out. Yeah, we probably could. Uh-oh. I won't be devastated. Click. Oh, there we go. I've seen that guy on movie. So best scene in San Francisco movie history, best scene in all of movie history, tell Heather why this is important to the culture of our community. I just, I feel like I love Star Trek 4. I feel like it is clearly the best San Francisco movie ever. Like no doubt. You know, like I don't even know about this bullet that people keep talking about. You know, I guess Princess Diaries or Streets of San Francisco. So I married an ax murder. Yeah, no. So actually, so I married an ax murder as a close second for best San Francisco movie for sure. But you know, I mean, it's really important to me personally that in Star Trek canon, the Federation is based in San Francisco and San Francisco is basically like the center of the galaxy according to Star Trek. It's like- We like to think so. It's the headquarters of the most important peacekeeping organization in the galaxy. It's where all the like Vulcans and Romulans and well not Romulans, I guess, but we're all the Vulcans and Andorians and everybody hang out when they're on earth. And I just, I think that that's really important to recognize, like we, you know, of course it would be San Francisco. I mean, where else would you go? Where else would you put Starfleet headquarters? I mean, you know, we're clearly, yeah. Well, we hope Royal, The Royal Fleet gets a little secret outpost here in one of the next books, April new book comes out. I think we have a few questions. Yay. Oh. You have to do it through the microphone. Oh. So that our Zoom people can hear it. Oh, okay. Thank you. How did you come up with the idea for all the cool greetings and responses where there are other ones that you had to cut out? Well, give us a couple examples. Oh my God. I can't remember them, any of them. So, yeah, so in the Royal Fleet where it's basically the, you know, okay. So I, so when, in the Royal Fleet where you, you know, you travel into the, the basically the version of Starfleet or whatever the space Navy that Tina and her friends join in this book. One of the fun things is that they say these like blessings to each other when they meet and they just basically, they say things like, gosh, okay. So like happy reunions and short absences is one. I think raucous parties and no hangovers is one. There's just like, there's these like fun little greetings that people trade back and forth. And I felt like it was important to me that there'd be a little bit of pageantry and a little bit of like, you know, and I was watching some TV shows and movies about life in like the Navy or whatever because I obviously whenever you have like a space fleet you're gonna draw on real life organizations. And I didn't want this to be too close to any earth militaries because that didn't make sense to me and I didn't wanna be stuck in the trap of trying to be like true to like a real thing. But one of the things that I love about like earth militaries is that you have like these weird things of pageantry where it's like, you know, when somebody comes on, they play a little whistle or like there was like one episode of the TV show with the last ship where like every hour they ring a little bell or something behind the captain and they say little, they have like little things that they say to each other that are like weird little phrases that are like, they're kind of like jargony. They're not even jargon. It's like, you know, in the last ship, they're always saying like, what's your whiskey? And that's how they say, what's your location? It would be just as fast to say, what's your location? But they say, what's your whiskey? And I'm just like, that's so sweet. It's so cute. Like, what's your whiskey? And like, I don't know. I just wanted to have something like that. And I sort of spent a lot of time thinking about it. And it was actually really hard after a while to come up with those. Like I don't think I came up with any that I didn't use because at a certain point you've come up with like 10 of them and then you're like, okay, I need more. And actually, I'm really happy with all the ones I came up with because I tried to keep them really fun and kind of like a little bit rye. But I just wanted there to be lots of little bits of like, you know, just kind of quirky things that people do in the Royal Fleet. Like they talk about the hosts of Misadventure and the razor tongue of death. And like, oh, we're gonna dance along the razor tongue of death. And I just, I wanted things like that that were kind of like just little quirky weird things that, you know, gave it more of a personality because there's nothing worse than having something like this that's just stone serious and very kind of like, we are taking everything very seriously now. And like everything is just gonna be people shouting jargon to each other. I don't want that. And I felt like especially in a book that's supposed to be for younger readers, I wanted it to just be an element of fun to all of it. So I'm glad that that worked for somebody. Yeah, that was fun. Well, I love this question. Get my reading glasses just so I don't get it wrong. In chapter 25, when Tina finds out, Captain Argentine's wishes about cloning, it's really hard for her and very relatable. Do you have advice for people young and older discovering the purpose and direction for their lives, sometimes in spite of what other people, ancestors, adults, et cetera, expected? Yeah, I love that question. I mean, so obviously there's a huge identity crisis at the heart of this book. And I feel like I always find a way to put an identity crisis in everything I write because that's just like something that I always gravitate towards. I love people who are trying to figure out who they are and what kind of person they wanna be. I feel like that's just something that's super relatable to me. And it's something that I relate to very deeply as a trans person, but also as a weirdo. And so in this book, Tina, the main character, is actually the clone of this hero named Captain Argentine, who died. And basically they copied her brain and put it into this clone. And then it was like when Tina gets old enough, she'll regain all of the memories of Captain Argentine except a little bit of a spoiler that doesn't work out that way. Tina doesn't get back all the memories, which because that wouldn't be as interesting a book I feel like. But it is this thing of like, so she's like, okay, my purpose in life is to be the second coming, the reincarnation, the return of this epic hero who saved the galaxy a bunch of times before. And that's who I am. I'm striving to live up to this legacy that I've been given. And so one of the things that we do over the course of the book is like poke holes in that, of course, and kind of keep kind of finding ways to kind of dig at that and undermine it a little bit so that Tina has to really think about who she wants to be rather than just I wanna be the second coming of this person who I've built up in my mind is like this amazing hero. And one of the things that she finds out is that actually Captain Argentine did not want to be cloned, did not want her brain copied and put into like a fetus that was gonna be hidden on earth. She did not want any of that. She was like, when I die, just let me die. Do not try to bring me back. I think that that's gross and obscene and I don't wanna be a teenager a second time because it was hard enough the first time and just let me stay dead. That's my final wish, please. And when Tina finds this, it gives her a real crisis of like an identity crisis because she's thought that she had a purpose and it turns out that the person who she thought gave her this purpose actually did not want her to exist at all. And so I mean, I feel like there's a lot of stuff that I kind of circle around about like people trying to do what they think they're supposed to do or be who they think they're supposed to be. And I always feel like that's kind of a toxic thing to put on someone. And I feel like nobody should ever feel like the meaning of their life is to fulfill someone else's expectation or to complete someone else's work or to live up to someone else's legacy. Your life is your life. You should be your own person and you shouldn't let anybody put that on you. And I feel like this is a thing that we keep coming back to in different ways throughout the whole trilogy, this idea of like finding your own identity and it's really hard and it's even harder when there's something that seems really shiny that's like, oh, I could, instead of doing all this work of figuring out who I am, I could just be this thing that someone else is kind of like set up that it's like a one-size-fits-all thing that I could just put on myself and then I don't have to worry. And I feel like life, in real life, there's lots of things like that where people are just like offering us a thing that we can just take as our identity and not have to do all that work. And it's always really seductive and it can be really fun and really like empowering or can feel really empowering. But in the end, it's actually very disempowering because you haven't done that work and you haven't found who you really wanna be. And I feel like it's a process for Tina, even in the third book, no spoilers, but even in the third book, she's still having these conversations about like, who am I if I'm not this person that I thought I was gonna be? And like, what do I want my life to be about? As beautifully said. Well, thanks. And now we know that Tina lives through the second book. I mean, come on. I felt pretty confident. Tina's the main character. She lives through all three books. Does she live through the end of the third book? You'll find out. Dun, dun, dun. Did you have specific pronunciation for all the names or did you envision readers figuring it out for themselves, allowing them to create their own idea of your world? And can I shout out your, because I read the book, but I also got the book on, is it called a book on tape anymore? Is that showing how old I am? So when I'm doing the dog walk. They give you a big reel-to-reel thing and you had to thread it into the thing and then like turn the crank. But I'm going back and forth between reading the book and the audio book and your audio book reader should get the audio book Oscar. Oh my God. I'm so... Such an incredible, like each character's voice. I started going to the audio book just to hear the voice. Oh my God. I'm sorry. I totally butted into the question. Quick sidebar about that. So Hinden Walsh, who is the voice of Princess Bubblegum in Adventure Time and also the voice of Starfire in Teen Titans and Teen Titans Go. I got to know her through various happenstance and I was so happy she did this and she told me. So there's one character in this book, Lizix, who Lizix's ears move around depending on how she's feeling. Like her ears can be like aggressive or they can be like laid back or they can kind of, they kind of express her personality and Hinden as she was recording the audio book would move her own ears around. Like that's how committed she was. She would actually be like playing with her own ears to get like Lizix's like mood. Wee, wee, wee, is that the? Yui, yui, yui, yui, yui. And actually Hinden, I think it was Hinden that came up with this headcanon that I love that like different, you could put the stress on different syllables and yui, yui, yui, yui, yui and that means different things about this person. Yeah. I'm sorry. Did I jump on the question there? The question was about pronunciation. Yeah. Okay, good. Whether you had it in your head or wanted readers to just come up with it. So I definitely had pronunciations in my head and part of what I was like, this was like, I loved the whole team at McMillan Audio who worked with me and Hinden on this audio book because they were so diligent about setting me like a ginormous list of like every single word and phrase in the book and how to like, so I had to like sit there with my phone recording the pronunciation and the hilarious part was for the second book they came back to me and they were like, well, we took all of the stuff you gave us for the first book. There's some software online where they were able to take it and have like the words listed and have like, you could click a thing and it would play me saying that word. So it was like a little speaking spell and like I could go to this website and like be like, click on the different words and hear myself saying them. I was like, oh, this is, I could do this for hours but they were like, here's the words that you didn't pronounce for the first book, please give us for the second book. It was so organized. But yeah, I actually did have like, ideas in my head of how you pronounce every single random weird alien thing in the book because I'm just that much of a weirdo and I love forcing people to say ui, ui, ui, ui. And like later in the second book, minor spoiler, we meet another member of ui, ui, ui, ui's species and her name, oh God, I'm so good to go to hell. Her name is Y, Y, Y, Y. Like W-A-I four times. Y, Y, Y, Y. And it's just like, she's a really mean character so it's just like every time you meet her, you're like, why, why, why, why? I'm like, anyway. Great, well I think that's it for questions. Any last thoughts, questions? Well thank you so much for joining us. It was super fun to read this book and talk to you about it and thank you to the library for hosting us.