 I think of stories as a type of technology, right? Or an extension of being human, right? And since the dawn of time, mankind has used storytelling to make sense of the world, through myth, through folklore, and this type of thing, right? And so these three individuals, I think, have developed a certain amount of depth, aptitude for that type of storytelling, for that type of myth making. So my first question is, what attracted you to that type of endeavor? And what types of mythopoetic or what type of mythology are you trying to put out into the world? And why? That's easy. Come on, that's easy. I know, like, keep it warm up a little bit. Yeah, I'm sorry. We ain't got no time. Come on. You don't have to go first. Well, I'll dive in and say, the first way, the first kind of myth making, maybe, that I loved was horror movies and horror books. And at least for me, when I look back on it, and I didn't think I understood this at the time, but one of the things that I think horror taught me or maybe more honestly reflected to me was that the setup for almost all horror is there is normal life, and then a monster appears to make life terrible. And then the job of life is to defeat that monster and try to reassert normal life again. And for me, I grew up in a very chaotic household. So to me, that felt like actually a very honest reflection of how life felt for me as a child. I was drawn to horror more than almost any other of the speculative realms, because I felt like all the other ones, to my mind, seemed too optimistic about what life is like. And horror seemed like exactly what life is like. And so for that reason, I became a horror writer kind of from then. I don't know that I was accurate, but that's how I felt when I was 10, you know. Wonderful. Yeah. I don't know. I think for me, what attracted me to writing these types of stories were secrets, really. Because for me, I started writing late. I started writing when I was 20. And what made me start writing, just this idea of secrets, there were a lot of secrets that were revolving, that were always just kind of around me, especially family secrets, especially secrets about women. And these are things that I wanted to know what those secrets were. And when I started writing, I was really concerned with answering and kind of digging into those secrets. And I found that storytelling allowed me to, one, ask those questions. And two, it gave me agency to kind of dig into those secrets, to ask those questions. Because a lot of times, if you asked about these secret stories that you would hear like a little bit of something, and then people would be quiet. And then if you asked about it a little more, they'd tell you to shut up. I found that being a storyteller allowed you to ask those questions without people shutting you down. So the need to satisfy my curiosity was really where I started. So it really does function like this kind of technology, or this application. I love that. The extension of your curiosity and the problem-solving aspect. I love that. Matt, did you want to? Yeah, and I just always like telling stories for their own right. I mean, I've been doing this for as long as I can remember. And I was fortunate enough to have parents who encouraged me and wanted me to do it. And I'm all over the map in terms of genre, because I figured if you're going to make stuff up, why limit yourself to just literary fiction or just straightforward stuff? And the constant theme for me, like my mother, my grandfather on my mother's side was a missionary from St. Louis who went down to Brazil and stayed in South America. So my mother was born in the Brazilian jungle and grew up in Argentina during the Prone administration and didn't get in the US until she was 23. And our house became Ellis Island for all of the Brazilian and Uruguayan and Argentinian relatives coming up. So I kind of grew up in this multicultural theological debate society where I was surrounded by people who saw things very differently than I did and were not going to change. And you're not allowed to kill each other, you just gotta have your fights and get along. And so the one sort of common thread through all my writing is I like telling stories about people from different points of view or different worldviews being forced to interact with each other in a way that doesn't allow for any easy outs. And I also just like telling stories about people who aren't like me and trying to do psychologically realistic portraits of them. So that's sort of what this has allowed me to do. And then I like on top of that to just be able to talk about vampires and whatever. Right, vampires, and I love the vampires and whatever. I'm a massive fan of horror as well. And for very similar, actually very similar reasons as you, Victor. So I was thinking about this as you guys are speaking. So there's obviously been this I don't know, resurgence of what people call Afrofuturism, right? We like to call it black speculative culture or black speculative cultural production. What are some of the things you think have kind of caused this really intense interest in fantasy science fiction horror that's basically kind of off the beaten track as far as like the mainstream or dealing with people of color's day to day lives but in a speculative fashion. Do you have any comments about what do you think is going on with this resurgence or this renaissance of black speculative culture? I just made that one. No, I just thought about it when you were talking. I'm sorry. You know, take your time. Well, I think that the interest in the need to hear those stories has always been there. Always been there. I think that what has shifted is that story creators are realizing that one, it's okay to write those stories, that they can write those stories and that people want to hear them. I think that that's the main thing because like this, the interest in science fiction, the interest in, I'm just gonna say African rooted narratives with speculative elements, that's not new. That's not new at all. It's absolutely right. But like this feeling that yes, we can write those stories. I think that is new. I think that yes, we can write these stories on our own terms. That's still very, very new. I think that there's still storytellers and creators out there who feel like they can't yet but I think that they're seeing more and more of what's coming out now and they're feeling braver and braver but that need and that want to see these stories has been around since human beings were telling stories. And it also got cheaper to do. Now, when I was coming up, you had to basically find a publishing house to publish you if you wanted to get a novel out and now there are other routes to do that. It still helps if you're not a practical person to have somebody do the publication for you but you can get your stuff out on the internet, you can get attention drawn to stuff that never was before and there are a lot more markets to sell into and very belatedly now, yes, the people with money are realizing, oh, this is actually a really good investment. You weren't lying to us when you told us in 1980 that you could make money doing this. Right. Well, I think maybe there's also just the reality of all that technology that allows a lot for your access or ability for people to communicate their desire for these stories and then just generations of people like that scene in World War Z when the zombies are at the wall and they just start piling up and piling up and piling up and piling up. Well, we're the zombies. And we breach the wall. Now we devour everything. And I think that's a good one. We are the zombies. Why would we be that? That's right. Yeah, definitely. I totally agree with that. One of the major things I look at is the democratization of the means of production. And a lot of times you would feel like you're kind of isolated. You are that particular geek of color that's isolated in a particular way. You don't have to be like that anymore. So that's totally wonderful. And you have, of course, events like this that are popping up all over the place that are actually bringing together enclaves of people to talk about this work. And I think that this notion of the gatekeeper is like which gate? What gate? So you talked a little bit about scenes that popped in my head. So as a creator, I always have small nuggets of things and stories that I create that I love or that I really feel proud of. Can you talk about an instance in one of your stories that you feel really resonated with you as a writer, as a creator, that you felt was that perfect nugget that when someone read it that they would resonate with it. I just came with that one too. It just popped in my head. Well, I was talking with you. What I like about that question is it's a great trap to make it seem like, oh, so they're just going to sit up there and talk about how they're great? They came up with great things and they knew it in the moment. And that's my answer is just turning it back on you. Oh, what? Well, one of my favorite things? Let me do it that. You're like anti-moderating. So is there a piece? I mean, I'd like to brag on your writing. Oh, I'm just kidding. OK. But I will say, to add to that, I find actually, sometimes there are things that I know for sure. I write it down, that sentence, that scene. And I'm like, this is it. And it just falls dead. Like, that also happens too. I'm speaking the other side of things. I'm absolutely sure this is going to be a heartbreaker. And then my editor or my wife or something like that, I'm like, you should just cut it before that scene happens. Oh. I have learned by now to say, OK, you're probably right. You're absolutely right. Hilarious. I don't know. Any particular. Yeah, I mean, what about some of the more recent work? Like, been to your something? The thing is that for me as the writer of those works, I feel like the whole thing. Of course. Resonates in that way for me every aspect of it. When I think of the Binti trilogy, there isn't one scene or thing in it that sticks out more than the rest. Because I see, especially when a novel is finished, I see the novel as a living thing. That's right. It's a thing. It's breathing. And then when it's released out in the wild, it's this creature that's out there. They're the wild, right? At least this is the wild. But so it's like pointing to, you take a human being and pointing to a human being's lung and saying, oh, this is the most valuable part of that human being. Good point. So I can't really. Think about answering the question. Yeah, you can't really take a part of it without it being connected to another part of it. So it's a hard, if I were, OK. So I'm going to try to answer your question. In the Binti trilogy, there are these living ships. And I love those living ships very much. So they're shrimp-like. And they have breathing rooms in them. So when they leave the earth, they are ships that can leave the earth and live outside, live in space. And that's kind of a fantasy of mine. I'd love to be able to travel the cosmos without a ship, without having to rely on all this other technology just to become something else. So those living ships kind of manifest that fantasy that I have of being able to move through the universe without the baggage of technology. I almost said the baggage of our bodies. So no, I like having a body. But yeah, the baggage of needing technology to be able to move around in space. So yeah, living ship. That's awesome. That's a good question. I knew it. I knew it was a thing. What about you, Matt? Yeah, I'm kind of, I get that same general answer where, for me, it's not one thing. I mean, I think if there is, for me, it's not so much a thing in the book itself. It's a moment where when I start a book, I'm obsessed with the idea of, and I've got a sense in my head of the way I want to feel when I read it. I'm writing it mainly for me, and obviously hoping that other people will like it too. But you start out, and I usually have a pretty good idea of the first six chapters or so. And then I know how it's going to end. And then there's this foggy area in the middle with little peaks and scenes poking up out of the mist. And writing it is basically a process of filling in that foggy area. There comes this moment when the front end meets up with the back end that I know, it's not done yet, but I know that it actually works, and it feels the way I wanted it to feel when I'm writing it, the way I was imagining it. That's, to me, the thing there. Right, right, so it's not so much a specific moment or a specific item in the book itself. It's that moment of completion when it's like, okay, this was worth doing, spending three years of my life on it. It feels the way I wanted it to feel. Right, right, right, so it's just kind of like, I don't know, this epiphany or this affect that you get. And I can point at little bits of business that make me that I'm like, oh, yeah. That's really clever, but it's really that totality of I got it. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely, it's a composition and it has life, and I love that aspect as well. I was, for a second when you said the mist, I geeked out, I thought about the Stephen King movie. Oh yeah. Sorry, I couldn't stop myself. It was like, oh, anyway, our guy. I love your analogy of the story being a person or an entity. That's kind of how I definitely think about the work that I make, and yeah, so it is like, creating life or giving birth or making this new living thing. So you all have been fortunate enough, I guess, fortunate, I suppose, to have your work be optioned to be turned into different types of mediations, right? So how does it feel to actually take, for someone to take something that you've spent all this time on and that you've cultivated, that you've edited and stayed with and been obsessed with for so long and actually put out into the wild, as you said, and then have someone say, hey, you know what? Let's take this entity and let's make it maybe even wilder or let's change it, let's adapt it. You know, how do you, what does that feel like? And what are some of the process that you go through when you're dealing with that kind of situation? Which is wonderful, I'm excited about the properties that will be created from your stories, you know, and then congratulations on that. But I know that it has to be some type of emotional connection or some type of maybe disruption of some kind that happens when that transpires, so what do you think? Well, so me, I have two things. One thing that I'm adapting myself and that's been a process of learning to not care about the book so much. Like the book is the book and the, say for TV, the show is the show and the two things can't be the same. But for the other project, it's somebody else who's gonna be doing that work and I would say what was fortunate was in the first conversation we had before we went through with things, I got to talk with them about what they were thinking and it was really nothing I would do. But they had good reasons why they were doing it. And I felt like, okay, maybe as a writer or maybe as a oldest child, I don't know what the reason is, I'm a very controlling person, but I need to learn to let go of that and trust that there are other smart town to people on this earth who can do something new with what the kernel was. And so I think that degree of sort of humility about it helped a lot to let that go. And I'm kind of excited for like, I can't wait to see what you do. No, seriously, yeah. I mean the collaborative process is super exciting and scary. And scary. Yeah, I've got a few things that have been optioned and so I have Who Fears Death was optioned by HBO and then I have the short story, Hello Moto, that has been made into a short film called Hello Rain. And there are some other things that I can't announce yet. But for me, it's been a really interesting experience. And I'm not the type of writer who holds on to my stories very tightly. I just feel like they are proud and strong in themselves. So I feel like they'll survive out in the world. That said, there's a difference, at least for me in my experience, there's a difference between TV and film. Film for a novelist watching your novel turned into a film or made into a film or adapted into a film is a painful thing. A very, very painful thing. One that I'm very weary of. So we'll leave that alone. TV on the other hand, I think I like more because and it's not like I said, I'm not really, I don't hold on closely to the story. I'm always very interested in seeing what all these other brilliant creators with different skill sets and ideas and visions have for what I've created. I'm really interested in that. And I also remain deeply involved too because I just feel like some things need to be, you let things go but some things need to, you need to have some control over some things and that's important to me. But with TV, what I love about TV is that a novel will stretch out. And sometimes the TV show will go beyond the novel and then you get to see what more of the story there is and I find that very exciting. And then a lot of times with TV series they can take just small scenes in the novel that you didn't get to explore and you might get to see like that little part expand into something more. So I find the whole thing very exciting. I find all kinds of writing learning experiences. And I'm always interested in learning and you mentioned humility. There's a humility that writers should come at things with where you don't know everything and you should be aware that you don't know everything and when you come at things in that way you learn a lot more. So I'm very willing to let people tell me things that I don't know and I'm willing to hear that. And so that can be easily said for dealing with my stories being optioned and I don't know everything. And I'm very open to listening because every time I listen I learn something new. I learn something new about how to tell stories for this medium which is very visual which is very different from novel writing. So it's all been a great learning experience and I think that's the most valuable part for me. Excellent, excellent. So yeah, I've got three things in play actually. Bad Monkeys has been optioned for Margot Robbie and so at this house in order has been optioned as an opera by Nico Muley. That I did not know about, okay. I mean, but the thing is with opera the lead time is even longer than with film so I may be much older by the time it actually sees the light of day but I'm kind of psyched about that. And then the big one is Lovecraft Country is being done by Jordan Peele and Misha Green for HBO. That's right. And... I told you they don't. Anyway. That was a weird thing. I mean the novel started out as an unsuccessful TV pitch back in 2007. I couldn't get the people I was talking to interested in the idea of doing the X-Files with a black family in Chicago in 1954. And so I figured out a way to do it as a novel. I was thinking in the back of my head that if this works, maybe it'll be proof of concept that no really, this could be a good story. And for once my timing was just right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But some peoples aren't. What is that? What is it? Oh man. That was for my flight. I'm sorry. I haven't silenced it. That was awesome. That was perfect. Let me make sure mine turned off. Hold up. Okay. All right, continue. I'm sorry. So basically Jordan Peele liked my book. And I'm actually really excited to see what they do. And I always feel like I've told my version of the story already. So at this point it's on the shelf. It'll always be there. And I'm curious to see what they're gonna do differently. And you know, it's like so far as from what I can see. It's not gonna be my lovecraft country, but that's kinda cool. It's another variation. And I think it's what maybe we're saying about TV expanding things outwards. I mean the book, because in part I think because I was sort of thinking about it as a proof of concept, it's structured very much like a season of TV. And you could actually break the chapters as episodes if you wanted to. But there's still plenty of room. And Misha was just tweeting last week that they've got the writer's room together. And they're already bouncing ideas off the wall. And she's very, very excited. I'm very, very excited. So yeah, it's gonna be interesting seeing something of mine in translation and where it goes from there. I'm super excited about it. I am too. And I was like, oh, I love that idea. Speaking of lovecraft, obviously, I'm serious, sorry. He's gonna come. I was trying to figure out, I know. What is the thing? I mean, I think like a lot of us, we grew up reading weird fiction and science fiction, fantasy, horror. And HP Lovecraft is unavoidable, right? I mean, I think, well, I mean, yeah, yeah. It's unavoidable. I think it's unavoidable. And this is something that Victor and I was talking about last night, that a lot of the mythology that he's created or he created, or along with his compadres who he actually had shared universes and things like that to carry on some of the mythos that he helped put into play. It's hard to deny that a lot of the things that he put into play are like part of the DNA of some of our popular media, right? I mean, but also it's hard to deny that he was a prototypically xenophobic and racist and probably extremely classist, right? And this comes through in some of his constructions of the grotesque, other of the abject as well, right? So, you all three of you have some connections with his mythology. I was curious to see what brought you to talking about his work and how you use it. I know that Nettie's space is a little bit more resistant, but I would love to hear. I would love to hear. I would love to hear. Oh, the shade, I love it. I love it. I love it. Yeah, so can I tell us about what led you to talk about or to kind of remix or reinterpret some of the things that Lovecraft was dealing with? And yeah. Well, in my case, I mean, I sometimes I think, like if you are introduced to something, like if you have an uncle or an aunt who's not a terribly good person, but they've been good to you when you were young, in some small way, very difficult to stop loving them entirely, right? And in fact, I think in some ways, the default that people go to is like, well, I loved them when I was younger, so I can't talk bad about them at all, right? Which I think is a different kind of family human dynamic that is also unhealthy. Because then you don't get to sort of, you don't get to take apart what was bad about what they did, even as you appreciate what might have been good for you when you were young. And so I really think like, like I have friends and close people who I try to give Lovecraft to now as adults and they just bounce off of him, I think because if you don't access him at a certain time, I do wonder if it's just too silly and too troubling for you to just drop all that stuff and get into, right? But I mean, but by that standard, I mean, I've got family members who never watched Star Wars when they were young. And then, you know, in this next round, we watched Star Wars together and they're just sitting there just like, what is this nonsense? Ridiculous. And it's terribly acted. What are you doing? There's two good actors in this entire first series. And they're not wrong either, but I sit there and be like, how dare you? This is slavery. Good is whatever. Like Flash Gordon, right? Yes, exactly. So at least for me, coming back to Lovecraft more recently, for this novel I wrote that came out in 2016 called The Ballad of Black Tom, it was 2015 and it was the summer I had just finished up a draft of a novel and sent it to my editor. But like, sometimes, you know, after you're done with a big writing project, your muscles are still actually, they still want to move a little bit. You still have some energy left and I was kind of scrambling around for a thing to do and I was poking books off the shelf to read and I pulled down this book of Lovecraft stories and I was like, it's been forever since I read that. And then in the same moment as that, that was to say it was 2015, so it was the summer when cops were shooting black people, is to say it was every summer, right? Unfortunately, but it was that summer and any number of black folks were being shot by the cops and I was reading the Lovecraft as that news was popping off and I started thinking to myself, how could I talk about the present by going through this dude in the past? And in particular, his one maybe most racist story called The Horror at Red Hook, how could I essentially take that story from him and use it in the way I want and by using it by writing this story in the past, I could talk about the present in a way that would surprise a reader. And for me, that was the, so I had loved him and then I hated him and then I came to a place of like, it's complicated. Yes, it is, yeah, I flew through that in November too. Thank you for that, yeah. I think the first time I came across Matt's work was in an interview between you and Victor, I believe. So what? It was weird timing, our books dropping exactly the same day. Yeah, yeah, the same day. Heard rumblings about a black time as Lovecraft Country was coming up and I kind of backed into the Lovecraft theme with that because again, my point of entry originally was the X-Files and the question you have to answer if you're gonna have a show about people having recurring paranormal adventures is what's special about these folks that they're encountering monsters every week? And my answer for this was that it was a, it's a black family on a travel agency in Chicago in 1954 and the agency publishes a fictional version of the Green Book called The Safe Negro Travel Guide and my Fox Mulder character is the son of the family, Atticus Turner, who's a field researcher for the guy whose job is to drive around the country looking for hotels and restaurants that will take him in. And he's also a nerd, so he's the kind of guy if he sees the Loch Ness monster running across the highway in the middle of the night he's curious rather than just freaked out and he's got the genre savvy to know how to deal with that. So it's gonna be on the one hand, this family dealing with weekly weird tales starring black protagonists in traditionally white roles and then at the same time, obviously it's a black family living in the Jim Crow era in the era of legal segregation dealing with more mundane horrors of that. So they needed something to connect the two kinds of horror and Lovecraft was kind of perfect for that because you've got the cosmic horror that he's famous for and but he's also a white supremacist. So Lovecraft Country became kind of, yeah, it was a reference both to the paranormal realm where monsters come from but also white America and that's how I got into that. And then I came up with a backstory about a group of very Lovecraftian white sorcerers who have designs on Atticus's family. And so that's how that got in there. And Lovecraft is just a subset of the genre stories that I wanted to be able to play with that way and redo, so yeah. Excellent, excellent. So what are you doing? Oh, God, okay. Okay, so I'm trying to get my thoughts together. Oh, what are my connections to Lovecraft? That's your question. A little bit, I mean, when I knew I was gonna be talking to the three of you, I was like, oh, that is an interesting thing to talk about. I don't have any connections to Lovecraft. I mean, I don't think that every, like for example, I see an octopus, I don't think Cthulhu, you know? I think his octopus is cute, it's intelligent. Yes, they are cute. It's intelligent, they have cities, they have control of their bodies, they would rule the earth if it weren't for their short lifespans. That's what I think of when I see an octopus. I love monsters, I do love monsters. I love large, destructive beasts. Yes, Kaiju, I love Kaiju. And I grew up reading a lot of horror. If I had any connection to Lovecraft, which I can't even stand saying that. Sorry. Because I'm not a fan, I'm sorry. I think we're clear on that, and that's an understatement of me not being a fan. But. Well, it used to work connection loosely, but I'm hoping that you will talk about it because I think it was a resistant space. Yeah. Okay, I'm sorry, I'll shut up. But I grew up reading a lot of horror, I will say that. And so if any of Lovecraft's DNA, which is a horrible thought, but if any of Lovecraft's DNA, literary DNA were in my work, it would be through the horror that I grew up reading because in my teens, for some reason, I was obsessed with horror. Like I read it like just, I was just consuming it like candy, I love candy. Yeah. And so I was reading Clive Barker, I was reading Robert McCammon, I was reading a lot of Stephen King, just consuming all of that. And all of those authors are highly influenced by Lovecraft. So if I had any connection, it would be in that, through that route. But I don't know, I just. Probably about the World Fantasy Award too. Oh, that. Yes. Yeah, that's kind of. Yeah, the World Fantasy Award. Do I have to tell that story? No, you know what? Maybe not. You know what? Yeah, okay. I'm a moderate moderator. I will summarize it quickly, really, really quickly. So my novel, Who Fears Death, won the World Fantasy Award in, what was it, 2010 for Best Novel. And I was the first black person, I'm not sure if it was a person of color, I think it was a person of color, who, to win that for Best Novel, and Who Fears Death, post-apocalyptic set in a part of Africa in the future, featuring a sorcerer, you know. These things were, that was a big deal for that novel to win that award. So when I wasn't at the award ceremony, they mailed the trophy to me, and it turned out to be a bust of H.P. Lovecraft's head. Okay, so, so yes, I guess it needs to tell us. And so I knew of Lovecraft, I was not a fan. I wasn't, at that time, you know, I knew Lovecraft's work mainly through, just coming across some of his short stories when I was an undergrad. But I didn't, and I knew of his issues, I knew of them, but I didn't know just how deep they were. And so I had this trophy, and I was proud of it. I'm like, oh yeah, this is my trophy, but it's Lovecraft's head, but look, it's my trophy. And okay, and I was showing it off to my ex-husband. Like, look at my trophy, and he's a poet. And he looked at it, and he was like, wait a minute, is that H.P. Lovecraft? And I'm like, yes, and he's like, let me show you something. And so he took me to the internet and showed me Lovecraft's poem, which was called The Creation of the Nigger. And so, like, when I saw that poem, his issues, the depth of his issues really kind of became clear to me. And this trophy being the award that I was given for this novel became very clear. And it was one of those moments where, you know when you don't wanna be that black person? You just don't wanna be the one, but I knew I had to be the one. I knew, I knew it was important to at least bring this forward, because it's one thing for this author to be celebrated, and that's fine, but I think an author should be celebrated in his or her or zur, entirety, completely. And I felt like this aspect of him was not being brought to the forefront. And I felt that maybe they should rethink the shape of this trophy. I didn't demand it, but what I did was I went back and I wrote this essay about my feelings about this award and receiving this award. It basically portrayed my experience more than making any demands. I did not say that you should change this award. That essay went on to kind of start a conversation in the science fiction and fantasy world. It was also, it wasn't the first time I received death threats, but it was, you know, it was one of those times where I received them because it got very heated. It got very heated, it got very racial. It got very problematic, but this went on for years, and then eventually some other writers jumped into it as well, jumped into the conversation as well, and now I think it was just last year they finally changed the shape of the award because of this conversation. So that's, yeah, that's my connection to Lovecraft. Thank you. Thank you. All right, and all of those stories, that's an extremely important story, particularly in this space when we're talking about, you know, dealing with this idea of symbolic annihilation where you erase someone's story or to remix people's stories. I think it's extremely important. And again, I'm very honored to be on the stage with three brave souls who make their own mythology and who are, I think in some ways, you know, turning out these wild tales to excite us and to empower us to go out there and fight the good fight. So I really thank you for this opportunity. I'm extremely honored. So I am going to open up, I don't, two questions, that's all we got time for. Is that cool? Two, do, two. Yes, please. Yeah, yeah. You're first. You're first, yeah. That's a really complex question. Yeah. So maybe one question. Sorry. That's difficult. Well, I'm a big believer in the routine, whatever that routine might be, but so just to quickly say, my wife and I have two kids. Before we had the kids, I could spend six hours writing and produce maybe a paragraph of work. And I would say it was because I'm so precise and I'm so careful. And it's also because I would listen to some music and I'd say, you know, I need inspiration. I'm gonna watch a half hour of a movie. And I'm a this, this, and this, you know, like that. And you just say, that's right. And, you know, the bed should be made, whatever. And so then our first child was born, our son, and my wife is a writer as well, which means we are both teachers. And so he was born at the end of May. So we had a little bit of summer off. And she said, like, look what I think we need to do. Each of us get two hours out of the house away from this wonderful, but draining human, yes? And so my normal routine would have been to go, I'll go downtown, all this isn't this, but now I only have two hours. And I know that two hours is going to be enforced. Yes? So I found a Dunkin Donuts around the corner from where we live, right? And there was a bathroom in the bus station next door so I was set, yeah? And I sat down for that two hours and I worked and it was very difficult to get myself going, what am I gonna write about, blah, blah, blah. But I found after about three months of that, in that two hours I would, without fail, produce much more than I ever used to produce in six. Yeah? And it was because I was absolutely concentrated in that time, put my phone down, nothing else. And as a result now, my writing routine is just, I write from 10 to 12, five days a week when we have breaks, three days a week when I'm teaching, when school is on. And that's all I do, from 10, as soon as it hits noon, I stop, I'm done for the day, I might do some reading, I might do this and that, but I've done my writing. And the only thing I wanna throw out there though is I feel like I've talked about that in the past and sometimes people, my wife and I, sometimes when we have a fight, after the fight has sort of dissipated, we'll sit down at the dinner table and we'll say, to each of us, what did you hear me say versus what we, I think I said, right? So I like to say I am not telling anyone, you have to write for two hours a day, you have to do this and this, you have to produce 500 words, I'm not in any way suggesting some concrete rule. I'm only saying that I think many human beings thrive on a certain routine, especially if you're gonna produce work. And so the whole point of my little thing that I just said is just I found a routine that works for me, your life will probably, if you can find a routine that works for you and stick with it, you will produce in the manner you need to produce and over time, you will accumulate pages. And so for me, just as a writer, just the last thing I would say is like, in that two hours, say on average, I produced three pages in that day, maybe, right? At the end of a week, that's 15 pages. In a month, that's 60 pages. At the end of a year, that's 720 pages. 500 of it is garbage. It doesn't matter. You have to write through that garbage. But for me, producing those pages in that routine way is the way that I keep myself from waiting three years to produce 720 pages. And 500 of it is still garbage. That's the thing that never goes away. So the routine helps me to clear out the colon of my right, and I'm sorry. It went too far. I went too far, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It was great. My writing routine, and that was really good. You've made my job a lot easier. A lot of things I don't have to say now. My writing routine has changed over time. When I first started, I was very organized. I also, yeah, I didn't have my daughter, and I could write the whole day. And I was writing every day. But that was because I wanted to. It wasn't because I felt I had to. I also don't believe in that adage, even though Stephen King says we should. I don't think you have to write every day. I think you do what works for you, and that's very specific to you as an individual. Also, know that just because you do something as a routine, and as a habit, doesn't mean it's the right habit for you. So you have to know when to switch it up. So that said, yeah, when I started off, I would always, I'd have to write in a, I had to be in a white room, just had to have white walls, where there's a window, yes. And I had to write a certain number of hours. Like I would sit, and I would literally write for many, many hours at a time. That was before I had a lot of responsibilities. Now, my writing routine, I could describe it in two words, organize chaos. It's like, I can't exactly tell you how I do it, but I know I do it. The first Binti novella that I wrote, I wrote it in airports. I wrote it on the airplane. I wrote it while on the move, you know? And I've learned, because I have a very busy schedule where I could be in three different countries within the month, and I still have deadlines, and I still, and not even the deadlines. The deadlines aren't even the problem. It's more, it's what's in my head. Like if I have to write something, I have to write it. So even if there is just complete madness around me, I will write that story. And that's, but that's something that I've learned to do and that I've kind of become, I've become that over the years. Like the way I started off is very different than the way I am now. I've written a lot of novels. So a lot of what I guess would be routine would be just, it's like something that I don't think about anymore. It's something that just, it's just a part of me. So when I say that I just do it, it's that routine that I don't even have a name for, that I can't quite put my foot on, that has developed over the years. Because I've maintained, when I started my PhD, for example, I started with several other students. We were all writers. By the time that, by the time we all finished, I was the only one left standing, you know? And it's because when I first started that PhD, really, oh, I tried to beat the creativity out of you. But I came in there with a kind of set way of doing things. Like I knew I had to write and it was just something that I always would do. So even when I had, when I was reading four books at the same time and taking my exams and writing all these papers, I still wrote. Like no matter what, I always still wrote. And the same with when my daughter was born, I still always found time to write. So sometimes I would have an hour a day. Sometimes I would have the whole day. Sometimes I would have, I'd have to write at night. Sometimes I'd have to write it in the day. That's what I mean by chaos. It's like, you just get it done. So, yeah. Lovely. Yeah, I mean, they both pretty much covered what I would say in terms of, sorry. Now, discipline is really important for me too. Because if I don't do it every day, it's just so easy to, you know, if I'm gonna take a break from writing, I'll take a break from writing. But if I wanna get stuff done, I really do need to make myself work every day. And I, I guess the only thing I would add is that, that wanting the finished product badly enough really helps. If you're, you know, and that want can come from I need to pay the bills. I need to meet this deadline so I don't embarrass myself in front of my publishing house or it can just be, if I don't write this book now, it's never gonna happen. And when I think back to my own experience at Cornell, there were plenty of other people in the English department who were, you know, interested in writing. And I think the main reason, they really may have been as talented as I was, but the difference was that this was always what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be. And, you know, I took the least labor-intensive way to get it done when I had a choice. But I was always, it was always something back in the back of my head when I started to get too lazy saying, no, you've really got to get moving on this if this is what you want to do with your life. And I think just some of the other folks just didn't have that and that was the difference. So if you can find a way to want it badly enough and to push yourself to go for it, you know, and that's why you should always, don't let somebody else tell you what story you should be writing. Write the story you most want to tell that nobody else is gonna do if you do it. And that's probably the best way, a positive way to make yourself sit down and get it done, excellent. You know what, I lied, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, we don't have time for another question. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, brother, I didn't expect that DD would be. Yeah, so here's the thing though, here's the thing. Our authors are about to go and do a signing in the addition room in the Latino Hispanic room and you can hold your questions till then. So now I'm not a moderate moderator, I gotta cut it off, because we have another panel. So my apologies for lying to you. It was DD's fault, I was just kidding, no it's not. Thank you so much, thank you so much. You're wonderful, thank you.