I all heard out with a plan and it never survives contact with the first draft. The characters do what the characters do once I start writing and sometimes I'll start writing and I'll realize, well that's not gonna work, I can't really do that. So I start trying things a little different. It diverges from the plan really quickly. Hello, you always need to do this gonna build podcasts. It's a podcast where we interview entrepreneurs, founders, engineers, product managers and other interesting people about
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Without further ado, for today's episode we have a software engineer turned science fiction writer, a very popular one, Dennis E Taylor, who is the author of the Bobbiverse series, which is an audible bestseller. He also wrote Outland and wrote Kill and a few other novels, which are just absolutely amazing. We love Dennis's books.
So today we talked to Dennis about his transition from software engineer to full-time writer. We talked about his process of kind of ideas, writing, publishing. We talked a lot about the whole process of how you get your book into audible, how the contract worked for him, how he works with a narrator, a reporter, and how they do edits.
We went into all of these details of how a book is being built. So yeah, enjoy this episode, which was called named Builders Gonna Write.
Dennis, it's amazing to have you here. I am a huge fan. So as soon as the Bobbiverse books drop, like I immediately get it, and recently I was in India, the day before I left, I think Roadkill was available on audible. And I was like, yes, this is my whole flight now.
Unfortunately, I finished it like I think before I even landed in India because I was like a 30-year flight. But yeah, huge fan of all the books. That's amazing.
And I've shared it with a lot of people. One of those is Ilya, who has taken it even further, I think.
Yeah, so I think it was 2019. Arnab is like, check out this new series, Bobbiverse, like you're gonna love it. I was actually staying by myself because my family was out and I went camping to Mount St. Helens by myself.
And I listened to all of the three books, I think all three of them were available at the time. In the same camping trip, I basically just couldn't stop listening.
So I was the enemy of nowhere, listening to those books, really enjoyed them. More recently, I hooked up my 11-year-old son on the Bobbiverse. So he read two of your books, really enjoyed them. I'm gonna have him read the other two as well.
The interesting thing, I think, you were probably the first celebrity who I messaged directly. It was, I think, 2019-2020 when I finished your books.
I also read the headlines by his bootstraps, where the main character was Bob, and Bob was self-replicating, which kind of similar to me to Bobbiverse in a way. And so I DMed you on Twitter. I'm like, is the name Bob from Bobbiverse?
Like a tribute, like a homage to Heinlein. And you said, no, it's just like a very common name, that's why I used it. But what struck me is that you responded to me. I was like, wow, like a famous book author is responded to me.
And now here we go a few years later, we are talking. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Glad to be here. I do try to respond to DMs and such like, but I don't always get to it.
I'm not very good at social media, a little impatient with it. Sometimes I think it's just not my jam.
Still, yeah, it's amazing. Welcome to the show. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about, I think, your journey from software into this.
Of course, talk about Bobbiverse and Roadkill and Outland and all of that in between two. So yeah, I guess first let's get started.
You were a software engineer for a long, long time, right? And you also did some odd jobs, I think before that.
So tell us a bit about how that life was and how did you end up in writing science fiction. Did you always want to write?
The IT career started the same way as just about everything I do. I just fell into it. It was not planned. I bought a Radio Shactara SAD back in the days when nobody knew what computers were basically.
I really got into it. And the next thing I knew I had a job programming. Of course, back in those days, if you knew which end of a keyboard was up, you could get a job as a programmer.
It was the Wild Wild West, really. I was in IT for 35 years, programmed various different languages, various different operating systems. I ended up on my last job at ICBC in North Vancouver.
The big blue building on Esplanade. And that's where I was working when I started writing. I did not, again, fell into it. I basically started writing Outland on a dare. And it worked out for me more or less.
And then I wrote, we are a Legion, as my second attempt. And that one got me an agent, and that's when things got serious.
So who dared you to write the first book?
My wife. I've told this story before, but it bears repeating. I bought a Galaxy Notepad and I installed Kindle on it.
And I downloaded a lot of free books from Amazon because there are a lot of free ebooks on Amazon. And you always have to be careful as an author, not to trash other authors, or it would be critical or anything like that.
But some of the books that are on Amazon really, really need editors at minimum.
Anyway, I made some costic comment, and my wife said, well, why don't you try? And I thought about it for a while, fired up word, and just started writing. And it just went from there.
This is like, towards the end of your software career, right? Like after about 35, 40 years.
It was about 35 years into it. And in retrospect, it was the end of my software career, because once the bulb of yours started flying, I retired.
So till then, you had not written or thought about writing like science fiction at all.
I thought about writing the same way you think about skydiving or visiting the island or something like that. It's not a serious plan. Just point, wouldn't that be interesting?
I've never had grand ambitions as a writer. I haven't been writing the great novels for 15 years or anything like that.
Instead, you are a full-time writer now. And I'm curious if full-time writing, like you've had a few successes, right? With the science fiction, can it sustain your lifestyle or you also have to rely on other sources of income?
I am entirely dependent on my writing income. We can talk about that more when you get into the whole publishing types, because the publishing format that I'm in makes a huge difference to my income.
Just before we get into all that, why don't we lay out for the casual listener perhaps who doesn't know about Bobby verse and Outland and all of these other short stories?
Or not short stories. They're pretty meaty on their own roadkill and all that. Why don't you take a candidate or we can our version of it if you like?
Just lay off the land of what Bobby verse is. I found the whole premise very cool and that's what got me hooked immediately. I think by the end of the first chapter you started, this is where this is heading and I was like, okay, I'm into this.
The whole basic premise of the Boba verse is a guy buys a policy to get himself frozen after death, cryonics, and immediately dies, of course, because that's the way books work.
And things don't go according to plan from there. He wakes up 100 years in the future as an uploaded artificial intelligence or a replica.
And as I call them, things are politically far different than they were when he died. He no longer has any rights. He's considered just a computer program.
He is being tested to be the resident intelligence for a von Neumann probe him and I think a half dozen other people shortening the story about he ends up being the one that succeeds, gets sent off into space, has some conflicts with probes from other countries.
Then as von Neumann probes do, he enters star systems, finds resources, replicates himself and sends himself in his new copies off in other directions. I've generally followed up to a half dozen different bobs in the stories.
And because they each give themselves different names to tell each other apart, they're able to be treated as separate characters. But they're able to be treated as separate characters in first person point of view. It's a bit of a gimmick, but it seems to work.
And they all have various adventures out there. It's not just enter star system catalog planets, find minerals, leave. They run into alien species, they run into problems, some of them decide to stay for a while.
Yeah, the book is hilarious. I think they also build a city, if I remember correctly, or like terraform planet, something that sort of, yeah, as you were describing this now that he sort of is awakened, I guess, installed 100 years from now.
I was recently rewatching back to the future with my son and it's so funny to see how they imagined 2015 back in 1985, like flying cars and all that.
So now it just feels so funny how they got it all wrong most of it. So as a writer, when you write about something that's part of the future, how do you think about this problem?
The problem is I'm not doing this as a future is I'm doing this as a novelist. So my primary concern has to be to keep the reader engaged.
So one thing I can't do is make the future so complex and incomprehensible that people just lose interest or can't follow or anything like that. So I try to write it as basically like living in New York with a few extra gadgets.
I don't introduce a lot of excessive gimmickery. If I can use an example, Diminaged by Neil Stevenson, the society portrayed in that book is extremely different than what any of us would be used to.
It was an object lesson to me because I found it hard keeping track of exactly what was going on in that book. So I just decided when I was writing that I would keep things more hometown.
It's been a few years that I read it, but that's the one where there's almost different subspecies of human beings who are like more adopted to space and all that, right?
Yeah, the protagonist or one of the protagonists in one instance gets absorbed into a group mind for a while and loses himself and then eventually comes out.
I mean, it's great science fiction, but you really have to work at it just to keep track of the character.
Right. So and then you have some other like Outland, which is kind of like there's a parallel universe thing going on there.
There's roadkill that I really enjoyed recently where I'll just say the beginning part, which was immediately again captivating like immediately in the first few pages is a guy random, normal guy driving hits something and then doesn't know what he hit because it's invisible turns out it's an alien.
It's an entire like fun story from there. So of all these books, which one is your favorite so far?
Oh boy, actually roadkill I think I had the most fun writing that one is the most semi comedic of the world.
Right, right. Let's get into a little bit of the process and everything else that's going on behind the scenes, right?
You wrote software for a long time. Now you write book. Are there any parallels in your mind between the two?
There are a surprisingly high number of parallels. It's a very similar mindset and it's a very similar development process writing a program writing a book.
You've got guidelines, but very few hard and fast rules, but you've got processes that you have to follow. There's a best practices in terms of what works and what doesn't.
You have to debug the books because you get inconsistencies. My big problem is timeline inconsistencies where this happens before that, but should have happened after it and stuff like that.
I actually spend quite a bit of time with my editor on pretty much every Bob book trying to shuffle things around so that the timeline makes sense because when I'm writing,
I'm just writing the story and things happen that affect other things because there's so many threads in the Bob of course, you have to really be careful about making sure they link to the other properly.
Right. I think in one of the other podcasts you mentioned that this is like an iterative discovery style of writing that you do where you just write and you go where the story is flowing and some tangents you will follow some you will not, but because it's not pre-planned,
you have to come back and read it or change some things that you have already written about.
Yeah, I always start out with a plan and it never survives contact with the first draft. The characters do what the characters do once I start writing and sometimes I'll start writing and I'll realize, well, that's not going to work. I can't really do that.
So I start trying things a little different. It diverges from the plan really quickly.
Yeah, and interesting that the book that has already shipped that is published, it's almost like a box software. So it's out there in the hands of the customers and I assume you can ship some edits to that book, but you can't drastically change the timeline for the next book to make sense.
You never know which version the reader is on for the previous book, right? So you have to work with what you've already done, like as a fixed right?
Yeah, that's the major difference between software and novelization as you cannot ship updates or accursions.
So you mentioned that you have to constantly go back and edit. I am just very curious, is there something like version control that you're doing? How do you keep up with all these edits and all that going back to the previous books?
I have a backup system at home to begin with. I have a network attached storage with some 24 terabytes on it and it doesn't automatically have a differential backup every night and full backup every month.
So I can always go back to an earlier version of whatever. Plus I use Dropbox, which allows me to go back in versions for a month. It saved my bacon a couple of times too.
Right now for my current novel I'm using Scribner, I'm trying it out. It has a certain amount of version control of its own. The jury's still out about whether all continue to use it, but it's great for moving chapters around, which is something I do have a problem with in the early versions.
And when you say either with Scribner, I think I got it or your home big system, is there like a tagging system? Like how do you know which version is what is in which version?
Well, I always only have the current version on the computer. If I need to go back to an earlier version, it's a process. So I'm very careful not to need to very often.
If I'm about to make a big change to the file at the moment, I will create a backup directory really quickly and just copy everything to it. And then if I need to go back, I can just copy the file back, but that's just add hog versioning.
Yeah. And if I was Scribner, what software did you use to write books? Is like Google Docs or something or something more sophisticated word?
I'm using Microsoft Office for 20 years, so I'm pretty used to it. It's not the best software for writing a novel, but the software that you're the most comfortable with is usually the one you use.
So basically you just want the software to be out of the way so you can focus on the idea not on like where is this damn thing formatting.
Yeah, so talking about idea at the universe or Bobby versus like fascinating, right? There's the Von Neumann probes like self replicating, but you have to put some constraints on it. Otherwise the whole story would basically go crazy.
Where do these ideas come from? Have you been thinking about them for a long time or did they start when you started writing these?
No, well, I've been reading science fiction since I was in grade five. That's when I picked up my first science fiction book. You can't be immersed in a genre for that long without picking up a lot of ideas and attitudes and a lot of the times if I'm reading a book and I use Larry Niven's book World Out of Time as an example.
I hate to pick on Larry Niven because he's one of my favorite authors, but you can read a book and it's a good book, but you wish they'd done this instead of that or you wish they'd introduced that or they hadn't done the other thing or whatever.
So when I'm writing a book a lot of the time I'm thinking of all those things that I wish other books had done.
It's like having your own VR where you can just that things up the way you want them to be.
It's actually why we started our podcast app start app made a cast. So yeah, we can just sort of plug with this podcast is best enjoyed with our app, not all of those other apps because ours is better.
But yeah, we did get tired with like, oh, we don't like this about this app and that is why don't we build our own.
Other developers do have a problem with that attitude. I don't know this way.
Yes, talking about the VR that was very fascinating how it allows you to visualize this very different world. The replicants are in right there, not even in space and sometimes even in time together and yet they're able to like all sit down and have a party and go to a baseball game and all that it's really fascinating.
When you said you read science fiction and you want to make some changes, do you keep track of these things over the years have you done that or like when you started writing all this came back to you that okay, you know that book I want to change this about that book.
I didn't have a list or anything like that going but once I started writing and I realized that this was going to be a full time gig.
So I started writing down ideas actually what I do is have an Apple watch and it has voice recorder on it. It's one of my complications on the corner of the thing.
So anytime I get an idea wherever I might be I just hit the button record it and then every once in a while I go through all my voice recordings allocate them appropriately because some of them are chores and things like that too.
I'm not the one to get the thing from the thing and my ideas list has been building on its own that way I've got more than 100 ideas on the ideas list.
A lot of them are only short story ideas but some of them are novelizations.
Did you transcribe those notes because I've tried doing something similar but then I'm like I look at all those notes and I just I don't feel like listening to them.
So I'm curious how you manage that.
I usually have like a dozen of most before I transcribe them so it's five minutes when I'm sitting in front of the computer.
No I just have very long notes I'll go for a walk and then I have like 10 minute note and I have no idea what it is about a month later.
Yeah, I'd be generally speaking my note is only long enough to jog my memory about what the thing was that I wanted to write down.
Once in a while I have gotten into a situation where I listen to a note and I'm thinking what the thing about but mostly it's enough to jog the memory.
I'm curious to go back in the beginning right so you decide to write something so you have an impulse so you pull up your word document and do you just start typing.
I mean you said you have an outline so can you walk us through the whole process from getting an impulse to write something to the point where it's good enough actually I can show it to someone.
Well when I first started of course it was just me so there was no one to answer to and I literally fired up word and started typing.
I had two books that were in my head that when I thought about it and one was outland and one was we are Legion although it was very nebulous at that point.
And I decided I would just almost a mental point flip decided to write outland first and yeah I just started typing I had no idea what I was doing at the time I had no idea of the rules of novelization you know the three acts and the points of you and not filtering and stuff like that there's so much that you find out when you start researching it which I do I'm a bit anal that way.
That we're if I get into something I research the hell out of it so yeah the first book was just heads down hammering away at the keyboard until I had something at that point I had to figure out what I wanted to do with it.
I decided to try getting an agent I went through query tracker and sent queries out to I think 50 or 60 agents and got not so much as a bite so I self published it which is cheap or free.
Oh, nam-san. Oh, nam-san. Yeah. Through KGP. Yeah. At the time there was draft to digital and one or two other software sites that would help you with structuring your novel and so forth.
I made coffee money. I keep saying I made enough money to buy Starbucks a couple times a week which was quite a good positive reinforcement.
I mean I wasn't going to retire on that but people were actually reading my novel and liking it and I thought well let's try again.
So then I started writing we are legion and once I was far enough along I did the query tracker thing again and this time I got an agent.
He's in Allenburg. He tried to push the book in the traditional manner searching from publishers to pick it up. The problem is that I was an unknown author and I'd written a trilogy and most publishers aren't interested in anything but a standalone from an unknown author.
So it didn't get any traction and after a while he presented it to Steve Felberg at Audible and Steve loved it. Steve made an offer and after a while we took the offer and Audible became my primary publisher.
And who is Steve? He's VP of product development or something like that. I was met his card or his email in front of me but he is pretty high up in Audible and also does editing which is quite interesting.
So he is my primary editor when I produce a book. What's interesting is that your publisher is actually an audio company. So it's like an audio first as opposed to text first like most other books would be.
Yeah and that's which I am not a traditionally published author in that I am audio first.
I wonder if it changes how you write at all.
It doesn't change how I write when I'm writing. Well I shouldn't say that it changes it a little bit but it does change the editing because you have to be concerned about the fact that it's going to be spoken.
One of the things that I noticed early on that they used to say one of the rules which be just suggestions in writing is that you should just use said don't growl, croak, snarl, yell and stuff like that.
Except occasionally although a lot of people disagree with that but in audio said becomes annoying beyond belief very quickly.
With audio you use beats more and dialogue tags less and when you use dialogue tags you use said less because otherwise it just creates.
Dialogue tags is like a dash in front of the line right is it. Dialogue tags is like he said blah blah blah or you're directly a script speech to an individual.
So I'm going down to the well he said smiling so that's a dialogue tag.
A beat is when you say something about the speaker without actually describing the dialogue to him and then immediately present the dialogue so Steve smacked himself in the head I can't believe I just did that so that's a beat.
I can't believe you're just making this up in the fly. It sounds so good.
So we were always wondering because Ilya you also listen to the audio books right.
I listen to the audio books yes I haven't read them.
Yeah me too me too and we are like in Reddit and all that people are always like impatiently waiting for the next book to drop it's always audio so it makes sense that audible is your publisher that's why it immediately comes up with the audio books because usually the physical books would come out and then people who love audio are waiting for like six months for all that process to finish and come out so that's awesome.
Yeah, sometimes I can a case of sentiment they've been waiting for like 45 years for the sentiment comics to be converted to audio yeah.
Yeah, or like with George R.R. Martin you're waiting for anything to come.
Yeah, yeah, unfortunately whether you're audio first or text first there's going to be people who want the other one and who are angry at you for taking too long to produce it so you can't win.
Yeah, yeah, my son he would never listen to your audio books at this stage because he's like it's too slow.
He can read the book in an evening but you can't possibly listen to a book in an evening.
I read very fast as well so if I need to consume a book quickly I'll get the text version.
The nice thing about audiobooks though is that you can listen to them while you're doing something else.
I usually listen to audiobooks when I'm snowboarding or mountain biking because if I'm on the lift I'm not doing anything so turn it on and listen to it.
Yeah, that's how I usually listen to dog walks, hikes and all that.
So your audiobooks come out first and then is there another editing process to take it to the physical books or do you just release it pretty much as is?
There will be some minor tweaks. There's a tension. I don't mean that in a bad way but just attention as in there is a push pull between Steven and I when the editing is going on because he edits it primarily for audio because it's his job.
I'm looking at it from the point of view that I'm going to be producing both so sometimes he'll make a suggestion I'll push back because I'll say you know that won't work in the book.
So it's a give and take then when the time comes to produce the text version off on a tangent we go my agent takes care of all the text versions.
He's become sort of a small publishing company for the e versions and the paper versions and he has a couple of people on staff who take care of the production of the ebook and so forth.
So they will do a little bit of editing and tweaking of the covers and stuff like that but it's not the same process by any means.
When you edit the audio version is there a special software like if you have a discussion about a specific paragraph is it like a comment in specific software or is it more like you have to say in this paragraph blah blah blah.
We use word and we turn versioning on and we turn comments on basically I send Steve the word document.
He sends it back with highlighted changes and comments on the side and I accept or reject the changes and respond to the comments and send it back to him and it back and forth back and forth.
It's usually maybe a six week process.
There will also be a femaleing if we have to hammer on a specific point but mostly it's in the word document.
And then it goes into the narration part and you always get a reporter we love him. I think reporter and RC Brae are two voices that are like I immediately realize who's talking if I hear anything from them.
How does that process how does that step work are you involved in that part narration and recording as well.
A little bit only a little bit if there are things that need to be specified in terms of pronunciation I will send a separate set of notes to Ray also in the case of book five I asked him if you can get a Scottish accent in there somewhere I'd love it and he did manage to the thing is way back when we were signing the contract with audible I was thinking will wait for doing reverse because I'd heard him on ready play or one and I thought he did a great job.
He has a lot of energy and the book need somebody with a lot of energy but Steve's job is to make these decisions and make the right ones and he thought that Ray Porter would be a better fit because you need a lot of different voice characterizations in the bomb over.
He set me up with Ray and it worked out extremely well.
So now Ray is narrator for all my books I had one short story that was done by somebody else and all well but it was just a short story so it wasn't an issue.
I think if I ever produced a novel with somebody else as the narrator I would probably get a lot of pushback from the fans.
I was still out of the way we were preparing for this. I listened to an audiobook Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persick and they have a narrator change in the middle of the book. Maybe they did a little bit of pick up of one of the chapters afterwards and then it goes back to the original narrator and that was just so jarring.
I wouldn't say that one narrator is better than the other is just the fact that it is different really threw me off.
I think for the series you have the same problem especially if people binge on them. Well of course the Martian was re-recorded with was that the week re-recorded it.
The original was with Archie Bray and then they couldn't frame it with them on the renewal of the license so they had to re-record it and I thought it was will lead in that they re-recorded it with not sure.
Anyway a lot of fans went ballistic not because the new recording was bad or anything just because they changed it. Where is my Archie Bray?
Talking about I think different voice characters in book four because until the first three books it's kind of Bob and his various replicant kind of versions of Bob.
With their own characters and all but the voice doesn't have to be I think that different the personality is different whereas in book four I forgot the name but there's the female character.
Bridget? Yes. Bridget and I thought he did an amazing job because I was never confused about who's talking about what even though there's like four different characters talking usually in the fourth book all at the same time about they're having discussions it was amazing yeah.
Well when Ray does several different Bob's in the same room or in the same conversation he does give them slightly different voices just so that you can tell who's who but he's not always consistent about keeping that voice in different chapters so you have to treat each chapter as its own thing.
Right talking about fans you mentioned about this other book there was a lot of like fan talking about it there's a huge subreddit for Bobby verse it occasionally comes up on the audible and the other sci-fi kind of subreddits to there's a lot of people engaged and there's a lot of people like passionate about it they have their own opinions and all that do you read through all that do you cultivate it in any way.
No. There's too much social media. I went down the social media rabbit hole early on and I was following Twitter and I was following Facebook and I was following Instagram and I was maybe to a certain extent following Reddit and it was just too much.
I was spending all my time I would basically be coming a social media hound I don't think you can do that unless it's your job and it really isn't my job no disrespect or anything but no I'm not a marketing person I write books my wife abstract of Facebook and Instagram and alerts me if anything needs my attention or if she thinks I should you know look at this this is a great picture or whatever but that is her job.
So maybe I caught you at the right time before you got off Twitter as well. X now. Oh X yeah and of course in response now we have threads and blue sky so tour social media is that I don't have time to keep up with.
Yeah yeah yeah I'm going to ask one more thing about the writing process you mentioned you just sat down and wrote outland till it was done similar with we are legends so there's a lot of hard science in your books that probably takes a lot of research as a whole.
How do you like basically not get distracted because that's something that writers often face and I think even software programmers we face it we're trying to write something but to write something we need to research something and then we are down into the rabbit hola research and then a few hours later what was I doing.
I mean I have occasionally gone down the rabbit hola that extent but I have a strong science background to begin with so for instance Von Neumann probes I already knew about Einsteinian space I already knew about of course being a software engineer digital intelligences and virtual reality already knew about.
So the biggest thing I had to do with we are Legion was nail down the local stars and the distance that I could get the travel times correct I wrote some apps for that and once I've done that then it was just automatic I'm curious if there is like a community of sci fi authors maybe there's a local community that you are part of I wonder if you know that fact of course what kind of background the people mostly have I would imagine that most sci fi writers would have some kind of engineering of science background just because of the nature of what.
Well they're all over the place I know that David Brinn is a physicist and I think Martha Wells is there are definitely some highly qualified people writing science fiction but there are also a lot of people who don't have any particular qualifications except that they write a good story as long as a person sticks to their strengths and or does enough research to make sure they don't stick their foot in their mouth they're going to be fine.
I also think that no matter how much you research you know occasionally everyone will get something wrong and with the enough size social media you will probably have some kind of stickler who would be like you got this thing wrong you don't know anything about it whatever did you have these kind of haters attack you for maybe getting something wrong in the book.
Well the only thing that I can think of that I actually did get wrong was my description of the towel ratio I describe it as getting larger as you get closer to see but in science it's actually it gets smaller as you get closer to see so I've just written that off as something that Bob got wrong and it continues to always call.
Oh well.
That's very smart. Yeah now I have had people come after me for things that they think I've gotten and once in a while I will explain the situation to them but mostly I ignore them you know jee I'm sorry you feel that way bye.
One more software hopefully the last software related question that I had but I was again very curious when you said I wrote some apps to figure it all out what do you write it what's your like go to programming language and do you still code like day today or
if needed C-share and I don't do much coding anymore it's dropped off but I've only got so many hours in the day and I've got a lot of interest I have occasionally fired up visual studio to do a small thing or two but no I'm not writing apps anymore.
I wanted to go back a little bit to the audio because I work a lot with audios I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to audio if a generator got something incorrectly maybe the pronunciation is not correct or some of that kind do you ever do edits and how does that process work of re recording specific parts.
That's exactly what happens I'm actually listening to book five right now and there are a couple of issues that I'm going to be talking to Steve about and either we decide either it's not worth worrying about or it'll have to be re recorded and what gets re recording whether it's a sentence or the entire chapter that's up to Steve for Ray.
They have to figure out how they can correct it.
Have you ever met Ray in person?
Yeah, actually, yeah, last year we went down to California for something entirely different and we just contacted Ray and met him for dinner while we were down there.
Yeah, also in the beginning you said that you leave off the money that you make with the books.
When we were doing the research we also realized that Ray Porter narrated Tim Ferriss' for our work week which is meta in a way because in his book Tim Ferriss writes about you create an artifact, digital artifact and then you sell it artifact so that you don't have to work as in like you don't know what it is.
You don't have to sell your time anymore and that's exactly what you did in your right books and you sell them and you have the same narrator which is what I thought was kind of a fun fact about how things are interconnected in these seniors.
Yeah, I was just going to say that the different income modes, there's the one that depends directly on the number of hours that you put into it, trades and stuff like that.
If you're a plumber for every hour you work, you get certain amount of money and then there's the modes of work where you produce something and then you basically live off it as semi passive income and then you produce something else with authors.
It's called backlist, you know, you have 10 books out there, you're working on your 11th book with the 10 books of producing income while you're working on the future books.
You also mentioned when we started that the format of the books has a lot to do with how much you get or what you get paid out of it. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Well, because I'm not traditionally published, I deal, when I say I, I really mean my agent deal directly with Audible and directly with Amazon.
So it's not really true because it's a more complicated formula, but nominally I get 20% of the book price from Audible for each sale and I get 70% of the book price from Amazon for each sale.
That's the non-audible version. Yeah, for the text record, then there's Kindle Unlimited where you get paid by the page and that's just weird, but there's income and then there's physical books which is an entirely different kettle of fish.
And you mentioned that book five, when is that coming? The current target is September 5th.
Great. Yeah. Book four was actually in terms of world building. That was my most favorite because you're in a completely different space that you have not imagined before in terms of like being in a planet.
Whereas before it was space, so even though you have never thought up those things, those didn't seem any different because you don't know any better. Whereas this time you are comparing it with like earth and how things work here. It's amazing. Yeah.
I enjoyed writing Heaven's River and is kind of cool in that I'm now attached to a certain extent to the concept of the topopolis on Wikipedia and stuff like that and that there's a form of immortality in that I think.
Okay, so while we wrap this up, tell us you've been listening to science fiction for a long, long, like many, many decades. Who are your favorite authors? What are some of the favorite books? Most of my favorites are the older authors, golden age, the Highland, Niven, Clark, stuff like that.
I have been reading less as I got into being an author myself, part of it's a question of time, part of it's a question of not stepping on other people's toes. But I've enjoyed the John Scalzi books that I've read Peter Klein.
These days, I'm more about picking up an individual book rather than following a specific author like Ready Player One. I really enjoyed. But it's the only book by Ernst Klein that I've read.
Right. Have you read on social media, especially in Reddit? There's a lot of chatter about the X-Force series by Craig Allenson and Skippy and your Bob and how they might actually end up in space together at some point. Have you read those books?
Well, I've read the first several of the X-Force books. I think when I started to realize that it was turning into a serialization, almost like Captain Future, I thought I don't have time.
Right. Massive. You've done books so far. Yeah. I haven't read the whole series, but I've read enough to understand Skippy.
I also just kind of thought, have you read the book Dark Matter by Blake Crouch? Yes. Yes. So, you know what it is about. But for the listener's context, it's also a multiverse book where the main character replicates in different multiverses, but it becomes a zero sum game where they sort of almost try to kill each other so that they reclaim their spot in a regional universe or something like that.
So, it's almost like the opposite of Bobbiverse, where Bobbiverse is the anti-zero sum game where they actually build a world together, right? As opposed to Dark Matter, it's almost like a flip side of this. I found it just kind of an interesting thing. I just realized.
Yeah. I'm a great believer in the Prisoners dilemma and tit for tat strategy. I think that you get a lot more done through cooperation, so my books tend to be written that way.
Now that you mentioned game theory, and already you also mentioned the three stages of a novel of a good exact term. I'm curious how much you've studied the formal writing and storytelling and all that after you started writing.
And if it helps your process or it inhibits your process in some way, because now you are familiar with all these expectations of the genre.
I did a lot of research when I suddenly realized that writing was going to be a serious income strategy. I bought books on Amazon, how to characterize and how to develop a plot and stuff like that.
I also did a lot of internet googling, and there are writers forums on the internet, and they have a lot of information on them.
Again, it's another rabbit hole you can get into if you let yourself go on it, but you just find what you can read, what you can internalize, what makes sense, leave what doesn't.
As I've said, most of the rules are just suggestions, but there is a best practice. Some things work, some things don't.
So again, drawing a parallel with the software world for a person to like start writing software. There are these best practices. Again, like their rules, but they're not like really enforced by anybody, except for maybe a code review.
In your case, there isn't a code except maybe by compiler.
But the best practices are not enforced by anybody, except your team, maybe. Anyway, the question that I'm trying to get to is how long would you expect somebody not in the writing world at all to come up with all this, come up to speed with all the best practices and all that.
Because in software, we kind of have a notion that maybe it's about six months or so, that's when you start to get into the flow. Maybe it's about a year.
It's probably about the same with writing. I think it took me about a year. I wrote out London 2014. I started writing, we are a legion at the beginning of 2015.
And by that point, I had picked up most of the rules about point of view and filtering and tension and climax and so on and so forth. And all the niggly little things.
I didn't necessarily agree with all of them, but I knew what they were. So yeah, six months to year. Of course, it depends on how heavily you get into the research too.
Yeah, what I was getting at with this, I was recently reading autobiography by Duff Mackegan, who was a bass player at Guns and Dresses.
So he was talking about how in music, the verse, the chorus, they have the bridge and the chorus again.
And that's how most of the music is composed. Whereas what they were trying to do is like, yeah, just stick a bridge in there or like, forgo the bridge altogether.
Because once you have this idea that it has to follow certain pattern, then you just start to follow that pattern subconsciously because that's what you've internalized and just becomes just like everybody else's.
I wonder if it's maybe different in writing because writing is a long form format and maybe it's not as noticeable as in a three minute music piece.
Well, one of the problems, I guess it's a problem with trying to write a non traditional novel is because they are so long and the reader has to invest so much time in consuming the novel.
If your non traditional idea doesn't captivate, they'll DNF.
What's LDNF?
Did not finish.
Okay.
From like racing and all that. That's why I'm familiar with it anyway.
Yeah, I also wonder how writing has changed over the years. I'm just looking at my son, right? And I gave him a hobby by JR talking.
He couldn't finish it. He's like, it's just so boring. There's so much build up going on. But that's what books were like a hundred years ago.
Yeah. Well, of course, back in the days of all over twist and stuff like that, there was an entirely different style where quite often anyway, at least in cases of books like that.
The author would break the fourth wall and speak directly to the reader and you never see that these days.
Maybe there's a book out there where they do that, but you know, and so dear reader, we find our hero now in the midst of his third battle.
You just don't do that. And these days, the attitude is that the reader has a much shorter attention span.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know. People are a lot busier people have a lot less free time. Maybe they're more impatient.
But one of the rules is you have to start the book in media res, which means in the action. So you have to hook on the first page in a movie.
It'll start with the chase scene and people shooting from cars and stuff like that to get you interested in the old days.
You could spend a lot more time building things up and describing.
And I think the immersion aspect too, like now it is in any form of media that we create.
We try to not let the reader or whoever is watching it not get out of it.
It's an immersive experience and breaking the fourth wall kind of immediately breaks that aspect.
Okay, there is actually something else happening here.
Now Deadpool can pull it off, but not very many.
Yeah, all right. So that has been a really interesting conversation.
Maybe to close this off, is there any advice that you have for maybe software engineers telling their corporate jobs who want to become science fiction writer?
Actually, I do know one of these people. He's a former colleague of ours, Arna. We will not name his name, but you know what I'm talking about.
He's been wanting to write a science fiction novel for a long time. So what advice would he give to someone like that?
The most important thing, I think, for writing any kind of a novel really, but especially science fiction novel, is to come up with a unique or refreshing idea or a different twist on an existing idea.
Don't try to write just a me to look unless you're doing it just for practice.
Sometimes people will write their first novel just to sort of get their feet wet and they're not so concerned about selling it. But if you want to sell it, yeah, it needs to captivate the reader in some way where it says, oh, that's different.
Or I wonder how that's going to work out or how is he going to handle that? There's got to be a twist. There's got to be a hook of some kind.
Awesome. Yeah, this has been great. I'll ask you one last question. And if you don't want to answer it, we'll keep it off the record.
I plead the fifth. Okay. Yeah. Where is the Bobby Ver series going? Like how long have you planned out? Well, it's open ended. Obviously. And with book five, you'll find that it's even more open ended than you thought.
But from a practical point of view, there has to come a point where readers are going to become less interested.
Or it's just going to get old or it's going to start getting repetitive or I'm going to die. I mean, I don't know. But I use 10 books as an arbitrary goal point, but I'm not glued to it by any means.
Well, looking forward to all these like I said in the beginning, this is the book.
Audible sends me an email when one of your book comes out and I'm like, yes, this is it. Yeah, I'm now engaged for the next I don't know three, four days because I finish it immediately. So yeah, thank you. It's been amazing having you on the podcast.
I'm going to say unbeatable moment for us as fans of your work. So yeah, thanks for coming.
All right. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And as opposed to crypto fun fact is that when you said yes, I kept the secrets from our nap.
When you agreed to come on to the podcast, then I sent him the note and I was like, what?
We had some emotions in slack flowing over that. Yeah. Thank you for listening to our episode. Please check out the meta cast app at meta cast dot app.
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