Source: This content originally appeared in audio format on the Dead Robots’ Society Podcast.
Title: Glynn Stewart Gives Good Opera
Interviewers: Paul E. Cooley and Terry Mixon
Summary: “Paul and Terry interview author Glynn Stewart and discuss his worlds, his writing process, and the experience of co-writing a book with Terry.”
Length: 16,000 words (transcript); 1 hr and 23 minutes (podcast)
Table of contents:
Show notes (8 min read)
Starship’s Mage (4 min read)
Co-writing Vigilante (4 min read)
Publishing and genre (8 min read)
Reviving old projects (10 min read)
New series (5 min read)
Process (5 min read)
New territory (7 min read)
Assessing success (4 min read)
Links (3 min read)
TRANSCRIPT:
Show Notes
Paul E. Cooley: Howdy, folks. Welcome to Episode 461 of the Dead Robot’s Society. I’m Paul E. Cooley, your scuba instructor. Joining me today is Terry “The River Boat Captain” Mixon. How are you doing, Terry? We’re coming to you live from the Dead Robot’s Society submarine here in Houston, Texas.
Terry Mixon: I am so totally changing my [podcast recording] caption to being “riverboat captain.”
Paul E. Cooley: It was, what, “island tour?”
Terry Mixon: Yep.
Paul E. Cooley: “Island tour guide,” yeah. There we go. So mine is “Underwater Explorer.” Oh my god, so at least we’re both high and dry so far. Or rather, dry. I don’t know about the high part. But we’re both dry and our houses are not underwater yet. Hopefully that’s not going to be an issue. We’re recording this, what is it, Monday, August 28?
Terry Mixon: It is. We’re doing a day early because there’s going to be a tropical storm rolling over us probably tomorrow, to go along with our flooding.
Paul E. Cooley: We figured y’all would want your content, and since Terry and I both have power and internet and nothing better to do …
Terry Mixon: I for one am trapped in the neighborhood. Although the house is high and dry, all the exit roads are flooded, so I’m going nowhere. I seem to have some time on my hands.
Paul E. Cooley: Yes, but did you get your writing done?
Terry Mixon: You would figure that I would use it for writing, but I have to keep running down and staring at Jim Cantori on the Weather Channel. I’m having a bro crush on him or something.
Paul E. Cooley: That guy is all over the place, and he always looks like he’s about ready to come unglued. It reminds me when, oh god, who was the famous Houston weather for— Was it Neil Frank? Yeah, Neil Frank during Allison. They were, like, “At 2:00 in the morning, whatever, Neil will give us some good news.” “There is no good news!” Just completely lost his shit.
Terry Mixon: “Have you lost your fucking mind?” Yeah, that’s Neil Frank. That is indeed Neil Frank.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah I just about cried when he retired because he was so good at his job. But yeah, that night he just lost his shit.
Terry Mixon: There was one guy that was down here that did his weather reporting standing in a ditch. I’m trying to remember his name. It’ll come to me at the last moment I’m sure. Everyone mocked him.
Paul E. Cooley: Yes. Everyone should have mocked him. But yeah, Dr. Neil Frank was awesome. We miss you. So, how’s the writing?
Terry Mixon: I actually have gotten some writing done. I am taking a break from writing Battle for Terra and I’m knocking out a short story for an anthology. I’m about halfway done with it, and it’s fun, but gosh, it’s hard to focus on doing it when all you want to do is stare at the weather and see what’s going on.
Paul E. Cooley: It’s a disease, man. It’s a disease, because you’re always checking out … Well I don’t know about you, but my phone has had 45 weather alerts just in the past two days.
Terry Mixon: I turned those off.
Paul E. Cooley: Well we turned them off a long time ago anyway, but I think I posted something on there. We had 15 warnings at one point. So it’s kind of hard to ignore it. It really is difficult to ignore it.
Terry Mixon: I’ll get back to my writing, assuming that the power stays on, tomorrow. We’ll see how that works out. But luckily my schedule has some built-in slip to it. It’s not harming my overall schedule to go ahead and take some time to watch the disaster unfold around us. This is a natural disaster.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh yeah. Oh definitely. Definitely, this is bad shit.
Terry Mixon: But back to Jim Cantori. He’s the kind of guy I saw on a special before this. He went to a wind tunnel to demonstrate what hurricane-force winds were like. So they strapped him into a harness and stuck him in the wind tunnel, and cranked it up bit by bit to 190 miles an hour for the wind.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh my god.
Terry Mixon: Holy cow.
Paul E. Cooley: Did his cheeks go like …
Terry Mixon: They went that way long before he got to 190. At 190, he had waves in his skin where it was like rippling his entire head, his bald head, all the way back. It was impressive.
Paul E. Cooley: That was Cat-5? That’s Cat-5 winds, right?
Terry Mixon: Yeah, that’s category five hurricane winds. He originally said, “Yeah, this wind tunnel goes up to 190 miles an hour, but we’re not gonna go that high.” And they cranked him up to 190 miles an hour and he could not say no.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, because by that time he couldn’t speak.
Terry Mixon: Exactly, sir. Knowing him though, he probably went for it.
Paul E. Cooley: Probably. Probably.
Terry Mixon: In for a penny, in for a pound. Crank that sucker up.
Paul E. Cooley: So let’s talk. This is interesting because today’s intro was actually for an interview with you two regarding this book. But you and Glynn Stewart just released a new book?
Terry Mixon: Yes. Heart of Vengeance. It’s doing exceptionally well. Perhaps not as well as his bestsellers, but far better than my usual bestsellers. It’s nice to have some coattails to ride along with.
Paul E. Cooley: So, here’s the vaunted question. I think I asked this during the upcoming episode, anyway. Have you seen a spike in your back catalog yet?
Terry Mixon: I’m seeing a spike in people signing up for my mailing list, and I’m seeing a rise in sales. I don’t think that I’d call it a spike, but I’m seeing an upswell, if that makes any sense.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s even better.
Terry Mixon: So I think that it’s going to work out just fine. I’m definitely attracting some folks from his side of the aisle as well, and I’m pretty happy with that. He sent a note out that it peaked. The last time he looked, it was at, like 206 was what it was at last night sometime, so it almost broke into the top 200. It’s sitting at 218 right now, so I absolutely cannot complain about having a book at 218.
Paul E. Cooley: That is awesome. Congrats, man. Congrats to both of you.
Terry Mixon: Thank you.
Paul E. Cooley: That is hella-cool. I’m so happy.
Terry Mixon: Usually, my books open into the, the ones that release well will be into the 5-600 range at the initial spike, and when they go through that initial drop off and then come back up, when people start doing the “Also Boughts,” it’ll rise back into the 7-800s. Maybe a little lower, maybe a little higher. So this is significantly better than I normally see on my own, although I do damn well. I’m not trying to downplay that, but it’s nice seeing how the other side lives.
Paul E. Cooley: You’re getting a taste of what it is to be a real boy.
Terry Mixon: I will totally be Glynn Stewart’s cabana boy.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah. Well let’s hope that very soon your sales match that anyway on your own works. Me, I’ve got a long way to go.
Terry Mixon: I got an orange banner that says that I’m a bestseller. I’ve never had one of those before.
Paul E. Cooley: I’ve had three of them.
Terry Mixon: Yeah. They don’t come out so easily in the military science-fiction subcategories.
Paul E. Cooley: No, but I did get that in Derelict. I did get that for Marines, and I got one for Tomb too, if I remember correctly. I know I got one for The Black but I got one for Marines as well. So, yeah, it’s not just getting the banner though, it’s how long does it stay there, and it sounds to me like y’all are going to be there for a while. So that’s pretty damn cool.
Terry Mixon: Fingers crossed.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah.
Terry Mixon: My bank account can certainly use the assistance.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah. Understand that completely. I got kind of derailed on a lot of things because of health issues and a pretty massive jilt of depression, but I’ve kind of come out of it and working on getting Flames done again, which is now at 111,000 words.
Terry Mixon: You’re unstoppable.
Paul E. Cooley: And moving upward. So I still have another three or four scenes to write and a couple things to go back to, so I’m thinking it’s maybe a 115-er before it’s over with.
Terry Mixon: You’ve got plenty of space to go to get to that Dan Sanderson level.
Paul E. Cooley: Dan Sanderson? Brandon Sanderson.
Terry Mixon: Brandon Sanderson, excuse me. I was thinking Dan Wells for some reason. I’m not sure. I got it all morphed together in my head. Brandon Sanderson.
Paul E. Cooley: Dan Wells is definitely not Brandon Sanderson.
Terry Mixon: Yeah, pretty much.
Paul E. Cooley: And vice versa. Yeah, Dan Wells actually writes a story as opposed to a universe. Wow, I’m getting so bitchy about that. I really need to stop.
Terry Mixon: Stop.
Paul E. Cooley: Stop. Anyway, so while all this was going on, I had this really strange thought about the fourth Black book, and I was talking to B-Man the other night about it after we saw The Dark Tower film, and I need to put my review on that too, but I’ll get to that tomorrow. The idea would make the series a bit longer than I had planned. It would also complicate the ever-loving shit out of it.
Terry Mixon: You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Paul E. Cooley: No it’s not that it’s a bad thing, it’s just making me rethink how I want to do this, and it also means that it would take a lot longer to get the books done. A lot longer.
Terry Mixon: But you’re going to have more product when you’re done.
Paul E. Cooley: But I’m going to have more product, but I’m thinking this means Evolution will probably be at least 120,000 words. At least.
Terry Mixon: Or is it going to be two books?
Paul E. Cooley: Or it could be two books, because I have this penchant for pissing off people and I might as well just continue that.
Terry Mixon: It’s called tradition at this point.
Paul E. Cooley: It’s what you expect from Paul’s sci-fi shit. So I just, I had this crazy idea and I don’t know if it’ll fly. I don’t know if it’s jumping the shark. We’ll talk about it offline.
Terry Mixon: All right. Well, we don’t have to go into the details of it now.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah.
Terry Mixon: But saying you don’t know whether it’ll fly or not, all I have to do is say the word “Sharknado,” and you know that anything can fly. Which, of course, brings up what we were talking about just before the show where you’re going to go ahead and start writing “Jelly-Gatornado.”
Paul E. Cooley: “Jelly-Gatornado?” Yeah, I guess was it last night? I think it was last night I put up the ridiculous plot idea that I had. Somebody was like, “All I know for sure is that you were high.” So I thought, oh, well that means it was a good idea. You loved it, didn’t you?
Terry Mixon: Once you’re done covering the flood, and writing “Jelly-Gatornado,” you can go ahead and write the sequel, which is “Jelly-Gatornado 2: Feel the Burn.”
Paul E. Cooley: “Feel the Burn.” Oh my god, this is so bad. Just stop it. On that note, we’re going to get out of this so we can introduce y’all to Glynn Stewart and this Terry Mixon guy and talk about this book they wrote.
Terry Mixon: If you have not gone out and picked up your copy of Heart of Vengeance, you should do so because it’s on sale for $2.99 right now, and sometime in the next day or so, which would be when you’re getting this podcast if you haven’t gotten it, it’s going to go up a little bit. So, go grab your copy while you can.
Starship’s Mage
Paul E. Cooley: We will put links in the show notes to that, so go up to the website or check the show notes on the actual podcast episode. Or, if you’re watching the YouTube, should be in the description below.
Paul: Now, let’s get to this interview. Today we have Author Glynn Stewart, who’s going to talk to us about his works and why the hell he picked this Terry Mixon doofus to help him write the newest one, latest one, whatever. So, Glynn, welcome to the show.
Glynn Stewart: Thank you.
Paul E. Cooley: Now, for our listening audience that doesn’t know who the hell you are, who are you?
Glynn Stewart: Who am I? I’m nobody. I’m not important.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s terrible.
Terry Mixon: Somehow, I don’t think that that’s true.
Glynn Stewart: I’m the author of now four ongoing series without Terry and one with Terry. Starship’s Mage, Castle Federation, Duchy of Terra, ONSET, and now Vigilante with Terry, which gives me five ongoing series, and I believe Heart of Vengeance makes 18 novels out.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah. There are a couple of standalone fantasy out there, but I have never been successful in fantasy. Discounting the space fantasy series [Starship’s Mage].
Paul E. Cooley: A space fantasy series? How does that work?
Terry Mixon: If it works for Star Wars, why not?
Glynn Stewart: That’s a good chunk of the logic behind Starship’s Mage, yes.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay, explain this to me. What exactly is this science-fiction-fantasy?
Glynn Stewart: So in the Starship’s Mage setting, all of the science, all of the tech is as hard as I can make it. I have a better than layman’s but not fully to being an engineer or a scientist’s understanding of physics, especially around space travel, and everything of science in Starship’s Mage is pretty much bang-on hard SF. And then there’s mages.
Paul E. Cooley: Huh?
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, basically. So in the setting, there was a massive eugenics project carried out by a bunch of really evil bastards who bred the magic gift back into the human race intentionally. And among the other things that the mages do, they can, with certain tools, teleport a starship a full light year.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay, so they’re kind of like Navigators in Dune.
Glynn Stewart: Navigators in Dune, Anne McCaffrey’s Talent series I think was also one that used something similar. Similar things have been done a few times under the space fantasy label. In Starship’s Mage, it’s explicitly very much a magic that’s going on, and it’s got rules. And I understand how it works, though not necessarily the characters in the setting, so it’s not explained to the reader, but I know what the limitations of it are, which is important I find when you’re working with magic.
So the setting is basically, we have no scientific solution to FTL travel. We have no scientific solution to FTL communications. All of this is magic. Literally, a wizard did it.
Terry Mixon: I have to say that I chanced across your name and your book the first time going through a space opera official marketing thread, and the entire concept of mixing the two is what attracted me to trying you out for the first time, and I love that series. It’s awesome.
Glynn Stewart: I’m working on the first of the Starship’s Mage Universe books, as opposed to the Starship’s Mage books right now. So that’s an interesting project to dig through.
Terry Mixon: What’s the difference between the two?
Glynn Stewart: It’s not a Damien Montgomery novel.
Terry Mixon: Ooh. All right.
Glynn Stewart: It’s a David Rice novel.
Paul E. Cooley: What are those two characters?
Glynn Stewart: Damien Montgomery is the main character of the Starship’s Mage five-book series. He’s an extremely powerful mage. A Hand of the Mage King of Mars. His job is to basically be a troubleshooter for the Mage King, emphasis on trouble, and emphasis on shoot. Usually he finds trouble and gets shot by it.
Paul E. Cooley: So he’s a fixer.
Glynn Stewart: Yes. David Rice, on the other hand, is the captain of the ship that Damien Montgomery served on before he became hand to the Mage King.
Paul E. Cooley: Ah, okay.
Glynn Stewart: So the first book is Damien becoming powerful enough mage to be the Hand of the Mage King of Mars, and in that book he’s simply the jump mage aboard David Rice’s fighter.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay.
Glynn Stewart: And when all of that comes down and it’s over, Damien Montgomery gets drafted by the Mage King and David Rice no longer has a ship.
Terry Mixon: Awkward.
Glynn Stewart: Interstellar Mage begins when David Rice gets the replacement ship that the Mage King gives him, basically in trade for Damien Montgomery.
Terry Mixon: I can imagine what kind of trade that might equate to, so that should be interesting to see.
Glynn Stewart: “They stopped building these ships. They were too expensive and really big targets. Why did they give me one?”
Paul E. Cooley: Oh god.
Terry Mixon: Well it can’t all be good. It’s got to have some downside to it.
Glynn Stewart: Operating costs.
Paul E. Cooley: Operating costs. That’s usually the downfall of any system like that. But you have magic. You can just create matter from nothing, right?
Glynn Stewart: Nope. Closest that they come to that is flipping polarity. They have the ability to flip polarity to turn matter into antimatter, which helps fuel their antimatter engines, but otherwise there’s no creating anything from nothing.
Paul E. Cooley: Terry, I thought there was a ban on antimatter in science-fiction? I thought that was a banned thing.
Terry Mixon: That was a totally different universe. Totally different universe.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh, okay. All right, all right, just checking.
Terry Mixon: That’s the four horsemen universe where I wrote a short story where they banned antimatter but I had to write about it anyway.
Paul E. Cooley: Because Terry’s a smartass. “Give me a limitation and I’ll explain why it’s a limitation.”
Terry Mixon: I can write a cautionary tale as well as anybody else.
Co-writing Vigilante
Paul E. Cooley: So five series. How do you juggle five series? This is a thing we talked a little bit about with Terry before because he’s juggling a whole bunch of crap as well.
Glynn Stewart: I cycle, so it’s basically a book in each series and then back. And of course, Terry writes Vigilante. Everything I had to do for Vigilante was done years ago so Terry’s just fixing my mess for me.
Paul E. Cooley: Ah. I see how this works.
Terry Mixon: I look forward to seeing how well these two books do in the end because if it does well enough and I can sweet talk you into writing more in this series, then we’ll see how the balance actually shifts around. That’ll be interesting to see.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, because basically now we have three co-authors on this series. There’s 33-year-old Glynn, 19-year-old Glynn, and Terry.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh, good job.
Terry Mixon: I have to say that going through this the first time was a learning experience because I wasn’t sure when I started exactly how much I should change the basic set of the story. It was only when I got near to wrapping it up where I realized just how much freedom you were giving me to change it. Otherwise, I think I might have changed the beginning a little bit more than I had. But I was being cautious.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah. So then I went back and rewrote the beginning, so it all worked out.
Terry Mixon: It came out really well in the end. I think people are going to like it.
Glynn Stewart: It did. I’m really pleased with it.
Paul E. Cooley: So when you’re juggling five different series, what’s your release cycle like? I mean, you’re obviously flipping back and forth, but how many books are you putting out a year at this point?
Glynn Stewart: If everything breaks the way I currently expect it, including both Vigilante books, I will have nine books out in 2017.
Terry Mixon: Dude, that’s awesome.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow.
Glynn Stewart: Of which I will have written seven and Terry will have written two. My target is about seven and a half. My target is a book every six to seven weeks.
Paul E. Cooley: Hm. How long are your books in general?
Glynn Stewart: Depending on series, between 80 and 120,000.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay. All right.
Glynn Stewart: The ONSET books are about 80,000. Vigilante about 80,000. Duchy of Terra runs about 120,000. Then Castle Federation and Starship’s Mage both run about 90-100,000 words a piece.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay. I want to remind our listeners we did review one of your books, what was it …
Glynn Stewart: Yep, The Terran Privateer.
Paul E. Cooley: Terran Privateer, that’s your Duchy of Terra, book one. Yes, we did review that.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah.
Paul E. Cooley: God, when was that Terry? Eight months ago?
Terry Mixon: It feels like something like that, yeah.
Glynn Stewart: It was before I moved so I don’t know. It was more than eight weeks ago, and time before I moved is a complete amorphous mess now.
Terry Mixon: Have you started unpacking yet?
Glynn Stewart: It’s all unpacked, it’s just not necessarily organized. I’m sitting in what will eventually be my wife’s oil painting studio, which currently has two folding tables and a bookshelf.
Paul E. Cooley: Yep, sounds like you just moved.
Terry Mixon: As Paul knows for a fact, when you move things never get unpacked. There will still be boxes years later.
Glynn Stewart: There is at least one box floating around here that was not packed in the move to come to this house, and was not packed in the move to come to Ontario, and was not packed in the move to the last house we moved to in Alberta. It was packed in the move before that.
Terry Mixon: It’s like a time capsule.
Glynn Stewart: And it has just moved. The only thing that happened was we had to open it and take out the candles when we were moving to Ontario because the shipping company didn’t want to be transporting candles in a truck in the summer for three days.
Paul E. Cooley: All right, that makes sense I guess. Well, it’s a Canadian summer. How hot can it possibly get?
Glynn Stewart: In Alberta, not very. Here, 33-34 Celsius.
Paul E. Cooley: What the hell is that in actual degrees?
Glynn Stewart: I have no idea what it is in Fahrenheit.
Paul E. Cooley: I’m sorry.
Glynn Stewart: Multiply by two and minus 20 or something like that.
Paul E. Cooley: It’s something like that. I can’t remember. I was actually trying to figure that out when I was in Germany not too long ago. I was like, “I can’t remember what the calculation is for that.” I had to go look it up.
Glynn Stewart: I remember trying to do it the other way around when I was in Vegas and I gave up. I just went, eh, it’s hot. It’s Vegas.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh, here’s a question for you. Are all your measurements in meters, or do you use English system?
Glynn Stewart: Me personally or in my fiction?
Paul E. Cooley: In your fiction.
Glynn Stewart: I try to stick to full metric. I have been called out on by my copy editor the fact that I tend to actually fall back on what I do in reality, which is some distances are in imperial and some distances are in metric. So if I’m actually measuring distances myself, short distances are in centimeters, medium distances are in feet, longer distances are in meters and then kilometers.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh god, no. Get the feet out of there.
Glynn Stewart: Welcome to Canada.
Paul E. Cooley: Get those feet out.
Glynn Stewart: Canada’s the same. Grams, pounds, kilograms.
Paul E. Cooley: I lived in Canada right when they were making the switch over to metric, so it was, yeah, really interesting.
Glynn Stewart: I’ll make you feel old. That was before I was born.
Paul E. Cooley: That does not surprise me. That does not surprise me at all. What was I, six? In ’75-’76. Somewhere in there. All the teachers were radically confused.
Terry Mixon: 33 Celsius is 91 degrees Fahrenheit.
Paul E. Cooley: Pfft.
Terry Mixon: That’s how hot it is today.
Glynn Stewart: So it gets up there, yeah. It’s a bit colder today because it’s raining, but it’s hotter here than it is in Alberta during the summer, and it stays warmer longer. So that’s part of why I moved.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s upsetting. I miss the cold. I miss the cold a lot. Well, when you get to experience 104 and 106 heat indexes on a fairly regular basis …
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, that’s when you go hide in the pool.
Publishing and Genre
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, that would require you to have one, and that would require for it not to boil. But that’s a completely different conversation altogether. So, with science-fiction versus fantasy, you’ve done both. You said you were more successful in the science-fiction arena. Which one do you like writing better?
Glynn Stewart: I’ve been focusing on space opera for so long, it’s hard to say. I do enjoy both to a large extent. I think I do come down on the science-fiction side being more fun for me a lot of the time. I write an urban fantasy series now just to kind of keep my hand in, and god knows I occasionally get ambushed by [ideas] for fantasy series, but I can’t economically justify them so…
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, I think I understand that problem completely. Better than most probably. Yeah, my fantasy series don’t do worth a shit either, so I completely understand.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah. Other than urban, I haven’t touched fantasy in two years.
Terry Mixon: I keep wanting to write an urban fantasy story, but I’ve already got so many balls in the air that I can’t justify starting yet another series because I don’t want to do that and then not visit it again for a while.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah I found with urban fantasy, during the gap between my book two and my book three of six months, which is perfectly fine in space opera, I lost half the audience that was following the series.
Paul E. Cooley: Hm.
Glynn Stewart: Like the third book did not do well at all unfortunately.
Paul E. Cooley: Is that one of the reasons why you decided to mix science-fiction and fantasy in the science-fiction Mage books, whose name I’ve already forgotten.
Terry Mixon: Starship’s Mage.
Glynn Stewart: That was, I don’t even remember why that originally got written to be honest. It started as a short story that I wrote, too; literally it was never intended to publish. I wrote the short story as a self-entertainment thing. Then my agent at the time asked me if I could turn it into something more and I went eh. Then my wife talked me into doing it as a novella sequence and self-publishing it. So that worked out apparently.
Paul E. Cooley: So do you still have an agent? Do you still work with publishing companies or are you just now …
Glynn Stewart: I still have an agent. He doesn’t have very many of my books anymore, but I still technically have an agent. There is still one or two books, I don’t actually remember. I literally have to email him to find out, that are out with traditional publishing houses that we’re waiting to hear back on. The one I can actually remember has been with the same house for a year and the only reason it didn’t get published last year was because they specifically asked for this manuscript a year ago.
Paul E. Cooley: Hm.
Glynn Stewart: We’ve heard crickets since, so.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, that sounds like … Nevermind. I’ll shut up.
Glynn Stewart: Everybody knows the argument and the bitch there on the part of every author who submitted to traditional publishing ever.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah. I don’t have that particular problem with my publisher. But I know everybody who has problems with their publishers. So based on what I’m seeing here, you’ve done a lot more of your work as an independent.
Glynn Stewart: I have done all of my work as an independent.
Paul E. Cooley: So none of your work has ever been published by a publishing company?
Glynn Stewart: The audiobooks are done by Tantor and Podium.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay.
Glynn Stewart: So I am technically traditionally published in audio. But I am entirely independently published in text and in e-books and in physical copies for the actual text books.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay. Well, obviously your experience has been awesome, but were there any particular problems that you faced during the evolution of the independent platforms?
Glynn Stewart: So far, so good. I tried to stay out of Kindle Unlimited for quite some time, which ended up not working out very well for me. It was when I fell in with Kindle Unlimited that I started making enough money that I could do this full-time. So much as I do not like feeding the 800-pound gorilla’s monopoly, I play along with the 800-pound gorilla’s monopoly because it feeds my cats.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, there’s a reason why we’re not sponsored by Audible or Amazon, because we bite the hand that feeds constantly.
Terry Mixon: I think it’s more like because they don’t know we exist, but that’s okay.
Paul E. Cooley: Well everybody asks me when we’re going to actually get some sponsorship on this show so we can make some more cash, and uh-uh. No. I couldn’t be that kind of hypocrite. It’s bad enough I have to use the platform, so I’m certainly not going to take money directly from them so I can bitch about them. That just seems stupid, so don’t want to do it.
Terry Mixon: That would seem kind of ironic, actually.
Paul E. Cooley: No. Bitch about Amazon and then go, “Oh, yeah, and Amazon can do this for you, and now they have housecleaning, and this, that …” No, we are not sponsored by Amazon. I’m not doing that shit. It’s not fucking happening. Bad Terry. Bad. Bad Terry. I get that look so often from him.
Terry Mixon: I’m an instigator. I cause trouble.
Paul E. Cooley: Uh-huh, yeah. I know. Usually for me. Has he caused you trouble? So you two just collaborated on this book.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah.
Terry Mixon: He did the good stuff, I did the bad stuff.
Glynn Stewart: No, we’re blaming the bad stuff on 19-year-old me because he’s not here to defend himself.
Paul E. Cooley: You know, that is just such a freaking cop-out. My god, that’s horrible.
Glynn Stewart: I stole it from Terry Pratchett.
Paul E. Cooley: Well at least you didn’t say Terry Mixon. Don’t steal anything from that jackass.
Terry Mixon: Don’t steal anything from me.
Paul E. Cooley: So this is …
Glynn Stewart: Terry Pratchett said with the release of The Carpet People that it had two authors: 18-year-old him and 40-year-old him, and they didn’t get along very well.
Paul E. Cooley: Been there, done that. Finally kicked 18-year-old, or 20-year-old Paul to the curb and said, “No, let’s redo this entire thing.” Is that more or less what you did here? We’re talking about Heart of Vengeance, book one of the Vigilante series, which you and Terry just co-wrote.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah.
Paul E. Cooley: So is that more or less what happened?
Glynn Stewart: Not entirely. I think of the 80,000 or so words that’s in Heart of Vengeance, about 25,000 are pre- the rewrite that I sent Terry.
Terry Mixon: Actually, chapters 1-14 out of 30 were your original material. So almost half the book.
Glynn Stewart: Yes, except I rewrote that before I sent it to you.
Terry Mixon: Then you rewrote it again.
Paul E. Cooley: So how did this exactly work, guys? I mean, first off, how did you two end up deciding to do this together?
Terry Mixon: He sent me an instant message and I almost drove off the road on the way back from the gym.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s what you get for looking at your messages while you’re driving, you doofus.
Terry Mixon: I know.
Glynn Stewart: You shouldn’t do that, yeah. Yeah, because I’d been debating … I had the original Vigilante novel, which is about 100-110,000-word novel with a severe structural defect in the middle, and it was unpublishable. Pieces of it were decent but the total of it was unpublishable. So I had been meaning for several years to rewrite it into two books and I was not getting around to it. I finally accepted that I wasn’t going to get around to it, and that it was a matter of okay, so if I’m going to have a co-author, who am I going to grab? It came down to, there were a couple of different names on my list, I asked Terry first and Terry sort of jumped up and down going, “Me, me, me, me.”
Paul E. Cooley: He’s so needy, isn’t he? He’s just so needy.
Terry Mixon: I’m such a prima donna. I’m terrible.
Paul E. Cooley: Yes, Terry “The Prima Donna” Mixon. We just call him The PD on this show. TPD, you know as Terry Prima Donna. Now, Terry, why were you excited to get on this gig? Why would you want to do this?
Terry Mixon: Because I absolutely love Starship’s Mage, and the chance of working with the guy that can create some amazing stuff like that was something that I wanted to get on. I really did want to be part of that just because he’s awesome. If you haven’t read Starship’s Mage, you need to because it’s an amazing series.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow, there’s a lot of ass-kissing going on here.
Glynn Stewart: I noticed.
Paul E. Cooley: I’m not sure I’m happy with where this conversation is going. I mean if you two …
Terry Mixon: It’s not ass-kissing if it’s true. It is easily one of my favorite series.
Paul E. Cooley: If there was not lots of squabbling, you know, terse messages going back and forth, passive-aggressive tendencies over word choice and plot points, then this conversation has no point.
Terry Mixon: You know, if this co-writing expedition was a novel, it would be thrown out because of lack of drama.
Glynn Stewart: So it’s a Nathan Lowell novel is what you’re telling me?
Terry Mixon: Oh!
Paul E. Cooley: Oh! Damn, that is so unfair.
Terry Mixon: Well first we should discuss how to make coffee. We have to have cold water first because cold water is really the important factor here.
Paul E. Cooley: I do want to point something out, and I was thinking about this the other day when somebody was bitching about how much coffee is consumed in Derelict. The first series I remember, or first book I remember that just had coffee everywhere was The Mote in God’s Eye by Pournelle and Niven.
Terry Mixon: Oh yes. Yeah.
Paul E. Cooley: Right? Because that’s the only time they figure out that the…laymill, right? Was it laymill?
Glynn Stewart: It’s been so long since I’ve read Mote in God’s Eye.
Paul E. Cooley: Anyway, whatever the race of aliens. The only way the figure out that they’ve gotten aboard the ship and start fucking with stuff is because all of the coffee machines are clean. And I remember there’s like this Arab merchant or whatever that’s aboard the ship and he spends, like, I don’t know how many chapters of the book teaching them how to make proper coffee and bitching about the sludge they’ve been drinking. So I just thought that was funny. So I’m wondering if Nathan Lowell grabbed that from there or if it was just innate in his being. I don’t know.
Glynn Stewart: I suspect from the conversations that I’ve had with Nathan, and Nathan is a brilliant author that he made a series of six books with nothing I would call conflict, as a military s-f writer at least, until book six, that I couldn’t put down, I think it’s simply just leftovers of his own experience in the merchant fleet. Coffee being what the ship’s actually run on.
Paul E. Cooley: Yes, coffee is what the ships actually run on. Absolutely. Coffee is what the military runs … Well, these days they may run on Red Bull. I have no idea.
Glynn Stewart: From what I know of the people I know who are in the military at this age, they run on coffee still. Actually, tea, but that person’s intelligent, so…
Paul E. Cooley: Ouch. Damn. I’m not even going to plumb the depths of that particular statement and how it can be taken.
Glynn Stewart: Canadian Naval Intelligence.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow. Okay, never mind. We’re talking about Canucks. Tea, that makes total sense.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, it’d make more sense if they were British but you know.
Paul E. Cooley: Eh, eh. I don’t know. So how big a part does tea take and how big of a part of that culture is in Heart of Vengeance? Is tea everywhere instead of coffee?
Terry Mixon: I think we mentioned tea once.
Glynn Stewart: I think there’s a mention of beer.
Paul E. Cooley: What?
Glynn Stewart: I kind of mentioned of someone who subsists on starlight instead of beer. But that’s also someone being a snarky bastard.
Reviving old projects
Paul E. Cooley: Okay. I’m lost. That’s all right. I haven’t read the book obviously. Oh my god. Why were you interested in bringing this book back? Why were you interested in pulling it back out of the drawer and saying, “You know what? This is something I want to get out there and I want to continue on, even if I have to find a [co-author]?”
Glynn Stewart: It was that the pieces of it were publishable, but the whole wasn’t, and I just found that really, really frustrating. So it niggled at me like a loose tooth for years. Like, I knew I could go back and turn this into two novels and take three months to do it or whatever, and I’d have two publishable novels. I just hate rewriting.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh, the truth comes out.
Glynn Stewart: So I got Terry to do it.
Paul E. Cooley: Terry, did you feel like the janitor, just coming in and sweeping up? Is that what was going on here?
Terry Mixon: Maybe a little bit, because 19-year-old Glynn definitely has a different style of word choice and style of writing than modern Glynn.
Paul E. Cooley: Mm-hmm.
Glynn Stewart: Amazingly, 19-year-old Glynn also probably has more politically in common with Terry than I do.
Paul E. Cooley: Hm. Interesting. Not even going to ask. Don’t want to know.
Terry Mixon: Probably safer that way.
Paul E. Cooley: When you said that the book had a massive plot problem, is that something you figured out before, how to solve that before you sent it to Terry, or is that something you guys worked out together?
Glynn Stewart: No, I knew always what the solution had to be, and it was plain and simply that there were two novels in there.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay.
Glynn Stewart: And there were several years between those novels.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh.
Glynn Stewart: Having a three-year time skip in the middle of a book just does not work, especially not if anything at all happens in there of import. So the second half of the book starts with one of the biggest violations of “show don’t tell” I’ve ever engaged in, and that’s a rule I routinely ignore.
Paul E. Cooley: So you didn’t want to put a big info dump to say, “Here’s all the shit that happened between episode one and two.”
Terry Mixon: “Meanwhile, in season one…”
Glynn Stewart: That is basically what the first chapter of the second half of the book. “This is everything that happened in the last three years that I don’t feel like writing about.”
Paul E. Cooley: Ah, you slacker. That brings up an interesting point, though. Why did you not want to write about that three-year span? Is it because nothing of import happened?
Glynn Stewart: Well stuff happened in there. It wasn’t stuff that was relevant to the main emotional arc of the book.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay. Therefore, you didn’t feel like there was any point in dragging the characters through that mess?
Glynn Stewart: Yeah. Like the book is about the main character’s revenge. So the first part of the book, what became Heart of Vengeance, is him acquiring the resources to actually be able to pursue that revenge, or starting on that path. And the second half of the book, what will eventually be Oath of Vengeance, is him actually getting his revenge. And then there’s a time gap in between where he is doing all sorts of things and making a reputation for himself, but he isn’t pursuing his revenge. He doesn’t have enough information to be able to action it.
Terry Mixon: He also doesn’t have enough resources to execute his revenge, so growth needed to take place to make that happen.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, and to a certain extent that growth can happen offscreen, but it can’t happen offscreen in the middle of the book.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay, fair enough. I see what you’re saying.
Terry Mixon: The way that we ended up doing this is I took an aspect of the book that existed and I made another set of bad guys out of them.
Glynn Stewart: Yep.
Terry Mixon: And I used them as the foil for the remaining half of book one so that we could fill the space and actually still have it mean something, because you can’t just write filler. You’ve got to actually have the story mean something, and it completed the arc that he was going through to transition from his old life to his new life, and that sets up a place where you can have a gap of a couple of years so that he then grows in that new life and he’s ready to proceed to tackle the bigger problem.
Paul E. Cooley: What do you mean you can’t write filler? Isn’t that basically what all those novels are? It’s whether you get to 150,000-200,000 words so we can shove all that filler in there to meet some ridiculous word count?
Terry Mixon: I’d rather not do that.
Glynn Stewart: I can think of very specific examples, but I’m not going to. I will not speak well of the greats of the genre at the moment.
Paul E. Cooley: I was going to say bring somebody else up but that would require me to cough and sneeze and say their name, and I’m not going to do that.
Terry Mixon: Is this going to be another James Patterson moment for you?
Paul E. Cooley: I was not going to go after James Patterson. I’m really fucking pissed off because Audible sent me this bullshit, “Hey, for this extra money you can get private access to James Patterson’s new series.” It’s like, are you fucking kidding? He didn’t even write it. Are you out of your goddam minds?
Glynn Stewart: My understanding is he writes even less of those than I wrote of Heart of Vengeance.
Paul E. Cooley: There you go. Yeah, yeah, exactly. “Here’s this plot outline and a title. Go write this thing for me, schmuck. Oh yeah, and by the way, you only get 10% of the proceeds. Fuck you.”
Terry Mixon: But think of the exposure.
Paul E. Cooley: Think of the exposure. It won’t pay the bills, but hey.
Glynn Stewart: I don’t know, 10% of the proceeds on a James Patterson novel is probably a bit more than …
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, well. Yeah. That’s 10% of the profits after James Patterson pays all of his bills for his trillion dollar house and everything else. He’s actually just got a-
Glynn Stewart: I should’ve built [something] like that into the contract with Terry. Crap.
Terry Mixon: Dammit, missed opportunities.
Paul E. Cooley: Glynn, you’re just not following the game plan here, man. Come on. He’s basically your slave.
Glynn Stewart: I was covering all the expenses.
Terry Mixon: I’m covering the expenses for my house out of my half, dammit. You should’ve, on there, instead of having our names the same size, it should’ve been Glynn Stewart, Terry Mixon down at the bottom.
Glynn Stewart: That’s how James Patterson does it.
Paul E. Cooley: Yes.
Glynn Stewart: I was trying to be a bit more ethical than that.
Paul E. Cooley: No, you can’t have that. You can’t have ethics in that. So when you guys were doing this, Terry, when you were working on it, did you go back and ask Glynn specific questions about how you wanted to proceed with different things? Did you get a plot outline from him? How did that work?
Terry Mixon: This is going to be shocking for anybody that knows me, because I don’t do outlines, but we went ahead and took the outline that he wrote of what currently existed, and we expanded the first part of it to go ahead and fit in what we thought should be in there for the next part. And then I proceeded to mostly ignore it as I continued to write the end of the book.
Glynn Stewart: I think it’s about as close to the outline as anything I ever wrote. So he followed the outline about as well as I expected.
Terry Mixon: I really wasn’t sure when I started this how close I had to adhere so that’s why I was glad you were reading it chapter as it went along, and your continued silence said, “Okay, I’m not going too far off the reservation here.”
Paul E. Cooley: So did you two collaborate on the outline going forward from the original story? Is that how that worked?
Glynn Stewart: He read the original story, I wrote an outline. He sent me his ideas and then I sent him the outline, and then we basically bounced the outline back and forth three or four times until we had a final. We had a final outline and then Terry took that and the first set of 40,000 words of the original Vigilante novel, and that became Heart of Vengeance.
Paul E. Cooley: So how did that work? Were you guys using, like, Google Docs or something to collaborate on it?
Glynn Stewart: It was all on Dropbox.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay, so just updating a document between the two of you?
Glynn Stewart: Yep.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay.
Terry Mixon: You can tell from all the red ink in the first fourteen chapters, there were a lot of word changes that I made because, while I think we write pretty close to the same way concerning voice, I was very worried when I started this because I didn’t know how differently we were going to be voice-wise. But it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.
Glynn Stewart: I think we’ve ended up with the Vigilante series having a distinct voice that isn’t quite mine and isn’t quite Terry’s.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah that was going to be my next question. So Terry, when you’re writing this, were you trying to ape his voice?
Terry Mixon: No, I was not. When I went through the original language, I tried to clean up the text. I wouldn’t say that I tried to bring it into being my language, but the parts that felt clunky, I changed them. And I didn’t worry about trying to ape his style of writing or try to make it more my style of writing. I just tried to make it as smooth as clear as I possibly could so that it was what it was. As we went along, we both changed this text, and so it is something in between the two of us, and I’m glad that our writing styles are actually fairly close together.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah.
Paul E. Cooley: Glynn, is this something you actually thought about when you got his stuff back and started going through it? Is that something that you noticed?
Glynn Stewart: Voice is not really something I consciously consider in my writing. It’s something that I go for, “Does this fit?” I do a lot of events where people are like, “This is how I have structured this out, and I have a plan for my theme or my voice.” I’m like, yeah no. Theme and voice happen. I just take out the bits that … I start with a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay, fair enough.
Glynn Stewart: That’s my method of getting theme and voice. If it doesn’t feel like it fits, it changes.
Terry Mixon: And astonishingly, that’s exactly the same thing that I do.
Paul E. Cooley: What a bunch of slackers.
Glynn Stewart: Oh yes.
Paul E. Cooley: I was expecting some massive intellectual thesis on how to do this and everything else so our listeners could learn from that. Instead, you’re saying go with your gut. That’s such a cop-out.
Glynn Stewart: Yep. You want a massive intellectual thesis? Poke me on capitalization of intellectual capital in modern capitalism combined with generally accepted accounting principles.
Paul E. Cooley: That was pure gobbledygook. In other words, it must’ve been a technical paper. That’s all I can assume.
Glynn Stewart: I have a thesis statement for a PhD in accounting that I could probably turn into a thesis, but I’m not an accountant anymore, so fuck it.
Paul E. Cooley: Amen. I’m with that plan. Go for it. Just keep writing the sci-fi stuff.
Terry Mixon: My wife was an accountant before she became disabled, and every time she starts talking accounting, my head hits the desk. I’m glad she doesn’t talk like that when I’m driving or I might have an accident falling asleep at the wheel.
Paul E. Cooley: I understand that happens to people of your age.
Terry Mixon: Oh, ho. What did you say?
Paul E. Cooley: Nothing.
Terry Mixon: I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.
Paul E. Cooley: Uh-huh.
Glynn Stewart: Bunch of old farts.
Paul E. Cooley: Hey, hey, hey. I’ve only got a little bit of gray. Just a couple of gray hairs in here. Look at him.
Terry Mixon: He’s actually a lot younger than he looks.
Paul E. Cooley: Ow, damn. Wow.
Glynn Stewart: That’s just twisting the knife, Terry. That’s mean.
Terry Mixon: Damned with faint praise.
Paul E. Cooley: Glynn looks like he just graduated from high school and he’s on here with a couple old farts who both look like they know.
Terry Mixon: I’m pretty sure he’s not out of his 20s yet.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, 30s. That’s bullshit. He’s still in his 20s. 19-year-old him? Yeah, that was three years ago. Anyway.
Glynn Stewart: Should I be getting off of your lawn, gentlemen?
Paul E. Cooley: Yes, get off my damn lawn.
Terry Mixon: What are you, Paul, in your mid-40s?
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, 46.
Terry Mixon: That’s what I was saying. I’m just in my early 50s, so yeah we’re a couple of decades further down the path of being curmudgeonly.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, that’s fair.
Paul E. Cooley: I’ve been told I was a curmudgeon when I was 25, so go figure.
Glynn Stewart: I think I got told I was a curmudgeon at 15, so.
Paul E. Cooley: Hm, hm, hm. Well, you know, when you start using Just for Men for your beard, that’s when you know you’ve hit it. Obviously, I don’t.
Glynn Stewart: At the point I need to do that, I will less regularly have a beard.
Paul E. Cooley: Ah, come on. It makes you look stately and handsome, and that’s what I keep telling myself.
Glynn Stewart: Mine comes in bright, Nordic Viking red.
Paul E. Cooley: Ooh, cool. You should keep that. That’s awesome.
Glynn Stewart: I have it about half the year. It’s too hot in summer here.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh, man. Good lord. All right, we need to have him fly down here and spend a summer in Houston.
Glynn Stewart: No.
Terry Mixon: Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
Glynn Stewart: No. I refuse.
Terry Mixon: It’s a trick.
Paul E. Cooley: You’ll never bitch about the heat that you deal with again, buddy. Ever. Ever. Stop your whining.
Terry Mixon: It’s the humidity that gets you.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, it’s the humidity that kills you.
Glynn Stewart: Mexico in March was hot enough for me forever, thanks.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh. At least that’s a dry heat.
Glynn Stewart: I was on the coast. It was not a dry heat.
Paul E. Cooley: Well yeah, but then you got the ocean.
Glynn Stewart: True.
Paul E. Cooley: Which you can actually swim in, as opposed to the shithole that we call Galveston. That’s an entirely different thing. Sorry.
Terry Mixon: You’re getting off on the side there, sport.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah. Wow, we’ve drifted off topic. I’m shocked.
Terry Mixon: Indeed.
Glynn Stewart: Horrified, traumatized. Completely surprised.
New series
Paul E. Cooley: Yes. So this book, you just said it’s going to be a two-book series. Is that the plan?
Glynn Stewart: The plan is a duology. Terry is making mouthings about a book three, and I might decide to do something. We’ll see. Depends on how they do economically and what kind of agreement we can come to.
Paul E. Cooley: Indeed.
Glynn Stewart: When I ran the report this morning, we’d made $12. I also read that report approximately 30 minutes after the book launched, so…
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah I’m looking at the bestselling rank and it’s at 4,098 in the Kindle store, so I have a feeling it’s going to do very well and it’s made more than $12.
Glynn Stewart: It’s only at 4,000? Huh.
Paul E. Cooley: You just published it, you schmuck.
Terry Mixon: It’s a new series. It just published. If it’s anything like when I launch a new series, it’s not going to do nearly as well as the established series did. That’s just the way it works.
Glynn Stewart: We’ll see. It will hit my mailing list in the morning and then that’ll be probably the bigger boost it’ll get. Then it’ll trickle down for three days and then the algorithms will kick in and it’ll bump back up, as they always do.
Terry Mixon: Yeah, it’ll hit my mailing list as well. I still haven’t written the email for it, so it’ll go out tonight.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah.
Glynn Stewart: I’m hoping for number one on Amazon here. I have high expectations of your work, Terry.
Terry Mixon: Woo-hoo! If only. We’ll see. I hope so too, but I’m not going to count on it.
Paul E. Cooley: So right now, this book’s only available on Kindle. Are you planning a TPB?
Terry Mixon: Paperback will probably be uploaded and so forth tonight. I’m just waiting on finalizing the wraparound. I need my wife to plug in the actual number of pages into that PDF for me.
Paul E. Cooley: Gotcha.
Terry Mixon: She’s distracted by the kitten.
Paul E. Cooley: As all three of us are distracted by kittens.
Terry Mixon: He’s also a Vellum user. I’m obviously the one that’s far behind the power curve here.
Glynn Stewart: I’m not actually that big a fan of Vellum’s paperbacks, but they work.
Paul E. Cooley: I haven’t tried it yet so we’re probably going to try it on the next book.
Glynn Stewart: It’s amazingly slick. It’s super efficient. It’s incredibly easy to use. I can just produce a better product in InDesign. It takes me four hours to do it in InDesign and it takes me five minutes to do it in Vellum.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow.
Glynn Stewart: And I haven’t decided whether that balance is worth it yet.
Paul E. Cooley: How many paperbacks do you sell?
Glynn Stewart: Between 2-400 a month, depending on. So usually 2-300 a month and then 3-400 in a launch month.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow. That’s impressive.
Glynn Stewart: That’s across 18 novels, so I’m only really selling 10-15 of each novel sort of thing, but.
Paul E. Cooley: You know what? It doesn’t matter. That’s 10-15 of each novel, therefore you’re getting 3-400 sales at a pop.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah.
Paul E. Cooley: You’re using CreateSpace for those?
Glynn Stewart: Yep.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay, so then you’re getting all that money pretty much sans printing costs.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah. I mean I get about the same for paperback that sells on Amazon at least as I get for an e-book that sells on Amazon.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay. Interesting. Are you also thinking about doing an audiobook for this one?
Glynn Stewart: We’re thinking about it. I don’t think there’s really been a decision yet. ACX just opened up for Canadian publishers recently.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s right, yeah. I forgot about that.
Glynn Stewart: So my inclination is to use Heart as a testing ground for Faolan’s Pen’s ACX account. But I haven’t even opened it yet. And I don’t like listening to audiobooks so it’ll require me to dump proofing it on Terry, which he’s already volunteered for because he’s a sucker.
Terry Mixon: Ouch.
Paul E. Cooley: Terry.
Terry Mixon: I just heard that I volunteered for it. Woo-hoo!
Paul E. Cooley: No, no, you just heard you were volunteered for it.
Terry Mixon: Or, is that how that works?
Paul E. Cooley: That’s a completely different deal.
Glynn Stewart: When this first came up, I asked and he said, “Sure, I could do that.”
Terry Mixon: I probably did.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, he’s probably willing to agree to anything. He was on his meds that day.
Terry Mixon: Ow. I know that when we first posted word about this that a couple of people that do audiobooks immediately said, “Oh, oh. I’m interested.”
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, so one of my narrators and your narrator were about to have a cat fight in the comments.
Terry Mixon: I want to keep all the blood inside my body, so I’m going to step right back and say that’s the publisher’s decision.
Paul E. Cooley: Once again, Terry just handles conflict by copping out.
Glynn Stewart: I guess that means, I’m not sure, so should I be handling that myself or outsourcing it to my business partner who handles operations?
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah. You’re obviously, if you’re doing all this stuff indie, you’ve also been the publisher. You’re dealing with editors, you’re dealing with cover designers, I assume. I don’t know that for sure.
Glynn Stewart: No. My wife is also my business partner and I think is actually going to technically be the, as we break down titles at the end of the year, I believe we’re actually moving her to be the CEO of the company, and I will be hovering off on the side as Chief Operating Officer probably, in terms of titles, because she actually does more to run Faolan’s Pen, the actual publishing business, than I do. I write the books, which are where Faolan’s Pen’s business comes from, but she does all of the contracting. The only people she doesn’t deal with is the copyeditor.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow. Okay. So she deals with the cover designer?
Glynn Stewart: She used to do the covers herself, and then her health no longer allowed that, so now she coordinates with all the cover designers. She speaks the language of visual design in a way I don’t. So when we filter my concepts through her, we get far better creative briefs that go out to the artist, and I find that even some of the best artists in the business do much better work when you’re challenging them to do something different.
Tom Edwards is amazing, but the covers I get from him are better than the covers he does for a lot of people.
Paul E. Cooley: Is that because you raise the expectations?
Glynn Stewart: I think it’s because we raise the expectations. We give him a clearer idea of what we want, and we challenge him to do something a bit beyond the usually box standard Tom Edward spaceship next to a planet, which has become a stereotype at this point.
Paul E. Cooley: Hey, hey, hey. Stop describing the cover for Derelict, all right? Just quit that right now.
Glynn Stewart: I believe I just described the covers of half of the top 100 for space opera for the last year.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah. I think probably for the last 20 years, or 50 years, or since they were invented.
Glynn Stewart: Well for the last year, half of them have been Tom Edwards specifically.
Paul E. Cooley: Ah, so he’s like the go-to person for space opera now, is that what you’re saying?
Glynn Stewart: He’s been the go-to person for space opera for a while. Chris Fox complains about it because Chris Fox was the guy who said, “Yeah, and I hired Tom Edwards for this,” and then Tom Edwards’ now booked for six months out.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh, hm. Yeah. Trying to find somebody whose deadlines match up with yours a little bit better.
Glynn Stewart: I am booked for my covers for everybody through next year. The end of next year.
Process
Paul E. Cooley: Wow. So how many hours a day do you write?
Glynn Stewart: Depends on the day. I aim for 5,000 words a day. Usually that’s about an eight-hour workday, about half of which is actually writing. So I’ll write for half an hour and do something else for half an hour, and then back and forth through the day.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay, so you break it up. You don’t try and do it all in one step.
Glynn Stewart: God, no. I can’t.
Paul E. Cooley: Why not, you slacker?
Terry Mixon: Because we’d go nuts.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh come on. I know Terry sits there for ten hours and stares at the screen and just sits there and pecks at his keyboard the entire time. Doesn’t do anything else.
Terry Mixon: No.
Glynn Stewart: I write for 30 minutes, and then I go play Overwatch, and then I write for 30 minutes, and then I go play Overwatch.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow, I need to try that. I’ll write for 30 minutes. Go play, get my ass kicked in Siege, come back and write another 30 minutes. That’s what I need to be doing apparently.
Terry Mixon: Yeah, then you’ll just be more bitter. “Got my ass kicked, I’m gonna be bitter.”
Paul E. Cooley: No, I’ll look forward to writing. “Oh, good. Something I can do. Something a man of my age can actually be good at.” That’s the way that used to work. That’s interesting. So you work throughout the entire day, but basically you’re taking longer than little coffee breaks. You’re actually going out and doing something else.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah. I say Overwatch because that’s the one I’m playing right now, but it’s often video games. I do a lot of half-hour writing, half-hour video games, half-hour writing.
Paul E. Cooley: Interesting.
Terry Mixon: Basically, the way I’ll end up doing it is I’ll write a scene, I’ll go do something else. I’ll come back and I’ll read that scene that I just wrote, and then I’ll write another scene. I try to aim for three scenes a day, and I actually write seven days a week as opposed to five days a week, so I end up with about 3,500 finished words a day. But it’s probably close to the same output a week that Glynn has.
Glynn Stewart: I aim for 5,000 words a day, five days a week, and I end up somewhere between 20-25,000 words a week.
Paul E. Cooley: Yep, I’m a slacker. I’m a slacker.
Terry Mixon: Of course, I’m being insane with my goals for 2018. I’m actually going to try to make a novel a month. We’ll see how well that works.
Glynn Stewart: My comparison point is a young lady named Amanda Lee who writes in paranormal romance and urban fantasy and cozy mysteries, who consistently churns out 70,000 words a week.
Terry Mixon: Yikes. I cannot even imagine that.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s a Lowell every day.
Glynn Stewart: She will release I believe 56 novels in 2017.
Terry Mixon: Dang.
Glynn Stewart: Sorry, I think that’s 56 novels, novellas, and short stories.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh god. No.
Glynn Stewart: That’s under two names. Yeah.
Terry Mixon: That’s like a quarter of a million words a month.
Glynn Stewart: When I grow up, I want to be Amanda Lee.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, I don’t think I could write the books I want to write that fast. I just don’t think I could do it.
Glynn Stewart: 5,000 words a day is a really good balance for me.
Terry Mixon: I think this last year, if I look, I’ll bet I’ll have published six novels by the time I’m done with 2017. Six or seven novels. So it’s taken … I’ve been writing full-time for two years now, and I’m having to work myself up into higher performance every year. So I’m finally getting to where I feel like I can accomplish more every day and get into the groove all the time. So I’m finally hitting my stride.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, and I’ve been doing this full-time for about the same amount of time. And that’s what I’m feeling as well. I wrote 100,000 words in July, and that’s not something I plan on doing every month, but I definitely feel that I’m hitting my stride, and this is not only more like the pace I was aiming for, but a pace I can sustain, which I wasn’t actually expecting it to be. I was only really aiming to keep up eight books a year for a couple of years and then slow things down, as, you know, I get old and decrepit.
Paul E. Cooley: Old and decrepit? Fuck you.
Terry Mixon: Goddamn these kids.
Paul E. Cooley: Before you went full-time, how many words a day or words a week or words a month were you on average getting?
Glynn Stewart: I was targeting about 1,000 words a day as best I could. Like 500-1,000 words a day.
Paul E. Cooley: How often were you hitting that?
Glynn Stewart: Usually. I mean, the year in 2015, before I went full-time, I released three novels I think.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay.
Glynn Stewart: Between January and September of 2015, I released three novels, and then I went full-time and released a fourth in December.
Paul E. Cooley: Writing as fast as you do now, do you feel like the complexity of the stories suffers at all, or is it just about the same as it was before?
Glynn Stewart: It’s all on the outline I find. That’s the only way I can write at the speed I write is because I work out a lot of the complexity in advance. And by doing that, I’m pretty sure I still have just as complex, just as intertwined stories as I always had.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay.
Glynn Stewart: The new Duchy of Terra that’s coming out at the end of the month I think is one of the best novels I’ve ever written.
Terry Mixon: I am so glad to hear that. I’m looking forward to that sucker.
Paul E. Cooley: I’m shocked that Terry would look forward to a Glynn Stewart novel. I am so shocked.
Terry Mixon: I’ve only been raving about you for, what, a year and something since I read the first novel?
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah. I’ve had to hear all about it. I’m sick of hearing your name, buddy. Sick of hearing your name.
Glynn Stewart: And you’ve never even met me before today and you’re already sick of my name. Wow.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s right. I’ve had enough of your shit already. That’s the way that works. It’s all Terry’s fault.
Glynn Stewart: I can accept that.
Terry Mixon: When I started writing the last half of Heart of Vengeance, I had some vague ideas that already varied from where the plot line was going to go. Characters that were going to make an appearance. I’m actually surprised by how well it all came together at the end where I tied everything sort of together and left a few plot threads luring out there. But that’s pretty much how all fine novels do it.
Glynn Stewart: I’m waiting for the shipping wars to come out of this book.
Terry Mixon: Waiting for the what?
Glynn Stewart: The shipping wars. The people who are shipping Brad and Falcon, because it’s going to happen.
Terry Mixon: I actually thought about that a little bit. So, yeah.
Glynn Stewart: There’s a sequence in there where I’m like yeah, and then guy looks at them and classes them as fair and moves on. It’s like yep. There were definite moments of are these two three wrong words from tearing each other’s clothes off?
Paul E. Cooley: What?
Glynn Stewart: But it’s just not that kind of book.
Terry Mixon: It wasn’t that kind of book, no.
Paul E. Cooley: Why? Why? Terry used to write erotica.
Terry Mixon: It’s true.
Paul E. Cooley: But why aren’t there any erot—Well, I guess there probably are. Why aren’t you guys writing erotic space opera? What’s wrong with you?
Glynn Stewart: Because Lindsay Buroker does it so much better than we can.
Terry Mixon: It’s true. It’s totally true.
Paul E. Cooley: Bullshit. Poor planning. You’re just giving up, copping out.
Glynn Stewart: Have you read her stuff?
New territory
Paul E. Cooley: Shit no. But that is an interesting question for you. You’ve been writing military sci-fi and space opera, and obviously some fantasy. Is there anything else in the science fiction realm that you want to go after? Is there something on your bucket list? Is there something you want to try?
Glynn Stewart: Mostly my brain is bubbling over with different ideas for space opera. Some of them a bit more deeper and more thematic, more literary I suppose, for all that there will still be explosions. That’s probably what’s going to be my first big step out of my current comfort zone, so to speak, is what I’m currently calling Secret Project E, which is kind of intended to be my massive science-fiction magnum opus.
Paul E. Cooley: Hm. You’re how old and you’re writing a magnum opus?
Glynn Stewart: Eh, it probably will still be shorter than a David Weber novel.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh god.
Terry Mixon: Yeah, even beyond that there’s Brandon Sanderson. You’re not going to hit that level, so you’re all right.
Paul E. Cooley: I thought we had decided that he had become He Who Shall Not Be Named on this show? Or was that Patterson? I don’t remember which.
Terry Mixon: Just don’t have as many meetings as David Weber does.
Paul E. Cooley: I’ve never read a David Weber book, but my understanding is three-quarters of it now is meetings.
Glynn Stewart: 60%.
Terry Mixon: Feels like it sometimes, yeah.
Glynn Stewart: The problem is that David Weber writes a really fascinating personal interaction meeting.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s tough.
Glynn Stewart: You hit the end of the book and you look back and you’re like, “That was 60% meetings. I couldn’t put it down, but this doesn’t make any sense.”
Paul E. Cooley: Like writing 100,000 words about coffee?
Glynn Stewart: Coffee on a spaceship.
Paul E. Cooley: Well, of course, coffee on a spaceship. I mean, you can’t have it any other way, right? That’s the only way to make sure it’s vacuum fresh.
Glynn Stewart: Exactly, yes.
Paul E. Cooley: I’m very depressed now. I’m very depressed I didn’t get a groan over that pun. You guys suck.
Terry Mixon: We’re used to it from you. We just ignored it.
Glynn Stewart: I have friends who are pun masters and I just tune out puns automatically at this point.
Paul E. Cooley: Hm. I have Terry. I try and tune him out but it’s not working so far.
Glynn Stewart: That makes the show very weird if you’re not talking to the cohost.
Paul E. Cooley: I don’t like to think of him as a cohost. I like to think of him as more of a digital growth.
Terry Mixon: A blight on his life, perhaps.
Paul E. Cooley: A blight on my life. Yeah, why do we do this show every week? I just don’t understand.
Terry Mixon: I suspect it’s because you’re a masochist.
Paul E. Cooley: Ah, you know, maybe you’re right.
Glynn Stewart: We’re science-fiction authors. I thought masochism was par for the course.
Paul E. Cooley: Well I’m not just a science-fiction author. I’m also a horror writer, so yeah.
Glynn Stewart: Oh yeah, masochist.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, and also sadist. I enjoy torturing my characters.
Terry Mixon: I think it’s self-loathing really.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh there’s tons. I thought writing brought out self-loathing. I thought that was part of the deal.
Glynn Stewart: Certainly it brings out insecurities and uncertainties.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, and other shit that is kind of terrifying.
Terry Mixon: One of the biggest things that I learned just starting this out, that’s helped me so much, is that I have no idea how good anything I write is. I have to let other people tell me if it’s any good or not. So I don’t go crazy thinking about it.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah, to a certain extent I try very hard not to pay attention to my own opinion of my work when I finish it. It’s just it’s done, it gets edited, it goes out, and I try not to think about it in between.
Paul E. Cooley: I usually get scared when I go through my second pass and if I’m enjoying the book, I’m like, “What’s wrong with it?”
Glynn Stewart: Oh yeah.
Paul E. Cooley: Something’s got to be wrong.
Glynn Stewart: There’s been a couple that terrified me until I actually sat down and did the second pass and went, “Okay, this is actually kind of good.”
Paul E. Cooley: Meets expectations.
Terry Mixon: What never ceases to amaze me is when I publish one I’m like, “Oh gosh, I just don’t know about this. How this is going to work.” I publish it and then the readers come back and tell me what they liked about it and what I was doing. I’m like, “I don’t remember doing any of this. Are you sure you’re reading the same book?”
Glynn Stewart: That’s okay. I always get reviews telling me that it’s “lesbians gone wild in space,” so.
Paul E. Cooley: Lesbians gone wild in space.
Terry Mixon: It’s because your books are so filled with lesbians.
Glynn Stewart: Yes. Apparently. Or the one that was complaining about Terran Privateer just being kissy-faced boys.
Terry Mixon: What?
Glynn Stewart: Oh my reviews are entertaining.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh, so are ours. So are ours.
Terry Mixon: I don’t read my reviews. I have no idea. They’re probably very entertaining but I don’t …
Paul E. Cooley: Oh I occasionally jump on there to see what crazy thing. I only go look at the one and two-star reviews.
Glynn Stewart: If you ever want a laugh at just how, at what people think they can say on the internet in this era, and just wow. Go read the one and two-star reviews on Space Carrier Avalon.
Paul E. Cooley: Hm. I know one of the authors on the secret group that three of us are part of I think. Somebody said that one of their books got a review, that it was really a review for a toaster they’d ordered from Amazon and it was on their book.
Glynn Stewart: A few reviews where I have read the review and I’m like, “I seriously don’t know what book you’re talking about. But it’s not mine.”
Terry Mixon: I got a contact off of my website, somebody saying that they had loved my work up to this point, but they could not possibly continue after the last book that I published that was just filled with filthy language and all kinds of other things. And I said, “Are you sure you’re talking about this book? Because I’m pretty confident that it doesn’t have any bad language in it,” and the answer back was, “Never mind.”
Paul E. Cooley: It was probably a review for one of my books is how that worked.
Glynn Stewart: No, I get the emails saying, “You’re far too good an author to use this level of profanity in your work, and you should be more realistic with it,” or something. I don’t remember anymore. I just started tuning them all out.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, those are the people who have never met anybody who was in the military while they were in the military and knows nothing about the military.
Glynn Stewart: The officers in my books swear like accountants. I suspect they don’t swear enough to be actual military officers, but they swear at about the level you’ll hear in a meeting of the senior accountants at most midsize companies.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah my officers swear like the enlisted and the enlisted swear like, well, yeah.
Glynn Stewart: Sailors?
Paul E. Cooley: Enlisted sailors from the 1890s.
Terry Mixon: Talking about things that we would like to write, I’ve written one post-apocalyptic novel. I’d like to write more in that, so I have to come back to that.
Glynn Stewart: My parents adored your post-apocalyptic novel, I should tell you.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah, see this just goes back and confirms what I’ve always known. Only old people read Terry’s books.
Terry Mixon: It could be true. I definitely have a fan base of older readers. So this could be true.
Glynn Stewart: So do I. Every time I send out a mailing list email, I get a bunch of unsubscribes back and at least one of them these days seems to be labeled “Passed Away.”
Paul E. Cooley: Oh no. Oh god.
Glynn Stewart: I feel like I might outlive my audience.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh that’s horrible. Oh my god, I’ve never gotten one of those.
Terry Mixon: I want to write an urban fantasy as well, but I have an idea and I have not found the time in my schedule that I can afford to do it. Like I need another series.
Glynn Stewart: My schedule is booked up through the end of next year for writing and I’m kind of grumpy because I keep getting new plot bunnies.
Paul E. Cooley: Plot bunnies, yes. Like dust bunnies, only … Yeah, I know how that works.
Glynn Stewart: There is a field in the back of my brain where the plot bunnies breed, and they don’t go away.
Paul E. Cooley: If you spend any time with Terry, he’ll be more than happy to stuff more of them in there every five minutes.
Terry Mixon: It’s true. I love brainstorming ideas.
Glynn Stewart: Mine don’t need any help.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah.
Glynn Stewart: Mine do not need any help.
Paul E. Cooley: Nobody really needs help with those. Terry just cackles with laughter when he sees the look on other people’s faces when he gives them an idea.
Terry Mixon: I do.
Glynn Stewart: There’s a couple really successful romance authors of my acquaintance who are like, “Yep, any time I finish a book, it’s a six-week period of stress trying to come up with the idea for the next one.”
Paul E. Cooley: What?
Glynn Stewart: And they’re always worried that they’re not going to have another idea.
Paul E. Cooley: Wow. They should look at my old shit. Wow. I can’t fathom having that problem.
Glynn Stewart: This is a lady who is extremely successful. But every time she finishes a book, it is a massive issue for her to come up with the idea for the next one.
Terry Mixon: I’m going through the list of making a story bible for my Empire of Bones Saga, and I’ve gotten …
Glynn Stewart: I should do that.
Terry Mixon: … first four books done. I’m a little bit behind because I’ve got a few sheets of paper, the ones from the last three books that I need to enter into that to bring it up to current. At the bottom, I have open plot threads. Just things that I’ve said or done that could be approached in another book. And it’s huge and it’s not getting any smaller.
Assessing success
Glynn Stewart: I am seriously tempted to find somebody I can pay to go through my books and build me a Wiki of every character and ship in them all.
Terry Mixon: If you find someone that does that, let me know, because I might be right behind you.
Paul E. Cooley: Strangely enough, we’ve had that conversation very recently on this show.
Terry Mixon: It’s true.
Glynn Stewart: Terrifyingly, I actually have people I could pay to do that. I just don’t want to know what they’d charge me.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah we both have that problem too. Terry just says you got to grab minions and run with them.
Glynn Stewart: I have minions I just haven’t decided whether or not this is something I want to pay my minions to handle.
Paul E. Cooley: Right, yeah. But we’re in the same boat. Both of us.
Terry Mixon: We are not in the same boat. He has a publicist. We do not.
Paul E. Cooley: Well, we don’t rate publicists. You probably do at this point.
Glynn Stewart: I rate a publicist? I have a publicist so I guess I rate a publicist? I don’t know anymore.
Paul E. Cooley: I’m looking at your charts here. You rate a publicist. Terry’s close to rating a publicist.
Glynn Stewart: I’m at the point where I still have to occasionally stop and remind myself that I am generally in the top 100 authors in Kindle Unlimited every month and should probably start to consider myself as potentially one of the bigger science-fiction authors alive, and my brain just refuses to compute that, sort of self-destructs every time we have this conversation.
Terry Mixon: We’re not really wired for our own success.
Glynn Stewart: We aren’t, no.
Paul E. Cooley: No.
Glynn Stewart: I have 500 five-star reviews, great. One one-star review, sobbing in the bathroom.
Terry Mixon: There’s a reason I don’t read those damn reviews.
Paul E. Cooley: I have minions who will occasionally tell me about a really bad review that they read and they’ll boil that down to the humorous aspects of it.
Glynn Stewart: I have been repeatedly encouraged by my soon-to-be CEO to do that, and I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Terry Mixon: Looking at the urban fantasy story that I wanted to write, I fully intend to have a character in there track down some reviewers from something on Amazon and kill them, and that’s going to be the bad guy that they have to deal with. It’s some guy that’s tracking down bad reviewers and killing them.
Paul E. Cooley: Sounds like a book I would write.
Terry Mixon: Then why aren’t you writing it?
Paul E. Cooley: Because I got all this other shit to write. I got monsters eating people. People love my monsters. As long as I have monsters eating people, I’ll be selling books. That’s how this works.
Terry Mixon: Well then why don’t you have somebody investigating the monster that’s killing people that leave bad reviews on Amazon?
Paul E. Cooley: Because I have other monsters doing other shit right now. God. Get in line, bitches.
Glynn Stewart: The line is recorded. There is a publishing schedule, and I still boggle at the fact that I have my writing time scheduled for the next 18 months.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh my god.
Terry Mixon: I can’t schedule anything as far as writing time beyond individual days. I say I’m going to try to write my 3,500 words today. Most days I make it, some days I don’t, and I just leave a little play in there for the fact that I’m going to have some days that I don’t hit it, and stumble towards my goals of getting novels published.
Glynn Stewart: I have the specific sequence the novels will be released in. I have to book my editor about three months in advance, so. And my artists are, like everyone I’m using for artists at this point, I swear half of them have to book six months to a year in advance, so everything is scheduled out. I know what I’ll be writing through the end of next year. There’s one thing, depending on how the urban fantasy series goes, that may actually getting axed out of my schedule, which will give me some more flexibility. But I will be quite sad if that happens.
Paul E. Cooley: Interesting.
Terry Mixon: Thus far, my wife does my covers. She uses stock art and it’s worked well enough so far. So glad I don’t have to try to schedule artists into it. I’d go insane.
Glynn Stewart: I have my wife schedule the artists. It works great.
Paul E. Cooley: I see how this works.
Glynn Stewart: There’s a reason that she’s the CEO and I’m not. She does all the stuff that isn’t writing at this point.
Paul E. Cooley: Yeah.
Glynn Stewart: It’s a really effective division of labor, actually.
Terry Mixon: I wish I could let go of more things.
Paul E. Cooley: If you got a partner that’s handling all those aspects so you can focus on the stuff that you’re supposed to be doing, that’s got to be wonderful.
Glynn Stewart: It is amazing. She is the only reason I’m in this business.
Paul E. Cooley: Well, good to know. So there you go, dearest listeners. Find somebody else you can hand all this shit off to and you’ll be a happier person for it.
Glynn Stewart: Well she’s also the one who told me to try this. If I had not married my wife, I would not be a self-published author.
Paul E. Cooley: That’s terrifying.
Glynn Stewart: She is the only reason this ever happened.
Paul E. Cooley: Huh. Interesting. Well, do you have any words of wisdom to give our writing audience before we wrap this up?
Glynn Stewart: Words of wisdom? I don’t have any wisdom.
Paul E. Cooley: Well there you have it, folks. All right.
Glynn Stewart: My only advice to people is just keep writing. That’s nine-tenths of it. All the stuff around this scam or that scam, or this advertising program or that advertising program. Just keep writing books. The best thing you can do to sell books is put up another book. I think we forget that a lot with everything that goes on in this business.
Paul E. Cooley: We do forget, and we keep telling ourselves. And even though we’re the ones saying it, we still forget it.
Terry Mixon: It’s true.
Glynn Stewart: Oh yes. Yeah.
Paul E. Cooley: So it’s good to hear that from somebody else and to have them also say, “Yes, we forget this all the time,” because Terry and I do.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah.
Paul E. Cooley: I’m pretty damn sure every author we’ve ever had on this show has the same problem to a certain extent.
Glynn Stewart: Yeah. We all struggle with our insecurities and we all forget that the best thing you could do is write the next damn book.
Links
Paul E. Cooley: Well cool. Well, Glynn, thank you very much for coming on. Glynn and Terry’s book Heart of Vengeance, Vigilante Book One, just came out, so you all should go check it out. And also, go look at the show notes for Glynn Stewart’s author page. Terry’s author page is always there, so you can ignore him. You probably looked at it before. But go check out Glynn Stewart and go through the archives and read our review of The Terran Privateer, if you want to get an idea what’s going on with this Glynn guy. So that’s it. If you have complaints, comments, accolades, whatever else, death threats.
Terry Mixon: Bitter denunciations.
Paul E. Cooley: Bitter denunciations. You can send them to show@deadrobotsociety.com. You can tweet me @Paul_E_Cooley, or you can join our Facebook group, The Listeners of the Dead Robot Society where you will find a massive conglomeration of crazy people who post things daily, ask questions, find beta readers, argue about certain things. We love our community. It’s growing every day. It’s been awesome to watch it grow and also contribute to it. It’s been a wonderful experience.
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t thank our wonderful host, podHoster, for making all 14 trillion episodes of Dead Robot Society available for your ear holes.
That said, if you want to help us keep the show on the air and commercial-free, you can become a Patreon patron for as little as $1 a month. Get access to early podcast episodes, live shows, ask questions of the two doofuses that are currently hosting this mess, and receive other entitlements like at the $10 level, you get your name called out every week, and you also get the opportunity to make Paul say really stupid shit.
And since we’re talking about stupid shit, here we go. Our $10 patrons, as of this second, are Drew Bernardi, Robert Slade, John Kilgowan, Chris Winder, Isabelle Cushy, Andre Conde Moreas, DJ Chamberlin, Jonathan Zarusin, I just love saying it like that, JR Handley, Caleb “What the Hell Happened to Meg Ryan’s Face” James. Why, Caleb? Why? And Sue. My editor is Sue Baymen, which actually is a real comment because that is my editor.
So go to Patreon.com/DRSpodcast for more information on that. Like I said, check the show notes for links to Glynn’s site, Glynn’s author page and et cetera. As well as Terry.
Terry Mixon: Well you should actually, I’m going to stop you here, you should let him go ahead and say for himself where we can find him.
Paul E. Cooley: Oh, yes. You know, I can’t believe I forgot to say that. Glynn, where the hell can we find you?
Glynn Stewart: Amazon. Also www.glynnstewart.com.
Paul E. Cooley: Which then …
Glynn Stewart: That’ll redirect. Right now that’s a redirect, but relatively quickly that will actually be my full website.
Paul E. Cooley: Okay. Fair enough. Terry, see, you completely derailed me.
Glynn Stewart: And I’m on Facebook. I have an author page as just Glynn Stewart Author.
Paul E. Cooley: Ooh, okay. Well more things that I’ll have to get in the editing. All right, any last words, Mr. Mixon?
Terry Mixon: Keep writing.
Paul E. Cooley: Keep writing. I think we can go with that. Also, one last thing because Terry derailed me. You can also find our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/DRSpodcast where you can see all the madness…if you want to see what we look like. You probably want to see what our guests look like. Us, not so much. Anyway, you can go up there and see that. Leave a comment, review, subscribe, and we’ll get you there.
With that said, we’ll cut it off for this week, and we’ll be back next week with more crazy. Thank you very much for coming on, Glynn. It was a blast.
Glynn Stewart: Thank you for having me.
Paul E. Cooley: You’re very welcome. Terry, I’ll see you next week.
Terry Mixon: Bye-bye.
Glynn Stewart: Have fun, children.
Paul E. Cooley: When you say something, the picture changes. So you should say something. Bye, folks.