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MyLinh Shattan on How West Point Shaped Two Generations · Author Hour

• speaker-0: You're continually reading as a writer and you're always working on craft. So I'd say, like, how did Eric do it? I'm looking at you as a business side, but you're also a writer, right? Something. How how did how did you make it so people could digest it? And then I look at a lot of my books that I love, or if I reread them like for structure, but you actually must sit your butt in the chair and write. Some people are like 350 a day, a thousand a day. You can read how they do it. Annie Dillard, you know, Stephen King, Anne Lamont. But you gotta generate the writing to have writing. speaker-1: All right, Milan, thank you so much for joining us. speaker-0: I'm glad to be here. speaker-1: Before we get into your well, your book and your backstory are really the same. So I'd love to you have a very fascinating story and I would love to kind of pull your string on it. No, thank speaker-0: Thank you. It's interesting. I feel like I've been telling stories most of my life. My father's in an Irish American and my mother's ⁓ Vietnamese from central Vietnam. And they're both storytellers in their own language. You know, they could they could spin a yarn for days, months, and and you'd be waiting for the punchline, like wake up in the middle of the night, some other country and go, ⁓ that's what it's about. But no, it's so it's like it's been interesting telling people, you know, the the the background, especially with my name. My brother is a six foot one. Guy named Donald Brewster, and he looks very Vietnamese. Whereas I can almost pass because I'm pretty tall, but then everybody stumbles on them. Is it Milee? What's your name? You know, I like, yeah, it's Vietnamese, right? Like, so anyway, I've been telling stories for a long time, but I think the genesis of it for me was, you know, you have children, and I don't I don't know if you have children as well, but they make you re-evaluate a lot of stuff. speaker-1: F speaker-0: So when my oldest looked at what she was going to do and she decided like West Point was the only place for her, I was I was not ready for it, I guess. You know, like if you get out and do stuff yourself, I'd do anything. I'd look at like, well, there's Eric. I mean, he's doing it. I can do that. ⁓ that was my way of thinking. I was I'm a big person, you know? And I just wasn't ready for when my kid did that. And it's the weirdest thing. I mean, I could sleep on a dime, do everything, jump out of planes, rappel out of helicopters, but when she left, I just didn't sleep. It was the weirdest thing. Like, what's going on? And so the fear you have for your child, and I'm sure you've seen it where you lost your kid for two minutes or something, you know, like it's just like nothing. Right. And so now I really am experiencing, you know, at late stage in my life, what the fear is like for a military parent. And that's when I just was like, I gotta start writing this. No designs, no, I wanna put this out there for the public. Really for myself. Let's get to the bottom of this. And to sustain a book, as you know, you have to have an intense level of passion. And so it was fear. I mean, honest goodness, fear. speaker-1: So you started writing this just as a a ⁓ way to process what you were going through. At what point did it turn into, ⁓ this is something that I want to kind of turn inside out and share with the world? speaker-0: Mm-hmm. So I had been writing and I loved writing. So the irony is I've done so much was in the corporate world, was teaching as a professor, and then I wore the uniform and I was an army officer at the end of the Cold War. And I really wanted to major in English. And I had the parents that were like, What are you gonna do with that? You know, so I majored in mathematics because naturally it's so close math and English, but can you speaker-1: What what are the available things to study for you at West Point? Are you are you sort of shuttled into a specific speaker-0: Yeah, no, that's a great question. People don't realize ⁓ West Point is the nation's first engineering school. It continually ranks in the top two or three, mechanical and civil. I mean, whatever we do, we have to use. It's it's it's beyond theory, right? So it's it's pragmatic. But you have to have a bachelor's of science degree. So there are close to 40 majors. So I could be an English and philosophy major. I would still have a bachelor's of science degree with an engineering track. And you're taking a multivariable class, it's like thirty, thirty-five core courses because it is classical liberal arts. It's not enough that you know your mathematics, you don't gotta know high level of mathematics and engineering because you're going to be on the ground somewhere, you know, whether you're trying to put a bridge in place or ⁓ set up, you know, potable water. No, so I could have majored in English for sure. I'd still be an engineer, I'd still have a bachelor's of science degree, but I'd also have an English major. But at some point, and and I think like you, like, you know, teaching seminars or something, like you want to be a writer? You really, you really wanna be a writer. Is there anything else in the world that you can do? Cause you should do that. But you gotta love words. And it's like breathing, right? Like I just have to write. So ⁓ I started writing like twenty some years ago. I've got over 10,000 hours in. I was a freelance person. I did correspondence for the military, did newspapers, you remember them? speaker-1: I miss newspapers. Yeah. Let it go newspaper. speaker-0: No, I I just I won a contest, like 800 people, and they were bringing in columnists, you know. And then they love my writing and they're like, could you do the military feature? And so I wrote features on our deployed soldiers and it used to be picked up by the early bird, the Department of Defense, and I loved it. Get paid nothing. Right. So finally I just realized, all right, gotta I gotta start writing for myself. So when my daughter left, I said I'm gonna really work on craft. I think I was already competent as a journalist, but I'm like, I want to figure out how to write long form, which you've done. I don't know if you you also studied, but so I went back for a master's in fine arts and I just I looked at all the writers I liked and I applied to those programs and there were two or three writers who just stood out for me. I I love their work. And so I said, well, I'll go at least have exposure to commercial writers, professional writers, and see if it helps my writing. Cause there's so many theories on, no, don't go to the schoolhouse. Your right's gonna mess you up. But yeah, so the I had been writing for a long time and I said this is it. My kid's going, I'm going to. ⁓ so I went abroad with a low residency program. And that's I didn't set out to write it. I just started writing all these things that were bugging me. And like, I have to write this. This is really bothering me. And I found out that I was writing this story about the stuff she's going through, and that was kind of a foil. I'm like, if you write about your kid, you probably don't want to say your name. So the very first draft, I didn't even use your name. She was a foil for really exploring my my experience when women were just integrated. I was in a twelfth class. The first class graduated in eighty. I reported in nineteen eighty-seven, twelve years after Saigonville. speaker-1: Yeah. So so the context for people who are sort of ⁓ who are putting the pieces together breadcrumb style, but like the the essence of the book is that you went through West Point as one of the first women, some of the very earliest classes of women to attend West Point. And now thirty years later, your daughter is going through and it it is a very interesting mix of kind of like memoir and reflection about Your experience, her experience, feeling of of yeah, military parents and that that mixture of kind of fear and courage and hope. Like I think it's it's a really like cool and unique story. I think it's so I'm so glad that you I'm so glad you wrote it and I'm so glad that you shared it. ⁓ yeah. So those are both those are both independent decisions. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. I think that it was ⁓ the epiphany about 2018, a year after I had my first manuscript. I woke up or I that sometime that day and I said, This is raising Athena. It's it's it's how did I raise a child? Because when you when you see your child with weaponry in the current combat uniform, man, you're like, that's not my kid. It is my kid, but what the heck? Kind of freaked me out, really. And so then I I realized I needed to this is the what I wrote, but when you start out, it's just a lot of there's so much crap in there, right? You gotta cut it out, you gotta really figure out what your thesis is. And honestly, I don't know if if you've read I read so many books on writing, Eric. I read I love Murakami, Haruki Murakami, and he wrote this thing, the novelist as a profession, which is a rare individual that makes money writing, like like Poe tried to Edgar Allan Poe tried to do too. And it's extraordinary. Like he does, he explains to you because he plans to make his whole living is writing books. Like I the rest of us are, you know, even Stephen King, right? Like he had a teaching English somewhere, like driving his book around, you know. So I just began the process and and I I probably have at least five full rewrites. So I I I respect the reader's intelligence a lot. And it's like to me. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: I love the Hemingway school, which is take it all out if you if you don't think it adds, let let the reader figure it out. But then I realized like Mark Kait, who's fantastic, your your senior editor over there, is just like, you know, you he loved the philosophical things and the reflections. I don't have I don't have a religion. I don't like have something to fall back on. And when she asks, my daughter asks me. about filling out her dog tags. That's that's about death, right? Like that's about when you die on the battlefield. How does Eric want his final rights? Right? Like it's it's five lines. It hasn't changed for a hundred years. And you gotta put your your blood type on there and you gotta put your religious preference on there. So I'm Buddhist and Catholic. My husband's Jewish and Unitarian. Like, what are we, you know? speaker-1: Those your five lines right there. speaker-0: Right. So, you know, like I put no preference. And at the time they had mandatory chapel services. When people served, they served for God and country. Really. A lot of people still do. And I was the only person like standing. You need like chapel services were voluntary. And I would just go back to my barracks. And they're like, come on, Brewstery, you gotta go get the cookies or something. Like worried about my soul. I'm like, you're screaming at me one minute. Then you want me to go get some cookies. I mean, I went, but Yeah, so I had to I had to sort these things out. And then I I really learned a lot as a writer too. Just being in the schoolhouse with you get workshopped. I don't know if you've been workshopped. speaker-1: Tell me about it. speaker-0: So you go in a workshop and it's called it's really a workshop model. I went to Queen's University in Charlotte. And ⁓ I love that because you sit like on a stool basically or in the room and you don't talk. And we've read Eric's chapter on Elon or whatever, and we pass it around and we take it home and we we we we mark it all up and then we just let you tell you what we think. And you just you can't say anything. You go around the room and you get workshopped. And then at the end you get the edits, the copy edits of however people do it, and and you get it all to take back with you to decide how you want to use it. You know, you have five people telling you this is slow or this statement, you know, like, or you really have no scene development here, or your dialogue's off. Okay, you're probably off, right? Then and then you have to make the decision, you know, how you if you're gonna change it, right? And and how It it it ultimately makes you better. But no, so I learned from the workshop model at Queens. It was very, very good. And I had great ⁓ professional writers too that I work with. speaker-1: Interesting. So d how did your book change between like your original vision for it and what ended up actually getting published finally? Mm-hmm. speaker-0: It's it's so extreme. So I'm about the slowest writer on the planet. I'd say it was eight to nine to ten years. speaker-1: Perfection takes time, you know. Craftsmanship has no deadline, as I said. speaker-0: We have other our lives going on. I mean, there's a lot of other stuff. I'm involved with so much stuff. But I mean it's just a fantastic question. So my the first manuscript, it's like, who is it that says shitty first drafts? I wanna say it's Anne Lamotte. She wrote Bird by Bird. I I've read them all, like you name it. It's the most arcane, like chuck Pellinick. I've read all this stuff. It's speaker-1: Do you have a favorite of those? Like does does one stand out as like resonating with you the most? speaker-0: Gosh, I love Ursula Le Guin's steering the craft. Like she has 10 exercises, and like the last one is going, gut it in half. Take it and cut it in half. And you distill the essence and what's most important for your reader. And you know what? It's probably better because you're a lot of it's just garbage. What are you really saying? So the short answer to that, I would say, is I just wrote what was. On my mind and what I was wrestling with at that time in my life. And I realized I was dealing with the struggles of a military parent that were new to me. And I also realized there's not many much in American history, in human history. Women have been fighting for a long time, they've been in combat, but they've usually had to go weird ways about it or cover their gender. But we're really the first generation where it's mother and daughter. Right. So for all the men, they just go, hey. Eric, you'd ask your dad and Bob would know, or you asked your godfather, or your uncle, or your grandparent. There was not a model for women. And so when I had these issues or whatever, they're really and women were hard on women. Eric, they were just really tough. They're like, Well, we did it. You know, only half of us survived, and you gotta be able to be tough to survive. And they're kind of lone wolves. So Mentors as a word really didn't exist. And it didn't mean that I didn't have guys that were kind or people that wanted to help you. There were just no precedents. There were speaker-1: Yeah, there's a difference between a mentor and a model. Yes. speaker-0: Absolutely. Or even a friend or teammate, right? It's just different. ⁓ 'cause they had no experience either, right? Like it's so I I realized what I was doing historically there was no precedent for. And I I didn't set out to be that way. So at the end of the first year, I wake up and I'm like, ⁓ it's about raising Athena. Or I the words came to me like I'm trying to raise this warrior. I didn't mean to set out. I just speaker-1: It's a great title. So I love the title. speaker-0: If you're familiar with the myth, she comes out fully formed in body armor, you know, with the lance and the shield and the pellets and I mean, she comes out of Zeus's head, right? And look, there is she has no mother if you think about it, right? It's just there's no mother. So I didn't have that. And so I was like, what do I tell my kid? And I didn't process a lot of the crazy stuff. So that's what I had at first. Going to the schoolhouse helped. It it was a wake up to the weaknesses in my writing, real professionals. meant truly mentoring try help you, right? Like you gotta do this. And then probably in the next few rewrites, I realized, okay, I need to really think about Kara as a character and not simply a foil without a name. So Mark Kait at Scribe, you know, he he just reads a gazillion books. He said, We're all dying and it's like to know who this Kara is. So one of the last probably the last two rewrites I developed her character. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: And we done a lot more interviews and realized your kid is 18. You don't like me, like maybe you don't want to put her thoughts out there and her name. And but by the time she's 26 now. So and we had so many interviews. And so I developed her as fully and respectfully as I could without projecting my thoughts into her mind. So using her language, her quotes, her interviews, her stories, and then accurately fleshing her out. warts and all like you know, like you you might think that you're a great kid but you're a pain in the ass sometimes, you know, like really just fleshing her out as I flesh myself out, which is speaker-1: Was she what was her reaction to that? I mean, obviously, you know, you're interviewing her, you did this with her tacit, if not explicit, permission. But I feel like a lot of people struggle with that's like, you know, to write a good memoir, you have to represent other people. And it's very hard to do that in an unbiased way or in a like full and honest way. So how how did you approach that conversation with her? speaker-0: So by this time you gotta figure by she she's in her early twenties, it seems like half her life or a third of her life her mother's been writing. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So speaker-0: But I I tried to create what I did is I tried to create the tension of discovery and bring the reader in the narrative presence. So there's three temporal straw it's really quite like intense, but trying to make it seamless for the reader, which is I'm doing my backstory in Saigon. I open up on the embassy because my father's rescued from the embassy with the ambassador, the very last chopper for the official mission personnel to get out of Saigon. My dad's on that. No phones. We don't know, right? Like I got out a few weeks earlier. Then I open I get to my daughter in the very beginning and I let her I use her essay so people can hear her voice. So I include different forms of writing so you can see her college essay and it brings people to tears. So I I've had people request it, say, Can I put it on my screen? I'm like, sure, put it on your screensaver. You know, like it's pretty powerful. So As I'm folding her in, I think the way you flesh her out is I framed the flashbacks. So each chapter, I open with something that's going on with her that's bothering me. I didn't have to box. Okay. So men, nosebleeds, it's notorious. Most concussions, I think, across the United States and any sport is army boxing. Women didn't have to box. So my daughter's in the second class. She has to box. I don't know why. It's freaking me out. I'm like, It was scary for men. Their nose is knocked out of joint, blood's hitting on the floor. And I'm thinking my daughter's gonna do that. Right. Like I still am not quite rap figured out how to fall asleep. And I'm thinking, you know, you're you're scared. Imagine your kid, right? Is this your kid? You're like, I don't care about myself. So I framed it with the sh the stuff going down. She goes, Mom, I got boxing. I'm like, what does that mean you got boxing? Do you get your gloves? And so she's telling me actual what it's like boxing, getting hit in the face. Like watching girls bleed and and you know, going up against people that actually boxed before. And she's she practices with guys. She she tests as far as the graded bouts are with weight to weight, skill level to skill level, gender to gender. But you it could be you and Eric. Like, I'm your weight, I'm 160 on 170. I'm gonna, I'm gonna box the guy my weight. Like, no way he's gonna spack a weight more behind his punch. But so I would frame each chapter the way you would structure your thing. And I realized whatever was bothering me about what she told me about. And then I would go back into my time because what was it like for me? I had to run fast. I had to be strong. I had to carry men's back. I had to prove myself double. Right. So I end up being on the track team, but I was a slow ass runner. I was sorry, I was really slow and I fell out of runs. And some guys helped me finish. I learned to finish. I got really fast. I went in the fast group. My mom was like an Olympic level runner in Vietnam. But then I end up walking on the track team and in the track captain. So my my peers told that story when they went to their units. They're like, we have to tell you about this girl who was a fallout runner, couldn't even stay in the formation runs. Hey, 131 down the strip. And so you're you're running down the strip, left foot, right foot. And I'm like, you know, you get to the X mile part, and I'm like, I'm gonna pass out. And I did, I just fall out. But amazing thing happens when you're training every day and you're going through this tough stuff, like going through the gas chamber, you know. You can suffer it. It sucks. But you learn how to trust that gas mask when you've you've just taken in CS gas, right? And all every orifice of your body is leaking fluids. Right. Like, so I used her experience and I would go back and try to reconcile some of these serious things that happen. And I was lucky. Like honestly, everybody had a suck. There everybody sucked in some way. You do not get through unscathed. It might look different for a woman and there are bad things that can happen. So I I do talk about that. And I didn't, by the way. So, you know, one of the editors, like, aren't you gonna talk about sexual harassment? I'm like, Okay. I guess I guess I should. But that was one of the things that was bothering me. You know, like, is she gonna have to put up with that shit? And yeah, everybody puts up with stuff. It it's a little more professional. Women can have been there longer. There's always, you know, bad individuals. There's bad actors. speaker-1: ⁓ I wonder what some what are some of the biggest changes that you've between your two experiences, between you and Kara's experience thirty years apart? speaker-0: Mm-hmm. I mean that's a big spoiler, but I like speaker-1: ⁓ no, I don't no spoilers. No. speaker-0: But it is. It's just it's where do you get to what do I I mean I don't resolve things, right? Like, you know, my kid went to Korea, she went to Poland, she was in Biesbaden fighting with the Ukrainians, so she's gonna take command soon. My son wants to go in the Rangers, right? So I'm living scared a lot. I mean, I'm just tracking the news, but I did a lot of research on death. You know, 58,000 that died in Vietnam. And I'm looking at POW's MIAs today. What happens with women. And I looked at every one of my classmates that died. And in the process of writing this book, I went to a few funerals and ⁓ three of my good friends' kids died. You know, like that's I mean, it's just so I don't resolve it, but I face it. I mean, I face it. And I think America, because we're an all-volunteer force, just doesn't know who we are anymore. So it's it's my story and my daughter's really gritty, really raw. It's really s I've been working in the field force for U at this my US senator. I do the you need a congressional nomination. I work with the admissions at West Point for nearly two decades. I see every essay. I'm on boards for scholarship for military units. You these kids are amazing. In Vietnam, they protested they didn't want to go. Right. So across the country, we we were all had stake, you know, all had a stake. World War Two. Just a hundred years. I mean, World War One, every eight able-bodied male went. Yeah. Right. So today it's less than one percent. You watch the Maduro raid, you watch Epic Fury, you watch Hammer. I mean, you watch all these things. I I have people writing me, like, could you pray for my son? Like, cause now it's the parent's fear. Like the kid is fearless. You're like, ⁓ mom, it's not gonna happen. Like, but like we we've lived longer. We've been defeatable. So what's happened, what's changed is I understand the problems and the numbers. They track military deaths very closely and suicide, ⁓ suicide has outpaced all the rest. So we got a big problem with that. We still have an issue with sexual harassment. So I looked at the stats. That really helped me and I just didn't want to look at those things. But I I also went by name and looked at my classmates who died. I talked to the my my peers who lost a dozen soldiers, you know, like you're calling, hey Eric, you're the one that's got to talk and write a letter to the family. So I I think 50-year anniversary of women stepping into a Federal Service Academy this July seventh. So my audiobook is released from Scribe on that day. 250th year anniversary of the country. These are the people that made our country. And now we are fewer than 1%. It's insane. No one who are we? I meet people who don't know anybody in the service. So like I'm telling you who we are. And I put a lot of other characters in by name and people that have died and you know, like this is who we are. And I'm worried because I don't think people ⁓ have a stake in the game or spend time taking time to know who's going out and dying for ⁓ you know. speaker-1: Yeah. I I come from a military family on on both sides actually. And it's i I mean a common w you know, where I grew up, but it's I I I agree, like the more more people I meet from the coast have no idea, don't know anybody, don't understand why anybody would enlist, don't understand the mindset of somebody who, as you say, yeah, s God and country and kind of the tradition and the honor that comes from that, which is a shame. And I I'm glad that, you know, there's There's a lot that's being like talked about and shared and more of the stories are coming out. speaker-0: Yeah, no, and thank goodness you guys also share a lot of the stories. ⁓ I had six, I mean, I had agents, number one agent in nonfiction. And the interesting thing is, I mean, loved it. Like, this is incredibly terrific. Learned what a book proposal was. But the publishers, the traditional publishers, ⁓ it's not on their list. It's not on the list. I'm like, if I'm not on your list, like what the frick is on your list? There's a silo. There's a real silo in publishing for Like there are voices that aren't heard that scribe is allowing to be heard. It's like you're you're exposed to both parents. That's incredible that we in the in your family. So, you know, incredibly thankful for families like yours, but we're w there's a it's the widening civil military gap. And ⁓ the irony is I didn't set out that way. I wanted to be a great writer. I had to get this stuff down and I just I wanted to be write it as well as I could and respect the reader. But it's an antidote for that problem, which is you don't know us, read, read, read. Yeah. speaker-1: It's a common thing. I think it's a there's a paradox of like the more personal of your story, the more personally you approach your story, the more people it ends up reaching and the b wider applicability it has. And, you know, to be really raw and real with your own story does inevitably get to this kind of like, yeah, it this helps people understand the world that they're in more broadly because you come to really love the person that you're reading about. You know, if you if you do y your best as an author and your best as a reader, the reader sort of brings an open mind and open heart too. You do some to come to really gain empathy for somebody that you a a part of the world or a perspective that you didn't have coming in. Yeah. speaker-0: No, that's me. I've been running book clubs for twenty years and it all these books I wouldn't have read. I mean, I just like it's great. It exposes me to things that I didn't know at all about and probably wouldn't ever choose. speaker-1: ⁓ man, did you get to bring your book to your book club? speaker-0: So they're gonna read it over the summer, you know? speaker-1: Yes. ⁓ that must be so special. speaker-0: It is really special. And I launched it at West Point when the fiftieth year anniversary, the women, there were five hundred people that came back for that. Wow. You know, and that's and I I mean I couldn't people just walked away because I couldn't sign them, you know, enough. I couldn't get them done and I didn't know even how to charge. I was like, how does this work? I've never done this in speaker-1: That's so cool. I I generally ask what are what is the you know, an unexpected good thing that came as a result of your book. But ⁓ it sounds like launching at West Point on the fiftieth anniversary might be Yeah. speaker-0: I I think there's divine intervention because I really won the launch last year with you guys and I had Ellie Cole was working with her and my mother got sick and died. And I'm like, this is a priority. She never got to see the book, but I I am they started flag day. I'm a the featured speaker. I'm going out to the air museum in California. By the way, your your play your your seminar was fantastic. I ⁓ good couldn't get it all down. So the slides just came through. But like all these things and The women's memorial, they're all talking to me. And so they're just going out. I'm going down to my bookstore tomorrow. They they ordered copies. I w they want me to sign them. I'm gonna be talking on flag day and explaining how what the flag means to me. And they just like, can you just sign your book? I'm like, well, let's talk about the flag. And but it's it's it's gratis. I think you said that it's like it's it's like the first year or six months, just go and do all these things, talk on podcasts. But as soon as the book came out, so I think it was Tony Orlando who's saying, tie a yellow ribbon. He was last year's speaker. It's like thousands. They have four thousand follow they mean they have l ton of people there. I'm thinking, ⁓ man, do I wanna do that? And you know, I gotta get myself out there. And so it's speaker-1: Yes, you do want to do it. That's incredible. speaker-0: wanna use your playbook and just go, I wanna knock it out of the park because I'm I'm really believing in the reception from independent top Goodreads reviewers, like very top. Like it's so good. So I I'm getting valid, there's validation with like, okay, it's reaching people. They love it. They're reading it. I have pictures of them reading it. How do I reach the audience besides my little self? speaker-1: That's Yeah. Yeah. This would be an amazing book club book. I gotta Yeah. So fantastic. My general closing question is what do you recommend? What what is your piece of advice for authors who are just aspiring, just on the cusp of sort of making a commitment to their book that are, you know, maybe in your case eight or ten years up the road. speaker-0: I I mean I that's that's such a great way to close. Gotta I think you gotta love, really truly love it because it's it's tough. It's really, really tough. And I think really until I had quite a few thousand hours, and and I there's something about it, but I hit enough hours and I read everything out there. You're continually reading. So I I'm reading everything. I read, I'm I'm purging my house. I probably have thousands of books. I just purged 500 books, but You're continually reading as a writer and you're always working on craft. So I'd say, like, how did Eric do it? Like, so I'm looking at you as a business side, but you're also a writer, right? Something. How how did how did you make it so people could digest it? And then I look at a lot of my books that I love, or if I reread them like for structure, but you actually must sit your butt in the chair and write. See what I mean? Like you have to you have to write the material. So there's generative periods of your life. Some people are like 350 a day, a thousand a day. You can read how they do it. Annie Dillard, you know, Stephen King, Anne Lamont. But your method, Eric, what is it that works? The kids are asleep. You sit down, you crank your 350. What is it? So you got to generate the writing to have writing. And don't it just, you got to keep rewriting too. It just because you got it out doesn't mean it's great. You're getting it out. I I think everybody writes like, ⁓ you to read it. Like, yeah, but is it any good? Like, why, why would I want to read it? speaker-1: Yeah. The refining, the the the magic is in the refining. And I think the the most underrated sentence in this whole this whole podcast is like you did five major revisions. This is this is a lot of refinement and work. And you know, very few people walk up and hit the bullseye with their first throw. So but the thing, the good news is swings are free. So you can just keep at it until you're happy with the product. And nobody has to know how many revisions it took and how many hours it's. speaker-0: Huge. They asked and I'm like, Well, my friends got their PhD in less time, so Yeah. speaker-1: All right. Where would you send people to to learn about you, follow along with your journey, pick up the book? Yes. speaker-0: So I've been running a blog for 12 years and I do have followers and I have a podcast and it's a treehouseletter.com. If you put in Raising Athena or Mila in chat, my name's hard. So treehouseletter.com slash the book has all lots of reviews, indie reviews, top-rated reviewers, and it tells you how to get the book. I'm doing signed copies. And let me tell you, this is a humbling and educational process, Eric. speaker-1: As is life. It's a microcosm of life. Yeah. Thank you so much, Milan, for for taking the time. Thank you for your service. Thank you for the the courage that it takes to let your daughter not a let but you know, watch your your daughter and the rest of your family join the service. She's not the only one. No. So speaker-0: I have to say that Kara, Davis, and Nora, my daughter, my third daughter gets her commission. She's gonna go with the once every third airborne. My son is the fourth infantry division. All five of us served eight members on active duty right now in the family. speaker-1: Incredible. Thank you all. Heroes. speaker-0: Thanks, Eric.