Latest / The Two Authors’ Podcast / Creator and Critic Voices with T.D. Donnelly

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Creator and Critic Voices with T.D. Donnelly · The Two Authors’ Podcast

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  You have to understand these people are horrible people, okay?
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  They're probably gonna cut this out.
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  But everybody everybody in our friend group at all of these conventions
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  And we're gone.
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  Okay, so and we're out.
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  Thank you guys so much.
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  The soundbite we use for the show.
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  My gosh.
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  Welcome to the Two Authors' Podcast, an entertaining chat show hosted by best-selling mystery and thriller authors Douglas Pratt and Nicholas Harvey.
• 0:28
  In lively, humorous and informative conversation with distinguished guests who share their thoughts and experience about forging a successful author career.
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  Welcome to this week's show, brought to you as always by Vellum.
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  The best formatting solution.
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  Very fabuloso.
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  That's right.
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  If if dinosaurs had had to format, they'd a used Vellum, but they didn't they had to worry about it back then.
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  What an obscure reference.
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  That's so silly Doug!
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  Dinosaurs don't have opposable thumbs.
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  How do they type on a keyboard?
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  like a Velociraptor, he might be like tapping away.
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  the last writer.
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  Like insane.
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  I'm just saying that even a dinosaur could use vellum because it's pretty damn easy.
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  So that's that
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  there you got it.
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  Wow, you just stole the commercial from uh the guys who sell insurance.
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  Even a caveman could do it.
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  Caveman
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  I was trying to go total totally different.
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  So Dinosaurs.
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  Dinosaurs existed before caveman.
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  True thing.
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  So that's true.
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  I get you now.
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  I'm on the same page ish.
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  So an indie trick here.
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  Speaking of pages and cool things that you can do in Vellum is one little trick us indies do is you want a call to action in the back of the book, right?
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  You've read the book, you put the end if you put the end, which we don't for a reason, 'cause the end it it kind of uh Amazon likes to recognize it as being the end and cuts
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  things off.
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  But after it ends, you can put like a scene break and put your call to action under behind it.
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  So you've got a bonus chapter you want to do, you've got a link to a newsletter, you wanna do the pre-order link to the next book.
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  If you put it there next on that numbered page, then the old Kindles, when you roll through your Kindle and get to the end of the book, you know how when you scroll past the
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  end page it kicks you out?
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  Make sure it's in there before the person gets kicked out.
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  Cause once they get kicked out, they go to that buy page and it's got your next book if you have it, or some others of your book.
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  And it's got about a hundred other books from other people.
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  So you got this shiny page of all kinds of things to distract people.
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  So you want to keep on that page with your call to action right there.
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  Available to do in
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  Also also very easy not to put the end because let's be honest, if they flip the page the book's over with, it's already there.
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  You don't have to tell everybody it's the end.
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  They should know.
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  I mean why did I'm always like, Why do people tell me it's the end?
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  I mean there's no more book left.
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  It's obviously the ends.
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  But also, a big thank you, of course, to all of our s Patreon supporters.
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  And if you guys are feeling you get any any value from this show, I don't know what to tell you really, but
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  Thank you.
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  You're easily pleased and we appreciate you.
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  Then you should head over to the Patreon and support us over there.
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  It's like three dollars a month.
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  You get a lot of cool bonuses.
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  We have bonus questions from every guest.
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  So if you just check us out at patreon.com forward slash the two authors, we have all sorts of fun stuff over there.
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  So check it out.
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  We have a guest today.
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  No
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  We do have a a guest, a good friend of ours, uh Mr.
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  T.D. Thomas Donnelly is gonna be joining us today.
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  And like we said, we we've joked with Tom, he's a good friend of ours, but this will be I think a very educational.
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  So if you're interested in Hollywood or hearing from somebody who's been writing for thirty years, this is probably good.
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  I think you're gonna
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  We we held out on this longer than I thought we could hold out actually.
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  As a as a in joke with with Tom uh to not have him on the show.
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  uh
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  Great.
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  He's a really good one.
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  So he's got a new book coming out called Super Draft.
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  He'll talk about that.
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  So it's gonna be really great.
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  But before we get going, we'll have a Two Authors' Question from our recent guest, Dean E.
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  Ray.
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  Thank you, Deany Ray, for sticking around for our Two Authors' Question.
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  It's always great to keep you around a little bit.
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  Nice.
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  So what have you got for us?
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  I was thinking if you guys were to co write the book, like what does a bad guy and a good guy, like a villain
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  Which character would we wanna do?
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  if you were like in the book, like which of you which one of you would be the superhero and which one of you would be the supervillain?
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  I wanna be the villain.
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  I don't think he'd be I don't I mean I uh I mean I don't know.
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  don't know if he'd be a really good villain though.
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  I'm
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  Go save that that that woman from the burning building.
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  Nah, it looks a bit hard.
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  I set fire to it.
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  If you don't venture
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  will say I think for the most part we as writers probably identify more with the hero than we do with the villains, with the few exceptions of people that write from the protagonist
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  or the antagonist point of view.
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  I think that for the most part, we just naturally kind of we all see ourselves as a hero.
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  I mean of course then again we the villain often sees himself as a hero too.
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  So I think for us we write the protagonist because that's more the ideal that we would want.
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  So I would
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  probably say that in re realistically I would probably prefer to be the superhero than the villain, but I do love a good villain, so
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  That's a great point.
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  I think, you know, all of our main protagonists have a little bit of us in them, right?
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  Whether consciously or unconsciously.
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  And it's not necessarily the us that we are, it's the us that we see our sons out or we wanna be.
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  Yeah.
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  Mainly wanna be.
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  Yeah.
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  All right, Deanny.
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  You you superhero or villain?
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  To be honest, I'm leaning towards supervillain, but only because it's the thought of living vicariously through that.
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  Especially as a woman, you know, just be be bad, you know, 'cause we're taught to be, you know, all nice and, you know, polite and whatnot.
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  And every time I read a book when I there's a heroine or a villain that's like a bit badass and she's female, I'm like, heck yes.
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  I would love to do that.
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  Yeah.
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  There's also a reason why Deeny travels and moves countries that she can't go back to.
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  also a reason why my hero in my in my book is an ex criminal.
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  oh
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  Well, awesome question.
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  Thank you so much for sticking around with us and uh we'll see you soon in Vegas.
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  Some guys can't wait.
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  Well, welcome to the show, Tom Donnelly.
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  So excited to have you upon finally after you've s you've strong armed us at this point.
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  So is that what's going on here?
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  Wait, is that is that Tom Donnelly?
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  Hell froze over.
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  Somebody canceled, I'm pretty sure.
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  I mean
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  You mentioned me enough on your god darn podcast.
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  How dare you?
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  How dare you take this long.
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  What are you talking about?
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  We also talk about Franklin a lot too, so you know, we hold him in the high esteem, so I mean
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  what?
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  I take that as a good, good sign.
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  Bet rather be in that company than most others.
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  yeah, there's a few other people.
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  We don't if we don't mention you, then that's a whole nother issue.
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  So But let's get started.
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  Kinda like tell us a little bit about your, you know, kind of you got a long history of writing, so to kinda back us up and give us a little bit how you got started in in writing
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  and then we'll kind of dive into how you got started into publishing in indie publishing too.
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  So
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  I mean, I guess it depends how far you want to go back, but oh
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  Tom riding in the bathtub.
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  So
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  uh Well no, I was a science I was a science geek when I was when I was growing up.
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  I thought I was gonna be a a great scientist.
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  And then my first crush I ever had in like the seventh or eighth grade, she was also she was like one of the smartest kids in in in school too.
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  And I I was really just smitten with her.
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  And she wrote a poem in the literary journal.
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  I didn't know what a literary journal was.
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  I didn't know and by the way, middle school literary journal.
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  It could not be worse, right?
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  my bearest
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  The moment she started doing that, I was like, wow, that's something I could do too.
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  And I sort of so I d started doing like a little bit of it.
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  And then I had this one English teacher in the tenth grade, Doc Flanagan.
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  He he basically was a university professor that was laid off or whatever, the you know, there was you know, the English professors and stuff, it's tough, and came to teach at my
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  high school for a brief period of time.
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  And he was just one of these fire brands that was just like, you could do anything you want with your life.
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  Like we had to wear ties and jackets of Catholic school.
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  So he was like, get rid of that nonsense.
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  Get yeah, and I was just like totally into it.
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  And I wrote this one thing.
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  He had he said, you know, you write a five hundred words on describing the night, right?
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  Just just sort of experiential, go out there and all that sort stuff.
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  And mine was very different than everyone else's.
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  And he
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  made it a point like in front of the whole class, he was like, This is a writer.
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  This is something.
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  This is like like what you have here is not nothing.
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  And boy boy was that wind in my sails because I Right.
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  I had only thought of it as a a hobby.
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  A way to get girls, it sounds like.
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  Well, a little bit, right?
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  Not not at all.
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  I mean that's yeah, I mean that's fair.
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  Say what you want, Cyrano de Bergerac is is is a thing for a reason.
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  And I decided at that point that why not consider that?
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  And before you know it, there was a I guess a drive-in movie theater in my town and they tore it down and they put up one of the earlier multiplexes, like a 10-movie movie
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  theater, which by the way, the writer and director Chris McQuarrie, who does all of the Mission Impossible movies, he was a security guard at
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  At that same movie theater at that same time when I would ride my bike there, like even I had to even ride on the on the highway for a little bit.
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  It was not I didn't tell my parents I was doing this.
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  But I would go there at 10 a.m.
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  on a Saturday, pay five bucks for a matinee, and then sneak into two or three other movie theaters, avoiding Chris McQuarrie.
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  That shows a little love for the the film, right?
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  Yeah.
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  Right.
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  Yeah, and I fell in love with it and and suddenly I I just had this idea that that, gosh, you know, if I could write movies for a living, I think I could be happy my entire life
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  just doing that.
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  And so I I I suddenly became a dog with a bone and my guidance counselors and everyone else, they they could not dissuade me from this idea.
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  And it was in the the the late eighties, which was
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  that time where we thought the Japanese were gonna take over everything, right?
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  You know, rising sun, the the the the Crichton novel came out where, my God, they're gonna take over everything and they they apprentice for ten thousand hours to become masters at
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  things.
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  And and I got that ten thousand hour idea in there and I broke it I remember breaking it down one time and I'm like, that's only like ten years.
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  If I start now, uh I could be twenty six, twenty seven and be a master at this and e if it doesn't work out, I can still do something else with my life.
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  And that's what I decided I was gonna do.
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  And
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  You know, I went to to to a a school in the, you know, New England area and got a degree in English and drama and then went to USC film school.
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  The whole time I was just writing, writing, writing.
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  I wrote my first feature as my thesis at USC Film School, and then started working as an editor in in Hollywood for a couple of years until a producer said, Hey, I would like you
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  very much to edit the next thing I got going on and I said, I'm sorry, I can't.
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  And he's like
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  I thought we had a good relationship.
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  No, we had a great relationship.
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  But whenever I've saved up enough to write for like six months, I always write for six months.
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  I'm not I'm not just an editor, I want to be a writer as well.
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  And he was like, Wow, okay, that's interesting.
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  Can I see something you written?
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  And I literally had this one thing and gave it to him.
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  And before you know it, he had sent it to a few of his friends.
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  And little did I know, he used to be a senior, senior executive at 20th Century Fox.
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  The three people he sent it to, two of them ended up putting in bids.
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  Eventually later somebody else put in another bid.
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  There was a three studio bidding war for it and I was off to the ra I paid off eighty thousand dollars in student debt in one day and had more left over to and had more left
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  over to to to spare and boom, I was a writer.
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  And that that's been thirty one years now, no day job for thirty one years, just just solely surviving as a writer.
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  That's a brilliant story.
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  You know, we've had uh other guests on where we've talked about this is, you know, that the path to success, especially in something like Hollywood, which is just madness, right?
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  The odds are so poor.
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  But you have to put yourself in the position, right?
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  You have to do all the work bar before that.
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  Amy, who we had on the show, right, when she went ballistic on a TikTok, she's was about ready to her series was gonna do really well.
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  It went crazy because she had a TikTok hit.
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  But everything was in place.
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  And it sounds like that that that that's your story right there.
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  You you did all the fundamentals, you had everything in place, and a door opened.
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  Well, not quite everything in place.
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  It it actually happened a little earlier than it should have.
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  By any stretch, uh I don't know another writer that sold the very first feature they ever or they ever wrote.
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  So I was really, really f really, really fortunate.
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  But it did come with a consequence, right?
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  It came with a consequence that suddenly I'm in all of these rooms and I'm expected to pitch and I'm expected to talk story and expected to do all these things kind of before
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  I'm ready to do that, right?
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  And there is a there is a real blessing in
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  In those early days, it doesn't feel like a blessing when you're struggling to get your first thing out there and published.
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  You're able to make your mistakes in private, which is a very, very, it's a very advantageous thing.
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  And suddenly all of my mistakes were embarrassingly public in rooms of like 15 executives that are all like, who the hell is this bozo?
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  And that created a lot of, you know, imposter syndrome and a lot of writer's block and all everything that comes with that.
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  happen there.
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  But Nick, you're absolutely right that it is one of those things that, you know, Hollywood is a lottery.
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  How Hollywood is really, really, really hard to do anything in.
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  But guess what?
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  You have the opportunity to increase your odds tremendously by being ready, by being prepared, by being proactive, by doing the the right things.
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  And there's no lottery in the world that gives you extra bites of that particular apple.
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  So kind of jump back, you talk about the imposter syndrome and stuff like that, having faced it at a young age.
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  I mean, most of us now who who are writing we're, let's say, advanced ages.
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  How do you overcome that?
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  I mean, I can imagine, like, you're standing there in a room full of, you know, execs whose names you see on credits and you're feeling like, Why am I here?
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  How do you go from being that that scared little kid to being this an obnoxious filmmaker like you are?
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  So Wow.
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  Wow.
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  I mean you almost landed that plane.
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  You all you're so close to landing that plane.
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  I I'm impressed he waited almost ten minutes to to to t to take a swing and whiff it.
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  Ha ha.
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  I wasn't even going to.
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  I was gonna like slide right through it and then I like, nah, I gotta drop it.
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  He would he would he feel like so left out.
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  I in all reality though, it to to
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  Listen to your NINC roundup.
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  I know the character assassination.
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  It was going to happen at some point.
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  Like you didn't even mention the fact that you threw you threw a water bottle at me.
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  Water cup.
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  It was a and and it was empty.
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  It was a empty cup, so
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  All right, whatever.
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  Whatever.
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  No, that's well, the truth is that I have a book that's coming out in a couple of weeks called Super Draft, which is about the writing process.
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  And the beginning of that book began 30 years ago with me trying to overcome this imposter syndrome, to overcome this writer's block.
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  And I had writer's block for easily the first 10, 15 years of my career on and off.
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  Because, you know, I I I I've said it before.
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  The the writers group that that we're all in, I call it Smurf Village, 'cause it's not
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  Hey come on in, let me tell you all my
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  And it's so different than Hollywood, where Hollywood is definitely a knife fight in a phone booth.
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  It is it is it is blood sport every day when you're when you're out there.
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  So the ability for imposter syndrome to come back when you think you've vanquished it is omnipresent because there's always somebody that is trying to cut you down or trying to
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  challenge you in a particular way.
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  Sometimes it's just
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  They want their own writer on the project.
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  And if I'm doing too well, then I might be good on that project.
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  Sometimes it's simply a power play to make sure that the writer doesn't get too cocky, right?
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  Sometimes and and sometimes it's none of the above.
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  Sometimes it is just plain rank sociopathy, right?
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  That's just the way it it it works out there sometimes.
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  That's Nick does to me all the time, that rank sociopathy, I think.
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  I don't know, that's a lot that's a big word, so
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  Pretty good, right?
• 17:33
  You're lucky I I had to sound it out before I said it though, so don't worry about so s okay, make sure I say it right.
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  So if you want, I'll tell you the the the basics of Super Draft, which is basically that I I figured out that not just for me, but for a lot of people, because I was talking to a
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  lot of young writers.
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  I was in my uh early mid-20s when I sold the first script, and all of my friends were film school grads, and they all want they wanted to do the same thing.
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  So we would constantly be talking about this.
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  And I kind of came to the conclusion that every human being on the planet has two voices in their head.
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  They have the creator and they have the critic.
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  And
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  I've never in my life needed to explain the critic voice to any human being.
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  They immediately, Oh, I know that one.
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  Intimately familiar with that one.
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  And it doesn't it doesn't ma you could be a a janitor in a high school, you know the critic voice.
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  It doesn't matter who you
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  Lot like my eleventh grade uh English teacher, to be honest with you, Mrs.
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  Bond.
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  That's who it sounded like.
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  She had a really nasally
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  Is that the voice you hear when y when you get the doubts in your head it's her speaking to you?
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  like, I knew you couldn't do it.
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  For a lot of women, it's their ex-husband's voice a little bit.
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  Whereas the creator voice is very different, right?
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  The creator voice is quiet and whispering and just giving you a little, a little hint here, a little hint there.
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  And I came to the conclusion that you can never hear both voices in the same room.
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  If the critic voice is operating, you cannot hear the creator.
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  And to work in a critic-only process, for a creative process.
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  is death.
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  It is pain.
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  You can do it, but you're really grinding the words out at that point and just trying to get to that next sentence.
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  It's write, delete, adjust, rethink, despair, write.
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  It it it it it is just this
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  It's gonna probably take you a long time to write that manuscript too.
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  It does.
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  It does.
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  And yet so many people, so many people have that same process to this day, more or less, right?
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  And I I came to the conclusion that I really need to find a way to separate those voices so that there is a creator led part of the process and there is a critic led part of the
• 19:47
  process and go back and forth, back and forth.
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  So brainstorming, creator led process.
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  The only time in the business world you will ever hear any acknowledgement of a creator voice, right?
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  What do they say?
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  They say there are no bad ideas here.
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  And why do they say that?
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  They don't believe there are no bad ideas.
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  There are executives.
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  They think there are horrible ideas all the time.
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  They just figured out that if you don't say that, nothing good happens in a brainstorm.
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  Yeah.
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  You have to which is literally shutting the critic voice out of the process, right?
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  Which allows the creator to to to come forth.
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  I'm a big fan of that, Tom.
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  It is, you know, the business I came from was super competitive motorsports.
• 20:24
  And uh same
• 20:25
  Sport, she had to win a trophy.
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  Very it's naturally competitive.
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  You won a trophy.
• 20:30
  You had it was definitely competitive, right?
• 20:32
  That's
• 20:32
  it's fully competitive.
• 20:33
  Yeah.
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  But they you know, and there's a lot of ego involved and stuff like that.
• 20:37
  And that was one of the things when I made it to management was that there is no bad idea because the key was in the example I gave is that dumb idea that you just came up with
• 20:45
  that has a fatal flaw in it, just spurred another idea that got rid of that fatal flaw.
• 20:50
  And together, you know, just the the room is stronger than the individual.
• 20:54
  And you've got to if if you can build that atmosphere, which is really hard to do, it takes one personality to destroy that atmosphere in a in a group of
• 21:02
  people.
• 21:02
  So I I can only imagine it being hell in Hollywood trying to get out of work, man.
• 21:07
  they they know it in Hollywood.
• 21:08
  Their phrase, what they say all the time to me is, here's the bad version.
• 21:13
  And they give you the bad version, right?
• 21:15
  It's like, it's like, I don't know how to put this.
• 21:18
  I don't like this part of the the story.
• 21:20
  I wish it was more like, well well, here's the bad version.
• 21:23
  And I love hearing that.
• 21:24
  I mock them mercilessly for it, but I I I get it.
• 21:28
  I get when you give me the bad version, I get a window into what it is you're looking for in in its basest, basic form.
• 21:37
  And I can take a bad version and figure out the great version much easier than if you give me nothing, that if you just say this isn't working for me.
• 21:46
  And now a word from this episode's sponsor.
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• 22:15
  Now we'll get back to the show.
• 22:17
  I had a another thought about the imposter syndrome, and I'm sure this is very similar in many industries, but for us as as the three of us are indie authors, so we're running our
• 22:26
  businesses and we're doing the creative.
• 22:29
  So I know for me, I have double imposter syndrome.
• 22:32
  I've got the creative problem, right?
• 22:33
  You're trying to put the best work out you can.
• 22:35
  Then you switch hats and you've got to do all the marketing and that side of it, which is
• 22:40
  my God, that's even easier to have imposter syndrome over there because it's it's a minefield, right?
• 22:45
  Ever changing.
• 22:46
  So it's kind of like the double whammy.
• 22:47
  And it's hard to not let them blend over when like you said, the critic's pretty loud.
• 22:53
  So when them you know, the business side uh critic is second guessing you, it's hard to sit down and clear your mind and be creative.
• 23:00
  This is the new part to me, right?
• 23:02
  I tell everybody at all these conferences, I am at once one of the most veteran and experienced uh writers that you will meet at this conference.
• 23:10
  And I am also one of the least experienced writers and authors at this conference because I've only been writing books for two years, right?
• 23:17
  That we had a Hollywood writer strike uh about two, two and half years ago, where for ten months I was told in no uncertain terms I am not allowed to write movies or television
• 23:25
  shows because the studio has locked this out.
• 23:27
  And it would just happen to be the year that my second kid also entered college at the same time, which is oh what a wonderful time for this.
• 23:34
  What a delight.
• 23:35
  Could not have been worked out better for me.
• 23:39
  amazing.
• 23:39
  And I was freaking out.
• 23:42
  And then I met a lot of these indie authors who I really count as friends.
• 23:47
  It was a tremendously welcoming community at a time when I felt very, very adrift.
• 23:54
  And finding them and getting to know them was a real, real blessing in my in my life.
• 23:58
  And it's a blessing that I count very often.
• 24:00
  but yeah, but I'm still very new.
• 24:02
  I my my third book in my Malcolm Chaucer series uh only came out at the beginning of this year.
• 24:08
  And I didn't even bother advertising until I had three books out.
• 24:11
  So I'm six months maybe into the advertising experiment, into the marketing uh side of things.
• 24:18
  I mean, other than
• 24:19
  And my natural personality of in person marketing and things like that.
• 24:23
  But uh yeah, it's it is imposter syndrome.
• 24:26
  Hey, welcome back, old friend.
• 24:28
  I haven't seen you in a little while.
• 24:29
  It's good to good to have you here.
• 24:31
  Yeah, welcome to the pleasure dome.
• 24:33
  It's it's really kicking off this year in in the publishing marketing, so
• 24:37
  you picked a you picked a real shitty time to start.
• 24:41
  So I let me ask you on the flip side, though so y we talk about the critic voice a lot and and what I see sometimes is new authors.
• 24:48
  I mean these people you you see on threads, everybody who's published a new book that are stuck in the creator side where they haven't even bothered listening to the critic side.
• 24:56
  So their book is the most amazing book ever.
• 24:59
  And so that's what they're what they're telling everybody.
• 25:02
  And and we've all probably talked to somebody who's like, no, let me tell you my story.
• 25:06
  And I'm like, Okay, great, yeah.
• 25:07
  That's you know, and we kinda like roll our eyes at that point because we've all we're like and we were all there probably too at some point because all we're doing is hearing
• 25:15
  that creator side.
• 25:16
  So I mean you you see that in probably in Hollywood as well, so
• 25:20
  All the time, but let's not misdiagnose that, right?
• 25:23
  That is just a person that is really, really early on the Dunning-Kruger arc.
• 25:29
  Dunning-Kruger is very simple.
• 25:35
  It's it's it's when we begin a process, we overestimate how easy it's gonna be, and then we drop down as we start doing it, we drop down until the trough of hell.
• 25:45
  Which is the the point where we're like, my God, this is so hard.
• 25:49
  It's impossible for me to do it.
• 25:51
  I can't get any better.
• 25:52
  Until eventually you start to come up the other side and you've gained enough experience doing it that you have a a reasonable notion of your skill level versus how hard it
• 26:03
  actually is.
• 26:04
  Those authors are just Dunning-Kruger acolytes, right?
• 26:08
  They're at the beginning of that curve.
• 26:10
  And they haven't really done it yet, right?
• 26:13
  I mean, f rare is the person
• 26:15
  That is doing is saying, my goodness, it's the greatest idea ever.
• 26:20
  And they've actually written it, or they've actually written multiple books.
• 26:24
  It's almost always, I want to tell you this idea because I want you to write it, or I want, or I'm about to write it, or I'm starting it, right?
• 26:33
  They haven't, they haven't hit any of those, those points yet, because boy boy, that critic is eventually going to find you.
• 26:39
  And if it if it doesn't, I don't think you can be a good writer without both.
• 26:43
  I used to talk about.
• 26:45
  The critic as the enemy of the writing process.
• 26:48
  Only because more often than not, the critic is the one that is putting in the roadblocks and getting in the way and actually stopping you from writing.
• 26:57
  But the critic properly used is integral in the writing process.
• 27:02
  The outlining process, if you are a plotter or a planter, uh the outlining process is basically taking all of this brainstorming ideas that you have floating around there.
• 27:13
  And picking winners and losers or or framing it or shaping it.
• 27:17
  And that's absolutely a critical process.
• 27:20
  And the editing process is a a critical process as well, especially if you are free drafting or super drafting as I as I call it, where you are literally shutting the critic
• 27:31
  out of the draft process and you're just writing as fa as fast and as free as you can.
• 27:37
  You're going to need to do some critic work after that process.
• 27:42
  So it it's a it's it's a tough thing to come to terms with that you gotta kinda make friends with your critic or your or at least
• 27:49
  Little pressure.
• 27:50
  It's little a little mix of both probably helps, so yeah.
• 27:53
  A little pressure is is not a bad thing.
• 27:55
  A lot of pressure can be a bad thing and it varies by personality, but a little bit of pressure is incentive, right?
• 28:01
  It's it's it if you use it to drive you and push you forward rather than push you back, then it's it's it's crucial.
• 28:07
  So let's talk a little bit about the difference between screenwriting and novel writing.
• 28:12
  There's a pretty big difference, right?
• 28:13
  So and you are in the perfect seat to tell us those big differences.
• 28:17
  I mean, on the one hand, writing is writing.
• 28:19
  I think storytelling is storytelling.
• 28:21
  So, yes, there are definitely different forms in in some very, very particular ways.
• 28:27
  But I think that anyone who is who has worked hard enough to become great at one can become can become at least very good at the other.
• 28:36
  Uh I don't think it's it's a chasm that you can't transcend.
• 28:41
  That said, if I knew
• 28:43
  How freaking easy novel writing was for the 30 years uh I was a screenwriter.
• 28:48
  uh I am so mad at you guys.
• 28:52
  It is so my God.
• 28:53
  You're telling me that you can just describe the internal character state of anybody you want at any particular time.
• 29:00
  You can describe what they're thinking, what they're feeling, what's going on in their heads.
• 29:03
  You're telling me that for my spy thrillers, it could be 70,000 words or it could be 150,000 words and no one bats an eye.
• 29:10
  Are you out of your mind?
• 29:11
  What are you do what are you talking about?
• 29:12
  It's ridiculous.
• 29:14
  We get entered monologues too.
• 29:15
  That's kinda fun.
• 29:17
  God.
• 29:18
  It is so much easier writing a novel.
• 29:20
  And people think the other way around, right?
• 29:22
  They think, well, a screenplay is so short, it's so easy.
• 29:25
  And the novel can be is is much, much longer.
• 29:28
  That's got to be much harder.
• 29:30
  it's absolutely the other way around.
• 29:32
  Especially when you're doing adaptations like I like I get paid to do a a lot.
• 29:38
  The novel Sahara by Clive Cussler was 193,000 words.
• 29:43
  And I had to turn that into a twenty-three thousand-word screenplay and still capture the same story feel.
• 29:50
  How do you do that?
• 29:52
  I was gonna say that that'd be a good question.
• 29:53
  So how does one go I mean, that's gotta be uh the cutting up process, especially if you're uh if you're the novelist from that side, you're like, I wrote all these words and you're
• 30:02
  how do you as a screenwriter decide what is gonna be staying in the screen and what's gonna be going to the cutting room floor for
• 30:09
  Well, I worked with Clive for the better part of a year on that project.
• 30:13
  I have a kind of a rule that I will not adapt somebody's work if I don't have at least their initial buy-in and their agreement that this is good.
• 30:22
  I want to talk to them about it.
• 30:23
  I wanna uh say, Hey, this is a problem in the screenplay form.
• 30:30
  What can we do about that?
• 30:31
  And get at least their input.
• 30:33
  And at the end of the day, we may have to not entirely agree.
• 30:36
  I still have a job that I have to do.
• 30:38
  But uh, you know, with Clive, it was really important to me that we we find some agreement on this.
• 30:43
  The novel Sahara has its main villain die, and there's still 200 pages of the book left, or 150 pages of the book left.
• 30:54
  And you can't really do that in a i in in a in a movie.
• 30:56
  You can't have you know, it it becomes Return of the King, the Last Lord of the Rings movie, where you've got seventeen endings and you're like, my god, are we are we done yet?
• 31:04
  Just to be clear, Tom, you can't do it in most novels unless you're Clive Cussler either.
• 31:10
  I agree.
• 31:11
  Well Clive doesn't agree.
• 31:12
  He thinks you can do it every time.
• 31:14
  But it it's one of those
• 31:16
  Clancy does a good job of it too, so of just never ending like just dragging it on.
• 31:21
  Look, these these guys become kings of their own fiefdom and no one can tell them different and they get to play by slightly different rules.
• 31:29
  And would the books be better if they ended closer to the death of the main the the main villain?
• 31:34
  Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't.
• 31:36
  I can't I I can't specifically say to that, but probably that's my guess is is is probably.
• 31:40
  What you have to do is you have to do what what screenwriting basically is, which is in a novel, the great thing is is that I can write a chapter and it could be about one thing.
• 31:50
  I can never in screenwriting write a scene and have it be about one thing.
• 31:54
  It has to be layers deep.
• 31:56
  It has to be, okay, this scene is going to be putting out this amount of exposition so that we are layering in the things that need to happen later.
• 32:06
  I'm doing this beat on the character's change arc and I'm nailing that, planting these three things that are going to be paid off in a later scene.
• 32:16
  Oh, and the scene itself has to be.
• 32:19
  integrally sound, so I need to have the beginning, middle, end drama of this particular scene as well.
• 32:25
  And all of those things have to be in there for that scene to work.
• 32:28
  So these scenes need to be crafted again and again and again and just gone over and continuously adjusted as the story form of the screenplay is being laid out and compressed
• 32:42
  and expanded until it fits properly.
• 32:45
  So does that does that make sense to you?
• 32:46
  Yeah, no, it makes sense a lot.
• 32:48
  And and I'm pretty visual, so I'm kind of picturing this.
• 32:50
  You take this long novel and you start pulling up the things that have to stay, right?
• 32:55
  The pieces of the plot that are key, that are integral, that make this story work, the core of it.
• 33:00
  And when you start doing that and you go, Well, this has got to happen, so it means this has to happen and this has to set it up, it starts building itself and then I'm pretty
• 33:08
  sure you get to that point where it's like, Well, we've already got too much shit.
• 33:11
  So something, some plot subplot has to go.
• 33:14
  Some's character.
• 33:15
  Can we combine?
• 33:17
  Yeah.
• 33:17
  Is that kind of how you go about it?
• 33:20
  You you nailed it, Nick.
• 33:21
  That's exactly what it's like.
• 33:23
  You pick your non negotiables first, right?
• 33:26
  These are the things that must be in there.
• 33:27
  And then you figure out that, oh, the non negotiables are a four-hour movie, so I have to get rid of some of my non-negotiables.
• 33:35
  But you don't want to get rid of them.
• 33:36
  So what you end up doing is you end up finding ways to fold them together, to combine them, to make one scene that accomplishes what in the book was three scenes over the
• 33:47
  course of the entire second act.
• 33:48
  and join it all together.
• 33:50
  So you get that story feel, you get that s those story moments still happen.
• 33:54
  They just happen in a very compressed way and in a way that you weren't expecting.
• 33:58
  So it's very hard.
• 34:00
  And and I think we kinda talked about this once before, but like if you're an outliner, I don't know that I mean I'm like more of a half outliner, as we talked about before, but I
• 34:09
  mean what's the difference between writing a screenplay first and then adapting that treating that as an outline and adapting it into a novel?
• 34:15
  Now you get into my trade secrets.
• 34:17
  How dare you?
• 34:17
  So
• 34:19
  See that's what we do here is we break down all the rules.
• 34:22
  There's no this isn't Hollywood, this is indie authors.
• 34:25
  okay, so Hollywood buys between 10 and 20 scripts for every movie that gets made, which means over the course of my 30 year career, I've got dozens of scripts that I have slaved
• 34:37
  over for six months, sometimes longer, and dealt with studio notes and dealt with executives and defended this and changed that and made it really a a highly, highly
• 34:49
  functioning story that that operates on many, many levels that only twelve people have ever read.
• 34:54
  My agents, the executive the executives, a couple producers, those are the only people that have ever read it.
• 35:00
  But guess what?
• 35:01
  Give it long enough time, give it seven years, give it ten years, those rights revert back.
• 35:05
  I can do something with that again.
• 35:07
  And little by little, these are gonna be uh new series, uh book series that I'm that I'm I'm gonna be doing.
• 35:13
  Uh because a screenplay, when you think about it, is actually the perfect outline.
• 35:18
  It takes months and you you
• 35:20
  can fully visualize the entire story from beginning to end there and it is expandable into the novel form in a in wonderful, wonderful ways.
• 35:31
  So yeah, I absolutely think that that's a great thing to do.
• 35:35
  Yeah there are no panters in Hollywood, really.
• 35:37
  So you can't just say, Well, thank you for the four hundred thousand dollars to write this thing.
• 35:42
  I think, you know what, I'm just gonna go w based on feel here, but I think it's gonna really turn out great.
• 35:47
  We'll see you in three months.
• 35:48
  No, they're not gonna they're not gonna be
• 35:50
  I could be very happy about that.
• 35:52
  Well I tend to argue that even in writing that panters are just they're outlining in their first draft and then they're gonna go back and fix it and do whatever.
• 36:00
  So I mean if you're if you're outlining the first time, that is your pantsing the first time anyway.
• 36:04
  So
• 36:05
  Yeah, I I think to put it in Super Draft terms, I think panters are people who have a louder creator than most people, and they're comfortable running with the creator voice
• 36:17
  and just letting the creator play.
• 36:20
  whereas plotters have a overactive critic voice that is overly loud, and the critic literally won't let them proceed very far unless they can see
• 36:32
  you know, the buoys ahead on the, you know, in in the bay.
• 36:35
  They could see their the path out.
• 36:37
  I guess for the novel world, I'm a plotter.
• 36:41
  For Hollywood, I'm almost a pantser.
• 36:44
  I am definitely one of these people that is like, I know enough in the outline now.
• 36:48
  I just want to get just green light me to write this thing, okay?
• 36:52
  Do you really need the this eight page outline to be an eighteen page outline?
• 36:56
  I can do it, but it's not gonna make the work better, right?
• 36:59
  Let's go here.
• 37:01
  Yeah, th it's just one of those things.
• 37:03
  And now a quick word from this episode's sponsor.
• 37:06
  The Author Nation Conference for Indie Authors is coming up in like a week or so.
• 37:10
  I'm Jamie Davis, show manager for the event in Las Vegas.
• 37:14
  Are you prepped and ready for the biggest and best event for indies ever?
• 37:18
  I know I am.
• 37:20
  And that reminds me, what do you call a conference for boomerang enthusiasts?
• 37:25
  A meet and ye.
• 37:27
  And now, let's get back to the show.
• 37:29
  Being indies, that's one of the freedoms we truly have.
• 37:32
  Even the the you know, 'cause the most of the trad authors we talk to, even when they really are a pantser at heart, they have to pitch their agent first.
• 37:42
  Even when they've got series of books out there and stuff, most of the time at some point in that process, they have to pitch their agent that then has to pitch the publisher.
• 37:49
  So they have to outline in some decent amount.
• 37:53
  It doesn't have to be a a a huge
• 37:55
  40 page thing, but they they they have to present it.
• 37:58
  So it's one of the freedoms that we have, which I guess is good and bad, right?
• 38:01
  It it gives us a a lot of freedom.
• 38:03
  So you talked a little more about super drafts.
• 38:05
  So super drafts is the book that's coming out.
• 38:07
  When's it coming out?
• 38:08
  And what are you going to give an author?
• 38:10
  So if I'm an author picking up a copy of Super Draft, what am I getting from this?
• 38:13
  Thank you, Nick, for bringing it back to something relevant.
• 38:16
  Here we go.
• 38:16
  So yeah, it should be it should be out by the end of October.
• 38:19
  And there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books about the craft of writing.
• 38:25
  There are maybe five or six on the process of writing, which is weird to me.
• 38:31
  It's like, why do we talk so much about craft and so little about process?
• 38:35
  And at the at the core of it, I figured out that I believe it's because we are precious about our process.
• 38:43
  We are emotional about our process in a way they w we aren't about craft.
• 38:47
  You tell me something new about craft, I'll throw it into the next book I write.
• 38:51
  Absolutely.
• 38:52
  I'll try it out and see you if it sticks.
• 38:54
  You s tell me that you you want a monkey with my process, and I get I get really, really defensive really, really quickly.
• 39:00
  I'm sorry, you have a monkey write your stuff?
• 39:02
  I I missed that.
• 39:03
  Yeah, basically.
• 39:04
  okay, cool.
• 39:09
  You don't have a you don't have a draft monkey?
• 39:11
  You gotta get a draft monkey.
• 39:12
  They're way thicker.
• 39:14
  my god.
• 39:14
  uh
• 39:16
  That should be the name of your next book, Draft Monkey.
• 39:18
  That's gonna uh I'm throwing it out there right now.
• 39:20
  name of our band, we're coming out with a with a new album, Draft Monkeys.
• 39:24
  If you give me a plate a nameplate for my desk and you just have Thomas Dean Donnelly draft monkey, that would be absolutely perfect description of what I do.
• 39:32
  And yet another t shirt we have to make.
• 39:34
  And yet another t-shirt.
• 39:36
  Anyway, so what it really comes down to is that writing a novel is extraordinarily hard.
• 39:41
  Writing a screenplay is extraordinarily hard.
• 39:44
  We get used to it, and so we don't think of it as quite that hard, but but in our sense memory, in our in our in our past, we still have that memory of that first book and the
• 39:52
  labor pains of of putting that out there.
• 39:55
  We tend to stick close to the first process that got that book out.
• 40:01
  Because the s mere fact of getting it out is so hard that whatever we had to do to do that has to be the way we're gonna do it.
• 40:08
  And we tend to calcify that a little bit and we tend not to explore other options.
• 40:14
  Now I wrote this book first and foremost for people that haven't written their book yet or haven't gotten to that stage yet to get past the imposter syndrome, to get past the
• 40:23
  writer's block, to get past all of those things and to create a process that can work for them and can legitimately for people.
• 40:30
  you know, no matter if you're a plotter or a pantser, you can use parts of this process to get your work to write faster and to write better because you're using both of the voices
• 40:41
  in your head, not just one.
• 40:43
  And most of our processes, we tend to rely very heavily on one voice and not so much on the other and and give the other a a short shrift.
• 40:49
  So that's really what Super Draft's about.
• 40:52
  And it it has everything from there are critic tricks, right?
• 40:56
  The critic wants to be in the in the drafting process.
• 40:59
  And the critic has
• 41:00
  all of these tricks that he uses.
• 41:03
  I I I name mine.
• 41:04
  Okay.
• 41:05
  So my my creator is Phoebe and my critic is Philip.
• 41:09
  And I don't actually have a friend named Philip.
• 41:11
  I don't know anybody named Philip.
• 41:12
  ah
• 41:13
  gonna say, where did this come from?
• 41:14
  I Phoebe is friends, it's just this really nice strumming a guitar, playing a silly song, talking to you nicely.
• 41:20
  I get that.
• 41:21
  That, yeah.
• 41:21
  With Philip, I came up with the name Philip one day when I was just annoyed as hell with my with my critic voice who was just not leaving me alone.
• 41:32
  And I decided, shut up, and I just had to give it a name, right?
• 41:35
  I had to name it.
• 41:36
  And Philip is a great name to say with derision.
• 41:39
  You know?
• 41:40
  It is.
• 41:43
  Philip, shut up, Philip.
• 41:44
  You're not welcome here right now.
• 41:46
  God Philip, damn it.
• 41:48
  That's that became
• 41:51
  The name Shut Up Philip is a is is that that absolutely works.
• 41:57
  I have cousin named Philip, I would buy that shirt just to wear it around my cousin.
• 42:00
  Like, shut up, Philip.
• 42:02
  So you guys were at SPS Live when I I was the the this was my the very first talk of SPS Live this year in London was this talk was a talk about super draft.
• 42:10
  And every time I mentioned Philip, there is always one person with a big frown on their face, and I'm like, I could see a Philip over there.
• 42:18
  There's Philip over there.
• 42:19
  And I know they're gonna come and talk to me afterwards, and they always do.
• 42:23
  They say, Hi, I'm Philip.
• 42:26
  I was like, I'm so sorry.
• 42:28
  I am so bleeding sorry.
• 42:30
  I do not, I don't mean any bad thing about it.
• 42:33
  It just happens to be the name.
• 42:34
  But guess what?
• 42:35
  Naming your critic is a good thing to do because you're externalizing this voice.
• 42:40
  You're, you're, you're giving it its personality.
• 42:43
  It's not you.
• 42:44
  It's something else that you can shut out.
• 42:46
  You have to learn how to tell Philip what's okay and what's not okay because Philip hits below the belt.
• 42:52
  Philip will not.
• 42:54
  criticize the work, he'll criticize you.
• 42:56
  And that is not okay.
• 42:57
  I tell my kids this all the time.
• 42:59
  I say, if I heard anyone talking to you the way you talk about yourself, I would punch that person in their face and I would I would go to prison if I had to.
• 43:08
  I would never let anyone talk to you the way you talk to yourself.
• 43:12
  Why is it okay for you to do that?
• 43:14
  And so, you know, we do things like we we talk in Super Draft about things like research.
• 43:20
  Research is a good one.
• 43:21
  Research is
• 43:22
  can be a very important part of your writing process.
• 43:25
  Research can also be a fantastic trick that the critic puts to between you and the actual drafting of your
• 43:34
  Talking about us 'cause that's our rabbit we we call rabbit holes and Nick and I are always like, we spend like
• 43:40
  Down a rabbit hole.
• 43:41
  Well, so guess what?
• 43:42
  I got a chapter on research and how to do it without letting it become critic led procrastination.
• 43:49
  I do things like the the right downhill protocol.
• 43:51
  So I have this thing where I say that when you're writing, try to have a timer for it so that when you the timer goes off, you stop writing.
• 44:02
  And this isn't necessarily, even if you're not a big sprinter, because not every writer likes sprints.
• 44:07
  Don't worry about sprinting.
• 44:09
  Just have a timer and when that timer goes off, stop.
• 44:11
  Don't think about it as sprinting.
• 44:12
  Don't think about it as hitting any word count.
• 44:15
  And there are and people ask me why.
• 44:16
  I said, okay, because here's the deal.
• 44:18
  If you stop exactly when the timer goes off, you're usually stopping mid sentence.
• 44:23
  You're usually stopping when you know exactly what's coming next.
• 44:27
  And you're gonna want to finish that word, that sentence, that paragraph, that chapter.
• 44:31
  Don't do it.
• 44:33
  Because if you do, every time you start writing, you're starting cold.
• 44:37
  You're starting at the a place where you don't know what happens next.
• 44:41
  Whereas if you start when you haven't even finished the word, let alone the sentence, the first word that you write is the often the hardest word to write in that writing session.
• 44:50
  The first sentence, the first paragraph, those are the hardest ones because you're starting cold.
• 44:55
  If you know exactly what comes next, it is much, much easier to start.
• 44:58
  I call it the right downhill because I had this really, really awful car when I moved to Los Angeles.
• 45:02
  It was just a piece of junk and would not start half the time.
• 45:06
  But I realized if I parked it on a downhill grade, I could get in that car and I could do the rolling start and I never missed a meeting again.
• 45:14
  I was always able to
• 45:16
  For all of our younger uh listeners, you used to have stick shifts.
• 45:20
  you can't
• 45:23
  won't work and you can't buy a stick shift anymore, so none of us know.
• 45:26
  And even like my Jeep won't even do that anymore.
• 45:28
  Like that's a stick shift and I guess they they've added a safety feature.
• 45:32
  Kinda annoys me but 'cause I've tried it a couple of times, but yeah.
• 45:36
  This car was the Ford Festiva L.
• 45:38
  I couldn't even afford the LS or the LX.
• 45:40
  I could only afford one letter.
• 45:42
  L it had no air conditioning in Los Angeles.
• 45:47
  It had no radio.
• 45:48
  It had manual transmission.
• 45:50
  And it was it was a McNugget box piece of budget.
• 45:53
  It was just hard.
• 45:54
  Or open like the Flintstones, you just kinda had to go brrrr and then take off
• 45:58
  It was it was it was almost that bad.
• 46:00
  But anyway, so so yeah, I have all these all these tricks to basically outwit the ways the critic is going to try to stop you from that creative process.
• 46:10
  The latter half of the book it goes into different ways to hear your your creator better, to do things to like when the creator really fires, really hits you, it's like a bolt of
• 46:22
  lightning, right?
• 46:23
  It's like, my God, where did that come from?
• 46:25
  That's amazing.
• 46:26
  But guess what?
• 46:26
  There are things we can do that brain science has shown us that there are all sorts of things we can do to get struck by lightning more often.
• 46:34
  And boy, as a writer, wouldn't what we want to be struck by lightning more often.
• 46:37
  Be nice.
• 46:37
  Well they might need to check out Super Draft, which is you said end of October.
• 46:41
  about the time this comes out it'll be live.
• 46:44
  out, yeah.
• 46:44
  So check it out.
• 46:46
  we do have two more questions to ask you because we've kept you for a while here and we appreciate your time.
• 46:50
  But so our first question we ask everybody, which is what do you think is your author superpower?
• 46:55
  My author superpower.
• 46:58
  My author superpower is actually the creator voice.
• 47:03
  My creator voice is like I I people say, Do you ever run out of ideas?
• 47:07
  I said, my God, no.
• 47:08
  I have more things to write than I could write in four lifetimes.
• 47:12
  And it's always coming with with something new every day.
• 47:18
  And over the years I've learned how to train my brain and
• 47:23
  to retain those things, right?
• 47:25
  To hang on to them a little more.
• 47:26
  So when I'm, you know, riding on a subway and I see this homeless woman talking to herself and I get this idea that what if she's not just talking to herself?
• 47:35
  What if she's hearing the thoughts of everyone in the train car around her and she's responding to them.
• 47:40
  Like she she it's driv driving her crazy.
• 47:43
  She's responding to them, but they're actual voices.
• 47:45
  That was actually the impetus for the first screenplay I ever wrote, Thoughtcrimes.
• 47:49
  So that that was how that that that was how that started.
• 47:52
  That's a pretty good superpower.
• 47:53
  I honestly I'd I'd say a superpower of yours also from from our conversation we've had here is finding the balance between the creator and the critic, because that is a war.
• 48:04
  That is literally a war zone we all go through.
• 48:07
  And so the way you've described it, finding that balance, that that truly is a superpower.
• 48:12
  Thank you.
• 48:12
  I to I totally agree.
• 48:14
  But that that's that's not one I was born with.
• 48:16
  That was one that I I had to uh to to create full cloth out of a lot of pain and a lot of misery.
• 48:23
  in fairness, most superpowers people aren't born with, they get from freak acts.
• 48:26
  You got a bit bit by a spider, yeah.
• 48:29
  I mean Superman had them from the get go, but everyone else got like from weird accidents.
• 48:33
  So all right, one more question for you, and which is our wheel of questions.
• 48:36
  I know you're excited about this.
• 48:38
  I'm supposed to I'm supposed to pretend there's an actual wheel here.
• 48:40
  Yeah, okay.
• 48:42
  my goodness that oh
• 48:45
  at the actual wheel and oh So
• 48:49
  Sure, sure.
• 48:52
  For the for the audience, he is he is now pulling up a a uh pre recorded card.
• 48:57
  An AI sort it list on his computer.
• 49:01
  Let me if I were gonna do that, I'd pick the question for you and it would be really hard, but uh but this was a good one, so you're in luck.
• 49:07
  All right, what is your nineteen eighties or nineteen seventies TV sidekick that you'd wanna have hanging around with you?
• 49:16
  The facile answer would be uh I would pick Bear from BJ and the Bear because I
• 49:21
  That's a good
• 49:23
  Need a draft monkey.
• 49:24
  uh And I would have a literal draft monkey right there.
• 49:28
  By the way, Greg Evigan, star of BJ and the Bear, from Sayreville, New Jersey, my hometown.
• 49:35
  Three most famous people in ascending order.
• 49:38
  Number three, Greg Evigan, number two, John Bon Jovi, and number one, of course, Thomas Dean Donnelly.
• 49:43
  All from Sayreville, New Jersey.
• 49:44
  uh
• 49:46
  I didn't
• 49:48
  Who is the second one?
• 49:49
  Uh John Bon John Bon Jovi he he he's he I think he plays I think he plays guitar
• 49:54
  Something yeah.
• 49:56
  He did some music back in the eighties or something.
• 49:59
  don't know nothing.
• 50:00
  two thousand, two thousand
• 50:01
  All right Dougie, what's yours?
• 50:02
  What's your sidekick?
• 50:04
  I'm gonna go well, I'm gonna go Twiki from Buck Rogers.
• 50:07
  Oh, Twiki.
• 50:10
  Twiki.
• 50:10
  No, Twiki.
• 50:11
  Twiki.
• 50:13
  It's a it's a cat.
• 50:14
  Twiggy was a British
• 50:16
  In the sixties.
• 50:18
  Twiki.
• 50:18
  I hadn't watched Buck Rogers.
• 50:20
  Okay, in all fairness, I would have gone Erin Gray.
• 50:23
  Yeah.
• 50:25
  That's fair.
• 50:27
  Does Ashley listen?
• 50:28
  Because that
• 50:30
  Cheryl listens to every one and I'm still going with Charlie's Angels, so I'm taking a lot of 'em.
• 50:35
  They're my sidekicks.
• 50:36
  Not bad.
• 50:37
  They're not sidekick.
• 50:40
  Bosley is the sidekick.
• 50:41
  You you you got you got Bosley.
• 50:44
  I flipped the script.
• 50:45
  that just I mean, boo.
• 50:47
  Ha ha ha ha ha.
• 50:49
  That just killed it.
• 50:50
  Dang.
• 50:51
  Okay.
• 50:52
  Wait a minute, hold on.
• 50:52
  Which Charlie's Angels is your favorite then, Nick?
• 50:54
  You know what, I d I don't mind, honestly.
• 50:58
  I don't think they had a bad one.
• 50:59
  Well far a far a force it.
• 51:02
  Far a for
• 51:03
  about you, Tom?
• 51:04
  What's your favorite Charlie's Angels?
• 51:06
  You know what?
• 51:07
  I think I would go with Kate Jackson.
• 51:12
  I I I I'd like the I like the pr I like the brainy, dark haired girls.
• 51:16
  They're they're they're they're fun.
• 51:18
  that I agree, that's gonna move mine too.
• 51:20
  Well, thank you so much for staying with us and hanging around.
• 51:22
  I think I could mention my my spy thriller for just a quick second, my spy thriller series, would that be okay?
• 51:27
  Absolutely.
• 51:27
  Yeah, you threw out the name earlier, but go for it.
• 51:29
  I d I did.
• 51:30
  So uh the the first book in the the Malcolm Chaucer series is called Year of the Rabbit.
• 51:36
  If you wanna see how a uh Hollywood screenwriter uh approaches uh the novel, they're very, very fun, they're very, very cinematic and they got a great review average on Amazon.
• 51:46
  Go check out Year of the Rabbit.
• 51:48
  There you go.
• 51:48
  Eight book two, I read it.
• 51:49
  We'll put a link in the show notes and I've made a nut note of the timeline so we can edit that bit out.
• 51:54
  All right, thank you, Tom, for
• 51:58
  I I can't I by the way, I'm dreading the intro before I come on board where I'm not even gonna hear what it is that you're saying about me before I come on.
• 52:07
  You guys are you have to understand these people are horrible people, okay?
• 52:11
  You're probably gonna cut this out.
• 52:13
  But everybody, everybody in our friend group at all of these conventions are just
• 52:18
  And we're gonna okay, so and we're out.
• 52:20
  Thank you guys so much.
• 52:21
  Gonna be the sound bite we use for the show.
• 52:24
  My gosh.
• 52:25
  All right, Tom.
• 52:26
  That's enough of you.
• 52:27
  Leave us immediately.
• 52:28
  Thank you so much for joining us.
• 52:29
  Thanks so much for having me.
• 52:36
  Thank you so much.
• 52:37
  T Donnelly, Tom Donnelly there.
• 52:39
  So nice to have him on.
• 52:40
  He's a he's a lot of fun.
• 52:41
  It's always a great time with Tom.
• 52:43
  Whether i h however whether it's on a chat stream or whether it's in person, it's a it's always a good time with Tom.
• 52:50
  So yeah.
• 52:51
  That's some good points.
• 52:52
  Like I I do like the idea of the whole the critic and the creator voice, those are important things to to really look at.
• 52:58
  So
• 52:59
  They you know w we we pound away at the keyboard and we do what we do and we're uh we talk about how insular we are um so often and we often don't pay enough attention to that stuff
• 53:11
  that is going on that really affects what we're doing daily.
• 53:15
  I think bringing it up and talking about it and identifying it and stuff like that.
• 53:19
  One one thing I was thinking about when he was say when he named his two.
• 53:24
  I like that.
• 53:24
  I've got to come up with names.
• 53:26
  Yeah, Phoebe and Philip.
• 53:28
  So the the
• 53:30
  I probably am gonna name it Doug.
• 53:32
  Yeah.
• 53:32
  Yeah.
• 53:33
  So the creative one, of course, will be named D.
• 53:37
  No, the the point that I thought of is, you know, he named Philip and he said, I I don't know, I don't know why it was Philip.
• 53:44
  It just sounded like a person in a room.
• 53:46
  That was really actually important because our tendency is it's the critic of voice.
• 53:52
  So what we graduate towards is immediately thinking about who's that one person that man was always
• 53:58
  Critical of or never thought I'd come to anything or don't name it that.
• 54:02
  Don't let that boy y all you're doing
• 54:04
  Don't give that person any credence.
• 54:06
  Yes.
• 54:07
  You're you're attaching the two together and making it worse.
• 54:10
  Make sure it's something that's has no emotional con context to you at this point.
• 54:16
  It's just a humorous name that is you're gonna talk about as being your critic.
• 54:21
  And don't attach it 'cause we all have those voices in our in our history and past of those moments that we wish we could frickin change, replay, whatever, or that person that
• 54:30
  really made us feel like shit, basically.
• 54:32
  And you don't want that
• 54:35
  name to be associated uh with this, it'll make it worse.
• 54:38
  note, don't use Nick, kind of use people.
• 54:41
  There we go.
• 54:42
  Everyone, everyone, everybody just made the same note.
• 54:45
  All right.
• 54:46
  Thanks, Tom.
• 54:47
  Huge thanks to Vellum.
• 54:49
  Great hanging out with you guys recently in um in Florida.
• 54:53
  And look hang out with them again in Vegas and their wonderful stuff.
• 54:58
  See how things are progressing.
• 55:00
  I got a beta for them for their new project.
• 55:03
  Uh Vellum going on.
• 55:05
  Interesting stuff.
• 55:06
  We'll learn more when we get to Vegas about that.
• 55:08
  Also
• 55:09
  Thank you to everyone in our Patreon.
• 55:11
  We really appreciate you.
• 55:12
  A gem in there from Tom Donnelly.
• 55:14
  A gem.
• 55:15
  Really good one, yes.
• 55:15
  Yeah, Hollywood just gold right there.
• 55:18
  So
• 55:19
  Yep.
• 55:19
  So three dollars a month, that's all it is.
• 55:21
  Three dollars a month, not an episode, just a month.
• 55:23
  to subscribe to our Patreon and you get all that bonus stuff in there.
• 55:26
  We appreciate the support.
• 55:27
  It help helps what keeps the wheels turning on the show here.
• 55:30
  And got links in the show notes.
• 55:32
  Links com links for Vellum, links for Patreon, all in the show notes.
• 55:36
  Grab those.
• 55:36
  Cool.
• 55:37
  and we'll be back next week with a new episode of the Two Authors' Podcast.
• 55:40
  Until next time.
• 55:40
  Be cool to each other.
• 55:42
  Fair winds and following seas.
• 55:45
  Been listening to the Two Authors' Podcast with Nicholas Harvey and Douglas Pratt.
• 55:50
  Subscribe on your favorite platform for new shows coming every week.