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Countdown to WriterCon with William Martin · WriterCon

0:00
Speaker 1: This week on the writer Con podcast Don't Quit Write
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Speaker 1: every Day. Welcome to writer Kon, a gathering place for
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Speaker 1: writers to share their knowledge about writing and the writing world.
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Speaker 1: Do you have a desire to write? Every successful writer
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Speaker 1: started with their first book. All it takes is determination
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Speaker 1: and knowledge, and writer con can provide that knowledge. Your
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Speaker 1: hosts are number one national best selling writer William Bernhardt,
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Speaker 1: author of more than sixty books, including The Superman Wars,
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Speaker 1: and Laura Bernhardt, Award winning author of the Wantlan File
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Speaker 1: series and Shadow of the taj.
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Speaker 2: Thank you, Jesse Ulrich. Hey, they're writers. Thanks for joining us.
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Speaker 2: I have an update on a story we ran on
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Speaker 2: one of the podcasts last month. You may recall the
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Speaker 2: story about the short story who won that one of
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Speaker 2: major prize only to be accused of having been written
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Speaker 2: by AI. This was the Commonwealth Prize, and just a
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Speaker 2: few days ago, as I speak, the Commonwealth Foundation dismissed
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Speaker 2: all those accusations and said that they did a month
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Speaker 2: long review and found that quote AI wasn't used in
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Speaker 2: quote to write them. Now, this is interesting. The Foundation
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Speaker 2: said that it did not use AI detection tools during
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Speaker 2: its review, but reached its conclusion by other means. I
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Speaker 2: don't know what that would be, probably just reading it
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Speaker 2: over and over again. Granted is the magazine that has
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Speaker 2: traditionally published the award winnings winners for this and other
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Speaker 2: short story competitions, but they announced that they're not going
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Speaker 2: to do any of that anymore.
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Speaker 3: Quote.
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Speaker 2: The twenty twenty sixth selection of the Regional winner winners
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Speaker 2: of the Commonwealth Prize caused a great deal of controversy
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Speaker 2: based on the speculation that one or more of the
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Speaker 2: stories may have been at least partially AI generated, accusations
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Speaker 2: that were strongly rejected by the authors. So they saying
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Speaker 2: that doesn't really explain why they're discontinuing running the stories,
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Speaker 2: but they are so perhaps they just think they're better
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Speaker 2: at detecting AI, or they don't want to, you know,
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Speaker 2: augment other people's mistakes. I don't know, Jesse, you're our
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Speaker 2: tech expert. How do you think this should be handled?
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Speaker 4: I mean, you got to you kind of.
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Speaker 1: You have to prove how you determined whether it was
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Speaker 1: written by human being or not. And even if you're
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Speaker 1: not going to run it, you have to tell people
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Speaker 1: why if you didn't use AI, you had to use
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Speaker 1: something because you can't just read it as a human
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Speaker 1: being and be like I can one hundred percent guarantee
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Speaker 1: this was.
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Speaker 4: Not written by AI. Right, Yeah, there's not a oh
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Speaker 4: what is that?
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Speaker 1: You know, Like you know, like in movies where there's
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Speaker 1: always like a new technology or whatever, but there's always
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Speaker 1: like the old guy who spent you know, twenty years
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Speaker 1: in the forest, who can like track things better than
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Speaker 1: the technology can.
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Speaker 2: Right.
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Speaker 4: We don't have We don't have that person for writing.
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Speaker 2: We don't, right, So how very if there's a character
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Speaker 2: in the story named Elias Thomas, it's probably Ai. But
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Speaker 2: we'll get to that later in the news. Okay, with
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Speaker 2: this episode, we are starting our official countdown to writer Con,
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Speaker 2: which of course is Labor Day weekend. That's September fourth
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Speaker 2: through seventh. This year, the Writer's conference is in Oklahoma
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Speaker 2: City at the Hilton Scurvian Hotel. In addition to our
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Speaker 2: usual programming, throughout the next two months of this podcast,
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Speaker 2: we'll be bringing you sneak previews of some of the
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Speaker 2: conference programming and speaking of By the way, the schedule
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Speaker 2: is now posted to our website writercon dot com. I
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Speaker 2: mean be warned that that's all subject to changes because
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Speaker 2: people have lives, and sometimes we have to juggle a
3:46
Speaker 2: few things, but that's pretty much the schedule up there.
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Speaker 2: I think we're covering every kind of writing there is.
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Speaker 2: We have agents covering every kind of writing there is.
3:56
Speaker 2: We have the latest on all that's happening in the
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Speaker 2: writing world and everything you need to know to succeed
4:02
Speaker 2: as a writer. And also speaking of writer Con, today,
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Speaker 2: our guest star interview is with Sunday keynote speaker William Martin.
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Speaker 2: As you probably know, he's one of the most one
4:17
Speaker 2: of the most successful guests we've ever had, and we've
4:19
Speaker 2: had some really good guests. He is the King of
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Speaker 2: the historical thriller. And that's not a title I awarded,
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Speaker 2: that's a title many people have awarded. He's the New
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Speaker 2: York Times bestselling author of twelve novels. His first book
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Speaker 2: was a New York Times bestseller, For Pete's Sake. He's
4:37
Speaker 2: also written a PBS documentary about George Washington and book
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Speaker 2: reviews and magazine articles, and a cult classic horror movie.
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Speaker 2: His most recent book is December forty one, which Steve Barry,
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Speaker 2: another fabulous historical thriller author who was also keynoted at
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Speaker 2: Writer con He called it another masterpiece from a master
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Speaker 2: and that's exactly what William Martin is so really looking
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Speaker 2: forward to talking to him. But first the news news
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Speaker 2: story number one, and this is one that perhaps has
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Speaker 2: a change of pace. Will actually I think bring joy
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Speaker 2: to many hearts. A self published book has now sold
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Speaker 2: over two point five million copies. Well it started as
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Speaker 2: self published anyway. I mean thousands, if not millions, of
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Speaker 2: people pour their heart onto the page and then upload it.
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Speaker 2: Remember when we covered the story that said that four
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Speaker 2: million books had been published last year, and what about
5:55
Speaker 2: three million of them were self published? Anyway, Most of
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Speaker 2: those books go largely on read but that is not
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Speaker 2: the case for THEO of Golden by Alan Levy. Levi,
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Speaker 2: by the way, who is a seventy year old former lawyer,
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Speaker 2: judge and singers songwriter. This is his first novel. It's
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Speaker 2: almost four hundred pages. It's about an elderly guy who
6:20
Speaker 2: travels to a fictional southern city and for most of
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Speaker 2: the book he sits on a park bench. I know,
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Speaker 2: I don't know why the Big five didn't pick up
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Speaker 2: on this, but anyway, almost three years after he first
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Speaker 2: self published it, THEO remains in the top five books
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Speaker 2: on Amazon. That's of everything in all categories, not just
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Speaker 2: in his category, but overall. It's in the top five
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Speaker 2: as we record this. For the past three weeks, it
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Speaker 2: has topped the New York Times bestseller list with, as
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Speaker 2: I said, two point five million copies sold. The book
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Speaker 2: talks about the virtues of close observation and deep conversation
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Speaker 2: and offline connections. Basically, the guys on the bench admires
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Speaker 2: the portraits lining the walls of a local coffee shop,
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Speaker 2: and he comes up with this plan. His mission, his
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Speaker 2: mission from God. Laura and I watched The Blues Brothers recently,
7:21
Speaker 2: so we're all about a mission from God. His mission
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Speaker 2: is to buy and return those portraits to their subject
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Speaker 2: and subjects, and you can just imagine the connections. He
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Speaker 2: then makes well, this book was still obscure to most
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Speaker 2: of the publishing world, but slowly but surely you built
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Speaker 2: a readership through what do we always say is the
7:44
Speaker 2: best kind of publicity a book can get, word of mouth.
7:48
Speaker 2: And also he had the help of his niece who's
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Speaker 2: named Aaron Ritchie, and she was working ceaselessly to get
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Speaker 2: this thing publicized. He asked her early on and if
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Speaker 2: she'd help him with the publishing, I'm going to guess
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Speaker 2: he may not be that tech friendly. And she figured
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Speaker 2: it out how to upload it, and then she figured
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Speaker 2: out how to publicize it. She had all these spreadsheets.
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Speaker 2: She was tracking self publishing platforms and wholesale distribution. She
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Speaker 2: studied other authors' websites. She made a list of allies
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Speaker 2: meaning friends, people he had the author had encountered over
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Speaker 2: his very long life, and send everybody email. She shipped
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Speaker 2: out free books to book clubs and church groups, and
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Speaker 2: I mean, what else can you say. At the end
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Speaker 2: of twenty twenty three, THEO of Golden had sold three
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Speaker 2: thousand copies, which would be darn good for most self
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Speaker 2: published books, actually most books period.
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Speaker 5: Any book.
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Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, but it's skyrocketed early in twenty twenty five
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Speaker 2: up to one hundred and twenty five thousand copies. And now,
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Speaker 2: of course, now the author has been interviewed by Katie
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Speaker 2: Kuric and Brauh and he's got the attention of Simon
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Speaker 2: and Schuster, and he sold two point five million copies. Jesse,
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Speaker 2: what is the moral of this story?
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Speaker 1: Well, I believe this This goes to your moral, which
9:15
Speaker 1: is like, don't quit. If you have a dream, you
9:18
Speaker 1: keep working on it.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, so you don't know when it'll happen.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, Now, only do you not know when it will happen.
9:23
Speaker 1: You don't need you don't need the things. You don't
9:27
Speaker 1: need the things you think you need to succeed, right,
9:30
Speaker 1: You just need help and a good product.
9:33
Speaker 5: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, Laura, are you like me kind of wishing that
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Speaker 2: this guy's niece would publish a manual or something. Maybe
9:42
Speaker 2: we could get her to speak a writer con.
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Speaker 4: Oh there, let go, that would be awesome.
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Speaker 5: She could come and teach something.
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Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, this is how I sold for five million
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Speaker 2: yeahs of my uncle's book.
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Speaker 5: I'd go, yes, Yes, it's a tough code to crack. Absolutely.
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Speaker 2: Okay, new story number two, which I was referring to
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Speaker 2: earlier when I mentioned Elias, The same character mysteriously keeps
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Speaker 2: appearing in AI stories. Okay. Recently, techie people, researchers, people
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Speaker 2: who understand all this AI stuff have noticed a weird
10:24
Speaker 2: phenomenon when you when anybody prompts chat GPT or Claude
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Speaker 2: or any of the popular lms, when you prompt them
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Speaker 2: to tell a story, Odds are it will spit out
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Speaker 2: a tale featuring this mysterious Elias Thorn guy, who, by
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Speaker 2: the way, is usually a lighthouse keeper, sometimes a clockmaker,
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Speaker 2: sometimes he's a detective, but whatever form he takes, he
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Speaker 2: keeps popping up over and over again. An AI general Stories.
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Speaker 2: Two Cornell University researchers sampled over twenty thousand stories generated
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Speaker 2: by four different lms, all with the same prompt tell
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Speaker 2: me a story, and Elias Thorne appeared in twenty six
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Speaker 2: point five percent of them. They also found that eighty
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Speaker 2: eight percent of these stories shared the same eleven names, locations,
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Speaker 2: and professions like lighthouse keeper, which I don't think has
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Speaker 2: turned up once in my sixty seven book history. Apparently
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Speaker 2: AI likes it. What's the deal? Is Elias a messenger
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Speaker 2: from the future who's figured out how to send a
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Speaker 2: message to save humanity. The Cornell group produced a paper
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Speaker 2: that speculated, and it's just speculation that AI models, which
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Speaker 2: are after all trained on other people's books and large
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Speaker 2: data sets, may have been instructed to and here I'm
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Speaker 2: quoting avoid references to copyrighted characters, of course, and adult
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Speaker 2: content when they come up with stories. And so I
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Speaker 2: guess that just leaves Elias Thorn or it could be
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Speaker 2: something they call model collapse or sometimes AI inbreeding. The
12:20
Speaker 2: basic idea is that as more and more the Internet
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Speaker 2: becomes AI generated, future al models will not be scraping
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Speaker 2: my books. They'll be scraping other low quality AI slop,
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Speaker 2: which will cause them to sped out even lower quality
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Speaker 2: AI slop, and on and on and idiocrisy comes for real. Jesse,
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Speaker 2: you have repeatedly said that AI should not be used
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Speaker 2: for creative work. So what do you think about this?
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Speaker 4: I mean, this proves my point.
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Speaker 1: Like I love I love like it's such a perfectly
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Speaker 1: great fake name.
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Speaker 4: It's almost like it's almost you.
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Speaker 1: Know, all the theories about how AI came up with
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Speaker 1: this sort of name just points points to the fact that, like,
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Speaker 1: creativity is hard. And I also love how it made
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Speaker 1: him a detective but not a detective. Plus one other thing,
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Speaker 1: which is, you know, the standard rule for detectives lighthouse
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Speaker 1: keeper who moved on, a lighthouse keeper who also solves crimes.
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Speaker 4: There we go, crimes that happened in the light tower. Yeah,
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Speaker 4: this is you know, this is one. I think this
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Speaker 4: is good.
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Speaker 1: This proves like AI is not ready to do creative work,
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Speaker 1: So maybe we shouldn't have it do that. And also
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Speaker 1: the more rules you give it, the harder it. Just
13:44
Speaker 1: like with real creativity, the more limitations you put on something,
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Speaker 1: the harder it becomes. This this exists both for human
13:49
Speaker 1: beings and computers, you.
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Speaker 2: Know, Is that true?
13:52
Speaker 3: Though?
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Speaker 2: I think sometimes I do better when I have some
13:56
Speaker 2: kind of restriction, you know, like I'm going to write
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Speaker 2: an but it's going to be this series character, or
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Speaker 2: I'm going to write a book, you know, something that
14:05
Speaker 2: it can only be so many words. I think sometimes
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Speaker 2: that can help channel create me.
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Speaker 4: But not Ai, I think I think it's a little bit.
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Speaker 1: It's a little bit of both, where like human beings
14:16
Speaker 1: can take restrictions and find creative ways.
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Speaker 5: Maybe rather than restrictions, we should say some directions. Yeah,
14:23
Speaker 5: that helps give direction to your creativity.
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Speaker 1: And yet just like the best example I always use
14:29
Speaker 1: in this case is like The Wrath of con Versus,
14:32
Speaker 1: the motion picture, like the Wrath of con had a
14:35
Speaker 1: much smaller budget, had a lot of restrictions on it,
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Speaker 1: and it is by far superior.
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Speaker 4: To the motion picture. We've had all the money.
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Speaker 2: Very true. So so Laura, I hear you sighn back there.
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Speaker 2: Are you thinking about writing another ghost detective series with
14:51
Speaker 2: Elias Thorne. The lighthouse.
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Speaker 5: Oh, so I sighed, because my current work in progress, Ghosted,
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Speaker 5: book six in the law Land Files series has a
15:02
Speaker 5: lighthouse in it. So you're saying, like, you've never written
15:04
Speaker 5: to the life.
15:05
Speaker 4: So now everyone's going to it.
15:06
Speaker 5: Now everyone's gonna think that it's AI generated. I definitely
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Speaker 5: cannot use the name Elias in there, or I'll open
15:14
Speaker 5: myself up to all kinds of criticism. But yeah, it
15:17
Speaker 5: does have a lighthouse featuring prominently in it.
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Speaker 2: Well, you're ahead of the trend or behind it one
15:26
Speaker 2: or the other.
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Speaker 5: I don't know what I am anymore, but I do
15:30
Speaker 5: like your idea. Maybe ooh, this would be so meta, Jesse.
15:36
Speaker 5: If I steal from AI and I take Elias Thorn
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Speaker 5: and then start writing a human generated story from the
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Speaker 5: AI generated ideas, there we go.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, ice plan that that is, Like, here's the thing.
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Speaker 1: That's what AI is good. AI is good synthesizing information
15:54
Speaker 1: very quickly for you to be like, Okay, I want
15:56
Speaker 1: to write a story with this type of character doing
15:58
Speaker 1: this type of thing, like give me give me a
16:02
Speaker 1: quick like theory, like a quick scene this character would do.
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Speaker 4: And then taking that and then actually writing a full story.
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Speaker 2: Yes, but all right, but at least we've learned one thing.
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Speaker 2: If you're reading a story submitted to a contest or not,
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Speaker 2: and the character is named Elias Thorne, yes, that's.
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Speaker 5: A there's where you should be suspicious.
16:30
Speaker 1: Like listeners by the time this episode comes out. Even
16:32
Speaker 1: though this episod's coming out very quickly, I have no
16:33
Speaker 1: doubt there'll be both a Twitter account, a Thread's account,
16:37
Speaker 1: and a blue Sky account of Elias Thorne.
16:40
Speaker 2: Yeah.
16:41
Speaker 4: If there isn't, I'm a start one.
16:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm.
16:45
Speaker 4: A I'm gonna find out right now we.
16:48
Speaker 2: Could boost my readership. Yeah, all right. Craft Corner Our
16:52
Speaker 2: Craft Corner segment this time is from Christina Kay. She's
16:56
Speaker 2: an author and an author coach who surprised will be
17:00
Speaker 2: a writer con this year, more than happy to talk
17:03
Speaker 2: to you about how she might be able to help
17:05
Speaker 2: you with your writing goals. Her topic today is how
17:09
Speaker 2: to treat your books like a business, not a hobby.
17:13
Speaker 2: Take it away, Christina.
17:18
Speaker 4: Craft Quarter.
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Speaker 6: I'm going to bet you anything I can tell you
17:23
Speaker 6: in thirty seconds flat, whether you're building an author business
17:29
Speaker 6: or you're simply financing a very expensive hobby. Do you
17:34
Speaker 6: have a one year publishing plan, a three year vision statement,
17:40
Speaker 6: a budget? How About a marketing strategy that does not
17:44
Speaker 6: depend on hoping your next TikTok post goes viral. An
17:49
Speaker 6: email list that you're growing, a system for tracking your numbers,
17:54
Speaker 6: how about an LLC that is legally established to protect
17:58
Speaker 6: your business. If you answered no to most of those congratulations,
18:05
Speaker 6: you're exactly in the same boat as thousands of super
18:10
Speaker 6: talented authors. That's actually good news, because none of those
18:14
Speaker 6: things have anything at all to do with your talent.
18:18
Speaker 6: They have instead, everything to do with learning to think differently.
18:24
Speaker 6: For the past twenty years, I've helped authors successfully launched
18:29
Speaker 6: not just their books, but their careers by teaching them
18:34
Speaker 6: what actually works in today's publishing and marketing worlds. Here's
18:39
Speaker 6: the biggest mindset shift I can give you in this
18:42
Speaker 6: short video. Authors write books, CEOs build assets. Every book
18:53
Speaker 6: you published should strengthen your brand, grow your readership, expand
18:59
Speaker 6: your email. Most importantly, increase your revenue, and move you
19:05
Speaker 6: one step closer to the author career that you know
19:08
Speaker 6: you've been dreaming about. We are living in a time
19:12
Speaker 6: when independent authors have more opportunity than ever before at
19:17
Speaker 6: building thriving, profitable careers with more freedom, more control, and
19:24
Speaker 6: a larger share of the profits than ever before. But
19:29
Speaker 6: there's a catch. Writing a great book is not enough anymore.
19:34
Speaker 6: You have to build a great business around it. Stop
19:39
Speaker 6: asking yourself what should I write next? Instead, ask yourself
19:46
Speaker 6: what would the CEO of my author empire do next?
19:53
Speaker 6: And then go do that. I will be speaking on
19:57
Speaker 6: Saturday and Sunday for this year's WRI six and I
20:02
Speaker 6: can't wait to meet you there. In the meantime, you're
20:05
Speaker 6: welcome to find and follow me on almost all social
20:09
Speaker 6: media outlets at Christina k Official, or you can visit
20:14
Speaker 6: my website learn more about me and my services and
20:17
Speaker 6: offers and all my successful clients at christinaka dot com. Otherwise,
20:22
Speaker 6: I will see you at Write.
20:27
Speaker 2: Thank you, Christina. Now let's talk to William Martin. William Martin,
20:38
Speaker 2: welcome back to the podcast.
20:40
Speaker 3: Hello, glad to be back.
20:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, great to have you here. All right, as you
20:45
Speaker 2: already know, we have a traditional opening question. If you
20:49
Speaker 2: could offer writers one piece of advice, what would it be?
20:54
Speaker 3: Don't quit write every.
20:55
Speaker 2: Day, let's due when that's okay?
21:00
Speaker 3: Well, they together, they work together. It's exciting every day,
21:05
Speaker 3: right right, don't quit. Write every day and hope that
21:11
Speaker 3: no matter what, someday you'll get to the end of
21:15
Speaker 3: a book.
21:16
Speaker 2: Which you know, I think they will if they don't quit,
21:19
Speaker 2: and you can, yeah, well finish a fight draft.
21:24
Speaker 3: I have, I have a time. My plan is to
21:31
Speaker 3: be in this room where the sausage gets made for
21:35
Speaker 3: about eight hours every day. The people have have goals
21:44
Speaker 3: in terms of words or sentences. You know, Stephen King
21:49
Speaker 3: has has I think a a word count. Robert B.
21:55
Speaker 3: Parker used to write five pages a day, you know,
21:58
Speaker 3: the author of the Spencer no the late author of
22:02
Speaker 3: the Spencer novels, quit and he'd write five pages and quit.
22:06
Speaker 3: And this was on the Spencer books, which were doing
22:10
Speaker 3: quite well. Five pages and quit, and quite often he'd
22:15
Speaker 3: be done at noon, and so he started writing new
22:18
Speaker 3: characters the Jesse Stone novels, and there were other characters.
22:25
Speaker 3: Maybe you will get that far if you write every day.
22:29
Speaker 3: But you know, I personally, one book, one book at
22:33
Speaker 3: a time has always been an and for me it's
22:38
Speaker 3: eight hours a day, and they those eight hours might
22:41
Speaker 3: sometimes produce two sentences and sometimes might produce twenty pages.
22:48
Speaker 3: And you just have to understand your own creative process
22:55
Speaker 3: and recognize that for some people it's going to be
23:02
Speaker 3: slower than for others. However, I think it was Louis
23:08
Speaker 3: Lamore who said, but whatever you do, start writing, because
23:15
Speaker 3: you don't get water until you turn on the faucet.
23:20
Speaker 2: That's the great way of putting. When did you realize
23:25
Speaker 2: you wanted to be a writer?
23:28
Speaker 3: Well, I realized first that I wanted to be a
23:32
Speaker 3: movie director, and I probably just I probably decided that
23:37
Speaker 3: when I was seeing movies like Lawrence of Arabia and
23:40
Speaker 3: Meet Me on the Bounty and The Longest Day How
23:44
Speaker 3: the West Was Won, all of those big, thundering epics
23:50
Speaker 3: of the early nineteen sixties, many of which are still
23:55
Speaker 3: better than the movies they make today as far as
23:57
Speaker 3: I'm concerned. You're not the only one the grandeur. And
24:02
Speaker 3: yet the complexity of Lawrence of Arabia is is something
24:08
Speaker 3: that has very seldom been achieved in movies, from Birth
24:14
Speaker 3: of a Nation to the present. And anyway, I saw
24:17
Speaker 3: those movies and I saw the first of all the
24:20
Speaker 3: adventure they depicted. But I thought a lot about the
24:24
Speaker 3: adventure that must have been involved in the creation of them,
24:30
Speaker 3: which was a little bit naive of me, because you
24:32
Speaker 3: know that that kind of adventure can be pretty hellish.
24:37
Speaker 3: And I saw all of that, and I thought I
24:39
Speaker 3: want to be a movie director. And I followed that
24:45
Speaker 3: belief all through college, where I directed theater and did
24:51
Speaker 3: my senior honors thesis in the movies of John Ford,
24:55
Speaker 3: the Great movie Director. And then I went to the
25:00
Speaker 3: USC Film School and I said, I said to my father, Dad,
25:06
Speaker 3: I want to go to film school. He said, film school.
25:11
Speaker 3: I'd really rather see you go to law school. If
25:15
Speaker 3: you don't do what you want to do when you're young,
25:16
Speaker 3: you'll spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.
25:19
Speaker 2: This is true.
25:21
Speaker 3: So about thirty years later, when my son, who will
25:28
Speaker 3: be at writer con also said to me, Dad, I
25:32
Speaker 3: want to go to film school. I said, film school.
25:36
Speaker 3: I'd really rather see you going to law school. But
25:39
Speaker 3: as your grandfather said to me, etcetera, etcetera. So I
25:45
Speaker 3: went to the USC Film School and met a lot
25:48
Speaker 3: of people who ultimately turned out to be pretty successful,
25:52
Speaker 3: and I worked with them on their on We would
25:56
Speaker 3: create creative teams to work together, and I worked with
26:01
Speaker 3: Robert Elswid who's Academy Award winning a cinematographer shot There
26:07
Speaker 3: will be Blood, among other things, and people who became
26:13
Speaker 3: important in the production of movies and the production of
26:18
Speaker 3: television shows. But what I figured out as I was
26:23
Speaker 3: going through film school was that the quickest way into
26:26
Speaker 3: the movie business was to come with a script under
26:30
Speaker 3: your arm, and not a script for a sixteen minute,
26:34
Speaker 3: sixteen millimeters student film, but a script of one hundred
26:40
Speaker 3: and twenty pages that grabs you on the first page
26:46
Speaker 3: and doesn't let you go until the last page. And
26:49
Speaker 3: so I focused more and more on writing screenplays, and
26:55
Speaker 3: out of that learned the mechanics of storytelling. Wrote a
27:02
Speaker 3: couple of screenplays. The first one that really developed into
27:08
Speaker 3: a mature piece of work became ultimately my eleventh novel.
27:13
Speaker 3: But that's a story for a different time, right exactly. Anyway,
27:21
Speaker 3: I found my way into the into the business of
27:26
Speaker 3: writing by thinking that it was the back door into
27:31
Speaker 3: the business of directing. I wrote screenplays, nobody wanted to
27:36
Speaker 3: produce them, even though I made a few good contacts
27:39
Speaker 3: in Hollywood. Nobody at that time in the late the
27:43
Speaker 3: mid seventies wanted to produce movies, big historical movies, which
27:51
Speaker 3: was the kind of thing that I was writing, and
27:54
Speaker 3: my agent actually sent to me once after I after
27:58
Speaker 3: I submitted to her a big splay about the battle
28:01
Speaker 3: for water rights in the Southern CALIFORNI in southern California
28:04
Speaker 3: in the nineteen twenties, she said, Oh, too bad. George
28:08
Speaker 3: Stevens and John Ford are dead. You know. I was
28:12
Speaker 3: almost as if in my storytelling instincts and in the
28:16
Speaker 3: things that excited me, I was about a generation too late.
28:22
Speaker 2: But I thinking that all this is going to lead
28:24
Speaker 2: somehow to humanoids of the deed.
28:27
Speaker 3: From the deep. Well, we'll get we'll get to that,
28:30
Speaker 3: we'll get to a second. But eventually I would go around,
28:35
Speaker 3: go around the movie producers and pitch ideas, and one
28:39
Speaker 3: of them finally said to me, you know the way
28:40
Speaker 3: you write, You ought to write a novel. And at
28:46
Speaker 3: just about that time, there was a strike in Hollywood,
28:49
Speaker 3: and I had had it in my head that maybe
28:51
Speaker 3: I could write a novel. It's all storytelling. And I
28:56
Speaker 3: had a story about buried treasure beneath the streets of Boston,
29:01
Speaker 3: which became that book right there, Back Bay, which came
29:07
Speaker 3: out in nineteen eighty, which will be fifty years come
29:14
Speaker 3: in twenty thirty and that's what we celebrates, right. Yeah,
29:20
Speaker 3: Well I'm going to celebrate in a very big way
29:22
Speaker 3: at that one. But I'll tell you about that in
29:25
Speaker 3: a minute. That the process though with back Bay was
29:35
Speaker 3: basically applying the things that I knew as a screenwriter
29:38
Speaker 3: about grabbing a reader and the beginning of a story
29:42
Speaker 3: and sustaining dramatic tension and the plot velocity right the
29:49
Speaker 3: way I put it all together from my screen screenwriting training.
29:55
Speaker 3: And since then I have been learning more and more
30:00
Speaker 3: about the business of writing novels and developing as a stylist,
30:07
Speaker 3: which I would admit I really wasn't when I wrote
30:11
Speaker 3: back Bay. But we can talk more about style when
30:15
Speaker 3: when I'm there at writer Con.
30:18
Speaker 2: Everybody had to write a first books.
30:20
Speaker 3: That's right, yeah, required, But my first book was a
30:25
Speaker 3: New York Times bestseller because that's the thing strike that
30:29
Speaker 3: that hit back Bait, and I was too young and
30:33
Speaker 3: inexperienced to fully appreciate what has happened, but I was
30:40
Speaker 3: glad that it did.
30:42
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, but still Humanoids of the Deep, Okay, I
30:47
Speaker 2: got this cult horror film. Where did that come from?
30:51
Speaker 3: So one of the things that I did in the
30:54
Speaker 3: process of trying to develop a screenwriter was to make connections,
31:00
Speaker 3: make friends. And one of my professors at USC actually
31:04
Speaker 3: wrote movies for Roger Corman, the king of the B Pictures,
31:10
Speaker 3: who wrote He wrote Bloody Mama, Death Race two thousand,
31:16
Speaker 3: kind of movies that there are certain people out there
31:18
Speaker 3: who are saying, Oh, that's a great one, that's a
31:20
Speaker 3: great one. Ron mccorman made what I called exploitation films,
31:27
Speaker 3: and so I got to know his story editor, a
31:33
Speaker 3: wonderful woman by the name of Francis Dole, who has
31:37
Speaker 3: recently passed away. But just about the time that I
31:40
Speaker 3: was finishing the writing of Back Bay, she called me
31:43
Speaker 3: up and said, we have an assignment for you. Now,
31:48
Speaker 3: Roger Corman gave you an assignment. It meant that that
31:54
Speaker 3: movie was going to get made, no matter so in
31:59
Speaker 3: a town where where everybody is writing a screenplay, including
32:04
Speaker 3: the guy parking cars outside of the restaurant that you've
32:12
Speaker 3: just gone to, everybody has an idea for screenplay. But
32:18
Speaker 3: to know that something that you had written was going
32:22
Speaker 3: to be put before cameras and turned into film that
32:28
Speaker 3: was unbelievable. So who was I to turn down the
32:30
Speaker 3: opportunity to do that? All that she gave me was
32:34
Speaker 3: the title and the tagline, both of which had come
32:39
Speaker 3: from a guy who I guess was a real estate
32:43
Speaker 3: agent who had decided he wanted to be a movie producer.
32:45
Speaker 3: And he went to Roger Corman and said, I'll finance
32:49
Speaker 3: this movie. And Roger Corman, of course, being a man
32:52
Speaker 3: who loved outside finance, particularly when he knew that he
32:57
Speaker 3: could control the project, said okay, I'll do it. And
33:01
Speaker 3: the title was Humanoids from the Deep and the tagline
33:05
Speaker 3: forgive me. I did not come up with this. The
33:08
Speaker 3: tagline was they're not human, but they hunt human women,
33:14
Speaker 3: not killing for mating. And on that basis I wrote
33:22
Speaker 3: that movie. And it was about six months later that
33:26
Speaker 3: Back Bay became a New York Times bestseller, and I
33:30
Speaker 3: didn't need to worry about pleasing Roger Corman again in
33:34
Speaker 3: my career. Did he know?
33:36
Speaker 2: I mean, I could have seen him re releasing it
33:39
Speaker 2: as by the best selling author.
33:43
Speaker 3: Well, you know that the problem was that I I
33:48
Speaker 3: had a dispute over the ending of the movie, which
33:52
Speaker 3: I kind of a ripoff of Alien, which was a
33:56
Speaker 3: big movie in that particular summer, you know, the one
33:58
Speaker 3: with the baby pot that where the monster pops out
34:01
Speaker 3: of a John Hurts chest. That's you know, it's one
34:06
Speaker 3: of the most shocking incident incidents moments in the history
34:09
Speaker 3: of cinema.
34:10
Speaker 2: And he remember seeing that in the theater and the
34:13
Speaker 2: woman in front of him literally leaped out of her chair.
34:16
Speaker 3: Yep, yep. Well, uh, they decided after they saw that
34:22
Speaker 3: that that was how they wanted to end the movie.
34:25
Speaker 3: And Francis Dole, who was an english woman with a
34:29
Speaker 3: wonderful accent, would say, now, Bill, have you decided to
34:33
Speaker 3: write Birth of Monster Baby? I'd say, I'm not going
34:40
Speaker 3: to write that scene. In retrospect, I should have kept
34:46
Speaker 3: my name on the movie because I have gotten a
34:48
Speaker 3: lot of a lot of mileage from it, and uh
34:54
Speaker 3: learned a lot from it also, you know, and a
34:57
Speaker 3: lot of what I learned I I applied to subsequent
35:04
Speaker 3: books that I wrote. And that's that's a truth. No
35:09
Speaker 3: matter what you write, whether you're write a drawer full
35:14
Speaker 3: of short stories that you can't get published in the
35:18
Speaker 3: New Yorker, well maybe one day one of those short
35:22
Speaker 3: stories will break through for the New Yorker. I personally
35:26
Speaker 3: am totally incapable of writing a short story. I've never
35:32
Speaker 3: I've never been able to work. It's very hard work.
35:35
Speaker 3: People don't people don't understand. Oh, well, I can't write
35:40
Speaker 3: a novel, so I'll just write a few short stories.
35:42
Speaker 3: Now that doesn't work as long.
35:46
Speaker 2: And then you've got nowhere to send.
35:47
Speaker 3: It, right exactly. And the other one that falls under
35:52
Speaker 3: that that that label, I guess would be the children's book.
35:58
Speaker 3: You know, the children's book is a very difficult thing
36:03
Speaker 3: to write. It's like writing high coup, it's like writing poetry.
36:08
Speaker 3: And when when you when you meet someone who says, well,
36:11
Speaker 3: I can't write a novel for grown up, so I'll
36:13
Speaker 3: write a children's book, I say, well, you really, you
36:17
Speaker 3: might want to rethink that, because it's a it takes
36:20
Speaker 3: a very special set of skills and experience, and it
36:26
Speaker 3: isn't easier as it may appear. No, no, no.
36:31
Speaker 2: Now, Laura, you want to ask him about that PBS documentary, right, yes.
36:37
Speaker 5: So from Humanoids from the Deep to a PBS documentary
36:41
Speaker 5: on George Washington. Yes, well that age tell us about
36:44
Speaker 5: that one.
36:46
Speaker 3: That might I'm much prouder of George Washington, the man
36:50
Speaker 3: who wouldn't be king. But people seen it, well, you know,
36:56
Speaker 3: a show, a show like that in those days, even
37:00
Speaker 3: on the American experience on PBS, UH, that show would
37:04
Speaker 3: have been seen by six to eight million people, which
37:08
Speaker 3: a pretty good number of people. Yeah. Yeah, it is
37:16
Speaker 3: a sad fact of life. In my estimation that well,
37:21
Speaker 3: I've written some pretty good selling or well selling books,
37:26
Speaker 3: that the sum total of all the novels that I
37:32
Speaker 3: have written and all of their sales can't equal the
37:36
Speaker 3: number of people who have probably seen that awful movie. However, George,
37:42
Speaker 3: George Washington, the man books that you'd written, No, no,
37:47
Speaker 3: I had. I had a friend who's still working. David
37:51
Speaker 3: Sutherland is his name. He's a one of the last
37:55
Speaker 3: of the cinema verite filmmakers uh and and actually did
37:59
Speaker 3: a most of the films that he made would take
38:04
Speaker 3: him into someone's home, like he did one called The
38:07
Speaker 3: Farmer's Wife in Nebraska about a farmer. Another one was
38:11
Speaker 3: about a cowgirl, and he would follow that family around
38:17
Speaker 3: with the cameras and then create something out of it
38:20
Speaker 3: that would become a PBS special then, and they asked
38:26
Speaker 3: him for some reason, I think because he had done
38:29
Speaker 3: films about art and had been able to animate the
38:34
Speaker 3: works of certain artists very vividly. Could he go back
38:39
Speaker 3: to the eighteenth century and animate the imagery that was
38:43
Speaker 3: available to us of Georgia Wellington as general and president
38:48
Speaker 3: and so forth and so on. And so he asked
38:54
Speaker 3: me if i'd write it, and I said, I'll write
38:58
Speaker 3: it if you let me narrate it, because I was
39:01
Speaker 3: angling to make myself the Road Company David McCullough. That
39:04
Speaker 3: didn't end, but uh, but it was a wonderful experience
39:08
Speaker 3: writing that film, and it's a nice we have all
39:12
Speaker 3: We have talked many times since about trying to do
39:16
Speaker 3: one on uh maybe the famous movie director for American
39:22
Speaker 3: masters or uh, maybe for the American experience, but we
39:27
Speaker 3: haven't uh, we haven't managed to coordinate our time schedules.
39:34
Speaker 3: So it might happen. It might. It might be fun.
39:37
Speaker 5: That sounds very fun. That kind of combines both of
39:39
Speaker 5: your interests. Yes, film writing brings.
39:42
Speaker 3: It all together. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
39:45
Speaker 5: And you talked about how you spend eight hours every
39:49
Speaker 5: day focused on your writing. Can you write more specifics
39:53
Speaker 5: like what your process looks like?
39:55
Speaker 4: Are you are you.
39:56
Speaker 5: A pants or a planner? Do you outline how do
39:59
Speaker 5: you approach a new well?
40:00
Speaker 3: You know, I've been sort of I've taken my foot
40:04
Speaker 3: off the gas pedal the last few years. When I
40:10
Speaker 3: was in the midst of writing December forty one, my
40:13
Speaker 3: last novel, I had a heart attack sitting right here.
40:18
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, that's all right, it's fine. I was sitting
40:22
Speaker 3: right here, and I had promised them the book in
40:29
Speaker 3: six weeks. I had targeted the date a week before
40:35
Speaker 3: my daughter's wedding, so i'd have the book out of
40:37
Speaker 3: my house so forth. And I was sitting here and
40:42
Speaker 3: I was saying to myself, I need six months, not
40:46
Speaker 3: six weeks, to finish this. And then I found a
40:50
Speaker 3: little funny pain here and it started to travel, and no,
40:54
Speaker 3: it didn't stop, it didn't go away. I went downstairs.
40:58
Speaker 3: I walked up and down the driveway to try to
41:01
Speaker 3: walk it off. That I do not suggest to anyone
41:05
Speaker 3: that thinks this might be happening. Went next door to
41:09
Speaker 3: my neighbor who was a retired ear nose and throat specialist.
41:12
Speaker 3: He wasn't home, so I kept walking up and down
41:16
Speaker 3: the driveway. Chris, my wife, wasn't home. Then my neighbor
41:21
Speaker 3: pulled in and he looked over and he said, were
41:25
Speaker 3: you looking for me, Bill? And I said, well, yeah,
41:30
Speaker 3: little pain. So forth get in the car, and he said,
41:34
Speaker 3: it's probably nothing, but let's go down to the hospital,
41:36
Speaker 3: which is six minutes away. And I was fortunate. By
41:43
Speaker 3: the end of the afternoon, I had a stint and
41:48
Speaker 3: I was sitting in my hospital bed calling my sons
41:52
Speaker 3: and saying, you know how, I tell you guys, sometimes
41:55
Speaker 3: you eat too much cheese. Well, I have now compelling
42:00
Speaker 3: evidence to support that theory. But anyway, so I had
42:06
Speaker 3: the heart attack. And while I was having the the
42:11
Speaker 3: camera put up through my arm and a cross into
42:13
Speaker 3: my heart and they're they're studying the veins. I'm thinking
42:17
Speaker 3: to myself, I don't have any more to prove. I'm
42:21
Speaker 3: not going to kill myself anymore. And my editor went
42:25
Speaker 3: along with that. He actually he said take all the
42:29
Speaker 3: time you need. And eventually I spent another year writing
42:34
Speaker 3: December forty one and then said, I'm going to spend
42:39
Speaker 3: some time traveling and wondering about I'll get to my
42:42
Speaker 3: next novel eventually, but it is coming.
42:45
Speaker 5: It's important to have that balance.
42:47
Speaker 3: It is.
42:48
Speaker 5: It's so important, I think, to fight burnout.
42:51
Speaker 3: Yes, that's part of it, you know. I meant at
42:58
Speaker 3: some point that one point I was producing books almost
43:04
Speaker 3: won every two years. And and when you write books
43:10
Speaker 3: that are as big and long and research intensive as
43:14
Speaker 3: I write, they that that can be a lot of work,
43:19
Speaker 3: you know. And I truly hate sitting up here after
43:26
Speaker 3: supper at seven o'clock at night hoping that I can
43:30
Speaker 3: squeeze out a few more pages in order to get
43:34
Speaker 3: close to my my next deadline. And and that's that's
43:41
Speaker 3: when I that's when I say I'm too damn old
43:43
Speaker 3: for this. So and I.
43:45
Speaker 5: Think I think people who still have a day job
43:48
Speaker 5: and are trying to squeeze in that time so well
43:51
Speaker 5: and finish the next book, I think they're going to
43:54
Speaker 5: really connect with that idea as well. It's it's so
43:58
Speaker 5: easy to just keep pushing, pushing, right, and the next
44:00
Speaker 5: thing you know, you're burned out, your health is defraying,
44:03
Speaker 5: your relationships are suffering.
44:05
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, this is the this is the flip side
44:09
Speaker 3: of that business that I offered at the beginning about
44:13
Speaker 3: write every day. So forth, you should try to write
44:16
Speaker 3: every day. But I personally have an enormous amount of
44:22
Speaker 3: respect for people who keep a day job and also
44:26
Speaker 3: write books because I have been among the lucky ones
44:31
Speaker 3: in that I have. I have never I've never had
44:37
Speaker 3: to have a day job since I quit construction work.
44:41
Speaker 5: The writing is your day job.
44:42
Speaker 3: I said to my wife. I said to my wife,
44:44
Speaker 3: after I graduated from the US and Film School, just
44:47
Speaker 3: give me a year to write. She was working in
44:50
Speaker 3: the scientific lab at the time, and so she said, okay,
44:53
Speaker 3: And that was just about enough. I got my I
44:57
Speaker 3: got my princely Advanced bay of seven thousand, five hundred
45:04
Speaker 3: dollars and in well in late nineteen seventy seven. And
45:13
Speaker 3: that book made a lot more than seventy five hundred dollars.
45:16
Speaker 3: I am healthy. Yeah.
45:17
Speaker 2: Well, that's the nice thing about a small advance, isn't it.
45:20
Speaker 2: The book does.
45:21
Speaker 3: Well right right, That book bought this house that I
45:26
Speaker 3: mean right now. Years later, Yeah, subsequent subsequent books heeded it.
45:32
Speaker 3: And because it gets.
45:35
Speaker 2: Colder for the furniture, right, Okay, we've hit the mark.
45:39
Speaker 2: I'm going to cut into that I call the lightning round.
45:42
Speaker 2: I want you to know that I tailored two of
45:45
Speaker 2: these questions just for you, knowing your extensive historical and
45:51
Speaker 2: really pretty much every kind of knowledge. So first one,
45:56
Speaker 2: if you could steal something from any library or museum
46:02
Speaker 2: in the world, what would you take.
46:06
Speaker 3: I would steal. I would go with Peter Fallon, the
46:11
Speaker 3: main character in several of my novels, who is involved
46:16
Speaker 3: in a lot of this stuff, and steal a first
46:20
Speaker 3: folio of Shakespeare. Oh well, nice, And I know and
46:25
Speaker 3: I know where to find a couple of them. I've
46:27
Speaker 3: actually been my hands.
46:30
Speaker 2: And that would worry about taking care of it though,
46:32
Speaker 2: you know.
46:33
Speaker 3: That would be worth but that would be worth about
46:37
Speaker 3: fifty million.
46:38
Speaker 2: Oh my god. After the Superman book people came out,
46:41
Speaker 2: people would say, would you like to have an Action
46:43
Speaker 2: Comics number one? The last one sold for about fifteen million. Yeah. No,
46:48
Speaker 2: I don't want that. I don't want the responsibility for that.
46:52
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, well right in this line of books behind me,
46:55
Speaker 3: I have a plan from the second folio of Shakespeare,
47:02
Speaker 3: from the sixteen hundreds, certain books, certain dealers will if
47:09
Speaker 3: if the volume is just too hard to sell, to
47:15
Speaker 3: deteriorated and stained, they will take out razor out the
47:20
Speaker 3: plays that are that are still legible, and they'll sell
47:24
Speaker 3: those individually. And so I I have a copy of
47:27
Speaker 3: Loves Loves Labors one over there. Actually it's Love Loves
47:32
Speaker 3: it's actually Loves Labors Lost, Loves Labor's Loss. But in
47:37
Speaker 3: Harvard Yard. My novel about Harvard with Peter Fallon. In it,
47:42
Speaker 3: he tries to find loves labors one which they think
47:46
Speaker 3: Beer wrote and.
47:47
Speaker 2: Lost it was registered, but nobody's.
47:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, yeah.
47:53
Speaker 2: Okay, I totally didn't stump you with that. So let
47:55
Speaker 2: me try again. You could jump at, mister history, if
47:59
Speaker 2: you could jump up into a time machine and change anything, Okay.
48:05
Speaker 3: I would go back sixty million years and I would
48:10
Speaker 3: just adjust the rotation of the Earth by it, I
48:13
Speaker 3: don't know, maybe about about six hours, so that the
48:20
Speaker 3: asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula and Gulf of Mexico
48:26
Speaker 3: would hit in the Pacific because if that asked and
48:30
Speaker 3: I was just reading all this the other day, and
48:32
Speaker 3: I'm saying.
48:33
Speaker 2: You'd save the dinosaurs.
48:35
Speaker 3: No, well, listen, who knows. But the asteroid, the asteroid
48:43
Speaker 3: hitting the Gulf of Mexico, it hit a very shallow
48:48
Speaker 3: limestone seabed, and the limestone reacted in such a way
48:52
Speaker 3: that it went up into the air and became sulfuric acid.
48:56
Speaker 3: So after everything else was over with, the Earth was
48:59
Speaker 3: surrounded by this orbit of sulfuric acid in the little pellets.
49:05
Speaker 3: If it had hit in the Pacific. It would have
49:08
Speaker 3: caused probably a tidal wave and an explosion and so forth,
49:12
Speaker 3: but the effects might not have been as as completely catastrophic.
49:19
Speaker 3: So who knows what might have emerged. Who knows what
49:23
Speaker 3: we would be like.
49:24
Speaker 2: It could be humanoids from the deep.
49:26
Speaker 3: I know. That's great. I thought about I thought about
49:32
Speaker 3: that answer, and I figured you'd like that. That's that's
49:37
Speaker 3: the big picture. And then all of these in all
49:41
Speaker 3: of these books, I like to think about a big
49:42
Speaker 3: picture behind.
49:44
Speaker 2: It's so smart. Yeah, great, regret. I have to wrap
49:48
Speaker 2: this up. Okay, we will see you again at Ryder
49:51
Speaker 2: Con in September.
49:53
Speaker 3: Good.
49:54
Speaker 2: Until then, thanks for being on the podcast.
49:56
Speaker 3: Good okay having me, Yes and my son Dan Man.
50:02
Speaker 3: We'll be talking about games, writing games.
50:07
Speaker 2: Yes, podcast too. But yeah, I'll be back to writer
50:09
Speaker 2: conn all.
50:10
Speaker 3: Right, thanks for being okay, take care.
50:24
Speaker 2: Just a few parting words. Writer Con is September fourth
50:28
Speaker 2: through seventh and Oklahoma City at the historic and haunted
50:32
Speaker 2: Sturvan Hotel. Laura and I will be there, Jesse will
50:36
Speaker 2: be there, about sixty other writers agents will will be there.
50:42
Speaker 2: William Martin will be there with his son Dan Martin.
50:45
Speaker 2: As we know and you know, a whole bunch more.
50:49
Speaker 2: And like I said, the schedule is on our website,
50:52
Speaker 2: so go check it out. It is not too time
50:55
Speaker 2: to register and make plans to attend writer Con. The
50:58
Speaker 2: website is predictably writer con dot com. I also have
51:04
Speaker 2: to put in one more plug for my new book,
51:07
Speaker 2: The Superman Wars. Remember this is a book about a
51:10
Speaker 2: writer just like you, and the struggle struggles he suffered
51:14
Speaker 2: are sadly very much with us today. Some of the
51:18
Speaker 2: scams targeting targeting writers take a slightly different shape today,
51:23
Speaker 2: but man, the vultures are still with us. And Jerry Siegel,
51:27
Speaker 2: the kid who came up with the idea for Superman,
51:30
Speaker 2: was the first American writer to sue his publishers to
51:34
Speaker 2: stand up for his rights, and many other writers now
51:37
Speaker 2: benefit from what turned out to be the most important
51:40
Speaker 2: creator writes battle of modern times. Let me also say,
51:45
Speaker 2: if you haven't joined the writer Con Facebook group, you
51:48
Speaker 2: should do it now. Join this wonderful community of writers.
51:51
Speaker 2: They'll keep up to date. It doesn't cost a thing.
51:53
Speaker 2: I'll post a link in the show notes. All right,
51:56
Speaker 2: until next time, people keep writing, And remember you heard
52:02
Speaker 2: it from William Martin, so you know it must be true.
52:05
Speaker 2: You've heard it from me a few times too. You
52:08
Speaker 2: cannot fail if you refuse to quit. All right, See
52:13
Speaker 2: you next time.