Latest / WriterCon / Writing for TV, Comics & Novels with Marc Guggenheim

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Writing for TV, Comics & Novels with Marc Guggenheim · WriterCon

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This week on the writer Con podcast. Yeah, there's no substitute for I
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think, practicing your craft and doing your craft and also seeing how the craft
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is done by other writers. Welcome to writer Con, a gathering place for
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writers to share their knowledge about writing and the writing world. Your hosts are
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William Bernhardt, best selling novelist and author of the Red Sneaker books on writing,
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and Laura Bernhardt, award winning author of the want Ln Files book series.
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Thank you, Jesse Ulrich, and Hey there writers, thanks for joining
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us. So this episode is being released the weekend before Laura and I traveled
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to Cane Break just outside Tulsa for the writer Con retreat. I know we've
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talked about what we do, the feedback and the talks, and the time
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to write and whip your manuscript into shape before writer Con conference happens so you
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can pitch it to the agents. But there is so much more that goes
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on at these retreats. You meet people, you get to know, people,
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make friends for life, get beta readers you'll keep for life, and
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so many Laura, you remember the year and I think this was the COVID
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lockdown here. So we're all sitting around in mass and distancing itself at the
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retreat, and Marcia Preston, who's a terrific writer, was there. She's
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won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for Pete's sake, but she was I don't
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remember the point stuck somewhere in her novel, but on day five she said,
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thank you to the whole group. You gave me exactly what I need.
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And indeed that novel has now been published by a Big five publisher and
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she's doing really well with it. You have a favorite memory from the retreats
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That was a good one. That's when we were at Eureka Springs. What
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I really like about this one that's coming up is we're going to be in
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a new place and I'm excited to explore that. Yes different. It's always
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fun to go explore, try out different things. I know we're going to
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be welcoming in some writers who are going to be new to writer Con and
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I'm excited to meet them start working with them. We are going to have
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we're getting close to filling up. I think we have room. There's room,
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but on the other hand, we keep it small enough that we can
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adapt, so wherever you are in your writing, we can help you out
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if you're just starting. I had someone send me a message and ask me,
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I have all these ideas, but I don't know where to start.
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Are you guys going to be too advanced for someone in my position? I
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need to know how to structure a knowledge a novel. Are we going to
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be talking about things like that? We can? We can. We can
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adapt to help anybody at any level because we keep them smaller. So you
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get really intense, useful instruction, actionable advice feedback from people. And you're
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going to hear from people at all different levels, so it's really invaluable.
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Never in a confrontational or any way that would make no but if you're just
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beginning, you'll hear from people who are maybe on their fifth draft or people
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who maybe even published once before, and so it'll allow you to look ahead
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and plant some ideas and start getting getting your ducks in a row or further
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down the line, and give you an idea what to expect later in your
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process. Right, and Jesse, you're still welcome to drop by if you
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decide to drop that boring teaching teams, leadership thing or whatever that was.
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Listen, I would love for its nothing's more important than the retreats. So
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I listen, I would happily come again as listeners this podcast. Now,
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I'm always I've always enjoyed and being around people who are working on a creative
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produce and being supported in that by other creative people. Like It's fun no
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matter what it is, and so any any writer con, cruise, retreat,
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conference, whatever, it is always enjoyable, even if you're not necessarily
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a writer. It's just a great way to feel supported in whatever creative endeavor
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you're doing. It's a great vibe absolutely. All right, writer conor retreat,
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last chance, you won't hear about it on the next podcast because it
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will be over. So if you're interested, go to writer con dot com
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slash retreat and check it out. Our interview today is with Mark Guggenheim,
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who is an Emmy Award winning writer. He's written for many different media including
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television, film, video, video games, I mean, comic books,
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and now he has written his first book, which is called In Any Lifetime.
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We'll talk to him about all of that cool stuff later, but first
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the news. All right, first news story confronts a key issue involving agent
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client privacy or confidentiality. This caught my attention because I thought, I don't
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I mean, I thought this was not in controversy, you know, I
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thought this was an accepted fact. But here we got people discussing it.
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This controversy arose on social media, of course, where else when a literary
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agent named Hillary Harwell tweeted that she wanted to see a novel similar to a
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query she just rejected. I think Jesse's got the tweet up on the screen
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for those of you watching this on YouTube, So just to be clear,
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she listened, She read the query. She kind of liked the concept,
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but not the execution, so she basically tweeted asking other people to write the
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idea, except write it better for her. Well, as you might imagine,
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this appalled a few people in this book thread, accusing her of basically
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stealing the author's original idea, and in the wake, she was actually let
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go from her agency, the k T Legent Literary I mean, like I
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said, this has never arisen before to my knowledge, because it seems so
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obvious. Query should be confidential. But even if you know, you might
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talk about dinner to her, and well here's a pitch from somebody. You're
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not going to go around and ask people to to take somebody's idea and ask
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somebody else trying to write it. I don't know. This just seems like
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an egregious error in judgment. Lara, you were the one who brought this
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story to my attention? What do you think about it? I brought it
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to your attention because it bothered me so much. How many times do we
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in our retreats talk to people and reassure them it's okay when you're pitching an
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agent, you don't have to hold back. You don't have to keep things
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secret. It's okay to send your manuscript around. It will be kept confidential.
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We absolutely expect, at a bare minimum, that level of trust.
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I don't know if the agent thought they were being funny or clever. I
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don't really know what would have expected that to happen, because I can't imagine
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doing that. I mean, I've sat through pitch sessions before, and I
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would just never ever go away. Tell people during our retreats we don't go
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share ideas on social media. How many times that the retreats has to come
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up because unpublished authors sometimes tend to be excessively paranoid that somebody's going to steal
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their idea. And I always say, you can't protect an idea anyway.
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It's not the idea, it's what you do with it that matters. But
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I still don't think an agent should be posting other people's ideas. And I
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think this agent came back and said, well, the execution was terrible.
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There's no way I was going to have this person write it. Because people
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were asking in the thread of comments, why didn't you just ask for changes
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from that author. Well, the agent clearly didn't think that that author was
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up to doing it. But again, I think this was the This was
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I don't like it. It was not a good course of I mean,
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just to be a lawyer, you can't own an idea. You can sue
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someone for stealing your idea. You could steal them from plagiarism or for right
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stealing more, but not just that. I don't know, Jesse, what
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what what do you think about this? It's just like there are some yeah,
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you just like, I don't know, this feels wrong, Yeah,
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it feels wrong. It feels like taking someone's idea. I'd be like,
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hey, can someone write a slightly different version of this? So like you're
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taking someone's not intellectual property, but like, I don't know creative nexus,
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and be like, I don't want that from you, I want it from
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somebody else. Well, we've got creatives have to get each other, you
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know, we have to have each other's backs. We're supposed to support each
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other. Well, we've got more than a dozen agents and editors coming to
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writer Con this fall, and you know, there are all people I know,
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all people I like and trust and think are professional. But never in
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all the years that we've done this conference, if I said, and by
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the way, don't be posting other people's ideas on social media, I do
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not think that was necessary. No, exactly. Well, I'll put that
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into the briefings now, I guess okay. News story number two is about
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a young woman named Emily Henry, who was featured in a great piece in
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the New York Times just a couple of days ago as we record this,
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Because she has hit the best letter now five times, five consecutive romance novels,
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that's not the remarkable part. As if that weren't extraordinary enough, what's
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remarkable is she did it with no book tours, no book signing, and
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no TikTok. That's the main focus of the story is that she managed to
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write and publish five very popular books without, as she says, leaving her
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comfort zone. And I thought, Wow, this is my kind of writer.
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But I don't think it's just me. Writers. You know, to
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be introverts. That's why they're writers. They'd rather be reading at the library
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than at some discotheque or whatever. But I think they're sometimes surprised, even
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when they're traditionally published, surprised at how much they must get involved in the
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promotion process. And I might add that Emily Henry now not only has all
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these bestsellers, she's got a movie on Netflix based on her book called Happy
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Place. So, Laura, could anybody else do this? Or was she
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just phenomenally lucky? What do you think? I do think when it comes
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to book sales and book success, I do think there's always an element of
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luck. I'm super happy for her, and it's encouraging to me to hear
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that she didn't do something on TikTok that helped her strike out that it's refreshing
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to me to hear that getting old enough that it's getting harder and harder for
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me to learn new things and squeeze more into my days and stretch so thin
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already. She has to have written really good books, but or at least
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I I they're appealing to her audience, so they must be well written.
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Yeah, I just don't want it to seem like I'm encouraging people to not
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do promotion for their books, because most people should, is whether they're indie
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or traditionally traditionally published. But I do kind of love the fact that she
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managed to. It's not that she was being rude or superior, as she
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says, I just don't like doing that kind of stuff, so I'm not
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going to Well, she didn't leave her comfort zone, so she must have
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been doing things that she was okay with it. What did she do?
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Books? Yeah? What did she did? She she wrote some really good
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books, apparently because a lot of people are liking on them. Yeah,
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but lots of people write really good books that aren't successes, so that don't
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catch on. We heard what she didn't do? Write a romance novel.
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That's the next thing, all right, So Jesse, I'm thinking, after
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you finished that sugar Kink novel you've been working on, this might be an
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option because you probably don't want to go to book signings and explain that I
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would love to go to book signs, like all the things that writers don't
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want to do, I would do, and I should. I should,
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I should put my services out there. Be like you write the book,
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I will go out and talk about your book. Yeah. Will you be
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me and go on tour? Yeah, I'll stay home and watch TCM.
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It's perfect. Yeah. All right, Jesse, cue up that music and
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let's talk to Mark googannem Mark, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks
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for having me. All right, here's our usual first question. If you
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could offer writers one piece of advice, what would it be. Well,
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you know, I often give the following is my one piece of advice,
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and it's it's really two pieces of advice's advice, but it belongs together,
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which is read a lot and write a lot. I really don't think thank
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you. Yeah, there's no there's no substitute for I think practicing your craft
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and doing your craft and also seeing how the craft is done by other writers.
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And I think you learn as much from the good things as you do
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from the bad and vice versa. Absolutely, you got a new book out,
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Yeah, in any lifetime, tell us about that. Well, it's
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a sort of a multiversal romance. It's about a quantum physicist whose wife is
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killed in a tragic accident, and he is trying to find the one parallel
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universe where she's still alive. It's yeah, it's got like it's it's a
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little Michael Crichton meets time traveler's wife. And what's kind of fun about it
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is it takes place in two time periods. In the present day, we're
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telling the story of Jonas, the protagonist's efforts to find his wife, but
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in throughout the book, we're flashing back to their meeting, their courtship,
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their romance, their eventual marriage. So it's it's got a little bit of
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everything for everybody. So this is a science fiction novel, would it be
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fair to say, yeah, sci fi romance. I mean they never called
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Crichton science fiction, but he was. You know what what I so admire
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about Crichton's body of work is he did some things that were sci fi,
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and then he did other things that were not sci fi at all. He
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did some historical fiction. He did you know, Rising Sun is a murder
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mystery said in the present day. You know, he did all, he
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did it all. He was really a renaissance, a renaissance author as it
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were, and I admire that. Now, what are you doing because would
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it be fair to say this is not the first multi universe or parallel or
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whatever. I mean. I got an Uncle Scrooge comic the other day where
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Scrooge is going for the infinite universe sake, written by Jason Aaron, who's
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one of my favorite writers. Right, yeah, So what have you done
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to make this concept fresh in this novel? Well, basically by revealing that
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in my version of the multiverse, the there's only one universe where his wife
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is still alive. And that's the polar opposite to thank you. It's really
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it's a one to eighty from what you typically see in multiverses, which is,
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you know, there's twenty million variations on Person X, and this is
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the exact opposite. And what it what is a big component of the book
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is the idea that the universe actually favors certain outcomes. So while there may
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be an infinite number of worlds, they're not infinitely different. And you know,
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when we say that, you know it favors certain outcomes, we essentially
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already you know, sort of adopt that viewpoint. Ourselves. We call it
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fate, we call it destiny. Yeah, so, in many respects,
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the multiverse itself is the antagonist of the book. The multiverse is trying to
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stop Jonas the protagonist, from finding his wife, so you know, and
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it throws a variety of different obstacles in our hero's way, such as a
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rival scientist and even another woman. But the bad guy is the multiverse itself.
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Well, I'm in I need to read it. It sounds good.
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I hope you like it. I hope you like it, and I will.
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I've been having our last podcast, we talked with a lawyer writer who
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practiced for more than thirty five years and has now transitioned into writing full time.
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But you went the other route. You practiced for for years, is
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that right? And then you left to work in television. How did that
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happen? How did you stumble across that opportunity? Well, you know,
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it's funny. I used to be a litigator, and I kind of joke
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that if I didn't practice law, the only job I could get was as
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a television writer. Because when I when I left the practice of law,
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I knew I want to work in television. But I moved out to California
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without any job in place, and I, you know, took interviews for
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you know jobs, you know, non lawyer jobs, but also non television
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jobs, just to you know, be able to pay the rent. And
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it was amazing how nobody wanted to hire me. And you know, I
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yeah, it was painful, but it was like, it's funny. If
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you're a transactional attorney, the world is your oyster. You can do anything.
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You can be a CEO, a cfo CTO, it doesn't matter.
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But if you're a litigator, people only want you to suit people. So
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or write television. It turns out so that that worked out reasonably well for
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me. So you worked. You didn't stumble on to it. You you
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worked very hard to try to get it to writing for television. Oh yeah.
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I had been writing on the side since my third year of law school
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and I would, okay, I would write while I was practicing law and
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really start developing my craft. And you know, to work in television,
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it's a lot like other fields of writing, where you really have to you
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know, develop your skill set, I think before you're ready to do it
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for real. And I, you know, would write on the side while
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I was practicing, and I would take my vacation time and spend it out
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in Los Angeles meeting with producers and writers and studios and whatnot. So it
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was like a you know, that four to five year period was really sort
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of spent not just practicing law, but also trying to become a writer.
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Okay, And then did you like working in television? Oh? I loved
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it. I still work in television. It was wonderful. I mean,
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truth be told, like practicing law is. You know, it's a very
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stressful job. It's not a wonderful way to make a living, and as
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a litigator, you're basically fighting with people every day. That would be I
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think that's how I would feel about it. I know people who love it.
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I know some attorneys who are all about it, but I don't know
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that it would fit my personality. I found it exhausting, and I'm also
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quite frankly. I practiced with some very, very talented attorneys, and I
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think I was an okay attorney. I think I had some game, but
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I would look at the partners above me, who had a lot more experience,
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and I knew innately that there was a ceiling for me that I would
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never be as good as they were, And I found it very sort of
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frustrating to be in a job that I couldn't do at the highest level.
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And for whatever reason, I sort of felt an instinct like I could maybe
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do that in television. You know, the bar is so much lower in
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television, which is enormously Now. I have to bring this up because I
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know that one way or another, you have worked in numerous top dollar franchises
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like Star Wars, like Star Trek, like Planet of the Apes. How
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did all this come about? A lot of luck and really the result quite
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frankly, of just doing this job for a long time. I've been writing
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professionally for twenty four years, and I was, you know, about twenty
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years ago. I broke into comics and started writing movies as well. And
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if you just sort of work in all these different areas, eventually some opportunities
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get to come your way. So like, for example, you know,
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Star Wars happened because I because of relationships I made both through DC Comics and
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through uh the editor of the Star Wars line who was my previous editor on
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an X Men book that I wrote for Marvel. So a lot of it's
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you know, just building the relationships and eventually you get some, you know,
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some some offers for gigs. Planet of the Apes was funny. Planet
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of the Apes was, you know, just an email. I got an
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email from from Marvel one day saying, hey, would you have any interest
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in them? Absolutely? Yeah, yeah, So it varies. It definitely
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definitely varies. I kind of found over the course of my career that the
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the you can you can go out and sort of pitch yourself, you know,
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for gigs. But generally speaking, the gigs I've all gotten are their
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incoming phone calls. You know, they're basically like, you know, someone
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is either you know, knows me from another thing or they've heard of me,
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and they reach out different ways and say, hey, would you like
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to do this? And I always say, I work for ten year old
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me. If ten year old me thinks it would be a great idea,
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then that's what I do. What could be a better job than that?
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It's well, again, it goes back to Laura's question about you know,
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practicing law. My worst day as an attorney is my worst day as a
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writer is still better than my best day as an attorney. There you go,
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talk, can you tell a little bit about how writing for comic books
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differs from say, writing for television or now writing a novel. You know,
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they all exist along a spectrum of intimacy. You know, when I'm
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writing a TV show, I'm writing a script that's going to be in the
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hands of like one hundred people, sometimes two hundred people, you know,
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anywhere from studio executives to the gaffer on the set. And that's a document
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for a very you know, specific audience. And it's a document that is
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it's a document that is I I'm sorry to put this being collaborated the basis
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for a collaboration with one hundred to two hundred people. In comics, it's
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a document for essentially like five people. It's a it's a document for myself,
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you know, so the artist, the colorist, the letter h and
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the editor and a novel and that and that audience is pretty much the people.
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It's only five people actually making the thing. And then on the novel
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you have the exact opposite side of the equation, which is it's a document
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that is at first is only for me, but the end product also is
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only done by me. I mean, yes, there's editors and you know,
24:52
people involved, But fundamentally it's a much more intimate connection with the audience.
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They're seeing my actual words as opposed to screenplays and complex scripts. The
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audience is not seeing my words. They're seeing, you know, what either
25:08
the complic artist generates or what the director and actors do on the screen.
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So it's a to me, it's a question of intimacy. And in speaking
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of comic books, I couldn't help but notice that this new book of yours
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has a endorsement from Brad Meltzer. Yes, I also know and the audience
25:30
will know, not just from his novels, but of course also great comic
25:33
book work. And the guy who helped save the Superman House. That's right,
25:38
Assault of the Earth. I have to I have to, like,
25:41
I have to tell you he's just he's just the greatest guy. I'll tell
25:45
you quick, funny Brad you do. So. I met Brad working on
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a show called Jack and Bobby. Jack and Bobby was a show I remember
25:53
about a kid who who you know, is going to become the President of
25:56
the United States in the future. And during my work on that show,
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I happened to get my first com book writing gig. It was writing an
26:04
issue, a two issue story of Aquaman. And I had been reading comic
26:08
books my whole life, and I had my outline, and it never occurred
26:11
to me that I would have a problem writing a comic book. And I
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sit down in my office and I'm like, okay, right here we go,
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and oh my god, I have no idea how to write a comic
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book. I've never done that before, and I have no idea what I'm
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doing. I ran down the hall to you know, basically beg Brad to
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teach me how to write comics. And he was incredibly gracious as he's wanted
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to be, and gave me tips that I still use today. And he's
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just the warmest, most generous of souls, very nice. So what brought
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you to writing books? Well, novels, I suppose I should say novel
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I've always loved reading, you know, I've always been a fan of of
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books. Like I said, I work for ten year old me. If
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ten year old me thinks it's cool, then something I want to do.
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I had written a book in twenty seventeen that was sort of like a legal
27:12
thriller, sort of relying on my background, and I enjoyed it. The
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thing is, as you know, writing a novel takes a lot of time,
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and you know, when I'm running shows in particular, and I'm in
27:27
production on something that usually takes up all my time. So yeah, so
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it's just, you know, it's just there's only so many hours in the
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day. So you know, basically what happened was I had been playing around
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with the story for about ten years in various forms. I you know,
27:47
explored doing as a graphic novel, I explored doing as a screenplay, but
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I never had time to do what it really needed to be, which was
27:56
a novel, until the pandemic. The pandemic hit and suddenly production is shut
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down and I have a lot more time on my hands than I did.
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And kind of heard that as a common theme lately, but a lot use
28:10
that to their benefit. It was a rough time for everyone, but we
28:15
got some books written by Gosh, I tell you, you know, it
28:18
was a rough time, but in many ways it was exactly kind of what
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I needed. Twenty nineteen was an incredibly busy time for me. Was I
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was running multiple shows. I was working in Vancouver and Prague, and spent
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no time with my family, and you know, the irony of being a
28:37
showrunner. And this is a quality problem. I don't mean to complain about
28:41
it, but like the irony of being a showrunner is that you get into
28:45
being a showrunner by being a writer. And the higher you sort of get
28:49
up in the television hierarchy, the less time you have to write. So
28:55
for me, the pandemic was a wonderful you know, opportunity to revisit you
29:02
know, both my family, uh, and just the pure act of writing.
29:07
Yeah. Writer con has a newsletter and magazine that we send out by
29:11
substack, but you're on substack too. I said this this morning. You've
29:15
got Legal Dispatch, right, Legal Dispatch. Tell us about that, please,
29:19
Yeah, it's my it's my semi weekly news like, yeah, I
29:26
try to publish every Friday. I'm not always great about, like I missed
29:30
this week. But basically what it is is it's it's sort of an amalgam
29:37
of different things. It's I'm updating people on the work I'm doing right now,
29:41
the work that's coming out. I'll go back into sort of the archives
29:47
and you know, try to show some behind the scenes material from the various
29:52
shows I've worked on. When I feel like I've got something valuable to say,
29:56
I'll comment either on politics or on write. Usually it's more writing than
30:00
politics, you know. I try to always includes some bit of advice,
30:08
some bit of observation that I found helpful to me that may be helpful to
30:14
other people, that you know, can sometimes spark a discussion, and sometimes
30:19
just be like, hey, listen, this is the little, you know,
30:23
trick or hack or or thing that I've stumbled upon in my you know
30:29
now almost you know, thirty years doing writing that maybe is helpful to other
30:36
people. I'll give an example. I wrote a piece about what it takes
30:45
to write a good writing sample for television, because I feel like a lot
30:48
of writers these days just go about in the completely wrong way. And it's
30:53
you know, usually my pieces of advice are really simple and kind of axiomatic,
30:57
but action in a way that no one's really thought about before. And
31:02
the essence of that piece of advice was you have to write with your audience
31:06
in mind, which again is the most axiomatic thing in the world. But
31:08
you'd be shocked at how many, especially emerging writers don't write a sample thinking
31:15
about who's actually going to read it. They just write a sample and usually
31:18
as a sample that you know they're doing to impress themselves or impress at BOST
31:22
their agents, but without any sort of regard to, you know, the
31:26
type of showrunner or the type of producer who's actually going to be reading the
31:29
sample and evaluating whether or not they want to take a meeting with with that
31:33
writer. So I think, you know, providing some of those perspective shifts
31:37
is part of what I try to do in The Newslayer. That's really good
31:41
advice that applies to us as well. We're told writing genre fiction you need
31:47
to write with your ideal audience in mind. I've heard that before, which
31:51
it does make you think a little bit differently. Is my audience going to
31:53
like this? Or do I just think this is clever and fun? You
31:57
know, I feel like writing is it? I always say good writing is
32:04
an act of empathy. You have to not just place yourself in the shoes
32:08
of these fictional characters, but you have to place yourself in the shoes of
32:13
another person, the person who's going to be reading it. And part of
32:16
that is for the purposes of telling the story, but also part of that
32:20
is just for the purposes of getting your reader to understand the story. You
32:24
know, if you're so insular or sort of narcissistic in your writing, you're
32:29
going to end up writing something that other people just can't understand. You know.
32:35
I always say, like writing a comic book script is actually the most
32:37
empathetic form of writing because in that case, you're writing for someone specifically to
32:43
bring the thing to life, and you can't ask them to draw things that
32:47
are physically impossible to draw. But no matter how talented the artist is,
32:52
they can't draw like two actions in the same panel. So you know,
32:57
I always say, like, you've got to write with the idea of you
33:02
not being the person reading the things. That's really good, That's that's great
33:07
perspective. So you have you've talked a little bit about this, but maybe
33:12
expand on what a typical writing day looks like for you, what your process
33:16
is when you're actually writing. So maybe thinking about the novel, how did
33:22
you how did you write that while you were working on it? Yeah,
33:24
basically you know, well, it's funny, I don't ever have a typical
33:29
writing day because with the novel aside, I generally speak am working on more
33:35
than one thing at a time, and it's it's really about sort of triage
33:39
and which deadlines are coming up when. But you know, but this is
33:45
true sort of regardless, and it was true for when I was writing the
33:47
novel. I will generally speaking be at the keyboard, you know, between
33:52
nine and ten in the morning. You know, if I have the time,
33:58
I'll start off like spending about a half hour an hour returning emails.
34:05
I do feel sometimes, and I think most people feel this way, like
34:07
I could probably spend the entire day returning emails and get yeah, and still
34:14
have a you know, a full inbox by the end of the day.
34:17
But I try to like spend half an hour to an hour to get at
34:21
the most sort of time sense and once and then then I kind of just
34:24
start going, you know, if I you know, if I have a
34:30
you know, normally I have like some sort of outline or some sort of
34:34
set of notes to work off of. But if I'm having trouble starting what
34:38
I'll typically do is I'll read or or play what I call a tuning fork,
34:44
where I will sort of consume in some version of media about five minutes
34:52
worth of something that's akin to what I am chasing as a right now,
34:57
and the way I sort of describe it is is like if you watch cooking
35:00
show, you're going to get hungry, and you know, it's like I
35:04
think also seeing someone do something well makes you want to do that same thing.
35:08
Well, I agree. I like to immerse myself in reading what I'm
35:14
trying to write. When I'm writing it, I get that exactly so so
35:16
I'll do that and that's usually enough to get me going. And you know
35:22
then I just go, I don't. I don't believe in writer's block.
35:27
I believe, you know, when you write professionally, you have to be
35:30
a professional, and the professionals know that the muse doesn't show up to work
35:36
every day and you have to kind of figure out how to you know,
35:42
work past that stuff. And so's it's not to say that every day is
35:45
easy. You know, most days are not easy, but you those days
35:52
when you are in the zone. I think every writer will tell you those
35:54
are the days you write for you know, yeah, it's the best feeling.
36:00
So I'll, you know, I'll typically do that and then depending upon
36:04
what else is sort of going on, I'll I'll like in that batch of
36:09
writing around three to five pm and then catch up on again all the texts
36:17
that have come in all the emails, clear junk, Yeah, yeah,
36:22
and it. You know, it's funny. I used to go from like
36:29
project to project to project within a given day, and lately I would like,
36:34
pretty much since the pandemic, I've sort of shifted that to know,
36:39
this day is the day that's dedicated to project X, and then tomorrow will
36:44
be dedicated to project Y. You know it really, it really does vary.
36:47
It's hard to it's it's hard to sort of would I would I aspire
36:53
to have a routine. I to have a routine, but because I do
37:00
so many different things in so many different mediums, with so many different kinds
37:02
of deadlines and deliverables, it sort of frustrates my ability to have a proper
37:08
routine. Well, one last question for you, Mark, We've got so
37:12
many irons in the fire. What should we We've got this book now,
37:17
what can we look forward to reading from you in the future. Well,
37:22
let's see, so in any lifetime comes out August first, I think.
37:27
Also later in that month is the collection of my Plant of the Apes run
37:31
which is called Where the Planet of the Apes paperback. It's a lot of
37:37
fun. One thing that I did that I'm very excited by. Is it's
37:42
a prequel to the original Plant of the Apes movie, but I utilized the
37:46
art from Marvel Comics back in the seventies had a run called Adventures on the
37:54
Planet of the Apes where it's basically an adaptation of the first first two movies.
38:00
So we actually use actual panels and pages from that series to help tell
38:07
our story. So so that's a lot of fun, I and then I
38:15
it's funny. So much of my workload is kind of like it's like a
38:17
you know, an iceberg where you know, the vast majority of is under
38:21
the water line. There's stuff that, like you know, I hasn't been
38:25
announced that I can't talk about. Probably the only other thing I can sort
38:29
of say to expect from me is I am working on new Star Wars comic
38:34
that hasn't been announced yet, so I can't talk about it. But it's
38:37
in the works right now. I'm I'm you know, literally writing it before
38:43
and after we do this podcast, and uh, it's it's a it's a
38:49
lot of fun. I'm looking forward to great. Thanks for being on the
38:53
podcast, Mark appreciate it. Thank you. Well, all right, we
39:08
already talked about the writer Con of Retreat, which is happening later this week.
39:13
So let me remind you about the even bigger event, our annual celebration,
39:19
the writer Concumference, which is Labor Day weekend every year. This year
39:23
that's August thirtieth. Noah, yeah, August thirtieth through September second. We
39:30
are now has of yesterday, up to seventy speakers at this conference, more
39:35
than ninety sessions, as I already said, more than a dozen agents and
39:38
editors and publishers. We add more every week. We've got thirteen contest categories.
39:45
And you know, some people think entering competitions is a really good way
39:50
to end up getting published. We've heard that in the interviews we got free,
39:54
well free if you've paid to attend the conference, buffet lunches and all
39:59
kinds of learning opportunities. Visit the white website writercon dot com to learn more
40:05
about it. And I'm also going to remind you that I got a new
40:08
book at Justice for All, the eighth Daniel Pike book is now on sale.
40:15
All right, until next time, keep writing, and remember you cannot
40:22
fail if you refuse to quit. See you next time.