Bookwild - Your New Favorite Bisexual Stoner P.I. | Jack Friday's Killer Vibes

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

In this episode, I talk with Jack Friday (a.k.a John Fram) about his new P.I. series Killer Vibes! Listen to hear all about: Building a detective unlike the classic hard-boiled heroes: How Peter Key became a lazy, bisexual, stoner private investigator whose sincerity, humor, and curiosity make him feel fresh while still honoring classic noir traditions. The art of writing humor that actually lands: Why he never writes "jokes" on purpose, how Peter's personality naturally creates comedy, and why sincerity is the secret ingredient behind the book's funniest moments. Balancing creativity with the business of publishing: From choosing genres strategically to discussing pen names, annual series deadlines, Hollywood adaptations, and why chasing trends rarely works, John offers an honest look at the publishing industry behind the scenes. Creating memorable characters and a setting that feels like one: How Austin became a character in its own right, why supporting characters like LaShirl practically wrote themselves, and how an unexpected inheritance became the perfect origin story for Peter Key. Why John Fram created the Jack Friday pen name: John shares how Peter Key's voice and the desire to write an ongoing mystery series naturally led to a new identity, allowing readers to distinguish these books from his horror novels while giving him room to build a long-running detective franchise. Check Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mba 

This week I got to talk with Jack Friday, who has been on this podcast previously as John Fram. And we are talking about his new kind of PI noir thriller series called Killer Vives. That's the first book in the series. It is incredible. I am so happy that he went into kind of like a slightly humorous space. We talk all about it. It's not all humor, but it has it. And I just love this version of John Fram.

Here is a quick synopsis about Killer Vibes. Peter Key, a self-proclaimed lazy private investigator, unexpectedly inherits a rundown Austin house and a mountain of debt, before discovering clues that his uncle's death may have been a murder. As he digs deeper into a web of hidden agendas, cash, and danger, Peter finds himself caught in a deadly mystery where surviving means embracing Austin's strangers' secrets. This one is so much fun.

It is so bingeable. I think all of you are going to love it. That being said, let's hear from Jack Friday. So I'm super excited. John Fram has been here before, but he is Jack Friday for this episode because he kind of did a little genre switch up. And it's a lot of fun. So I'm super excited to talk about it. Thank you.

It's so good to be here. Yeah. So I know I was thinking back to the conversations we've had about your other books. And I know you said that you don't like write the idea that you have and someone else tells you what genre it is. is that what happened with this one? Like, did this completely shock you or like, where did it start and what happened? This book definitely felt a lot more. I don't want to say planned because I actually didn't outline it very heavily at all.

I just kind of wrote it. But there was a sense of like, how to explain it? I knew going into it that I was writing something different. It definitely felt different from the junk. And then the consequence of that was a, really early on I was thinking about the pen name. How do you distinguish this book from your other stuff? Because I had always wanted to write a series.

Like I'd always, always wanted to write an annual series. That always seemed like just so much fun. There's so much you can do with that. So many of the books that I grew up reading and the writers I really admired were all series authors. But the kind of horror novels, like horror, supernatural suspense, whatever you want to call it, they were all very like self-enclosed books more or less and so it never I knew that when I had the character of Peter Key and we can get into how that happened but once I had him I was like this is a character who can be a vehicle to carry me through many many books over a period of hopefully of

years like I was like I have in Peter somebody I really want to watch him get older and wiser and move through the world um all of which we're was to say, I was like, okay, this is very different than everything you've done. So let's actually kind of slow down and be a bit more strategic with it. So is Peter who came to you or when you're saying like this was more strategic, were you kind of like thinking about what to write before the idea was even there? It wasn't quite that strategic. It definitely wasn't like a focus tested product in the sense where it's like you sit down

and you're like, okay, I need a, I don't know, a book with these three elements or something. It wasn't quite that deliberate because the fact of the matter is that the publishing industry moves so slowly that if you try to write for a trend, you'll never, it'll be over by the time you get there. Like, there's so many people I know right now who are trying to write Romanticy. And it's such a gamble because it's like, well, the people who are cashing in on that trend wrote those books right when Fourth Wing published. Like they started that book the day Fourth Wing. came out and we're smart and saw the wind turning in that way by the time your romanticie novel

hits it it could still be going but that trend could be dead so you never if there's any like young we have like six tradwife thrillers right now that yeah all I know and like some of them are good and some of them or whatever but it's just like they all happened at once and I think that there's something, there's an argument to be made that you can write anything and if it's really good, it'll stand out, but it is a gamble to try to chase a trend. Like parenthetically, I was working on a horror novel that was about cannibalism. I had found a really weird way into that. And my agent was really keen on, like, my, I sent her like kind of a pitch, basically, like a little document of the book. And she was like, I really like this premise, but I've been looking through

the pub announcements, like the deal announcements, and there's four cannibalism books coming out in like 2026 and 2027, do you really want to try to compete in that space? And I was like, oh, that's a really good point. It is. So this is a long way of saying, no, it wasn't a pre-planned, like, novel, but once I had the character of Peter and I had this kind of like stoner private detective mystery setup, then I started thinking about, okay, how do I make sure, that people know that this is different from the horror novels. How do I maybe attract people who are interested in my work, but they don't want to read horror? Because I know that those people are out there. I like seeing comments and stuff with that. And I was always struck. I was like,

hmm, how do I get these people? Yeah. And then also, how do I make sure that my horror readers don't go into this expecting the same kind of a book? And maybe it can be pleasantly surprised, but still not too surprised where you're like disappointed. Totally. Yeah, because there were like isms or whatever where I was like, oh, this part is familiar.

But I think I even DMG you. I was like, so you needed it to write funny satire because I'm cracking up. And I don't really laugh when I'm reading books typically. I laugh at stand up for everyone. I'm not like, oh, I hate people who are like, it's all hard to make me laugh.

It's like, oh, I hate that. Yeah. You don't like joy, okay. Yeah, congratulations. Yeah, it's like somebody who's dating profile. Like, it's like sarcastic is how they describe themselves or something. And you're like, wow.

Okay. I'd rather jump off a bridge. Yeah, yeah, you're just, I think you're just an asshole. Yes. But this one was making me laugh out loud. And I was reading some of, I was even reading some of the quotes to Tyler. Like some of the stuff about Austin was so funny too. So was the humor?

Like, was that like kind of a part? part of the direction you thought you were going, or was it kind of like as you met Peter? It was definitely, it all comes out of Peter the character for sure, because I remember, so I've been friends with Stephen Rowley for a long time, who wrote Lily and The Octopus and the Gunkel and Fantastic writer, very, very funny guy. And, you know, it's always funny when you're friends with the writer, because we all know that we might need a blurb at some point, but you never want to ask for it. And with killer vibes, when it sold, I was like, hey, like, I'm going to need a blur.

Like, if you can do it, like, this is the one that would really help a lot because I'm moving into this funnier space. So knowing, having your stamp of approval could be really helpful. And he read it and he really loved it. And which was flattering because, you know, sometimes you read books for your friends and you're like, yeah, I'll blurb this, but like, it's, you don't ever talk about it again. This was one where he was, like, really enthusiastic about it. And he was like, I get sent books all the time that are described as funny and they're not funny because they're trying to be funny.

I think there's a lot of truth in that. If you're straining for a joke, it's not funny. And so for me, Peter is never really deliberately comic per se. I think he's, there's like, you can also talk about the difference between like sly and comedic. Like, I think there's slightly different things. He's a little sardonic, maybe. He's sardonic, and yet he's also sincere, which was always important to me. He's not like so, like I recently reread the Big Sleep, the Raymond Chandler novel from the 40s for a piece I'm working on.

And my God, like there's a reason everybody imitates it, but then there's also a reason why nobody actually reads it. Like it's so like Philip Marlow, the main character is just such boring company because he's always got a smart ass remark. he never has anything sincere to say. And you just get over it. Like you're just bored with it by the end. It's a lot of work. And I never wanted Peter to be like this sort of jackass. Like he needed to have a soul.

And so I would say that for me when I was working on this book, it was a matter of like writing a couple drafts, like revising it a few times. And then around that third revision, you start to find lines that make you chuckle. And then you can maybe lean in a little bit and be like, oh okay like can we ramp this up but it was never like okay i need to write three jokes today because that just seems like death you know yeah that makes it's it's kind of like it's well it's not the same as

stand-up because you're not trying to be funny the whole time about how they'll punch up like after they have kind of an oh 100% yeah you want to work you have to work the material several times to figure out what's funny yeah yeah i believe that um the other things thing is like it has kind of like your hard-boiled noir feeling a little bit like we have like I was telling Tyler when I was reading it too I was like I've never had the experience of reading a book and it felt like when you watch a show that has narration like the noir narration that's like so like popular in that and that genre when it's on TV or movie and I was like but that's what it feels like it almost feels like I am like having like the cinematic scene

play, but it feels like he's kind of narrating it to me too. So it felt super noir. But like what we talked about, it's also really funny. And he's also not a hard-boiled detective. Like you've said, he's like the laziest stoner PI, basically. So how did you balance all of those elements? That's where it gets really weird. And it's hard to give a good answer because there's like this sort of alchemy that happens with writing that's very hard to replicate like it's very hard to be to prescribe it so to speak like i'm finding as i write more peter novels that luckily i've been recreating that vibe like it's been it he himself creates that energy yeah me cognizantly doing it is very different like again i couldn't sit down and be like i need to write um three really good

like kind of hard-boiled moments today. It grows out of the mystery. It grows out of the character. I think what it is with this book is the way that Peter, again, like we were talking about sincerity, I think he's aware when things are serious to be serious, if that makes sense. And so I get really impatient with like cozy mysteries sometimes

because I'm like, you know, there's a dead body here. Like this is a serious problem. We need to give it some. some weight, so to speak. And so I get that there's a value in escapism and I'm not saying anybody's not allowed to read this or that book. But for me personally, it's like when bad guys show up with a gun, you're not going to be flipping jokes. You know what I mean? And like it's a dangerous moment. And so it was really important to me that this book have the tonal range to go from funny to maybe not scary, but very suspenseful. You know, the last like stretch of this book is quite

taught and that was very very much what I wanted yeah it's reminding me of so i don't know if anyone has managed to not hear about it at least but widows bay is so fun and it does horror and humor and it does it really really well and i really enjoyed that but there's also a show on apple called maximum maximum pleasure guaranteed okay with one of my favorites tadiana mazlani um and it we've been watching that and it has one of the best blends of what you just said it has really funny moments and then it has extremely thriller moments a lot of people are saying like if alfred hitchcock was writing a tv show of with our modern problems this would be it and i'm like i do agree actually there's a lot that is like that like cinematography wise especially too

but it like it will have us cracking up and then it's like you're like you're like like, oh, shit. And I think some of it, too, comes from, she's also like an amateur who gets pulled into death and mystery and corruption. And so, like, you can still have these funny moments because she's just like trying to just be a soccer mom, essentially. And then she's like, oh, God, this is terrifying. And I have no clue what to do. And I think that's kind of what happens a little bit with Peter too is it wasn't necessarily his intention to go into this, I think. Yeah. I think Peter's in an interesting spot because on the one hand, he is like a lot of people I know who would be good at something if he could figure out what he was good at.

His problem is that he doesn't really have anything to channel his energy into. So that was really deliberate for me of like, how can I make this character feel? How would he respond to this authentically? I think he would be curious. I think he would be excited because he's not an idiot, but he is a little bit braver, I think, than a lot of people in the sense that he's willing to sort of poke the bear and see what happens. Yeah.

And he's also a very stubborn guy. And so I think that. And he doesn't have anything to lose. That's like the other thing. That's a really good point. Yeah. He goes into this literally about to be homeless. So anything from here, like what's the worst that could happen, you know?

And then he realizes, of course... That opening chapter just, like, cracks me up so much. I was texting Gair and I was like, I've never had a book open this funny and scary at the same time. It was so much fun to write that. That was, again, one of those moments where I was very... There's an opening chapter of the book, like the very first chapter where Peter is about to be... Or he is basically getting evicted from a garage that he's been sleeping in. And the reason for that eviction is very funny.

but also very stupid, but it's a good way to, it was something, that was a moment that I really did think about pretty hard because I was like, I need a moment that can sort of encapsulate this character in three pages. And that's a tall order and it was able, that was the scene where that was able to work. Yes. But yeah, I agree. I think that part of the fun of the book is that Peter did not go into this wanting to be a private detective. He's not, and hopefully I'm finding as I write more of them, that even though he's growing more confident in his abilities, even by the end of this book, he's a lot more confident in himself. Yeah. He's still an outsider, and that helps a lot to diffuse, like you said, that sort of like hard-boiled self-seriousness. Yes. Yeah, definitely. He is bisexual as well.

And did you write everyone to be beautiful on purpose? Because that was like the other, I was like reading it. I'm like, I feel like every single male, female, everyone we encounter is beautiful. Is hot. Was it on purpose or was it just like, oh, let's just have some hot people. I think part of it was like, yeah, let's have some fun. I think Austin, Texas, like I live here, it has some of the hottest people per capita of any city of ever been to. Like even like New York where I lived like obviously like is the center of like models and

stuff. So there's beautiful people walking around downtown. But most New Yorkers are very average, just regular folks. Austin is uncanny. Like even the dads and the moms and the dads walking around, half of them like somehow are going to crossfit every day or something. Just like, who the hell are you people? But I don't know if it's something in the water or something in the air, but yeah, it's a beautiful town. So I wanted to kind of capture that. I did not know this. Yeah, Austin's great. It's like, well, I knew there were a lot of things I knew that I liked about. I did not know that all the hot people were there.

So now I need to go. A lot of people in Texas are here. I don't know what they're doing. They're all trying to start like an energy drink brand or something. They're all these like sort of like micro-influencers trying to get a hustle going. There's a lot of that here. Well, a lot of people kind of like migrated from L.A. during COVID, right?

Yes. Yeah. Austin's such a strange. at times it flirts with being a brand more than a city, which is kind of ominous. You know, and the book pokes fun at that a lot. That's what I was going to bring up. It's almost a character in the book.

It really is. Yeah, and it's one that I kind of had a lot of fun skewering. Like, yeah. I love it. Like, I do love Austin now. I hated it when I first moved here. I was like, man, the city's so fake. Like everything here is so artificial.

And it's like it loves to talk about how it's like the liberal blueberry and the like cherry pie of Texas and I'm like it's a bunch of rich liberals like are they really that progressive like let's be real like like you still have like homeless encampments out by the highways like it's definitely got a lot of the malaise that affects the rest of the country and that's interesting you know so I think that for me Austin is very much a character and it's a character that we get to have a lot of fun kind of poking fun at and it's also full of very hot people. Kind of as a parody of itself in a way.

Like it is almost prerotic, but also I think Peter, I don't know, he's an attractive dude. He's just how he sees the world, I'm assuming, too. Yeah, I think he's, that was one comment that I saw early on, like, a good reads reviewer was like Peter sort of judges everybody of every gender by their sexual appeal. Yes. And, like, he evaluates their sex appeal. And they're like, that feels sort of sad.

And I was like, you know, I think you're right. And I think it is a consequence of Peter's age in a way. Like I think when you're 29 and horny as hell, like you've got your antenna up in a way. And I'm curious. Like, and it made me realize that arguably when I was 29, I probably was seeing the world that way. So as Peter ages up, maybe. Yeah. I think it's fine.

I think it's like, I think he gets away with it because he's going after guys and girls. I think if he was just looking at women like pieces of me to be a bit more kind of gross. but I'm curious as Peter gets older. Yeah. How that changes, you know what I mean? Yeah, I didn't think of it as sad at any point. I was just like, oh, this is, like, it was reminding me of, oh, I can't remember which movie.

There was a movie here recently that was like, so the bisexual girlies are getting served with this movie. But that was like, but Challengers is one that comes to mind too. Yeah, for sure. Oh, my God. Yeah. Just like all these hot. Yeah.

You're like, everybody is hot. I love everybody that I see you right now. Yeah, no, it's just like. It was reminding me of that feeling where sometimes you're really lucky to be bisexual because like everything is attractive, really. I guess that's pansexual, but it has its ups and its downs for sure. But yeah, I think it's been a, it's funny to watch. It's fun.

It was fun to write. It was very fun to write inside the head of like a tall, a horny bisexual man. I know. And once you said he had a man bun, I think because, and Harry Styles doesn't even have a man bun anymore, But I think because his concert footage was getting in front of me on TikTok again. And then you said man bun. So then from there on out, Peter Key was basically Harry Styles with a man bun. So it was great for me.

Honestly, there's worse comparisons. I'm not sure how Harry Styles would feel about that. But I feel like, yeah, definitely worse comparison. I think he'll survive. I think he could handle one opinion like that. The other part that kind of makes him an outsider. is like you said he's kind of hit rock bottom in the first chapter he's getting kicked out and then it's this unexpected inheritance that like pulls him to Austin was there something that

made you want to write about like receiving an inheritance like that or like do you think it'd be good for an origin story because longer I thought about it I was like oh it is good for an origin story too this is a this is a complicated answer actually because I've been I had thought about this a lot of like kind of where did this come from. There's kind of two main sources. One of them was Walter Mosley, like the great crime writer. He did an amazing interview with the Paris Review. And he talked about how when he was getting going,

there were no black male heroes in fiction. Like they were black male protagonists, but there weren't heroic figures who were black, like from an underrepresented community, from the black community, full stop. And I was always struck by that because that's what he writes. Like Easy Rawlings and his newer characters, they're he wrote. They're guys that are, they're real enough that you can relate to them.

But they also, you would call them when things go wrong. You look up to them slightly. And it had me thinking. I was like, who are the millennial heroes? Like I really couldn't name like Harry Potter. Like surely we can do better than that now. Yeah. Like geez.

Like there's got to be more to life than Harry Potter. And then who are the. queer heroes, you know, not just like, like, is it like the, yeah, not just the sad stories. Yeah, like, not tragic. And like the heated rivalry guys, like what, what, who, who are our heroes? Like, that was really interesting to me. So there was that kind of thought had been percolating for a really long time of wanting to write a hero. And then when I was back when I first moved to Austin, or first lived in Austin before I moved to New York City for a bit, right before I left, I met this guy who inherited a house and Hyde Park from his uncle. And he's a

totally different person to Peter. Like, he's a very, very different guy. The house situation was very different. The house itself was very different. Like, all of that was different. But that one kind of kernel really stuck with me of like, what is, what do you do when you just have been given property? Like, as a millennial, that's a real boon. Like, that's a great thing. That's a good thing. And again, it was a great origin story. And like those things sort of came together when I left New York and came back to Austin. I was walking around Hyde Park, the neighborhood that the book is set in, trying to find that house.

Like I'd fallen out of touch with that guy. Like I couldn't even remember his name. Like it was a really weird, just sort of like nostalgic walk through the past. That one thought. And I was trying to find the house and it was gone. And so I was like, oh, he sold, you know, he got his. bag. From what I can tell, I think it's gone. And so I was like, I couldn't blame him. But as I was walking home from that trip, that was when these like thoughts started to percolate of like an

inheritance leading into the creation of a hero, like somebody who comes out of that, who comes through that process, kind of going through a trial and then comes out the other side much stronger. And that's a really good point about millennials, because that is almost the only way a lot of millennials would get a house like exactly i had not even thought of that and that's what that's a really good point i'm lucky i do live in indiana so how lucky is debatable but the the housing prices were really low when i started my first job and so thankfully the house we've been living in for i think 12 years now i got lucky and bought a house 12 years ago is basically what i'm saying and it's like i look at it now and i'm like oh my god

Like how would you, how would you even figure that out? So yeah, the whole inheritance part makes sense. And that is such a good point. It is that whole hero versus being a protagonist. Like it doesn't mean your story's happy. And it was also coincidentally, since I talked about Challenger's before, I remember my friend McKinsey, who's on this podcast every now and then when Challengers came out, she was saying it, which this is kind of the opposite, but it's that same thing.

She was like, I am so glad that they, let, I don't know what her character's name is anymore, Zendaya's character, like be such a complicated and polarizing black female character because she was talking about kind of the opposite, which, and it might be because black women have to be, like, saviors way too often.

But, like, because we would sometimes get so scared of casting them in any bad light, it was like, we can only have good versions of black female characters. And, like, she was even saying, like, romance books would feel the same way. And so when she saw it, to her, it was like, oh my gosh, thank you for letting like a black female character be morally gray. So it is interesting, like the different things because like I can't think necessarily of like a queer hero character either now that you're saying that. So it's fascinating which characters do come about and like

which ones you have to kind of like think about to make them come about if that makes sense. Yeah, totally. And I think too, like the creation. of character is such a, again, like that word from earlier, like, alchemy, it's like, it doesn't really make sense. It's a bunch of influences sort of in a puddle somewhere in your brain. And then they start to cohere into something. But yeah, yeah, representation matters. Like, it's such a kind of cheesy talking point now and it's very like woke left. But there is something really valuable about depicting people. To me, it's just about depicting people honestly, right? like that's what's interesting to me.

It's not about like how do I get 20% more queer representation onto the page? It's like how do I represent this non-straight man honestly? Yeah. And allow him to live fully. I know. You still have my funniest favorite quote about Nover at Home where you were like, I was like, I'm going to try to write a straight guy. I mean, yeah, that was funny.

That was genuinely such a hard lift. I would imagine. That was a tougher lift than almost anything I've ever written. Yeah, it was really odd to write that. And I think the only way it was word is because that character was basically sexless. Like, I mean, like, he... True. He didn't have, like, Peter's thing where he's constantly seeing the world through this, like, these horny goggles.

Like, he's very... Toby was on his own way. But he also... That guy had a lot on his plate. He had a lot of things. He was doing some other things to keep himself, you know, able to do what he needed to do. Yeah, exactly. Um, oh, what was the other thing? There was something else that popped in. Maybe it left.

Nope, it just left my brain. I just lost it. Oh, go ahead. Oh, no, you're good. I know. I'm more forgetful lately. And I'm like, I feel like I read enough and everything. Like, my brain should be fine. Um, so there are like quite a few side characters. Uh, lots of fun ones, even if, you know, I wouldn't want to hang out with every single one of them. Sure. But was there any side character that kind of like surprised you by like how much you liked him or her while you were writing him or her?

Sure. I mean like the two obvious ones are Grady and Carlos who are like Peter's best friend and Peter's new boss. Like Carlos is the guy he meets in the neighborhood who he sleeps with once and then they just became really good friends, like kind of classic. queer male experience. And then Grady is a private, like an actual private detective who gets brought in to help Peter. Peter does not want help, but winds up working with Grady and like, gets a mentor, even if he didn't really want one. Yeah. And, um, those two guys are just,

they're so much fun. They were so, they felt nuanced right out of the gate. Like, they felt very rounded right as I started talking to them, so to speak. The one that surprised me was Lecherell, the receptionist at the... I loved her name too. La Sherrill, yeah, I know, is it short for Shirley? No. It just is what it is.

It's just La Sheryl. She was so interesting because I knew I wanted her, I needed a receptionist. Like it was just sort of a utilitarian thing. Like your character goes to this office. And I knew, because a lot of private detectives, like in the movies they always look like poor and like hard scrabbled, but a lot of them are doing okay.

Like it can be a pretty, lucrative business in certain ways. And so I was like, I want this to be a nice office. I don't want this to be like some dingy, you know, rat hole or whatever. It's going to be a nice office in South Austin. And he's going to have a receptionist. And then that was a woman where it really felt like Peter opened the door and we both just like saw her for the first time. And it was such a strange. Those are the greatest, those are the best writing days when you just have a character just drop into your lap. And like that dialogue that you see in the book is, basically unchanged through many, many, many drafts because it was just like, once she started

going, I couldn't stop her. Yeah. So, she's so good at her job, but she's very direct and very unsentimental and gives no shits. And it's just, oh, my gosh, she's so much fun to write. Yeah. If we get big enough to need a receptionist, I'm going to be like, leave this page and I need you to be like her. exactly that's the job description like when you posted on indeed it's like you just need to have these traits

yes i'll let you borrow this book exactly um yeah she's amazing hopefully i would assume we're gonna see more of her and hopefully we're going to see more of everybody i'm assuming or a lot of people that yeah i mean i can finally talk about it we have a lot of these books coming um so that so that's so exciting it was nuts dude It really was. Like, we sold two more of them before. It was a two-book deal, and then we sold two more. So we're at, I'm holding up three fingers, four fingers. There, four books.

So fun. Yeah, we have four years of Peter Key on the way. So, thank you. Yeah, book two is done. We have a cover and everything. It's like, it's ready to rumble. We just, you know, obviously you want to promote one thing at a time. Totally.

Yeah, that's coming out next summer. And then books three is, it's in really good shape. And then book four, I'm still, I have like two ideas and it's really fun to be in that place where you can, I have a little bit of runway. It goes faster than you think. Like, I'm learning you really need to,

you have to write these pretty quick because I know some writers who have very successful sort of annual series and they're always behind. And they're always behind. And I was like, oh, I do not want to be that guy. Like, I need to be on top of these books. So, yeah, I met a writer at Thriller Fest. she's a friend that I knew I knew that she was she struggled to stay on top of her deadlines and I was like so how's the new one going and she's like uh it was due four weeks ago and I was like okay like how are you doing it says I have about 30,000 words which is about a little over a third of a book in our space and I was like girl what and she's like it'll be fine and I'm like if you say so I would be so stressed out for I don't work well under that kind of pressure.

I don't either. I would be losing my mind. So I was just like, holy shit, girl, good luck. That's what she did it. My husband, like, his, like, he would rather feel extremely rushed and work

like 10 straight hours on something than do it early. And I'm like a terrible person if it gets to that point. Like, don't know. Yeah, I'm not even doing good work. You know what I mean? Exactly.

Like you said, you're not a good, you're literally just unpleasant. Like I hate that feeling where you don't like yourself. Like it is not a good way to work, at least not creatively, maybe other industries, but I agree. I couldn't do it like that. Did you, no, you don't have to talk about any of the ideas, but since you were kind of

thinking about it, it sounds like you kind of really did want to do this like annualized type series. Did you have like a couple ideas for the next books when you started the first one? Not really. Yeah, I knew I wanted a series, but I only had the one story. at first. So that was kind of a leap of faith, I guess, where you're just like, well, we're going to hope that something comes together. But then, yeah, by the end of the book, I had a very clear idea of another story. And it's actually funny. I wrote a chunk of that one. And I realized it was

getting really dark. And I was like, I don't think this is the right follow up to this book. Like I don't want to get, I think there's allowed to be sort of darker, scarier books. There's allowed to be sort of sadder, more melancholy books. Like you're dealing with, you know, death and stuff. Like they can't all be funny. But I didn't want to follow up killer vibes because what I love about killer vibes, if I can shoot my own horn, I think what it's really, really good at is balancing a lot of different elements. I think it does a really good job of that.

And I didn't want to go from that into like a total scary, sad downer novel. So I wound up shelving that one and then getting the idea for what became book two, which is called Big Cult Energy. Oh my gosh, I love these titles. Girl, I know. That was really fun. That book is great. But yeah, and so I came up with that idea. Now, thankfully that I've been living in the Peter Key world, I have a backlog of ideas.

And what's funny is that there's, you know, there's different types of novels. and like a John Fram horror novel, they're like a big constructed sort of thing. They're very complicated. Those need a really powerful sort of central idea. Like they need a really good story hook and a really good metaphor. Like what are you saying? Like what's the underlying story here?

Right. The Peter Key Books, they can start with a bit more fragment, they can be more fragmentary and sort of cohere along the way, but they don't have to have that big high concept hook. And so there were a lot of different ideas. I had had sort of just in, I have an app in my phone where I just store like fragments of ideas. And it's fun because I'll skim through those sometimes and I'll be like, yeah, this never would

have worked as a horror novel. There's not enough meat on the bone for this to expand into a 500 page epic. But this could definitely be a really fun way to get Peter started on a case. Yeah, that's cool that you can kind of use some of your backlog ideas, maybe even. do you think you'll um this is not me putting in request do you think you'll write outside of this like are you going to try to write anything else that is a standalone or do you think you'll stick with this series for the next four years so i'm working on another john fran book right now um but it's it's so funny because i i knew that i wanted peter to be a series and that it was going to

have a pen name and it was going to be all these things. And the reality was the reality of publishing is that you really can't switch lanes too many times. Like publishing works best if you're if they know how to market you consistently. And so I knew I needed to write a few more horror novels because I had had the idea for killer vibes back in lockdown like in 2020. Oh, okay. And then I sort of set on it and let it percolate for a really long time. And I think it was between drafts of no road home. my second book that I wrote a very quick, messy draft of this book. And then I would work on, I would work on drafts of Peter between other drafts of other books. Like I was like kind of cramming it in whenever I found the time.

And then finally there was a point where midnight knock, we were able to sell it early. And that gave me kind of enough money. I could go part time at work. And that freed up enough time. I could slam out. I could like really get like a shareable draft of killer. vibes. And I sent it to my agent. And I was like, hey, I know I'm working on this other book, but like, are you interested in this one? And she's like, what the hell? Like, where did this come

from? And I had sort of told her about it. And like, she knew that I wanted to do this, but she had no idea. It was like, done. And so. And then it was, that was a really weird thing, because I had literally just sold one book and then we're going out on submission with another one kind of thing. And that, um, it was great. I mean, it was honestly, like, life-changing because to really survive and publishing, you have to build up kind of a head of steam and have like multiple contracts going. So that was a huge relief to get Peter sold. Now what's funny, though, is Peter's on this annual cycle and I'm literally trying to cram in John Fram books when I find the time. Right. That's a weird, it's a weird inversion of what my life had been before now.

Yeah. I mean, it's like one of those, when I get that kind of busy, there's a quote that says, like how lucky am I to be exhausted by the things I wished for previously. Absolutely. And sometimes that's what will keep you going when you're like, oh my gosh, now I'm having to do this much. But it made me wonder, we were talking off air about Ashley Winstead. And she obviously kind of moves around genres too. So that was what was kind of in my head.

I know some authors still are like, well, I like, I like writing this kind of story. Ian, I like writing this kind of story. So that's cool. And I think too we're always kind of poke. it's useful to write like that because it does allow you to have multiple audiences. And hopefully some of those audiences will carry over, but it's also useful to have just kind of a wider spread of people. You know what I mean?

It is a business. You do need to think these ways. You need to think about this to some extent, even if it's kind of like boring or like it peels some of the vinyl off. Like it makes it less romantic. There is something valuable about. Like I said, Peter was he came about organically, but once I had the premise,

it was a very calculated kind of operation of how to package and position in it. Yeah, totally. I wonder, does it help like when you get bored to, like, being able to, like, switch over to, like, something totally different than what you're writing? I think what's tricky for me, I'm not the kind of person who can work on two books at once, and I know people who can do that, and I really admire that. I will typically, yes and no, it's really fun to have another world to hang out in and it's also really fun to have kind of Peter to go back to because it's starting to feel

like it's starting to feel like a marriage or something in a weird way like maybe an open marriage like you're allowed to go and do your own thing for a while and you come back home and it it is interesting but it's also um which also sounds like the only marriage Peter would have so yeah oh that's actually that's a very good question that might come up very soon in future books oh so we're I'm going to wave linked here. Yeah, but I wish I could do multiples at a time because I feel like I would probably be, I would have a lot of fun with that, but I just, yeah. Again, like you said, what a blessing to be tired doing something that you love, but it makes

me really tired. For me, writing a novel is a very exhausting process. My agent has now, it took me of years to start doing this. And now I have reached a point where I'm like, I'll email her sometimes and I'm like, I need you to be my out of office and like filter my email for me because I I can't I'm so fried and like I hated to admit that because I feel like when you're coming up you need to always be available and always be working and there is some truth to that but it hit me when we I had made close several deals I was like I feel very secure as my place I feel like an asset to everybody here

right don't have to prove myself in the same way and I'm allowed to take a day off yeah so sometimes I'll email her and be like I'm taking the rest of the week off like if something urgent comes up like text me but I'm turning off my email and like that that was hard though that was so hard to learn and I can the point being that like I've learned I have to force myself to take a week or two off every draft like otherwise it'll just burn out and so I wish I could juggle two books but to the point of like is it creatively fulfilling yes but it's not like I can if I'm working on a Peter Key book, I'm going to finish that book. I'm not going to just stop it for a week because I don't outline these things super heavily. And I need to sort of stay in the moat. To me, it helps a lot to

sort of stay in the day-to-day groove so that you can just keep up with like all of the stuff. The overarching plot I can usually remember, but there's always these little subtle things that are happening at the edges that you risk losing track up. So it's really important to me to work like Monday to Friday. Yeah. It's making me think, one, And I think if I were writing, which eventually I will, but I think I would have to be the same way for multiple different reasons. I just like getting into a task and then following it through until it's done. Like that's just kind of where my brain works. But it also makes me think of, and it's a nuanced discussion, dropping all of the episodes or like airing episodes weekly.

And I completely understand that you stay in the public consciousness more when you do it weekly. as a viewer i feel like and they're still i mean i'm watching maximum pleasure guaranteed weekly but as a viewer what i dislike about it is the thing that you were pointing out about all the little details and so it's like there are those little things that no matter what if you're having seven days in between and so by the time you get to the finale if it's like an eight or 10 episode uh whatever show the pilot that you watch is now like two months old in your brain and so by the time you get to the And that's the part where like I hate missing all the little things that I feel like you get when you can consume it pretty much like a book is what I've always told people was why I liked waiting until the whole story was there. Because I'm like, I want to be able to feel the flow of the story and like feel all of it together, even if it's not all in one day.

But like over the course of like three days like it is with like a book for me typically. So I'm with you on that. That's what I did the Game of Thrones. Yeah. I waited to watch and I watched like the first four seasons in like a month. And that was a great way to explain. You know, the show that really exemplified that was the third season of Twin Peaks, like David Lynch's Twin Peaks, when they released like this sort of 25 years later sequel,

it was like 18 hours long. Like it was so big. And then it aired over like three months almost. Like it was a really long runtime. And it's so complicated and has so many missing pieces, there's so many pieces to it. Yeah. That as you're getting near the end, I mean, he's. Lynch was a brilliant director,

so you're enjoying it to some extent. But I remember I re-watched it on... Because like it sticks in your head. Like he's a visionary, he's a genius or whatever. So it's stuck in my head. I rewatched it a couple years later. And like I bought it on Amazon or whatever so I could just sit down and blast through it.

And I was like, this is one of the best things I've ever seen in my life. Like this is the best 18-hour movie I've ever seen. But you can't... I agree. I prefer just the... single drop because I do too I'm not watching Game of Thrones right now because I'd rather just be able to sit down and watch it all on a weekend you know yes or house of the dragon like the new house

yeah yeah severance oh severance was another one like that for me where like thankfully it was so much in the public public discussion that it was almost like I was watching it all week in between yeah sure exactly but that's right but it's really but it's one of those things too exactly what you're saying but when because like I watched the first season. I watched it out. It had all aired, but like it had a two and a half, almost three year hiatus in between season one and two. And like nobody watched the first season. So I, this was just, I'm not trying to be one of those. Like I watched it first, but I had no one to talk to about it for forever. And then I rewatched the first season going right into the second. And I was like,

this show is so good when you're finding answers to all these teeny tiny mysteries that they hide all over the place. But I understand. the attention economy is like like you said then there's like that that's like the other not romantic not artistic side of it is like non-netflix execs are like you don't get the same kind of attention and now Netflix feels like they just put out some statement where they're like our viewership is down we don't understand why and everyone's like well we've got a few ideas yeah it has to do with what they pick and what they end as well Yeah, the fact that they cancel shows, like, before they even air, like, they just...

No, I mean, I think it's, um, what we're running into with the golden age of TV, which is now brought it into, like, whatever we have, it's very dangerous to run an entertainment platform, like a tech company. Like, there's stuff you can learn from the tech business and analytics are very powerful. But there's also a lot of stuff that, like, Hollywood has learned through a century of being on the planet that they maybe have thrown out. out a little precipitously. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. I have so many crazy stories about the streamers that I could tell you, like, off stream because I've had different books, like, get to different

stages of adaptation. Oh, yeah. The shit that there, it's like, Hollywood is wild because it's some of the smartest people in the world. And everybody has no clue what's going on. Nobody has any clue what's going on ever. It's the weirdest thing. And there's some of the smartest best readers you'll ever meet, like, truly great people. Like, I've had almost almost nothing. but great experiences with like producers and executives. Wow. But it is so weird. Everybody is just like, there's all this money and nobody knows what to do with it.

And then they all suddenly have no money and they don't know what happened. It's really weird. Yeah. It is the, I think a lot of readers don't even realize when we talk about books being options. Like way more people's books have been options than most readers realize because it's not a guarantee. The option is, it's really. is a small piece of the puzzle. The other thing, too, like, something that...

There was a book recently, and I'm not familiar with the book, so I didn't feel like I could weigh in on it in a big way. But people were kind of upset by the casting choices. They were, like, this actor's too hot or whatever. Like, this isn't... Or, like, this actor's not a good fit for that character. Okay. And what I...

What I will say, if you ever just as a reader encounter that, yes, it could be bad casting. It could just be that somebody owed that actor or actress a favor. It can also be that in Hollywood world, everything is being kind of, if they're trying to decide if they're going to option something and then if they're going to develop it, you have a balance sheet of like,

here's all of our expenses, and then here's all of the ways we hedge our bets that this won't bomb. One of the big ways they hedge their bets is actors, and actors who appeal to different demographics, what kind of numbers those demographics represent, like all of these things. And so it could have just been that when they did the calculus for the show,

like when they, you know, really set down and did all the numbers, this combination of actors is what it took to get the executives over the finish line to make the product. And I'm not saying that that means you should just shut up and accept it. Like it could be a bad product. Like that is a lot of times how adaptations go wrong. Yes.

But it is the reality of the matter. Like it's not it's not any one person's fault. I think that's what's tough to, because when you're talking to a writer, if a writer screws up a book, you can DM one person about it and be like, I hated this book. And you don't have to write with like scene budgets or actor budgets. You can write whatever your brain can come up with. Literally, like with Peter, you are, it's a bit more structured because this type of novel can't be more than about 90,000 words. And that's not as much as you think it is.

Like once you get into the book, like the real estate fills up quickly, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. But in terms of, yeah, exactly, money, I don't have to think about that at all. I do now in a weird way because you're just kind of like, oh, well, the book adaptation can really change your life. So I do sometimes find myself thinking like maybe let's not write something that would cost $500 million to turn into a movie. But I don't think about that kind of thing too hard. I mean, it's not like top of mind. But yeah, I don't know.

Give people some grace. Hollywood like literally there's so many jerks in Hollywood but there's also a lot of really good people like doing their best yes most of the people are the people that love stories and are doing their best and then there's like your highest level C level people are the one kind of making it not interesting I've met a few of them they're not they're not evil by any stretch they're just very none of them wants a flop you know that's just their constant and they're in an industry where nobody's a kind way to look at it they're self-conscious It is what's so endearing about the studio if you watch that on that or on.

Oh, I heard that was really good. I haven't seen it. One of my favorite shows of all time still. So good. Oh, damn. All right. I'll check it out.

Yeah. It is so good. The way, I mean, I think even, because it sounds like you even had experiences with studios, but I think any artist who is really passionate about stories, but has to balance the business part of it will love.

love that show. It's fantastic. Yeah, no, I will definitely check it up. That sounds like I need like a backlog of stuff to watch when I'm done with tour. Yes. I have like a not a huge tour but just like the whole publicity like machine eats up your life for a few weeks. So when all that's done like yeah, I'm going to need something just to sit on the couch and watch. So that sounds great. And it's really good because it's either eight or ten episodes and it's like 30 to 40 minute episodes and they're just like so good. It'll be perfect for you. Well, we've strayed from the book a little bit, but that's okay. As of the time this is airing, everyone can go get the audiobook, the hardcover, is it hardcover and paperback?

I can't remember. We have a hardcover and we have an audio book. Okay, an audiobook. So yeah, however you read it, you can go read it. But I do always ask at the end, too, if you've read anything recently that you've loved or given this conversation if you've watched anything that you loved. Um, yeah, actually, I trying to think of the last thing that I, like, adored reading. It was probably just really interesting.

It's a history book, actually, nonfiction. It's a history of the founding of Australia, like the penal colony of Australia, called The Fatal Shore. Okay. It came out in like the 80s. And it's, it does something really incredible where it's this amazing work of scholarship.

As far as I understand, like, I'm not a, subject matter expert in the founding of Australia, but it feels it, from what I understand, like, the author really dug into a bunch of archives that had sort of languished for a long time and unearthed a lot of stuff. And then it's also just like exquisitely written. Like the prose itself is so good. Yeah, and it was gripping. Like I, it's like a 550 page book and I tore through it. This is like, when you said it, I was like, I'm pretty sure this is on my TBR for multiple reasons. I have a friend who is from Australia and then there was just like, I don't know, I was getting more and more interested. Someone recommended this on Instagram and I remember being like, is this from 1986?

And it was. So I added this two months ago. It says on good reads. So now you have convinced me this will probably be on next nonfiction. It's fantastic. It is long, but it is so well written and so. Is it narrative nonfiction? Ish, yeah, it's like, it's definitely not, it nails the narrative level that I like where it's not right over somebody's shoulder and speculating about like one particular person. Like it does have a scope. Yeah. But it's very, it has so many, he just found so many journals and letters and like records of like first person accounts of what people were going through. Yeah. And then it also, he just has a very wise understanding of like human nature. And that sounds very pretension.

but you'll know what I mean when you read it. You're like, this is a guy who like, what all great artists should strive to do, which is he understands the human condition, like the good and the bad. And there's, I just, I learned so much from it, but I also enjoyed reading it the way that I enjoyed reading like Tolstoy or something, like a really, really, really fantastic work of literature. Okay. Well, I'm going to bump this one up for myself.

You'll have to let me know what you think. It's fantastic. I will. But yeah, I just wanted to know more. And I'm reading a lot of American history. So I can use not that necessarily Australia's founding is any more uplifting than ours. But it's fascinating. Yeah, there's there was just a lot of nuance to it.

And at times it feels like an adventure story. You know, it's like all these people like. And it's also just, yeah, it was. God, I don't even know how to. I think my takeaway thing too with fatal shore that I find so compelling about. it. It's an example that if you work really hard and produce something great, it will last. Like, so many books come and go. And just the fact that we're talking about a book from 19, what was it, 86. Yeah, that's what it says. Like, we're like earnestly discussing a book from 1986. Like,

it's amazing to watch books become classics. And it's really cool when you're reading it. We're like, oh, yeah, like this is, I think we'll, this has a good shot of being read in a hundred years. It's just such a well-written piece of work. Yeah, that is so cool. Well, I'm bumping that one up. Enjoy. Where should people follow you? I think it's still probably John Fram adjacent. John Fram.

Yeah, on Instagram is my best place to go. I have a substack now, Fram on Friday. I do not publish every Friday. Don't put that on me. I refuse. But I'm learning to get into the substack groove. Yes. And then, yeah, Instagram is where you'll see like all the live updates, basically.

And any kind of cool stuff going on will be posted there. and then yeah those are the two main places yeah awesome i'll put that in the show notes and thank you for coming and talking about it and everybody go buy it thank you have a good day