librarypunk - 123 - David Demchuk

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

We’re talking about how the book sausage gets made! Publishing, publishers, libraries, horror, queerness, and maybe even some literal human sausage making.  https://twitter.com/david_demchuk https://bsky.app/profile/daviddemchuk.com https://hazlitt.net/feature/where-monsters-are-made Media mentioned Cruising (1980) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080569/  Eric LaRocca, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke https://ericlarocca.com/about Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt, Cuckoo. https://twitter.com/scumbelievable Hailey Piper, https://www.haileypiper.com/  Joe Koch, https://horrorsong.blog/ Suzan Palumbo, https://suzanpalumbo.wordpress.com/ Feeding Hannibal: A Connoisseur's Cookbook https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/feeding-hannibal-janice-poon/1123457647 Tender Is the Flesh https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Tender-Is-the-Flesh/Agustina-Bazterrica/9781982150921  On the Line: New Gay Fiction https://www.amazon.com/Line-New-Gay-Fiction/dp/0895940493 Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth The Borrowers Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time Rosemary’s Baby Thomas Trion, The Other  The Haunting of Hill House Gerard Boesche, Feral The Stepford Wives The Exorcist John Updike John Cheever Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man, A Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace David’s favourite contemporary queer/trans+ horror writers Eric LaRocca Gretchen Felker-Martin Hailey Piper Joe Koch Suzan Palumbo Adam Pottle Allison Rumfitt Lee Mandelo Kingfisher A.C. Wise Sam J. Miller Ashley Deng Jordan Shiveley Nino Cipri Chuck Tingle

Not too much of a spoiler, but this is a CanConn episode. So I think... A what? Cancon. We've talked about this, Jay. No, I don't know what you're talking about. What's Cancone? Canadian content.

Oh, because I knew Canadian, but... It's like a sponsored, like, isn't there, like, grants for a specific cancon, and it has to be like... Oh, we will get to that. Okay, great. Oh, good. Listen, my job here is just to look pretty. Like, that's all I'm good for. Doing beautifully.

Thank you. Let's go. I'm Justin. I'm Skalk on my brain. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they then. I'm Jay.

I'm a music library director and my pronouns are he him. And we have a guest. Yes. Yes. Who just stepped all over you. Yes, I'm David and I'm a celebrated author and my pronouns are he him. Yay. Welcome.

Thank you. We had a lovely discussion on Twitter and so I'm looking forward to talking more. And I've also been watching your interviews today, a lot of which I think happened right after Red X came out. So if you repeat any stories, I'm going to know. I read Red X about like a year ago and it was like, it changed my life. So I'm very excited about this. It was so good. Well, I mean, that's a hugely gratifying thing to hear. First of all, that you read it. And then secondly, that it changed your life. It was so good. I think it's something that every writer hopes for. Unfortunately, most of my stories are in that book. So I've had to come up with. like two new ones. So you're going to hear them anyway. So, but yes, we will chat. Great. But first, we have Anada News.

So Sadie's been the target of William Shakespeare Sadie, please tell us I will just start from the top So not specifically me But so at my library When people get suspected fishing emails And they pass it on

I'm the one who does secure checks. So when people are like, this has attachments, I don't know if it's legit or not. They get passed to me and I'm the one who runs through the security checks and stuff. So I get this one today. And the subject of the email is notice of infringement. And I grabbed that fucker out of the help desk queue so fast. I was like, this is all mine because I love digging into these things. And it is like security wise, everything's fine. There are two attachments, whatever. It's legitimate takedown request claiming that we have

infringing works and that we need to replace them. And I was like, what the fuck? This is a public library. And I open the attachments and I open, the first one I open is literally just a list of all of Shakespeare's plays with

like a synopsis, a list of characters and a list of like set, set like scenes, like where each scene is set with a link to Barnes & Noble. of this dude's, like I've been saying translation because that's like the easiest way to put it, but it's literally just like a new edition of like an edition that he has authored. And when I opened the second attachment to check it, it was like a legitimate like you have infringing works

under this law and this law. You need to remove these works, blah, blah, blah, blah, kind of thing with a list of just all of Shakespeare's place. Like no additions, no copyright years, nothing. Just plain old like title of each play in a list. And then at the bottom, it's proof of copyright and it's pictures of documents from the U.S. Copyright Office with a registration number. But if you look at them, it actually says translated, like Shakespeare translated and then the title of the book. So like the copyright is legit. It's just for his specific translations and additions of each Shakespeare play. And I actually went to. went to the copyright website and I dug through and I found it. And so there is a legit

copyright. He does have own a legit copyright for it. But he's claiming that it covers all of Shakespeare's place. And I'm just like mind blown, right? Because like, oh, and he's Canadian. So there was Canadian copyright too, which I don't know how to check. I knew it. So claims he owns the copyright. Is it actually, David? Like, claims to own the copyright for all of Shakespeare's plays in U.S. and Canada. And I'm just like, that is such a buck wild claim to make just on its face and then to send that shit to a public library and be like, you have to remove these infringing works. Like, the more I thought about it, the more and more ridiculous I just like got into this

because it's like, so you're claiming that every copy of Shakespeare's plays that we have in our hundred of thousand book collection are somehow copy, counterfeit that the whole. Wholesale publishers we're buying these books from are selling us counterfeit. Ingram. Copies of Shakespeare. And I'm just like, either this dude doesn't actually understand how copyright works and legitimately thinks he owns the copyright or has the copyrights plays. Or he thinks public librarians are too stupid to know how copyright works. And I'm like, one is stupid and one is stupider.

And then the more we looked into him, because I, of course, told Justin and Jay about this, this dude is just a good. Goddamn grifter. Just a straight-up grifter. Harvard Library has three of his physical books, by the way. Goodreads has over 10,000 books listed as being the author on Goodreads of over 10,000 books. And the hilarious thing is the copyright for these Shakespeare translations, he's had since 2012. Has he been pulling this grift on like public? Like since 2012 over Shakespeare.

And like I was telling my wife about this earlier. And I'm like, like being like, so we got a DMCA take down at work today. And I'm telling them all about it. And I go, guess what? Guess what? This dude claims to have copyright over. And they were like, oh, God, what even? And I go, all of Shakespeare's plays.

And they looked like I had just hit them with a hot cast iron pan. Like it was so funny. But yeah. So I've just been mind blown all day over this like insane. grifter. So on behalf of Canadians everywhere, I would like to apologize. We're the country of Drake. We have no swag. It's, uh, it's, I'm mortified. Just mortified. The copyright like registration title is Shakespeare translated from poem formation to play formation. But it's not a translation. That's not a translation. Just because something's an iambic

pentameter doesn't make it a poem. And also, not all the plays, like not all of every part of them is an iambic pentameter anyway. So they're not poetry. People just don't know how to understand early modern English. Well, I love how I listed all the plays as translated into plays, but he didn't claim that he translated any of the actual poetry into plays. So none of Shakespeare's sonnets are in there. No. Yeah. No, it's just the plays. I want to, I want plays of all the gay sonnets on it's like I think it's zero through is it 112 went away something there's like a 50 there's something that where it's just the gay ones or is it 30 something I don't remember anyway I want to take this man's grift down yeah his name is that we're gonna don't don't give anyone else

we're gonna have a whole episode called we ruin this guy's grift fine cut it out bleep it that'll be that'll be next episode or something anyway but the thing that blows my mind though is Presumably someone at the copyright office in 2012, when he e-filed his copyright notice, had to look at what he filed and said, yep, that's copyrightable. Because you have to send in the thing. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, though. I mean, do they ever turn anything down?

Did they ever examine anything that closely? Did they, I just don't know. Only recently with AI stuff, have they, like, said, oh, you can't actually copyright that. But I think back in 2012, they were just rubber stamp and whatever came in. This has his home address for the rights and permission. Look him up in the phone book. It has his phone number. Let's get him on the podcast.

That's right. Let's call him like Cole all right now, like a morning zoo or something. Well, if you could find someone with a British accent, you could get them to call and say, hi, it's William Shakespeare. What the fuck are you doing? Who the fuck do you think you are? I love that Shakespeare is listed as a co-authorship on the application. Oh, which means he has copyright again.

He shares it with Shakespeare. It's madness. The Shakespeare estate must be so happy. You would think someone in the copyright office would have walked across the street and told the fucking Shakespeare Library about this. Clearly not. Clearly not. Geography jokes. Justin doesn't get. It's because the Copyright Office is in the Library of Congress, and the Folger

Shakespeare Library is also in Washington, D.C. Ah. Yeah, because I've been there. No, I don't leave my house. Okay. Well, that was Canada news. Okay. All right, now on to a real Canadian icon. Yay. I drink to fast.

No. My interview skills always go out the window when I'm not on autopilot. But we did have a lovely discussion on Twitter about just writing and authorship in the process. And one thing I think that kind of drove our conversation was I think it's important for librarians to understand how books get made in the publishing industry because I feel like there is a disconnect. You don't really learn a whole lot in library school about like how does a publishing agreement work? How does an author agreement work? Even when you learn about copyright. everything I've learned about the author's perspective on publishing, it has been from people coming to me and going, can you help me with this? And it's very interesting because like,

authors alliance has resources for this. But there's not like a class you can take on how to become an author when it comes to like the nuts and bolts of going through the process. Well, there are a few. Those have only really emerged, I think, in the past few years. But one of the things that authors and agents and a few publishers have started doing is having online workshops where they were often they're not free. But they're not necessarily wildly expensive. Where they explain sort of like, you know, here's the process you have to go through. Even with the existence of those, even with the existence of websites. And even with the existence of authors associations and unions, there are still a lot of people.

I just today I had somebody ask, you know, online, someone who's a friend say, you know, at what point do you go and approach an agent and ask them if they would be interested in taking you on or if they'd be interested in representing your work to foreign markets and so on? And the answer, generally speaking, is when you have a novel in your hand that is new and that is ready to be sold. Because really, that's what an agent's job is, is to take your novel and to sell it. Before it's ready, academically it's interesting, but it is too soon to show to an agent. And if you don't have a book ready at all, you can have lots of great conversations, but that doesn't mean an agent could or should represent you. It's really about having that

item in your hand. And at that point, then it becomes a discussion of will they take you on? You sign an agreement. Then they look at the book. They try to figure out how it is that they're going to marketed who they're going to approach to publish it. So those kinds of things, even though there are authors who have been through this like, you know, two, three, four times, they haven't necessarily been through every single stage of every single process to do with publishing. So it doesn't surprise me that there are people outside of, you know, authorship and outside of publishing who don't have a completely clear idea of how books work, even though they work with books every single day. I can tell you a bit about that process from the several books that I have worked on.

So one book was published by a very small press. It had a very small print run and it had a very small advance. And we're talking like $500 Canadian, so even smaller. And so and that book was my first book. And that book was nominated for awards. It won awards. it got a lot of attention and an outsized amount of attention for the kind of book that it was that would traditionally, you know, that it would traditionally attract. And so as a result,

things happened like it made its money back really quickly. It had, you know, a number of printings. It had, I think, two translations, one into French for Quebec and one into Italian, and which was wonderful. And those kinds of things that are for a book that's technically small, really huge. Most it's, I would say it's fairly true regardless of how you're publishing. A book itself produces a certain amount of attention and a certain amount of revenue for the writer. But then there are a bunch of ancillary things that happen like you're able to do workshops, you're able to do school visits, you're able to do library visits. you're able to do library visits, you're able to sit on juries of granting bodies, you're able to

be on panels at festivals or moderate panels at festivals, you're able to do readings. Each of those things, some of those you do them for free because various people have no money, but there are some things where they pay you quite well. And it can end up that you can make more money from that stuff than from the actual book, which is kind of ironic. So that was my first experience. Thankfully, I was old, and I knew that what I was going through was highly unusual. And so I didn't invest too heavily in the notion that I was going to be some sort of literary star.

This was what happened with one particular book. With Red X, it was published by an imprint at one of the Big Five, the so-called Big Five. In this case, it was an imprint at Penguin Random House called Strangelite, and their focus is on more experimental writing that has a, kind of a unique personal perspective to it. And in this case, this was the rare thing where the publisher had seen a tweet of mine. I think we were already aware of each other. We were already following each other. But the publisher had seen a tweet of mine about the book and got into my DMs and asked me, you know, whenever it is that the book is ready, could you please make sure that I

see it? And so that is like, you know, the Cinderella story. And, And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. We did show it. I ultimately got an agent as a result of the first book. We did show the book to a number of publishers, but in fact, it was Jordan at Strange Light who picked up the book and published it for North America. And that book, being the second book, did not have this massive sensational debut author thing happened to it, but it's sold very respectfully.

It got great reviews. and I think it's an important, you know, so far as I can think anything's important. I think it's an important contribution to the queer literary canon, and in particular the queer horror canon. The third book, which comes out next year, is a co-authorship with a writer named Kareenly Clark. It will be her debut. And so this was my first experience co-writing something that was such a massive project. We've handed in something that's over 100,000 words.

We'll see how long that lasts. And it is a slight step away from the horror fiction of the first two into more of a mystery thriller with Gothic and horror elements. It is a retelling of the Sweeney Todd story from the point of view of Mrs. Lovett, who is the pie baking helpmate who helps dispose of the remains of Sweeney Todd's victims. She has not traditionally been very fully or well characterized in any of the Sweeney Todd retellings from the original Penny Dreadfuls right through to the various stage plays, radio plays, TV adaptations, and so on, and including the musicals. So I became really fascinated with the question of what would make her into the person who she would have to be in order to be. baking pies with people's remains in them. And so the title of the book is the butcher's daughter, which is your first clue as to what things in her life history contribute towards her character. And that book was, to our delight, picked up by a U.S. publisher, Soho Press,

and a UK publisher, Titan Books. Titan is treating it as more of a crime novel with horror elements. And Soho Press is actually launching an imprint shortly called Hell's Hundred, which focuses in particular on horror, and we are among the first year's titles under that imprint, which is tremendous. So that's a sense of how the career is going so far. In each of those instances, it has been about coming up with a concept or coming up with a character or having a particularly strong image and maybe, you know, a title or an ending, and then sitting down and exploring the material to make sure that there is a book there or a project there. And then once that exploration has sort of occurred, and I feel, or in the case with me and Kareen, we feel satisfied

that there is enough there to work with that we could dedicate like a year or a year and a half to this kind of project because we both have day jobs, then it's like it's time to dive in. I am not a writer who outlines, which is both really good for my work and really terrible for my mental health, particularly the longer the work, the harder it is, because you're having to carry everything in your head. In the case of the butcher's daughter, we ultimately did an outline, I would say when we were in the last 50 pages of the book, because we just needed to make sure we had the entire timeline correct, the entire structure correct, that there weren't like weird gaping holes, and then we could like manage the ending that we were heading towards.

But, and there are times, I mean, in all three books, where I did sit down at one point and sort of outline at least briefly to get a sense of where I was going and how things were falling into place. But generally, like, I'm not somebody who writes out an outline and then does scene, scene, scene, scene, to me, I would already feel like I had finished the book. And that's not a satisfactory thing for me. But it gets you into lots of trouble. You can go into dead ends.

You can find yourself kind of spiraling a bit. So you have to rely really heavily on an intuitive sense of structure in order to be able to carry that off. Then what happens is, in theory, you have an agent. If you don't have an agent, as I mentioned before, you have to write a query letter and try to engage an agent in representing the book you have in hand. If you have an agent, then you're in luck. And that person goes out, tries to sell. tries to get the best possible sales of rights that will work in your favor and rights that will actually be acted upon as opposed to selling rights that then don't get acted upon and it becomes

kind of like a waste of your ability to make money. And then from there, you work with the publisher in order to get the manuscript into its best possible shape. Publishers now large and small have fewer editors. So you really do have to do a tremendous amount of work if at all possible before actually sending it out to publishers so that they have to do the least. That's the ideal. And then when working with them, you understand that they have carte blanche over certain things, some of which might surprise you. For example, you do not have control of your cover. You can contribute to the discussion around your cover and how your book is presented, but the author does not have control over that. That is the purview of the publisher. So, and that's just a standard industry thing. You also don't

have control of a title, which may come as a big shock. You may have a title in mind. Your title might be great, but the reality is the publisher is the person, well, is the entity who determines whether, you know, this title or that title is going to work, whether this title might work in one territory, but not in another. That is absolutely part of a discussion. But with my first book, the bone mother, it was originally titled The Thimble Factory. And the publisher was very nice, about it, but came back three times to basically say, you know that's not going to fly. There is no such thing as a horror novel called the Thimble Factory. It is not going to be called the Thimble Factory. And I had thought, oh, it's like, it's ironic, right? And there, no, no, no, no. And then, you know, at one point we had a conversation where I said, well, if it could be another title, I suppose one title could be the bone mother, although it really only, you know, refers to one character in the book and only once in the book and not really anywhere else. So I really wouldn't go with that. The next thing I saw was a cover that had the bone mother on it. That was just the next thing that

happened. And I looked at it and I thought, they're not wrong. It's going to sell. And sometimes that's the note you have to take, you know? It's writers are not marketers, generally speaking. And even if they are marketers, they're not necessarily the best marketers of their own work. So that becomes an important part of the process. And for some writers, it's difficult because what that is is the moving towards your book away from being an expression of your personal creativity and towards being a product. That is an inevitable journey. And it's important on a certain level to embrace the journey, but it can be difficult, seeing that, you know, your book is going to be a thing that is going to be in a store. It's lovely to be romantic about bookstores, but it's going to be in a

store. The intention is for it to be sold, the intentions for people to pay for it, and for you to get money. So you kind of have to acknowledge that aspect of the process as uncomfortable as it can be, and there can be things that can mitigate it to sort of like drain a fraction of the capitalism out of it, but that's absolutely a part of what it is. And then everything after that is all about, you know, particularly now, like as we are continuing into the late stages of the pandemic, you know, the availability of printers, the availability of designers, the now pervasive threat of AI that people continually have to push back,

the difficulty in the marketplace of trying to promote anything, the enormous amount of stuff that is coming out, that is fighting, you know, not just for the physical resources of being printed, but also for the attention of audiences. And, and then, and then just trying to be perceived, and then ultimately to have your book, either immediately or over time, find its desired audience. And hopefully they'll say nice things about you. Unfortunately, you know, Goodreads is one of the platforms that they may may not say nice good things on. And then, and then either you have already started the next book or you shortly after will start the next book and it becomes kind of a machine. So that's,

that's publishing, that's publishing 101. You will, you should have questions. I would have questions. I encourage you to ask questions. I am curious because of the other interviews I was watching. You list off a lot of like other horror authors you're interested in. I was wondering for your co-author, someone that you had seen their work before? No. How did that come up out? That's actually a really good question because that was a really interesting function of my relationship with my agent.

I had been inspired to try writing a Mrs. Lovett book when Stephen Sondheim died. And of course, it's my favorite musical of his, really, the Sweeney Todd musical. Stephen Sondheim died, and in the Washington Post, there was an obituary, and the obituary referred to Sweeney Todd as the barber who murdered his victims and baked their bodies into pies. And I was on Twitter, and I turned to a friend of mine, another writer in Canada, Kelly Robson, and said, this is Mrs. Lovett erasure. And she was like, we were outraged, both of us. And I said aloud on Twitter, which one should never do, someone really needs to write the story. from her point of view. And she said, you're right. Someone does. And I said, you should do it, Kelly. And she said, no, you should do it, David. And I said, no, you should do it, Kelly. And then she was like, no, David, really, you should do it. And I thought, oh, shit. Because I realized, here we are in public, you know, with like hundreds of people and, you know, scrapers and various other things. And I thought, all right, well, if anyone's going to do it and it should be done, then I will do it.

And so I told, so I said aloud to everyone, all right, I'm calling my agent. And that's literally what I did was I, I sent a text to my agent Barbara. And I said, this is the only commercial idea I am ever going to have in my life. We should have a conversation. And so we did. And I said, the problem with writing this for me is that it would take me eight years because I do not have the knowledge. I do not, and I, I love to research, but I disappear into rabbit holes all the time. It is really, it's very, it's a big time suck for me. And, and like, it's a, it's Victorian London, which I thought would be the right period for it. The, the original Penny Dreadful is set even earlier than that, but it's an awkward sort of time to try to work within, because there are just so many things that aren't available to you that are available in Victorian London, particularly during, you know, the window that we ultimately chose. And like costumes and hair, things we're still discussing, by the way.

You know, what's on the walls? What's the furniture like? You know, what are people being paid? You know, what is a store it looked like? Who's in that store? Like, all of those things are things that I just, I only knew from movies and TV. And so therefore, and, you know, and books that also have made a lot of shit up. So I knew that if I was going to go down that road, it would be pastiche.

And I wanted something that was going to be truer. more accurate. And so I said this to her, not really, she said, well, would you like me to help you with this? And I said, well, sure. And she said, okay, give me like 24 hours. And I'll get right back to you. And I said, okay. So sure enough, the next day, she messaged me and she said, there's someone I'd like to introduce you to. And I said, that would be great. So the three of us got on a Zoom call, and that's where I met Corrine. And Corrine was one of Barbara's other clients who had written a number of novels, none of which had sold, but who was a specialist in Gothic, a specialist in Victorian in the Victorian era, a specialist in Victorian London, had lived in London, had done sets

and costumes for the stage in London, and was like, she just, like, ticked all the boxes. And she was really lovely and is really lovely and really pleasant, you know, and quite a gifted writer. And we thought in the meeting that we could, could probably do it. We could probably mesh and figure out a workflow, because it always is about workflow. Novels are really exercises in time management and project management as much as creativity, and that we would be able to pull something together, and crucially, we would be able to do it in less than two years, because you don't want to spend a lot of time on a book like this, and particularly if you have said it out loud to the world in one place or another. So,

So we wrote up a contract, signed it, and got to work. And we got, I would say we got the first draft finished in about 15 months, which frankly is a miracle, because I am not fast. She is a much faster writer than I am, which is fabulous. In the end, the book is about 50-50 as far as, you know, her writing and my writing and her editing and my editing and her factual contributions. that stuff has pretty much evenly blended. But you never know how that's going to go at the very beginning of a project, and particularly this kind of project. So yeah, so that's how it's been

with me and Kareen so far. Yeah. I started having like an argument with myself on my notes. Because I've noticed that there's a, I started writing on a note and then I just started having an argument with myself about the nature of historical writing. But when you're writing history and you're writing like horror because you've done this, this blend in red X. This is three times. I did not think this was going to be. I had an interview in on the CBC up here in Canada with someone who had interviewed me a number of times and who'd read a number of my books and said to me, you have this, first of all, it's, they're all, even if they're not capital H horror, there's horror in all of them. Secondly, they're, they're all historical, one way or another. They are all

concerned with history. And thirdly, they're all in villages. And I was like, oh, this is, what is my issue? What is going on here? What are I trying to work out? Yeah. Well, often you're, I mean, psychologically, there's a whole other bunch of stuff going on. But yes, absolutely. You're always thinking to yourself, what are my questions that I am carrying on my back throughout my writing career. And to do it really well, you have to have questions you cannot answer. You have to have things you cannot resolve. You may have a burning desire to resolve them or else you're not going to get to like page 200, but they cannot really be solvable. And I have those. I think a lot of writers have those. But it's a matter of how you then have to finesse everything in order to make sure that the

ball never really comes down, no matter how many times you toss it back up. So, So that's very much a thing. And I don't know. I mean, I find, I find when writing about history, I think I'm always writing about the present regardless. It's eerie now looking at stuff going on in the bone mother because it's literally being replicated in the news today. And you would never know that aspects of the book that are set before and during the Second World War, would ever re-manifest themselves, and particularly around Russia, now around Israel and Palestine, it's really, it's really unsettling. So part of it is realizing that that history is about cycles

and that, and that history is about, you know, humanity, unfortunately making the same mistakes again and again without recognizing, you know, what's happened in the past, or maybe recognizing it and thinking they can make make things turn out differently and they can't. But also I think that I have a real fascination with how history prior to our birth, prior even to our parents' birth, how that history has shaped our lives before we have even emerged into the world. And that things that we are doing now are shaping the history of people, should we have people, 200 years from now, that we are shaping their lives and and creating, you know, and having an impact on them. And that, that fascinates me.

And the way that the cycles repeat and twist and turn, that also fascinates me. Yeah, I know you've talked about the impact of horror on the body, because it's, you know, horror wants to do things to your body, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're, the two big places for horror to happen is, you know, is in your body and is in your mind. And so it used to be prior to, really prior to the period

that I'm writing about right now, prior to the Victorian era, there wasn't a lot of understanding of psychology. Psychology as a concept hadn't really come together. And so they all, they were always looking for other ways to explain what it was that was going on with people's madness or with people's, you know, mental health issues. And, and, and, also they were trying to understand what was going on with people physically. It was really frustrating picking a year where, you know, carbolic acid had not been invented yet. And so there were just a whole bunch of things that like soap was just not the same thing that it is now. Sterile procedures just didn't exist. People were dying because they had like open wounds on their hands and things

like that. So we had to like really hone in on what it is that we had available to us and that the people we were writing about had available to us and what they did not. And so, and so that's where you really come to understand. It's like, oh, five years later, this person would not have died this absolutely horrible hideous death, you know, because things would have been available in order to prevent that. So you're continually coming up against not only the limitations of the body, but the limitations of the understanding of the body. You're not only coming up against, you know, the limitations in the mind and challenges in the mind, but also the challenges in understanding the mind, because our understanding of the mind has

changed drastically, even in the last 50 years, never mind in the last 200 years. So I find horror for me really rests in, in those locations and in the discomfort. and the troubling of of those locations. And different horror writers approach that stuff differently. I have my own issues, you know, with my body as a queer body, my body is an aging body. Another writer might, you know, if they were HIV positive, they would have different experiences that they would be sort of struggling with.

I have my mental health issues. Someone else with different ones is going to struggle differently with those and is going to want to examine them differently. I have my own disabilities. Disability is a big part of the horror that I write and other people with, and I have friends who are disabled and horror writers and they approach it differently as well. So that, and of course, now, sex, gender, race, these are all things that are critical to, to explore in horror, not just to provide a more diverse face of horror, but also to speak to people's unique horrific experiences and how they are grappling with them. Yeah, I think I think I like so much about like Red X in particular, but like about queer horror made by queer people. And not, I'm not necessarily a person that thinks that like if a non-queer person makes queer horror, then it's like bad or not as good or something. I've gone on record saying cruising is one of my favorite movies. I've got a one sheet hanging up on my wall over there, right?

But like when like queer people do it, there's this like examination of like the queer villain that is like both like acknowledging. the ways that our monstrosity can be bad, but also the ways that our monstrosities are a good thing, where it's both challenging, like, a societal narrative, but also we are also reckoning with the, like, especially in Red X, like, the way that, like, systemically and historically, like, these systems of colonialism and homophobia have, like, forced this, like, predatory, deadly loneliness on us that can make us do. horrible things sometimes, right? I just, I love that sort of like willing to like just look ourselves right in the eye in

that book while also like enjoying some of the ways that the monstrosity was a good thing. Like it was so complicated. So I really like appreciate that about queer horror in particular. Well, and I think it's thank you. And that's absolutely, you know, what I was going for. And I, you know, and I'm, and I always appreciate when, when. queer readers sees on on these themes because not everyone who is queer, even not everyone who is queer and who enjoys horror necessarily has or needs to have an understanding of how queerness has

traditionally been depicted in a villainous fashion in the horror genre and how we have been portrayed as being, you know, insidious and conniving and seductive and and and demented and and vengeful and and all of these things, or sometimes just stupid. Sometimes we're just fools. So a lot of what queer people are trying to do, certainly me, but others that I perceive as well, is take those characterizations and go, there's a play, I think from the 1600s called The Witch of Edmonton. And the upshot of it is that an old woman in the village is accused of being a witch,

and she's not. But her continued persecution by her neighbors makes her sit down and go, okay, fine, fuck you all. I'm going to become a witch. And like, I honor that. So a lot of it is the same thing. It's like, okay, so if we're going to have something that is said in a queer milieu, and if we're going to have a queer villain, whatever that means, within that milieu, who is that person? What has led them? to this villainous place. It's not there being queer. That, of course, was the old argument. So if it's not that, then what is it? Very often, it's things like self-hatred, oppression from other people, you know, confusion, despair, loneliness, absolutely. Loneliness, I think, is probably

one of the most powerful negative forces in our culture at present. And I think it's something that deeply, deeply affects queer and trans people throughout our communities and is something that we need to confront because we do have, in what's supposed to be an inclusive community, a wide range of ways in which we exclude other people. And that is a thing that we need to own and that we need to try to transform within our communities if we're going to survive. That's just a thing I believe. And I think that's a thing that's boldly stated in Red X. And also, there's something empowering about being a certain kind of queer villain, a Disney villain kind of queer villain. And why not on a certain level enjoy that?

If there is something to be enjoyed in it, why not enjoy that? And examine it and question it. Like, you know, really interrogate it and maybe see, certainly it was my experience writing Red X and I made it part of it. of the book, implicating myself, interrogating myself in the process. Why do we, like, why would I sit down and watch Silence of the Lambs, knowing what's in it and knowing how, how difficult the portrayal of the Buffalo Bill character is? Like, what am I doing? What is the purpose of this? At the same time, you can look at it and you can go, there is something for me in here. What exactly is it? There are any number of, you know, wildly camping.

be ridiculous queer villains who I have enjoyed in horror movies and in horror novels, who at the same time, by their existence, have done great damage. What is that about? What is my relationship to that? How am I dealing with that within myself? I mean, those are, to me, those are very important questions. Did I deal you, Justin? I'm sorry.

No, I like the, I have to pull out a new page of notes. I like how you spend the view on, on like the external to internal. Like the external threat to the family, no, the threat is from within the family, and then also the external threat of our queerness makes us the villain. No, there's something else internal happening. If you understand it psychologically or sociologically or something, you've sort of rotated the way we look at it. I really enjoy that about how you talk about this. How you talk about queer horror? Yeah, like there's the scene in Red X where it's the drag night on Halloween.

Oh, yeah. And the drag queen, who everyone thinks is like in a K-hole or something. But she's seeing out on the floor this like cannibalistic orgy happening. And I was like, you know what? We've been to that bar. We know what that's like. This is the bad part? I was like, oh, this author gets me.

Well, and what was funny about that scene, this, of course, is, There's a drag queen whose name is Crystal Lake. And she will always be my favorite. And she's clear whether or not she's a horror queen, she has certainly decided to play into horror for the night, not realizing that horror is waiting for her. And as I was writing the scene, I actually warned my agent.

I actually sent her a text and I said, I have to tell you I'm writing a section right now that's really funny. And she wrote back and she said, is that wise? I said, oh, it's absolutely needed. Oh, we absolutely need a laugh right now. And she's like, okay, you know what's going on. It's up to you. So that was terrific. And because I had hung out with drag queens during that period and I knew how drag worked in bars and things like that and what, you know, how sad it was that there wasn't really a dressing room and there was all this bullshit going on, I thought to me, so I really want to captured that feel more than anything else. And I wanted to make sure she didn't get killed.

Insofar, I mean, insofar as sometimes you don't have complete control over your narrative because you instinctively know some things need to happen. And in this case, I was like, I want to try as much as humanly possible, I want to try to keep her from getting killed. And I knew as long as I kept her in the bar that the odds were pretty, good that she was going to make it out in, you know, relatively okay. And so, so I just was like, and also I just thought the audience, the reader just doesn't need it right at this moment. The reader is going to be stressing about the next three things that happen. So let's just, let's just have some fun. And, and so it was great to be able to write something that was just

its own little sort of like in its own little box and that just was completely surreal and, you know, hallucinogenic and hilarious. And, and it worked out so well. And, I was just so relieved and so happy. Because it's so funny, but also, that's like one of the more visceral parts of the book. Like, like, the way that she's describing seeing it is, like, so gory. It's like really effective. And I think the only reason that I, that I, that I think it works is because it's funny. If it had, if I had been serious, I think a lot of that gore would have gone too far for people.

But because it was so, first of all, because it was so obviously not happening. And secondly, because it was. was, and she was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And secondly, because it was being played for really dark humor, that meant that I could go a lot further than I went anywhere else, really, in the book. But what happened as a result was, once the scene was over, you knew I could go there. Yeah. And if I wanted to go there at some later point, seriously, I would. And so. Because it gets dark. Like, oh, yeah. Yeah. But I never went as full on. as I did during that scene. But I just wanted to leave the reader knowing that that was a possibility.

Similarly, I tried really hard to keep the monster's victims, Nicholas's victims, as men, more or at least as people who presented as men. And in particular, queer men who were disenfranchised, even within the queer community. But there are, of course, female characters. And there was a point in the book where I thought, I don't want people to get too comfortable. So I want to introduce the possibility that some of the female and female presenting characters could potentially be in danger. The key ones, I didn't want anything to happen to them. But I didn't want people going, oh, they're going to be the final girls, and they're going to get to the end, and they're going to vanquish. I wanted to keep things fairly wide open for as long as I could.

A caraclober alarm goes off. Yes, exactly. Because, you know, the moment that you let people get off the hook too far, you lose a lot of the suspense, you lose a lot of the dread. And then it just becomes an exercise. So I wanted to sort of, you know, keep stuff active in that way. I see more stuff being written down. Yeah, I was trying to figure out how I'm going to segue this back. because we ended up talking about Red X earlier.

But okay, okay, I can do this. I can do this. All right. You mentioned finding like the stream of attention with publishing. You have a certain amount of time to get attention out of there. And there's, we wanted to talk a little bit about like the promotion of works in particular areas. So I think this is where we can bring it back to CanCon.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, how, you know, doing an imprint in the U.S. versus, you know, how do you feel like horror or queer horror could be like promoted by something like the grants that exist or the structures that exist. Grants is the wrong word, but I'm an academic guy. Yeah, structures is a, is a better, probably a better approach to it. Canada and the U.S. are unsurprisingly very different countries, not least because Canada, while the territory is larger, it, the population is a fraction of what there is in the United States. It is mostly clustered along the border.

and we get an overwhelming amount of American content. And so one of the things that Canada and other countries like Canada have done to sort of, to counteract that is we have created some, in many cases, publicly funded initiatives that try to, you know, restore a little bit of the balance and to try to foster a Canadian cultural identity, whatever that means. It's really and truly it's multiple identities because Canada is also multiple nations, but when you consider our significant indigenous population, as well as people who have come to Canada from other countries.

And so we have, it has, it's a bit beleaguered, but it is still reasonably robust. We have federal granting bodies like the Canada Council of the Arts. Each of our provinces, which are like the states, have provincial funding bodies, for arts, for literature, and various other things. We also have some grants, some awards that are available in the larger cities, and those things help to sustain a literary marketplace that would not normally be sustainable otherwise, because there's just so much intense competition from what's coming south of the border. So those are very important. And some of that stuff exists in a limited way in the United States, but not in the same way. And as someone who has who has

been on juries for awards, who has been on juries for grants, the process of trying to sustain new and established authors through these programs, it's very important and people take it very seriously. It means a great deal. So I can't say enough about that. We also have, specific to libraries, we also have in Canada a public lending right program. We're not the only country in the world who does, but we do have one. And what that basically means is if your book is published and it is purchased by libraries across the country, you will get a certain amount of money depending upon how many libraries have your book, how long your book has been out, what portion of the book you are the sole author of. In the case of me and Corrine, what will happen

is we will end up sharing the public lending right for our book, the butcher's daughter, but for Red X and for the Bone Mother, like, this was money that came to me directly and solely. And it's a tremendous program. There are 18,000 Canadian authors who participate in this program. And what happens is they do a sampling of libraries from across the country to determine which Canadian authors have books in there. And depending on the proportion of those libraries, your book is in, that's what determines how much you get paid out. And it gets paid out every February. I just got my check. I'm going to be bold and tell people it was $1,000 Canadian. I was thrilled. And it makes, you know, when you think about the fact that, you know, my first book, my advance was $500.

My second book, my advance was $10,000. A thousand dollars is still a big chunk of change. It does make a difference. And for people who are new writers, for people who are, writing adventurous books for people who are trying to reach new audiences, this is the kind of boost a lot of them need that they don't normally get. So it's fantastic. When a book comes out, regardless of where it comes out, generally speaking, you have, we'll say, a six-month window where you can make an impression on a readership. If you're a debut author, you have no audience waiting for you, unless you've already created a name for yourself in some other medium or some other platform. So this is why a lot of attention is paid to debut authors when it comes to awards,

when it comes to reviews, when it comes to, when it comes to grants, when it comes to any kind of integration into the ecosystem. Once you've made your debut, then the real work begins. And you really have, depending on when your book comes out in a calendar year, you really have about six months. If you're lucky and you come out and say March or April, you might be able to stretch it to Christmas because Christmas is shopping season. But apart from that, there's that period of time where you try to have something that resembles a launch, you try to have things that look like readings, you try to go to conferences and festivals and participate in panels and network with other people. And you try to find readers however you can who might be interested in

your material and you rely a lot on, you know, the cliche of the kindness of strangers. Those, those things, because there are many, many brilliant books never find an audience. They just never do. There are many wonderful books that, like, they lay there right where you put them. And it could be any number of factors that contribute to that. Some of them might be the author. Some of them might be the publisher, some of them are just twists of fate. There's, you know, a lot of writers early on in the pandemic when they were supposed to be launching their books and they were, I was one of them. When that, you know, when they were supposed to be like, you know, here's a date in the States where you're going to be able to go and that all went out the window. And then it was like,

okay, how do you promote a book in this kind of environment? How do you, how do you find your audience in this particular way? One of the things I'll say about both queer audiences and horror audiences and therefore the one that is created when you bring the two together in the Venn diagram, is that they are underserved, tremendously loyal, eager for any kind of new and interesting material that you can provide them, and just tremendously supportive. And that makes a tremendous difference when you're in that kind of situation. Much of what has happened for my books has happened through word of mouth, has absolutely happened through library. with the Bone Mother in particular has happened through schools and universities, and it's

those kinds, and also some sort of, you know, industry stuff as well. But those are the things that really matter the most because it's really about readers, connecting with readers, around the value of your work. And there is absolutely nothing like that. There are nothing, nothing can replace that for me. I have had people who have never read a queer book before, but who are horror readers who have written into me and have said, this has completely changed my perspective on the gay and lesbian and trans communities. I had no idea about any of this. And I'm just like, well, first of all, where were you?

But secondly, that's amazing. Thank you very much. You know, I'm tremendously grateful. And similarly, I've had queer writers, queer readers who've come to me and go, I would never normally read horror and I had a really horrible time reading your book. And I cried and I was so upset, but I would tell you, I really, And it's like, yeah, I get that. I totally get that.

I would not wish it upon you. There's a reason why I put content warnings. But you know what? Thank you for giving it a chance. And maybe this will open up some other avenues for you. And I think that's been a really valuable thing as well. Yeah. For some reason, I don't know why my brain just went to the Babadook.

And I was like, you know, maybe you'll get lucky and someone will just have a horror book. And it'll accidentally end up in like the L. in like the LGBTQ algorithm and everyone will go, this is now the next gay horror novel. Well, I mean, that stuff does happen. I mean, who's really been tremendous for this? I mean, of course, I have personal favorites as far as queer horror is concerned. Eric LaRocca has just done tremendously for himself, themselves, themselves.

With, now, of course, I'm going to blank out on every single title. Things have gotten worse since we last spoke, which is now basically a modern queer horror classic. It's just a tremendous debut and a tremendously unsettling thing to read, and it reads, it flows like water. Like, it's just fabulous. Gretchen Falker Martin with Manhunt, soon to have her novel, Cuckoo. She's just a vicious writer and is representing a side of the transig. experience that we would never normally get to see. Haley Piper is a fantastic writer. Joe, I'm going to mispronounce the name, it's Joe Koch, I believe, is also fabulous. Susan Palumbo.

There's just, there's like, there's a tremendous group right now of, of queer horror writers who are just really digging into the form and, and into the experience and trying to give something that both speaks to queer readers who might never normally read horror, but also absolutely to horror readers who are looking for something very different from what they normally get to experience. It's quite fabulous. So if you don't know any of those people and you haven't read any of those people, then let me be the first to encourage you to do so.

And just to seek out queer horror in general, because right now I think we're having a real renaissance. And that, you know, is not a thing to, to disregard the fact that, you know, some of my writing involves overlapping niches, and those, and those niches are a critical part of any kind of promotional effort. So, although, I mean, there's always resistance. I think there's a resistance in the queer literary world to a genre in general. And, and of course, horror has, and I talk about this in Red X,

horror has traditionally been a conservative genre because horror is founded on fear of the unknown and and and trying to overcome whatever it is that is the unknown by destroying it. And, and so as a result, it is sometimes hard to get queer work recognized in the horror community. But I think a lot of stuff has been changing and I'm hopeful that that will continue to change. Yeah, I think we've really unleashed the freaks on the world. Yeah. And I am going to link everyone you mentioned. so that if someone's listening, they can go and just click through and they'll find someone you mentioned or work you mentioned. So that'll all be listed out.

I guess talking about the nuts and bolts of writing, we did talk a little bit about like self-worth and, you know, having a day job and writing on the side. I mean, is there anything that you would like to tell people who want to become to do what you do and do it on the side as you do, which I think is quite realistic. Yeah, I mean, it's brutal. So, again, it's really important to, first of all, it's important to understand your day and to, and to over time, understand where you have your energy and where you can, and when you can lend it. I am not an early morning person. I certainly know people who get up at like 4.30, 5.30 in the morning and they will, like, write for a couple of hours. and then, you know, the kids get up and you have to feed them and you have to get them to school and then you have to go to your job and then you have to come home and you have to feed them again, like all of that stuff. I am on the opposite end of that spectrum, not just because my

child is now 33 years old and is in another city, but I do not work early in the morning. And I'm privileged to live at the very eastern edge of the continent where I'm in fact, you know, awake before everybody else regardless. So, so I actually have a nice cushion before my workday truly begins. I do most of my writing when I am almost asleep. I do all, most of my writing like from 10 o'clock at night until like 1 or 1.30 in the morning. And for whatever reason that works for me, I think it is because I'm on the, the verge of exhaustion. And, and my, my sort of like monkey brain has calmed down a bit, and so other stuff can just flow through more freely. So that's how it works as far as a little, and also I am kinder to myself than a lot of writers. I do not believe that you

have to write thousands of words a day. I don't even believe that you have to write thousands of words a week. The targets I set for myself are when I am writing, because I'd also don't write every day, and there are many days can go by where I don't write. On a week that I'm going to be writing, I will write four times a week, and I will set a minimum of 250 words a day, which is really low. And if I don't even make that, I do not punish myself. If you add that up, that's a thousand words in a week. 50 weeks in a year, 50,000 words, that's a book. So it's possible if you do this and you don't continually go back and edit everything that you've been writing, which people do. And it's, I mean, it's understandable, but it's a bit of a mistake. You can actually

get a draft done of a short novel in, you know, about 12 months. So, so, and if you take a less self-punishing approach, at least for me, I find that the flow is easier. And, and 250 words, when you see it on the page, it's a manageable amount if you do need to tinker with it before you put that chunk to bed. So, and then yourself to bed. So, so that's a thing that's important to me. As you know, I said, I don't edit. I mean, not I don't edit. I don't outline. I do edit.

I edit too much. But I don't outline, at least not right away. The other thing is that I try really hard early on in any project to give myself, we'll say, you know, two or three weeks to just noodle. Because a lot of the time, you don't necessarily have the voice right away, or you're not necessarily starting in the right place, or you don't really know. character that you're trying to write about and you need to do a few exercises in order to try to draw that material forward. It can take a while before you think to yourself, all right,

this is how it starts and this is where it's going to go, at least for the first bit. So you have to create sort of a bit of an arena for yourself to work within a sandbox of a sort. One thing I'll do early on, for example, is I will write myself a letter from the central character of the book. And he or she or they will write, you know, here's, you know, dear David, here's what I want you to know about me. And then the stuff just starts coming that way. And then I just hang on to that. And it becomes a clue, you know, it doesn't necessarily determine anything, but it becomes a clue for how it is that I'm going to find my way into this person, into this situation, into this milieu, into this era sometimes, you know, and it doesn't have to be, you know,

my name is Amy and I'm 11 years old and my mother is this. Sometimes it's like, you know, here's what happened to me today. Here's someone in, you know, here's someone down the street who I hate. Here's, here's what happened when I got dumped, you know, like those kinds of things. And it, but they, but they work to, to help you more fully envision what it is that you're going to be working on. If you're working on a long project and a novel is a long project, there's no escaping it. You need to, you don't, as I say, I don't outline, but I do have a sense of structure usually in mind, and I need to have some sense of what milestones I'm going to hit when in order to get to the end. And I think most writers, most writers, I think, end up having an innate sense

of structure, or they have to learn about structure really fast in order to get through a long project. You need to have a sense of what the third of a way through looks like. like, you need to have a sense of what the halfway point looks like. You need to have a sense of when you are starting to narrow the path towards your ending, and then you need to have some sense of how to land it. And those things will not necessarily happen, you know, 50 pages, 50 pages, 50 pages, 50 pages, but you will get sort of a feel for how it's going to work within the structure you chose. I mean, with Red X, well, let's start with the bone mother. With the bone mother, it's a mosaic novel. It does have a structure, but the structure is not necessarily immediately apparent to the reader.

It will probably be apparent on an instinctual level, but it is not apparent as far as like, oh, here's where this crisis happens, because it's told from the point of view dozens of different characters, both in the past and a few of them in the present. And there is no clear plot. If you look carefully, you can sort of like draw the dots in a way that kind of creates a plot, but the plot is beside the point to a certain extent. With Red X, there is a thing happening where a big chunk of the book is fiction, and then chunk of the book is nonfiction essays by me about me and my feelings and my perspective. And those things are interleaved between each other.

Plus there are some experimental things that are going on, including emerging. of fact and fiction towards the end. In the new book, I'm sad to say, we have it all. We have, we have a narrator who never speaks. We have a two simultaneous storylines, 50 years apart, that are going on pretty much all the way through the book. We have, we obviously, we have an antagonist we can't trust. We have, we have a variety of people who get killed in a variety of different ways, and we have a conspiracy involving the Freemasons, and we have an ending that's like a punch in the face. We have a framing device that involves a couple of inspectors. We have, like, there's just, just a lot. It's an epistolary novel. That's, it's, it's a whole other thing.

Like, it was, it was the maximum amount that we could bite off and chew without getting it all over ourselves. And I'm not sure that we haven't. But, but, yeah, I mean, Sometimes you just want to go big. Where the previous books, I didn't really care about plot. With this one, Kareen and I have enough plot for like five books. Bokuda plot. So much plot. So very much plot.

If you love plot, particularly Gothic plot, you're going to eat well. Apt metaphor. Apt metaphor, absolutely. Oh, by the way, it's going to have recipes. I think we might need to have you come on Tinder subject. my cannibalism, sicko mode podcast when this comes out. I would be delighted. Yes.

We keep joking that we need to get the one Hannibal cookbook and do an episode on that. I've seen photos of it. It looks extraordinary. It looks great. I mean, who would ever make anything out of it? But, I mean, it looks gorgeous. So, yeah, absolutely. We're trying to make sure that our recipes work for any meat.

And that maybe one or two don't require meat at all. But, but yeah, they're in there. I'm going to ask if there was a vegetarian option. We will try for a vegetarian option. Yeah, yeah, it is the goofiest thing. There is just a lot of stuff going on in that book. It's just so strange, probably because of Jay's other podcast, but I had just this, I've always had very violent and visceral dreams.

And for some reason, the other week, I had one where part of the plot, this is like a long-ass dream, but part of the plot was I had to go to the clinic, this medical clinic, and I was picking up human meat, right? That people donate after they have like limbs amputated, right? And I was picking it up for this cult I was in, right? Because I was picking up human meat. And it was like deli rap, like you get at the butcher, right? So there was like a little bit of leg and then there was like ground human meat, right? And the thing that sticks in my head is, I don't know why my brain.

You told me this. I thought I did. The thing that drove me nuts was because the clinic's butcher, right, has to, like, grind it up. They also had, like, an in-house barbecue sauce. I think I've been living in Texas too long. So they had, like, a store-branded barbecue sauce that comes with the human meat. You didn't have, like, the red cross on it? Like, it was just some kind of.

It was just sweet baby rays, but in a different label. Yeah, it was just like Jack. Honey barbecue mesquite. Yeah. Honey barbecue mesquite. Of course that you pick up at the clinic. Yeah, it's at the clinic. I'm sad that they weren't more confident in the flavor of their human meat that they felt they had to sell you a barbecue sauce.

But sure. Justin, you just need to read Tinder's the Flash. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So good. Oh, yes. I need to read. I dream.

Yeah. Well, yeah, then you, yeah, then consider writing because, boy. No, I don't want to have that, I don't want to write that weird dream where I was Steve Bouchemmy, but then I was also a robot and my flesh had to regrow from an injection. And then when my nerves activated, it was the most painful thing I've ever felt in my life. Anyway, I don't know. I think these sound great. I think you have a future. It'd be more fun. Sure, or not. Any other writing questions?

What do librarians want to know about speaking of how the sausage is made? What do write librarians want to know? I mean, something I'm always curious about is like, so this was a huge thing when the lawsuit with the Internet Archive first start in, which we have talked about extensively. And like, there was kind of a like mask off moment with some authors. And I think partly due to misunderstanding things, but also partly because the Internet Archive was kind of also obfuscating some stuff it was doing. But like at first, when I was like, yeah, this is great. This is legal. I'll go to bat for them.

That like a lot of library authors were like, oh, I love libraries. But that's not what this is, ignoring how the Internet Archive operates and gets a lot of its materials and like what a library is. and this sort of like difference between like the physical material and a digitized version and then also completely like getting author, how authors get screwed over with like ebook deals. Like I've had, I've had. It's a hugely complicated situation. And I mean, and I got called out on it too. I have been added to a list on blue sky as a result.

And it's like, well, that's, you know, fine, fuck you too. But it is, I mean, it's complicated in a bunch of ways. And one of the things that is really hard for people is that not everything wants to be saved. There is this thing of like information wants to be free. Well, maybe. But not everything wants to be saved. And not every author needs to be preserved. Not every work needs to be preserved. Some things can just disappear. And authors play an important, and sometimes, their estates, play an important role in making those decisions. I have, I am, in my previous life, I'm a playwright. I've had a number of plays published. Those plays have gone out of print. One book of plays appeared on the Internet Archive. I wrote in, I will say they were very curious.

I wrote in and I said, I do not want this to be available on the Internet Archive. If someone wants to read the play or produce the play, they can come to me. I am not hard to find. And it was like, oh, but you're going to have, it's like, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know. But I already have lots of problems with people producing my plays and never contacting me and making money that I don't get to make. And you know, it's not like I made money from my plays. So I would like to have that control. Similarly, I would like to have the control for when something goes out of print when it comes to one of my

books. I would like to have the ability to control putting it back into print myself, something I have actually done with books. I would like to control making it available and new and interesting ways. Those things belong to me as an author. I appreciate that people have an appetite for lost work or what's considered to be lost work. And certainly from, for example, a researcher or scholarly perspective, I absolutely understand it. But for people who are doing basically just digital hoarding, on one hand, it can be harmless. On the other hand, what it can do is it can actually kill a market for your work. If your work is being, you know, broadly pirated in the UK, it is enough for publishers to go, we would never be able to sell your book here.

If I wanted to bring back a book that had been out of print, but it is all over the internet, you know, for people to get for free, there's not necessarily an incentive unless we do something in order to enhance it in order to counter what it is that's freely available. There is, has been an always will be a strong argument that piracy is in fact promotion, that pirates actually do buy a lot of stuff, and that if they are sufficiently interested in a work of yours, they will go and they will get it legitimately if it's legitimately available. And there is also, there is also a very strong argument for things like, you know, lost movies, lost TV shows, things that have only been available, untranslated, that now are available translated,

and kind of a creation of an underground of stuff that's passed around. And I can see how that as an aspect of preservation is absolutely worth discussing. One of the biggest problems I had with the Internet Archive was with the Internet Archive specifically. Because it, to me... Brewsters is annoying. Yeah. Because it is neither a repository that people present. participate in willingly, nor is it truly, I mean, it gestures towards being a library, in quotes,

but it is not truly a library. Libraries, for example, buy my books. They do, and I'm very grateful. And libraries control much more effectively who is reading those books. And libraries participate, I admit, in an onerous, usurious system that sells. them e-books at ridiculous, insane, stupid prices. And that's what I was going to ask about. Yeah, and that absolutely needs to be fixed because the idea behind the library from a publisher's point of view is that books decay, you know? If you have a copy of Red X on the shelf, sooner or later, it's either going to fall apart

or it's going to be made redundant in some way. And so it has a limited, pardon the pun, shelf life. And so with e-books, that's not an important. necessarily a problem. E-books can last forever. So the idea, they're not going to, but I mean, they can. So what you can, what the publishers have decided to do is charge absolutely outrageous amounts in order to counteract the fact that that you have something that doesn't literally fall apart at some point, except maybe in a bits and bytes kind of way eventually. So, that's an impetus for what's going on there. The understanding is, conceptually with a library,

is that a book is a kind of an object, and an object has a kind of a lifespan. And some publishers play into that to a certain extent. You see it all the time when books just become remandered, or they just get pitched. And on one hand, it's like restaurants throwing out food. You think to yourself, well, how horrible is that? You could just be giving them away. You could just be giving them to, you know, libraries or schools to wherever. A lot of places don't want books that are on the verge of being tossed out. But apart from that, it's that understanding that a book has a lifespan. And that there are places, there are libraries that are libraries where you can go and you can get books. You know, we already have libraries. Not every library has every book. That's understood. But libraries do exist.

And the libraries we have are already in danger. And why not support those? We are, you already have, we have a similar thing up here. You already have a library of Congress. The Library of Congress already has a copy of every book that has, I think that has an Isban. I think that's how it works. But I, you know, it's supposed to be. Well, because it's not technically our, it's not technically our national library. We don't have one. No, but it does exist as a repository so that while, while it's not about it being accessible to every reader across, you know, the United States or North America, you can't say that the book doesn't exist somewhere. In Toronto, we have. have a reference library where, you know, a large majority of books, including some very old books,

are retained. But we know that libraries, you know, curate their stock and make decisions all the time, right or wrong for what remains on the shelves and remains accessible. And that's part of the library process. And it has become part of, I think, the publishing and the authorial process as well. I am very attracted to books as objects and I, when I write a book, I'm thinking, and particularly with Red X was very obvious, I am thinking about the book as an object and what it represents. And one of the things that it represents to me is a kind of impermanence. So I think that's an important thing to think about. I'll give you another example. There is just an atrocious, It's brilliantly written, but an atrocious short story in an anthology that came out in the 80s.

I have it over here. Is my cord going to reach? Am I going to be able to find this book? Yes, it's right there. It's called On the Line, the book. It's well out of print. New Gay Fiction, edited by Ian Young. Ian Young was a queer professor.

May still be around up here in Canada. This book was published by the Crossing Press in Truman's, New York, and it was published in 1981. I, we had a queer bookstore, still have it in a form, in Toronto called Glad Day. I went into Glad Day. I had just moved to Toronto. I couldn't afford the book at the time, and I stood inside the bookstore, and I read the book. I came back day after day until I finished the book.

And the story that was so absolutely. Horrendous was called A Marriage of Convenience by Peter Burton. This is a story that, I mean, you could write it today. You can write anything today. I don't know that you could get it published today. And I don't know that you could get it published today and be an author who is available on the internet because you, like, it is, I trust me, I'm underselling it, is absolutely appalling.

Needless to say, I love it. I'm very fond of it. I wrote to Peter Burton has since died. It comes as no great surprise. It's been many years. But his most recent partner is still alive. I reached out to him on LinkedIn

of all places and said, listen, I really love this story. I would really like to get permission to reprint it in an anthology of new queer work. And he basically declined, which is his right. And there are any number of reasons why he might have declined. You know, he might not have wanted to have the story created a gigantic fuss. He might not, he might have found something

about it to be painful or personal and he didn't want to do that. He might not have wanted to have, you know, the writer be remembered with this particular story. Or he may not, he may be happy with the way that it landed throughout, you know, its lifetime and it's time for other new work to carry on. Regardless, that was his choice. I asked nicely. He refused nicely. And that's really the end of it. And sometimes that has to be the end of it. If you work really hard, you can find the book online. Fine. And some people have and some people have read it and some people have been sufficiently mortified. But there is a lot to be said for respecting the wishes of the author and the wishes of an estate, and also just the wishes of time. And it allows for the possibility

of rediscovery in different ways. So that's the only, I mean, it's a lot. It's not like I've not said much. I've said a lot. But that's pretty much the only thing that I have to say about it. If it weren't the internet archive, if it weren't centralized in the United States necessarily, if it weren't dependent upon the people it's dependent upon. If it was, say, if it was a Wikipedia-esque sort of thing, or if it was something, you know, maybe, I think there's an argument to be made for something, but I am not convinced for this specific thing that has been now the target of so much attention. Yeah, like, I think, so one of the big arguments that it was making at the time was that, like, oh, those of the things are out of print or more important. importantly for the e-book discussion is that publishers have not made an e-book version of this available to libraries. Because we can't just go buy a Kindle e-book.

No. Right? Like we have to get it through like overdrive or EBSCO or whatever. And so I was, and obviously that's like, you know, real expensive. Especially like public libraries get screwed over harder than academic libraries do. I think. And so I was wondering like how much of like when you are being published when you're, you're writing and you're like talking with your agent or publishers or whatever like when it comes

to discussions of yes, I want an ebook or an audiobook and I want to make that available to libraries. Like, do you have a say in like how that happens or how much is charged for? Yeah. If there's no DRM on it. No, I mean, I have a say in the formats that a book is made available. I don't have a veto, but I have a say. So I, and usually writers want more instead of less, you know, Red X was an interesting puzzle for us for a variety of reasons. I absolutely wanted a physical book for Red X. And there are absolutely a number of publishers who will not give you a physical book. So we'll start there. They will give you an e-book and that's all you'll get. But I was with a publisher who was publishing physical books. The only debate, you know, briefly was, would it be a soft cover or a hard cover? because that's a thing as well.

If there's a hard cover and then sometime later there's a soft cover, if the hard cover doesn't earn out, will there ever be a soft cover? That's very much a discussion. I absolutely wanted an audiobook knowing that it would require some creative production. And I needed to know that the publisher was interested in pursuing that kind of production for the book. If it was just going to be somebody reading it from start to finish, that was not as interesting. to me. At the same time, I would not have been able to say, you know what, you can't have that, I mean, we could have withheld the rights, but the fact is that it is very hard to sell a

book right now and not sell the audiobook rights as part of that package. And it was inevitable that we were going to have an e-book. I had a lot to say about the e-book because so much of what makes the book work is about its physicality. There are things that happen later in the book that can really only happen effectively in a physical book. And it is hard to represent those in an e-book. As it turned out, it is impossible to represent them in a Kindle book because Yeah, yeah, because Kindle has very specific things that are required from the way the text is formatted and presented, which strip away some of the crucial things in the physical

version of Red X. There is a visual distinction between the parts that are fiction and the parts that are essays. A lot of that was lost. There are things that are happening with misprinting starting to happen in the book intentionally. Those things are lost. And so I ended up, when it was made available on Neck Galley in Kindle form, I ended up having to deal with a number of people who are like, I can't review the book in this shape. And I'm like, this is not good. All you, you have, like, help me. And, and so... See, I had no idea, because I read it. I got it through my library, but as a Kindle book. Well, have you, have you seen the physical book? I haven't, like, I know that, like, I think they do, like, typefaces as it different in the killer book. And so I got the, like,

when it turned into you bit. Yeah, like, it's, there's a lot, there's, it's, it's compromised. It's a real problem. So, but I was, but I encourage you to do so. I mean, you don't. I mean, you I don't have to buy it, but you should certainly take a look at it. So I was not in a position to be able to, certainly I was not a position to be able to say, no, there can't be a Kindle book because the Amazon Kindle is the dominant ebook platform in North America. That is just a fact. So, and there is not a way or there wasn't a way, I don't know if that's ever changing, for Red X to be handed over to the Kindle as a PDF. I think they only have their own native form. and that's all there is to it. So that was a drag. And there are going to be, I mean, you know, publishers are going to hate me by the end of this. There are going to be issues with the new book as well because there are some, I will say, interventions in the text that will be a challenge to represent an electronic format. But basically when it comes to negotiating, it's a yes, no situation. We are aware of, as writers, we are aware of what's going on with publishers and libraries.

We have no role in determining how publishers charge for libraries for e-books, under what circumstances, under what terms, for how long. None of that is open to us at all. We aren't in a position to say, no, you can't give it to libraries. We aren't in a position to say you have to give it to libraries for free. We're not really, I think in fact, the only other thing that I haven't touched on that we can really argue about is whether or not there's DRM in the format that is used for the e-book. And even that, there are so few publishers who are willing to have that discussion. Yeah, like, we've had Corey Doctor-O-on before. Exactly. And he has to like, basically like, kickstart all of his stuff because he refuses the DRM.

Yeah, I mean, it's very, I had to, I don't know that I should say this out loud, but I'm going to say it. I had to buy and jailbreak my own book at one point in order to make it available to a book club. You did do crime. Yes. I was, I was very gay and I did crime. But it was like the book was not available to the people who wanted to have a discussion about it. And it was like, I am making it available to you in this limited way, in this limited time. And to do it, I had to crack my own book.

And that is, to me, it's insanity. It is insanity. But that's where we're at, right? That's funny. I'm going to get a DMCA take down. From Shakespeare. That's funny. I brought up self-piracy of authors today at work when I was talking to faculty members because I was,

part of my job is to say, you know, I can give information about author agreements, right? And so, you know, sometimes you get locked into something where it's, you know, I think part of this discussion, we've already gone really long. But part of this, too, is like margins on e-books as well. Like, you know, you can argue as an author for a greater share because the margins for the publisher are going to be different. So when you're writing out that contract and they say 10% on, you know, on this, 15% on that, sometimes they break it down like that. Wiley breaks it down like that, for example. And I think that is, there's a relationship between that and how the pricing

happens to libraries, but I don't think it's just about the pricing. I think it's also the DRM and the control and the way that the e-book gets to the library. That really, that's where the pricing goes and saying it's not really about the author's margins or even like the publisher's margins. No. And the other thing, too, is that while you see those percentages and you're agent sees those percentages in the contract that's proposed to you, your agent generally has a very strong sense, or else they'll ask, of whether or not any of those figures are negotiable.

A lot of those figures are a lot less negotiable than you would think. You are basically being handed something Fedocomplete. And most of the time, what it is, is there is, you know, there's this sort of like unspoken industry standard that if you are, I don't know, Sally Rooney, Nora Roberts, that you can go, no, I want more. And they will go, okay, well, fine, we'll give you like, but I mean, they're not going to give you everything anyway. So, and I'm not Nora Roberts. I've looked, I checked this morning.

It's unfortunate. I've looked at my bank account. I'm not Nora Roberts and I'm not Sally Rooney. So, so I'm, I'm not rolling in money. And, and so I have no clout. And, you know, and what they offer is essentially what you take. You can, you can, you can tinker with things like. what territories are included in the rights that somebody is purchasing?

You know, is it going to be just the United States? Is it going to be North America? Is it going to be North America plus somewhere else? If you have someone who takes over the UK rights, can they have UK rights plus the world or can they have UK rights plus the Commonwealth? If it's someone who's Canadian, are they going to have world rights? Are they going to have North American rights? It's that kind of thing.

But a part and obviously with that, you leverage a tiny bit more money. or a tiny bit less depending. But beyond that, we don't really get as granular as you would think. And we don't have a lot of control over how publishers use our books because, of course, they give out a lot. I mean, for publishers who are concerned about things like, you know, pirating, publishers give out a lot of free copies. And it's good that they give out a lot of free copies because those are promotional copies

that are given at various stages during the publication process. know, from the very beginning, you know, when you have arcs available, and those are uncorrected proofs, right through to when you have a book published. And there are, there are finished versions that are sent all over the place to all kinds of magazines and periodicals, all kinds of websites, all kinds of radio and television stations and organizations, to all kinds of awards, to, you know, like just they're everywhere. So, you know, we see no money from that. And, you know, and truly they are, in fact, doing us a favor because if they weren't sending out stuff for free, I would have to like take books out of my own stash, which I have

personally paid for, theoretically it cost, but all the same. And I would have to like wrap them and ship them and pay for the shipping. So, you know, it's better that they do it than I do it. But those are things that just go into the wind and never get seen again. One of the things that I have a great for secondhand bookstores. I do not have a great love for second hand bookstores that take uncorrected proofs because those don't represent the finished book and those are not for sale. First of all, buddy in, you know, whatever news outlet should not have taken an uncorrected proof and taken it to the second hand bookstore and sold it. And secondly, the second hand book store shouldn't be selling it to the public. The public should never see those. But that's a thing that

happens. So, yeah, I mean, there is, there is a squishy spot where making books available for promotion becomes, can become problematic. And, and there is this, I don't understand this, this hostility, because it is hostile, I think, this hostility between publishers and libraries. Libraries are doing writers and publishers a tremendous service, just a tremendous service. If I go to a library and I get a book, as I frequently do, bring it home and I love it, then I will buy it. I will just buy it. And if it's not buyable, then, you know, that's fine. The library has it.

And, you know, the library has the apparently illicit complete works of William Shakespeare. I don't have to buy them for myself. So, you know, so that's a good thing. And the other thing that I want to say about libraries that I think is important to touch on is that particularly now, but even when I was a child, and we're talking a long time ago, libraries are more than just books. Libraries are more than just warehouses of books. Libraries are community hubs. libraries provide a tremendous number of services to people in neighborhoods. When I was a child, particularly when I was a queer child, I escaped my home to the local library and it was my second home. I mean, some people will be horrified by this.

I assure them this was a good thing. I learned about being queer. I learned about what it meant. I learned about the history of it. I learned about the present of it in like 1968 when I was a child reading at the library. As you could tell from reading Red X, I had many issues with my mother. One issue I did not have with my mother, she let me read whatever I wanted. I reached a particular age and it was like, you just do it.

And so I would read surprisingly mature material for my age at the library. If I didn't get stuff and it went over my head, that was just fine. if I did get it even better, and I read a lot of stuff that was tremendously important to me as a queer person as a result of the library. And I developed a much better understanding of myself. I also, because of the time that I was reading there, which would have been around, say, 1968, 6970 through to about 1977, 1977, 1978. That was a really important time for black writing. It was particularly an important time for black poetry. There was a lot of Latinx stuff that was starting to come up as well. It was a tremendously important time for horror. It was a really

fascinating time for books dealing with feminism, dealing with queer sexuality. And all of that was available to me and really made me into the writer who I am now. And I think that libraries save queer and trans children every single day just through their existence. Yeah, you need a polished version of that so that you can make the big bucks when they invite you to speak at aLA next year. Yeah, because they are. I mean, you're on the radar now. Yeah. I know that we are followed by one of the candidates for the next president of ALA. Well, sure. Fly me down.

Yeah. Fly me down. I have things to say. I mean, and the ultimate thing I have to say is that I mean, I love libraries. And I think libraries are vital institutions. They are a public good. Every single public good, I mean, not just in North America, but worldwide is being eroded. and intentionally because I think the people who are doing the eroding understand the power of things like libraries.

Libraries are places where we share community knowledge. And that is something that has always, I think, been unsettling and disconcerting to people who would rather that we'd be ignorant. The way that schools are being eroded, the way that other institutions are being eroded, libraries are being eroded because of fear of people knowing too much and people having exposure to ideas that are not coming to them through, you know, streaming channels. And so it's a really, it's vital that we keep them alive and it's vital that we keep librarians safe. And that, I mean, patrons, authors, the whole infrastructure, but librarians in particular need to be kept safe. And that, if they want me to say that, fly me down. I'll come for a visit. I don't care.

I'm just doing a big thumbs up like, hey, you got to keep telling us. Thank you very much. Was there any final thing that you wanted to let the listeners know about before we wrap up? Let me take a look at our little list because we had a little list and God only knows. Yeah. Have we touched on practically everything on our... little list. I was wondering how we were going to swing it back to libraries, but you did the segue for me. So yeah, I think we hit everything. Yeah, well, that's good. I'm glad about that. I, let me just, let me just scan through it. Green News, but big five. How big, I'm building a career, building a career. So we didn't really talk a lot about self-publication. I mean,

there's not a lot to say about it. It's, it's an option for writers. But no one, I mean, I, it can be a jumping off point for writers, but I don't think it's much more than that. in its current format, particularly working with things like Ingram. Books I got out of the library at a young age. I heard you mention some of the horror that you were reading, I believe. Yeah, I mean, when I read a lot of stuff, first of all, I read voraciously just within the children section. And a lot of the classic children fiction, children's fiction of that period, I don't even know how much of it continues to be available. Like, you know, the Phantom Toll Booth and the borrowers, I mean, obviously a wrinkle in time was a huge thing for me.

All of Madeline Lungale's books were. There were a lot of books from that period that, and really from like, because when we talk about that, there were books that were still in print from the 50s. So I read a ton of that stuff as a child. But of course, I was aware that the real juice was available on the other side of the building. And so I started wandering over there from time to time, and I would be careful not to necessarily take books out, but to read them on the spot. And I think that was still for the library and something that they were keeping an eye on all the time. And so early books for me, like when I was young, will say like 12 or so, were things like Rosemary's Baby, the other by Thomas Tryon, which was, which is a covertly, he was a covertly, he was a queer writer, although not particularly out at the time that he was writing.

It was a covertly unsettling, queer-inflicted horror novel. And it really was the novel that started the horror trend during that period. It's a tremendous book, and will always have a great impact on me. Of course, I read The Haunting of Hellhouse. I read a book called Farrell by, I think it was Gerard Bouesh, about a killer cat, which sounds ridiculous, but was, in fact, really effective and was basically the precursor to Stephen King's Coojo. And then from there, it was like, you know, Stepford Wives, The Exorcist, and a variety of other things.

And then I, and I fanned out from there to a lot of literature of the 70s, because the literature of the 70s was very much a talking point on talk shows on television, where you would see authors interviewed on the radio among, you know, your parents' friends, among other people at the library. So I ended up reading, you know, like people like John Updick and John Updick and Cheever and early Margaret Atwood and I don't know, Philip Roth. I read Portnoy's complaint because of course I was also interested in so-called dirty books, things like that. And that really, and at a certain point, I think my mother came in at one point with me just to do her own sort of like, you know, book borrowing. And they sort of took her aside and said, do you know

what your son is reading? And she basically, she left a note with them saying, David couldn't take out whatever he wants. And I was like, oh, okay. And I tested that a little. And I don't think my mother was impressed with some of my choices, but she never really gave me any trouble for them. So that was a huge part of what made me a writer, was the access to some really great writing and some really great writing of that period. And writing that reflected a huge range of knowledge and opinion that would not normally have been available to me as a child in Winnipeg, Manitoba in like the late 60s and early 70s. So that was a big thing. And, and I'm a Well, and you know, and you can't help but have those books shape you. I mean, my other, my mother was also big on reading to us when we were children. And that also was very important because that was about learning about how books work as sound, as, as words in your head. I think it's really important whenever it's possible to do so to, to hear books being read and to be read to by a parent or even by, you know, someone else who's close to you in your life.

Because that's where a lot of books really come alive is when you hear them. I used to be really resistant to doing readings in my book until I recognize that a lot of people come to readings specifically for that experience, for having something come off the page. And in fact, one of the most seminal experiences that way for me was, it's irony that I used the word seminal for this. I had read early Margaret Atwood, and I did not really understand Margaret Atwood. I wasn't dumb. I just would be reading the books and I would be like, I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it.

And then I went to, and I'd never seen her. I went to a reading where she was launching, wasn't the launch, but she was launching Life Before Man, which was probably her breakout hit in Canada. And she read from it and the whole thing transformed because she has this very dry sense of humor that came through in her reading. And as soon as I heard it in her voice, I never stopped hearing her reading in her voice. All of her writing suddenly appeared that way, even like Handmaid's Tale, even, you know, Ailius Grace, all of it. And it was just everything clicked. And I thought to myself, that's probably going to be true for me too. Some people are just not going to get what I'm on

about until I actually read it out loud. So that I think is a critical part of the process as well. Yeah, I'm definitely big on on audiobooks for fiction simply because... Have you heard the audiobook for Red X? I just bought it. Probably while we were talking because I decided to. Which is great. I am tremendously proud of it. It was funny because, of course, one of the things they will do when they sign the contract

and they get production going and stuff like that, they will ask you routinely, do you want to read your book. And the Red X, I think, is something like 11 or 12 hours long. It's a lot of work. So I said no. I would like it if you would hire an actor to do it, please. But I said, I would like to read the essays. And they said, oh, of course, absolutely. And then, of course, there's a part of the book where the essay voice and the fiction voice start to merge. And how that is handled in the audiobook, I think, is just masterful. And similarly, the special effects in the book are now special effects in the audiobook. And I think they're beautifully handled as well. It is just a wonderful piece of audio theater. And I am hugely proud of it. So I urge you to listen to it.

Yeah, I heard you talk about that merging. And I thought that was so cool. Because this was like something I just heard like 15 minutes before we sat down to talk. I was like, I've got to get this. now because I love good adaptations of audiobooks or some where I feel like I always feel weird about full casting ones. But then you also have the other side where people are like, is the male reader going to do the voice when he gets to a woman character? Yeah. Which I know drives some people crazy.

Yeah, it's hard. I know like the key characters in the new book are all women. but there are absolutely some significant male characters who will need to be represented somehow. So there's at least two actors who are going to be involved. And it's all British. So it's not going to be Korean and it's not going to be me. I mean, you could hire us as novelties, but we would be terrible. So we already know that it's going to be, you know, at least two voices in some kind of

produced format. I don't particularly need an audiobook to be a theatrical production, but I do, I do want to have the texture of the book represented in some way. There are a lot of good narrators who are able to transcend these kinds of issues and who are able to read characters regardless gender or background and not fall into like, you know, grim stereotypes. And those people are just fantastic. But you also have to have some sensitivity about how it is that you are representing difference in in, in this kind of environment because people are going to be highly sensitized to it and rightly so. So, you know, I would be hesitant to have, it's not impossible, but I would be hesitant to have a black performer, you know, substituted for, you know,

like, sorry, I'm getting it the wrong way around, a white performer substituted for a black performer in reading a significant black character. To me, that's like, why are you doing that? What's that about? So at the same time, we had characters in Red X, you know, all the races, like all the, all the gender identifications, and I think the performer we had handled all that stuff really beautifully.

And so, you know, there are ways to make it work, but I don't think you need a cast of 20. I do think, though, you know, I mean, I think in many ways, the getting the writer to read everything. It's kind of a, is kind of a way out of that because it's like, well, it's the writer. But, but at the very least, I like to have some sense when, when characters are having a dialogue, that, that dialogue is, is being made kind of real for me. So that's, yeah, it's a, it's an, it's an interesting puzzle. I'm looking forward to seeing how

they solve it for the new book, because the new book is entirely correspondence with the exception of some documents. So, so you can do a lot with just individual performers. So, so we'll see. Do you guys pay an enormous amount for audiobooks as well? Yes. Yeah, and I mean, I don't know how public libraries, because like usually with like overdrive and Libby, I, like, isn't there's just like a package sometimes you get like, do you get to like do individual things. But I know for academic libraries, like, I might sometimes it's like based on like the size of your full-time enrollment if you're an academic library. Sometimes it's not, but like, the library I'm a director at, we have about 300 students. So we are like very small. And still,

sometimes I've had to pay for e-books, like $300. Yeah. Like for one user at a time. Yeah. No. And that's, yeah. I can't imagine what it's like for like large state schools. It's probably more expensive than a car. Yeah. I mean, I have no idea how any of that pricing works. And of course, in a public library where you're like, oh, we're going to have, you're going to have like 10 e-books in stock. It's like, well, what does that mean? How much is that? How does that get represented? But at the same time, there's nothing more gratifying than, you know, looking and going, oh, my God, they're all out. People are reading. People are reading. So, yeah, I mean, with budgets so tight and decisions being made, you know, that are really difficult in order to keep libraries alive.

I mean, I honor anything that they can do, but clearly something has to happen where this gets renegotiated because I think it's just painfully unfair. Yeah, we don't purchase audiobooks in my library, so I've never seen what the pricing would look like for us. But I can't tell you the highest e-book. I think the record is about $30,000 for an e-book. For what? It's like a car. This is probably like a chemistry book or something or an encyclopedia. How many seats did it have for it?

No, it was like one. So one person at a time? Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's, but you didn't have to repay for it. No. Yeah. That's, that's, but only one person at a time. That's madness.

Yeah. That's mad. I try to do unlimited when I can because sometimes you, those come with like a DRM free option. If you buy the unlimited users at a time, at least through the EPSCO platform. And sometimes like I've bought. books like that for like, I don't know, 50 bucks. But sometimes, it depends on if it's viewed as a textbook. Yeah.

Or not often if it's a textbook, then they just jack up the price is really high. Or they won't sell it. Yeah. Yeah. Or they won't sell it. Yeah. Speaking of, Citi probably needs to take care of their household. It's also past 10.30 p.m. for me, I'm on the East Coast.

Oh, shh. Well, and it's midnight for me. So, you know, there you go. Yeah. What time zone is Toronto in? No, I'm not in Toronto. I'm in St. John's Newfoundland. I am in Newfoundland time. Yeah.

I am all the way out of east. Like, I am closer to Ireland than I am to Toronto. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I still have in New Hampshire, I heard it argue that New Hampshire shouldn't be in Eastern time, that it should be one over. Over?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, then there's Atlantic time and then there's Newfoundland time. We are our own time. We are a half hour beyond everybody else. So, a half hour. Yeah, a half hour beyond Atlantic time. It's crazy. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's a weird thing. But I mean, I thought you were in Toronto. No. No. I was in, I was in Toronto for decades, you know, for like 38 years. And then, and then they moved out here to be with my husband and the house. And, and, and I've been. here for just over a year. I think it's something like 14 months. So. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's very small. It's a city of 150,000 people. And, and, and of course,

it is 800 to 1,000 miles away from everything. So, yeah. So any, now, unfortunately, now any trip, I shouldn't tell this while the, the ALA people are on, any trip is an additional $1,000 Canadian just to get me to a hub to go somewhere else. So it's quite annoying. They're trying to bring back international flights here, but we have very few so far. So we'll see how it goes. Maybe, maybe, well, by summer we're going to have a couple more, but maybe by next year, we will, we'll have easier access to London, we'll have easier access to Ireland, we'll have easier access to the states directly from here. That would be ideal. So, okay. Well, David, Thank you so much for spending all this time with us and telling us.

You're very welcome. I was more than happy to do it. And, oh, I will say, I mean, again, I'm not going to encourage you. But on the line, should you be skulking around in places like, oh, I don't know, the Internet Archive? And should you decide to read the absolutely abhorrent story, a marriage of convenience by Peter Burton, don't tell me about it. It is $20 on Amazon. Definitely not searching it right now. It is.

I do have the tab on it. Yeah, it's $20 for East copy on Amazon. Well, then I, you know, that's a deal. Or like A-Books or something? Yeah, that's a good deal. I do think I got this off of A-Books, I think. I love A-Books. Yeah.

I mean, it's got a, I mean, you know, it's got 18 stories and it's William Burroughs, Peter Burton, who I'd never heard of. I don't know if it's Felice, Pekano. James Purdy, Tom Remy, who is a really underknown fantasy and science fiction author, who was queer, David Watmo, George Whitmore, Edmund White. I mean, it's a really interesting snapshot of writing in the early 80s. So, yeah, it's a... Who's the editor? The editor's Ian Young.

Ian Young. Yeah. Am I trying to ILL it and see what shows up? Yeah. Homosexuality is a subject of fiction is as old as the epic of Gilgamesh or the satirica. Yeah, that's exactly how every introduction was written in 1981. That is totally it. But yeah, no, it's good.

It's good. All right. Good night.