Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #623: Mailbag Columns

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

One of the things I enjoy doing is answering questions from the fans. In this podcast, I explore the many ways I do that.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today is all about mailbag. Now, it's not a mailbag podcast. I do those from time to time. It is a podcast about doing various mailbag things, be it on my blog, in my column, here on the podcast. I'll talk about answering other people's questions and how they came about and why I do it and the philosophy behind it. But before I get to that, you guys have said you like behind the scenes stuff, so I'll share a little behind the scenes. Yesterday, so basically I drive to work four days a week. I work at home on Fridays and I need to record two podcasts during the week.

So what happens is, on Monday, I'll record a podcast. If it goes well, great. If not, I'll re-record it on Tuesday. And then, basically, I keep doing it until I get two podcasts. Sometimes, Monday, Tuesday, I'm done. Wednesday and Thursday, I don't record stuff. Sometimes, it takes all week long. I've had a few weeks where it took all week long to do one podcast so anyway, Monday this week I did my podcast it went great, wonderful Tuesday yesterday I was doing my podcast on the mailbag column it was going pretty well and then I got to work and normally when I get to work

I check to see how long I've been driving whether there's traffic and stuff and I accidentally, right when I was about to end I hit the end before I recorded my tag my, you know, I'm here at work. You know what that means. And so I went online to my Twitter and I said to people that, hey, I did this podcast. It went pretty well.

But I didn't record the outro, as they call it. Should I redo it again or not? And almost like 98% said just keep it. But because I'd already, like, because I'd done my first two podcasts, I decided I was going to try again to do this podcast. And if I liked it better, I would just keep this one. But if I liked yesterday's better, then I'd keep that one. So you guys will only know this if I kept this one.

So I decided, but I decided, well, I liked yesterday's episode. I had some time and I figured why not try it again? Uh, for those that don't know, by the way, I do no editing. I get in the car, I hit start, I get there, I hit stop. Um, so when people are like, oh, can't you just edit it in? I don't do editing. It's, in some level, could I learn how to do editing? I guess I can. I mean, it's, I'm not anti-editing or anything. It's just, there's something about the show that's very pure in the I start and stop, and so I've chosen not to do editing for some aesthetic reason, I guess. But anyway, so today is,

I mean, as far as you guys know, it's the first time I'm doing this, but I'm just letting you behind the scenes this is the second time I'm doing this. Normally when I do it again, obviously I don't let you guys know whether or not it's the first or second time or third or fourth time I'm doing this? Normally when I do it again, obviously I don't let you guys know whether or not it's the first or second time or third or fourth time I'm doing it. But that's a normal process for me is to do things and if I'm not super happy, I redo them.

And I probably redo close to half of my, I mean, just because I have the time. Just because I have the time. Oh, someone's honking at me. Just because I have the time, I often will record things to try to get them even better.

Because what I find is usually the first time I do something, I'll structure it some. But after I've done it once, the second time I have a little better idea what I'm doing. Anyway, just some behind the scenes stuff. Okay, so now let's talk mailbag. Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning, for me at least. So the very first thing I ever did connected to magic was I did magic the puzzling in the duelist. That's my first connection with wizards was doing a puzzle column in magic's magazine called the duelist. And so one of the things I did is I was active on the usernet at

the time, the bulletin board, so the early internet. And so I let it be known to, oh, so the way the puzzles worked was we would give you the puzzle, but we wouldn't give you the answer till the next duelist. And the idea was that if we gave the answer, people would just look at it. But if we didn't give the answer, then you kind of had to figure it out. And then the next issue, we'd give you the answer. And so what happened was, that honk was not at me, by the way. What happened was that I would, on the Usenet, say to people, hey, if you think you have the answer, you can mail it to me, and I'll tell you whether you have the answer or not. Be aware there wasn't that many people in the Usenet.

It wasn't like I indicated a lot of people did this, but a few people did. They go, oh, I think I have it. And then they'd send it to me. Either I'd say, oh, you got it, or I'd say, oh, here's why it doesn't work. Step five, you did this. You can't do that, or whatever. And occasionally from that, people knew my email. And so I'd have people write, mostly I got my first few fan letters

of people that just liked the puzzle column and wrote to say, oh, I really like the puzzle column. Sometimes when people would get the answers, they also would write it and say they liked it. But anyway, that was my first sort of interaction with sort of fan email. So then I got hired by Wizards, and I continued on the Usenet, just sort of being a voice trying to collect information. So one of the things I did when I started working at Wizards is I was very open that, oh, I got hired for Wizards. I'm not working at Wizards. Hey, if you guys have any input or

you care about anything, let me know. And so people started sending me mail. Then I became the editor-in-chief of The Duelist. And one of the things I said, I used to write a column called Mark My Words, which was like the editor column. And I would say to people, hey, I want to hear what you have to say. From time to time, I think I would occasionally put a letter in it. And anyway, that definitely started down this path of me sort of encouraging people to write, write to me. So when I was putting together the magic website, so at some point we decided that we wanted a better presence online. While Wizards had a website

it didn't really have, there wasn't reasons to visit and stuff. And so I sort of started up the website and this is when I started doing Making Magic. Anyway, one of the things we started doing when we first started the website was something called Question of the day. And the way it worked was we had an email. Anybody could write any questions they wanted. And we would then go track down the most appropriate person to answer the question. Oh, you have a rules question? Well, why not have the rules manager of magic answer that for you?

You want to know why a certain card had a certain art? We'll get the art director to tell you. Why did we design the card a certain way? Maybe I would tell you. So we'd go to the source of whoever was the most appropriate person to answer that. So it turned out that the question of the day was a big pain in the neck for Aaron Forsythe was the very first editor-in-chief. That's what got him hired at Wizards. The first thing he did. He eventually would come into R&D and obviously

be very successful in R&D. But when he started at Wizards, he was an editor, the editor-in-chief of the website. And what happened was he would get a whole bunch of questions, figure out who the most appropriate person was and then send out a whole bunch of questions. I was very good about sending them back, obviously. I answer questions pretty quickly. But most people... Excuse me. Oh, sorry.

Most people did not send them back. So Aaron was constantly bugging people. Eventually, we stopped doing the question of the day just because it was so hard to get the questions done. But anyway, one of the questions of the day was, why do you make bad cards? Uh, and I answered that one. It was up my alley.

And I gave the short answer. I mean, I think I wrote three or four paragraphs, but I, I gave the, you know, more condensed answer. Um, and essentially I, I sort of said like, we make bad cards because we kind of have to make bad cards for many reasons. But there's no way really to make magic the way we make magic and not have people consider cards to be bad. So I got a letter from a guy named Nathan. I don't remember his last name. But this very scathing letter about how dare you make bad cards.

And it really sort of responded very negatively to my answer or my question of the day. So I ended up writing an article about bad cards. So I started by giving his letter. And in its entirety, it was a little lengthier letter. And then I explained the mini—I went into detail, you know, that what I had said before— I mean, I was saying the same thing, but in, you know, more elaborate explanation. Because part of what I was trying to explain in my bad card article, which you guys can go read, is, you know, a lot of what people consider bad cards are just, this isn't for you, it's for somebody else, you know. Or this card has another purpose.

This is a limited card, not a constructed card, and that there's only so many constructed cards. And I explained all the different reasons. And that article ended up being really popular. It's one of the, it's like the sixth or seventh article I ever wrote, but it really helped define the kind of stuff I wanted to do. And it encouraged me to do other articles based on letters. And then eventually I decided just to do a mailbag column.

I'll just answer questions. And that went over really, really well. Players, you know, for a couple reasons. One is that people really enjoyed seeing themselves in the letter column and people enjoyed seeing people they knew and just seeing fans even if they didn't know they were. It was kind of cool to see, well, what do the fans want to know? What do the players want to know?

And you guys asked great questions. And so it was, you know, like, it was good content. There was really interesting questions asked. And, you know, it allowed me to answer some things. Like, one of the things normally when you write a column is, the column is all themed. And so if I have something I want to explain, but it a little tiny thing and it doesn't fit a larger context, it's kind of hard sometimes to explain that because the column is about something.

But a mailbag column is like, oh, well, I'm answering questions. The theme is I'm answering questions. So if someone asks me something that, look, it's only 400 or 500 words, I can explain that. And then the rest of the column doesn't have to be about that theme at all. or 500 words, I can explain that and then the rest of the column doesn't have to be about that theme at all. And so mailback columns allowed us to sort of make a very different kind of column

that allowed me to answer a lot of smaller things that might be harder normally in my column. And, like I said, it was, people really enjoyed like, getting players to ask things. And one of the things I also did is I want to make sure that it wasn't just,

I wanted people that were being critical. You know, one of the things about doing mailbag things is, look, we don't do everything right. There's things we do wrong. If people have, you know, legit complaints about things, hey, I want a voice that, hey, we're somebody who, we want to hear constructive feedback. We want to hear, if you don't like something, we do want to know that. And printing letters where you get to see other people being critical makes you feel like, oh, it's okay to be critical. I will note, by the way, my comment whenever I talk about this is, there's a difference between being critical and being mean.

I think that it's very possible to say, I don't like something, or I like something to be different in a way that's not impolite, essentially. I mean, I think that when you're writing things, you need, that there's some civility that you need. And we'll get to my blog in a second, but I do think it's important that, you know, you let people understand that, look, you know, there's a way to not like something and have issues and want to improve upon it in a way that doesn't require a nasty tone. You know, we work really hard to make the game.

I'm not saying we never make mistakes. I'm not saying we can't be better. But it's never bad because we didn't put a real faith effort to try to make the best we could. You know, it's never any mistakes we make is not out of, you know, ill will or something. It's not like we're, ha ha, we don't want you to like something. We're trying our hardest to make you like it. And that doesn't mean we won't make mistakes or not do it the way you like it. But, you know, we try hard to do what we do. So, you know, when you have feedback, you know, be polite about it. Not that you can't be constructive, but be polite.

So anyway, so I started doing mailbag columns in my, so that's the first mailbag columns I did, really. I had answered a few individual, like letters showed up, I think, a little bit in the do list, but not, that wasn't something we did on any regular basis. It wasn't really until the website, in my column, where we really started doing regular mailbag columns. And I did them first. A few other people started doing mailbag columns.

I'm the one that tends to do them regularly, mostly because I have the most interaction with the public and I get the most mail. And so it's the easiest to do them. So a couple of things that I learned along the way about doing mailbag columns. One is I used to do the mailbag columns from my email. This is also back in the time where most of my mail was email. With the advent of social media, a lot, people tend to contact me a lot more through social media than they do, for example, through my email, although I have an email. So the bottom of every column I do, there's a link to my email. I will always say in the last paragraph of every column I write,

hey, if you have any feedback, drop me an email, and there's a link there. And that's an email that you can send me my stuff. I do read my email. So if you have any things and would like to use email, you can. You can send me email. What I learned along the way is when I'm trying to do a mailbag column, the technology I learned is making use of Twitter. Twitter does two things for me. One is that I have a pretty big following on Twitter. I don't know exactly where I'm at, but I'm in the

high 80, low 90 thousands, I think. And if I ask for a question, A, I get a lot of people responding very quickly. And by asking for a single tweet, um, I get very condensed questions, which just makes for a better column, um, that Twitter makes people, because I asked for a single tweet, like, uh, it used to be 140 characters, now it's 280 characters, but it's just not that long. So people ask, um, and normally when I do it, I ask for a single question in a single tweet. Uh, and that allows me to just be concise. Um, the one thing that, uh, as I talk about my different mailbag things today, one of the things that I've been working really hard to do is make sure that all my mailbag items are

different from each other so that there's something unique in each one of them. And what I've decided for my mailbag columns online is I like to go a bit more in depth. I like to pick quite, I mean, not that I won't answer things that don't require going in depth if I have a clean, simple answer, but the place, the thing that I do in my column is I can go down deep on something. If someone asks something like, oh, that's a really, you're hitting an interesting point, you know, and to explain the answer that you're asking to the question you're asking, I can go a little deeper and explain some philosophy. And I like using my column to sort of use the questions as springboards to discuss interesting stuff. Some behind the scenes stuff, some philosophy

stuff, some color pie stuff, just really going a little deeper and talking about why or how we're doing something. The other thing I've learned about my column is that the more focused the mailbag usually, the better it is, then I like to have some theme to my mailbag. It just makes it feel a little more coherent. So, for example, the most common mailbag I do now is tied to sets. So, for example, the most common mailbag I do now is tied to sets. For example, most recently I wrote Ravnica Allegiance. I say, okay, hey, ask me questions about it, and then I answer questions about it.

And that every standard legal set and some supplemental sets, depending on my involvement with them, sometimes if there's something that have absolutely nothing to do with, it gets tricky to answer questions just because there's so many questions I don't have the answer to. But I do all stand-in legal sets, and usually if I have some connection to the supplemental set, I often will also answer questions about that. The other thing I do from time to time is I do mailbags where it's on some offbeat topic. Usually what I like to do is themes that inspire a lot of different kinds of questions. I do like having different questions, but I like them focused to a certain extent. So the one I did for a while, which I'm not sure if I finished yet, I did a who, what, why, where series where it was like all the questions were starting with who.

All the questions were starting with where. And it just gave some sort of connection and I was able all the questions were starting with who? All the questions were starting with where? And it just, it gave some sort of connection and I was able to answer questions. But having some sort of theme is nice. It just gives a little bit more of a, I don't know, aesthetic to the column. Okay, so that is me writing on my column. And I continue to mail back columns.

I do many, many, like I said, I do every standard legal set. So that is at least four columns, and often those are two parts. So often those are almost eight columns, and then maybe one or two others. So I probably do, I would say about one-fifth to one-sixth of my columns are mailbag columns. I find them to be, I find them to be really, really, I mean, you guys, the audience really likes them. They provide really interesting content. And they allow me to, you know, address the players in a really direct way. The other thing, by the way, that people really like is seeing their name. Like, it means a lot to people to see

them, their question get answered. Okay, so let's go on to my next mailbag thing, my blog. Blog-a-tog. Okay, so the history of the blog is I started making a comic online, now known as Tales from the Pit. Actually, I guess it was always known as Tales from the Pit. I got this app that let you make comics out of pictures pictures and the first few I posted were just me being silly. I thought that was funny. And then I just did it for a bunch of days in a row and then I started just, I never stopped. It's like, okay, and I started making a comic. And today

I, I think today was the 1968th comic I think I did today. So anyway, I'm well into that. I now have the longest running magic comic. Anyway, I started my blog to be a place to put my comics so there was a place for my comic to be. I would also put it on Twitter and stuff, but Twitter just goes so fast sometimes you would miss it, where it was easier on the blog to go back and look. But there's this little box when you sign up for Tumblr that says, do you want to let people ask you questions?

And it seems so innocent to the top. I'm like, oh, sure, I like answering questions. And what happened was, once players were aware they could ask me questions, they did. And so my blog really turned into kind of an ongoing daily mailbag. I mean, I do post my daily comics there every day, every weekday. On Fridays, I post this podcast. By the way, if you did not know this, my podcast goes in my column on Mondays.

But if you go to my social media, including my Twitter, my Tumblr, my Google+, I post my podcast on Friday, so you get it extra early if you follow me on social media. So I post my comic, my podcast. I post my column on Monday. So, and I reblog some stuff there. So, I mean, my blog is not just me answering questions, but because I do a lot of answering questions, it's the majority of it.

And what I found was that people really, really, really enjoy me answering the questions. So I decided, because I wanted the blog to be a little bit different from my column, and I wanted to sort of play into the strength of the blog, my philosophy of my mailbag stuff on my blog is I try to answer as many questions as possible. So what that means is I answer more questions but quicker and shorter. Also, the tone of the blog is, it's a little less

formal. If you ever watched me answering questions on my column, not that I'll never make a joke, but I'm a little more serious. My general tone in my column is a little more serious. It's not that I don't make jokes or things, but it's, it's, it's a little heavier. I mean, a little more serious. Um, my blog, I made a conscious decision just to be a little lighter. Uh, I mean, my background is comedy writing. So, I mean, I, um, I have a conscious decision just to be a little lighter. I mean, my background is comedy writing, so I mean, I have a little bit more fun, I guess, on my blog, and that allows me to answer questions that are a little less serious. I'll definitely have a little more attitude.

The other thing that went on in my blog, which is really interesting, is because of the nature where I answer stuff and people can ask questions right away, there's a lot of sort of threads that happen essentially where somebody asks something, I answer it, and that inspires another person to ask a related question. So if you read my blog, one of the things you'll see is, and this is unique to my blog, in that the mailbag

has a sort of an ongoing feel to it, that there are themes that weave through it, and that there is a sense of continuity. If you read my column, it is not that I won't refer back. Like, let's say I'm answering, I don't know, 15 questions, and question number 14 refers to question number 3 in some way. And I'll say, oh, as I said above, I'll refer to that I said that. But the questions are all really isolated questions. Sometimes when people ask questions on Twitter, they'll see somebody else asking a question and go, oh, that reminds me. And

so every once in a blue moon, they're connected, but very, very rarely. Where on my blog, they're connected all the time. It's very often where I answer a question and that just spurs more questions. And so if you read my blog, one of the things I recommend is reading it from, go as low down as you can and having not read the stuff because I answer in order and that there is sort of a, if you read from the top down you're going backwards chronologically, and so you're missing a little bit of the nuance of the stuff that's going on.

I mean, you can read it that way if you want, but, so the unique thing about my mailbag column on my blog is, A, there is, in some ways it has more continuity, that it sort of strings together, and there's a larger sort of story being told that a lot of times I answer something and people start, like, want to know more. And so the depth, even though I answer shorter questions, sometimes the depth, I mean, I'm more likely on my column to go into length about philosophy or something.

But when players want to understand something and I answer part questions on my blog, they'll go, oh, well, how about this? Or how about that? And if you add all my questions together, sometimes I go in more detail because people are sort of wanting to know something. So there's a little more back and forth on my blog that I think is, I don't know, fun and cool to see. The other thing, like I said, is my tone's a little bit different. I'm a little more jokier. There's running jokes and things. Like if

you are a regular reader of my blog, I call it the question marks, there are running jokes I do. There are things that, like, there are certain questions that get asked all the time that I make fun of, but they get asked all the time. And if you're a regular reader, I mean, there's some ongoing regular jokes that come up. And so there is part of reading the blog

is there's a community on the blog. It's a little different animal from my mailbag. So it is a different feel. So if you like my mailbag stuff and like a daily dose of my mailbag, the blog is where you go. Okay, but that's not the only place I do mailbag. The other big place I do mailbag is here on my podcast.

So what happened was, when I first started doing this podcast, Matt Cavata, a lot of you know as the artist Matt Cavata, although he works at Wizards, does graphic design, a lot of other stuff, way back when he was in R&D and he used to do names and flavor texts for a while. way back when he was in R&D and he used to do names and flavor texts for a while. Anyway, Matt would often get a ride to work. And so he lived real near me at the time. And so he was a regular on the show.

So maybe once a month, Matt would appear on the podcast. And so at some point, and early on, we just would talk about topics that Matt, like usually when I have a guest, we talk about a topic my guest is an expert in. Since you guys have heard me talk about everything I know, it's fun to have somebody who has some expertise beyond mine. And usually I'm sort of feeding them questions

because they're the ones that know the topic. And adding stuff where I have something to add in. So anyway, Matt and I have done a lot of stuff about art or about writing subjects and this and that. So one day I said to Matt, I have an idea. I do a mailbag column online on my column that's very popular. It'd be kind of

neat to do one here, but I need somebody to sort of read the questions. So what I did was I went on Twitter. I said, ask me questions. Matt and I are going to do on my podcast, we're going to answer questions. And then what I did is I copied every question. Not every question I can answer.

One of the things about mailbag columns, by the way, is one of the nice things about them is I get lots of questions so I can pick and choose what I want to answer. So, I mean, the reason I won't answer things is sometimes they're topics I'm not allowed to talk about or I'm not really the expert on the topic so it's hard for me to talk about any depth

or it's something that I don't have a clean answer to or it's something that involves upcoming products that I'm you know I'm not going to talk yet that maybe later I can talk about and so it's nice in doing the mailbag that I can pick and choose and try to I want to make the strongest content I can make so what I did when I did this with Matt is I took every question that I could answer. I weeded out the stuff that I really couldn't answer. I just had no expertise in it at all. So I gave Matt a lot, I got a lot of questions. So I said, Matt, okay, ask me any question

you want. It's up to you. And so we called it Mailbag with Matt. And the questions were not just to me. They're also to Matt because they know that Matt was in the car. In fact, usually whenever I have a guest in the car and we're doing mailbag, a lot of the questions get at the other person because I get to answer questions all the time. So anyway, Matt and I did mailbag with Matt and it went real well. We had fun doing it. And so the podcast is a couple of things about the mailbags that are different. One is I have another person because of the nature of having mailbags where I'm writing, we get two people.

So having a mailbag column with two people answering, you get a dialogue. That's just a very different, it's a very different, like we get to sort of feed off each other and someone will say something and the other person goes,

oh yeah, you know, and so there's a back and forth. Sometimes one of us will ask questions to the other one. Like sometimes someone will ask Matt a question, Matt will answer. I know there's a back and forth. Sometimes one of us will ask questions to the other one. Sometimes someone will ask Matt a question. Matt will answer. I know there's more interesting things there, so I might ask a further question

to get Matt to talk more about it. Or maybe I have additional information that I can jump in and talk about. So the back and forth is a little bit different. That's something that is kind of unique to the podcast, just having two people. And also having somebody else answer. While I've done lots and lots of unique to the podcast, just having two people, and also having somebody else answer. While I've done lots and lots of mailback comps,

a few other people have done them. The development column has done them from time to time, and there's been a few other people that have occasionally done mailback comps. No one really does them the regularity that I do them, just because I get the most mail, just because of my interaction with you guys. But there are a few other mailback comps. but it's not often that you get to sort of

have multiple people answer. That's cool. And you just get to hear from other people. Like, I don't know if Matt would have ever done mailbag questions if not in the context of him being on my podcast. So, you know, you get to hear from Matt and ask Matt questions that he might not normally answer. So we did a bunch of mailbag with Matt.

I think we did four or five mailbag with Matt. But then what happened was Matt moved not super far away from me, but far enough that he and I don't carpool as much. We do every once in a blue moon. And usually, nowadays, whenever we carpool, I tend to do a podcast with him just because people like having Matt on. Usually, nowadays, whenever we carpool, I tend to do a podcast with him just because people like having Matt on. So, these days, when you hear Matt on the podcast, it's like, oh, Matt, you know. There's not a lot of times that I take Matt to work that we don't do a podcast just because he enjoys doing the podcast and you guys like having him on. But it just happens way less. So, what next happened was my daughter, Rachel, decided that she wanted to go to this special school

that was 40 minutes away from her house that was near where I worked. And there was a period of time when she couldn't drive yet. So I would drive her in the morning. Now, most of the time, Rachel would just listen to her music and be quiet while I did my podcast.

But some of the time, we had her on. So I had done a series of podcasts. I did one with my dad called Meet My Dad, one with my mom called Meet My Mom. So I did one with her called Meet My Daughter, where I sort of interviewed her and just talked about growing up with Meet My Daughter and stuff. And then I found one or two other different things. We did a fun podcast where I was trying to demonstrate how a lot of words in magic don't necessarily mean, like you, you the player have learned what they mean, but in a vacuum, it's not clear what they mean.

And so I was giving her a lot of keywords, especially evergreen keywords, and saying, what do you think this does? Because she had played Magic. She had a rough idea of Magic played, but not enough that she really knew the keywords and stuff. So it was a good example of some of the keywords she exactly got what it did, and some of them she had no idea. And anyway, it was a fun podcast.

So anyway, one day I said to Rachel, I said, Rachel, I used to do this thing with Matt called Mailbag with Matt, where we get questions. Would you like to do a Mailbag comedy? So we called it Replies with Rachel. I think we've done three of them, three or four of them. So the interesting thing about Replies with Rachel, I mean, it worked the exact same way, which is

I told everybody that Rachel and I were going to do a podcast, a mailbag podcast, and so they sent questions. So the interesting thing about Rachel, which is different than Matt, so Matt obviously works on magic. So the questions that Matt got were about, oh, talk about art or talk about graphic design or talk about things that Matt did in the making of Magic. Rachel does not make Magic.

So a lot of the questions that Rachel got were about me. And players really enjoyed just having Rachel tell stories about me. So there's a lot of the mail-by columns. There's a lot of sharing of stories about me in them. Oh, that's another thing, by the way, that the podcasts do really well. One of the things that makes the mailback columns very different from the written ones is that you get to talk and you get to tell stories. And audio mediums are just way better for storytelling.

You get reflection. In some way, storytelling really is an audio art. I mean, not that you can't write stories, I guess, but there's something about telling a story. And so a lot of the fun, I think, on the mailbags that are the podcast ones is

it really lets me tell stories. And so I tend to lean into, I mean, we give longer answers on the podcast than we've ever given writing just because me telling a story for five minutes goes much faster than what we would take if I wrote a story that you would take five minutes to read. But anyway, the mailbag columns, our mailbag podcasts have been very popular. Like I said, the limitation here, I do my written ones, I do making magic ones all the time.

It is hard for me to do the podcast, I really need somebody with me to do the mailbag stuff. And right now, Matt doesn't drive for me very much, Rachel's off to college, so I don't necessarily have someone. I promise as I get people in the car, the tricky thing is usually if I get somebody new, I want to talk to them about exciting things and not just do a mailbag column. But I promise, probably the next mailbag column will be with Matt. One of the days, Matt will need a ride,

and I'll say, oh, hey, Matt, let's do a mailbag with Matt column. And he'll say, sure. The only weird thing is, Matt has to tell me enough advancement that I know to get the questions. But sometimes, Matt's called me in the morning and goes, oh, can you give me a ride today? And then I don't have the time to get the questions.

But anyway, I hope to do more mailbag podcasts. So those are the major places that I do mailbags. Those are the big three. I mean, there are other places. There are things that are similar. Like, I do a thing, I now call Blogatog Live, I used to call it Question Mark, where I go to conventions. San Diego Comic-Con is the big one, but I've done other conventions. I've done PAX, I've done Hazcon, a few other ones. Where what happens is I just get up and I say, okay, it's just like my blog. You get to ask me questions and I will answer them.

The cool thing about blogger talk live is I don't get to, I mean, cool thing for you guys, not cool for me, is that I don't get to weed the questions out. So there's a little more drama there and requires me to be a little more deft in answering questions because live you'll ask me things that I really aren't supposed to talk about or that are areas that like normally I would just not answer. questions because, um, live you'll ask me things that I really aren't supposed to talk about or that are areas that like normally I would just not answer, but when it's live, I can't not answer it. So I do answer them. Um, so there's a little more danger on blog and talk live. So if you're ever at one of the conventions, like I do it every year at San Diego Comic-Con, if you're ever at one of

the conventions where there's a blog talk, like it's fun. Um, uh, you know, there's a, there's an energy to answering things live. And like I said, know, there's a, there's an energy to answering things live. And like I said, um, it's a lot like me answering on the podcast where it's audio and me getting to talk. So, um, blog and talk live in a lot of ways is a cross between how I answer my blog and how I answer on the podcast. So that's kind of a cross there. Um, As far as other mailbag things, one of the closest is, one of the things I do from time to time is I do interviews that are email interviews where a reporter or somebody, instead of interviewing me in public, interviews me on paper. And that's not, I guess, technically a mailbag column, but it functions a lot like a mailbag

column because they're asking me things. A lot of the questions they're asking me are very similar to the kind of stuff I just get asked on my blog or in my column and then I answer. So those are, you know, it's not quite mailbagging. It's one person and it's a reporter. But they are very similar in nature to how I do it. So they read a lot like a mailbag interview, essentially. But anyway, let me end by talking a little bit about if you want to send me a letter. A few tips, guys, for if you would like to have me answer

your questions, let me give you a few quick tips. I've talked about this before, but it just seems apropos when I'm about two minutes from work. So let me quickly run through this. If you're going to ask me questions, number one, ask me a single question. If you ask me a whole bunch of questions, unless I can answer all the questions and I know the, unless I can quickly answer all of them, it's hard for me to answer. That if someone says question A, B, C, and I answer A,

even if I have an awesome answer to A, not answering B or C, it doesn't read well. People get like, well, you didn't answer B or C. So, ask one question. That makes it easier. I mean, and you can send multiple things. You know, I will, if you ask, I mean, even in my

column, I will, I mean, I do try to answer a lot of different people's questions, but if one person asks two really interesting questions, I occasionally answer two questions by the same person. In my blog, I answer questions by the same person all the time. Oh, people often ask me if I track who asks the question. Not really. Most of the time, I look at the name.

Most of the time, I make sure that it's something that's appropriate. Oh, that's another thing. If you're going to write me a question, especially on my blog, or my blog, or my... another thing if you're going to write me a question especially on my blog or my blog or my actually if you can ask me a question on any of them if you don't have a name that I can read aloud I will it makes it hard for me to answer the question

so if you have profanity or something in your name, your screen name it makes it hard for me to use the question so if it's important that I answer your questions it might want to change your screen name so there's not stuff like profanity that I can't repeat. Um, and, uh, so yeah, keep it to a single question. Uh, make sure there's no profanity and stuff in it. Maybe keep it family friendly. Um, also be polite. As I said earlier, um, you can be critical. You can not like things you can, I don't even mind you complaining about things,

but just do it in a, you know, just be polite, but don't be mean about it, you know. From time to time, I have a bad habit sometimes of answering questions

that are a little meaner in tone in my blog, just because I'm trying to sort of show that I'm taking criticism. But I have been trying to move away from, like, I much prefer people, you know, having critical comments but being polite about them. There's really no reason not to be polite. Like, I'm answering your question.

Like, be polite to me, you know. And as a general rule, when you're dealing with people who you want to answer your questions, people are less likely to answer your questions if you're just not nice to them. So be nice to them. questions. People are less likely to answer questions if you're just not nice to them. So be nice to them. And the other thing is, I'm always looking for questions I haven't answered a lot of times before. I mean, not that I don't read questions. I mean, I read my blog, I read

questions all the time. And the reason for that is, while there are some diehards that read everything I write, a lot of people, you know, read some of it. And so if there's important questions, sometimes I'll answer them multiple times. I try not to of people, you know, read some of it. And so if there's important questions, sometimes I'll answer them multiple times. I try not to answer them, you know, in the same day or anything. But I do try to, you know, if questions get answered a lot, I will try to hit them. And sometimes similar questions get asked again and again. So if you ask something different, something sort of a novel question, that increases me answering it. Just because, oh, I haven't answered this question before.

If something is pressing and a lot of people are answering it, just because I haven't answered this question before. If something is pressing and a lot of people are answering it, I'll answer that. I also really enjoy answering stuff that I haven't quite answered before. The other thing, especially on my blog, if you ask me a question that's really complex to answer or takes a lot of time to answer,

I often can't get to those. Not that I don't enjoy them, but I'm trying to answer as many questions as possible on my blog because one of the things I want is I want to see as many people as possible to see that they have had their question answered. That's important to people. It's one of the reasons I do a lot of short questions on my blog so that I can answer more questions. You know, if you write a question like,

Oh, well, you know, if you took the color pie and each, you know, each of the colors picked their favorite award winning movie, which movie was it? Like, oh, that requires research. I mean, that's not a cool question, but that's going to take up a lot of time to do. And normally, you know, I'm on my phone in between meetings or something or watching my kids. Like, I don't have a lot of time to answer. You know, I'm answering short bursts. That's the reason I do short questions. And I just don't have the time to do that kind of research. And so if you want me to answer,

the more you answer me a single question that's short that I can answer, the easier and better chance that I will answer it. But anyway, I'm now at work. So this went pretty well. So I think I'm going to keep this one. So while yesterday's was good, I think today's was better.

So anyway, I want going to keep this one. So while yesterday's was good, I think today's was better. So anyway, I want to officially wrap this up so I don't make a mistake I made last time. So before I do that, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. It was a little different. So I'm always curious when I do more offbeat episodes what people think. So I'd love a little bit of feedback. This was, I mean, I'm 600 podcasts in. So I'm stretching a little bit to find new and different things to talk about. So anyway, I mean, I'm 600 podcasts in, so I'm stretching a little bit

to find new and different things to talk about. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed today's. But I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. And this is the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.