Off-Nominal - 166 - General Five Year Old (with Tanya Harrison and Emma Louden)

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Jake is joined by Emma Louden and Tanya Harrison to talk about their new children's book Mia and the Martians and how distilling space down to a child's level is a fascinating and challenging topic.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 166 - General Five Year Old (with Tanya Harrison and Emma Louden) - YouTubeMia the Martians | IndiegogoFollow EmmaEmma Louden | WebsiteFollow TanyaTanya Harrison | WebsiteFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@offnom.com) / BlueskyOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeJake Robins | BlogJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@jakerobins.com) - BlueskyWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. You see a nominal MECO. Welcome to space. Hello everybody, welcome back. We're excited to be back. It's been a minute, and we're missing a key figure, which is our normal co-host, Anthony Colangelo, but we do have Emma here with us today. I'm just going to talk about her new book.

We're really excited to talk about that. So Anthony did have a baby, so he is away right now. So we're letting him have a little bit of a break, but that's going to be fun. That's going to be fun. And we're hoping as well to have a second guest here. So your co-author, Emma, which is my good friend, Tanya Harrison. She'll be joining us shortly. She got pulled away into something.

You know how Tanya is. Tanya's always got something really, really, like, important going on every day. So, you know, that's how that goes with her sometimes. But Emma, welcome. We're happy to have you. Thank you. Thank you, so much for having me on here. I'm really excited to be here and get to talk about me in the Martians and also just

join because this is such a fun podcast. Just hang out. Just two jokes, indeed. They're in serious. We love. We need more of that. Yeah, for sure. Emma, did you bring a drink with you today?

Did you do something fun? I did. I did. So it is middle of the afternoon here, so I opted to go with not an alcoholic beverage, but instead my favorite beverage, which is hot chocolate. Okay.

You got a cool mug there. Can we see that mug? I think I have to look at a little closer. So this is my Clark Planetarium mug. It is the Planetarium. Let me switch just without dumping in the hot. hot chocolate. It is the planetarium in Salt Lake City, which is my like absolute favorite planetarium in the country. It's the one that I grew up going to. But of all the planetariums

that I've ever visited, I think it is by far the best because it's super interactive and really fun. So I wrap them whenever I can. And I've got my favorite Guatemalan hot chocolate in it. So it's going to be a cozy fun afternoon. Guatemala and hot chocolate. Wow. Okay. I need to hear a story about that. Like what do you just like are you like into Guatemalan hot chocolate or is it something you just like suddenly came up across? So I don't really drink coffee. Caffeine, I like somehow got through college without drinking coffee and then when I tried it just like try the taste. Caffeine didn't super affect me. But I've always loved hot chocolate. So I've tried a whole bunch of different hot chocolates and my favorite one to make at home is Guatemala and hot chocolate because

it comes in these like bricks of chocolate and you break up the brick. And you break up the brick. and put like a quarter of the brick into milk on the stove and then there's this really fun wooden tool you use to like you put it like a stick in your hand you like this and you end up with this really yummy melty chocolate that's so much better than like a swiss miss packet or something like that so it makes any day better summer fall spring or winter yeah yeah no that's that's awesome because that the i mean the the mayans kind of invented hot chocolate if you kind of go far enough right so i've had some of the stuff because I live in Yucatan part of Mexico. So that's my neck of the woods here. And yeah, that's perfect. We've got to do some of those tastings and then you know where they put like the chili pepper and stuff in it too. But then that that puck thing is like a very big thing in Mexico.

We buy them just a brand called abuelitas and they're the same thing, little puck's stove and it's kind of cinnamony. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they're so good. There's this one little store in, I'm going to forget which city in Guatemala it is. I think it's in Chichikasango. where it's like three generations of these women who run the store.

And it's so fun because you go in to order hot chocolate there, like to buy the bricks of it. And this woman shuffles back to the back and like comes back out with your hot chocolate. And you get to hear all the stories and like see her grandchildren or great grandchildren running around the store and playing with her. And it just feels like you're part of something like really cool. And then you also get to drink really good hot chocolate out of it. So Mexican hot chocolate is a very close second to it. For sure. Well, I went with something around similar lines here. So I've got this beer here today.

I'll zoom in on this here. So Monday is the Mexican Independence Day. So I wanted to make sure I had something very Mexican here. So this is from Mexico City, Galavera, Imperial Stout. So I'm excited to have this one here today. Cool. Cracking it. We got a theme unintentionally. I love it. Our Latin American drink special. Tanya, better shore it up when she gets here. Yeah. Emma, so for people who don't know who you are, can you maybe just introduce yourself? Like where do you come from?

What do you do? And that kind of thing. Yeah. So my like bio that I usually give is I am Emma. I am an astrophysist, a strategist, and a speaker. I'm currently in my fourth year or sorry, I just started my fifth year and my brain is still adjusting to that. The fact that I'm now a fifth year graduate student at Yale studying astrophysics, in particular

I study planets beyond our solar system, exoplanets, trying to understand where they are in relation to their stars, where they are in relation to each other, how they're influenced by tides, and what that can tell us about the history of planet formation and evolution. I also really enjoy doing work related to science policy and science strategy, which is part of how Tony and I got to know each other, because we're both really interested in, like, how do you enable science and how do you bridge the gap between, like, space industry, companies and academia. And that is where a lot of my deep passion lies. And then the third part of that bio, the speaker part, I spend a lot of time out in schools, doing conversations about space and I love a cat tail coming through. I have my little one up here. I love going out and giving talks, mostly about my path to kind of show what different stories can look like for people in science and demonstrate in particular for little girls who are interested in science that you don't have to fit one particular mold to also call yourself a scientist. And the other part of the

message that I really try and spend a lot of time spreading is how space can be a source of practical hope in a world where we're really faced with a lot of. of deeply anxiety-inducing challenges, climate change being like a forefront of that. There's a lot of questions about why on earth do you study space? Like, why do you care about all that? And for me, the stars are where I find that source of factual hope and trying to spread that with a world that is in desperate need of things to reducing that anxiety is something I'm really passionate about. Dark but true, yes.

We just had, we just had Casey Dreyer on and we talked about space as a religion kind of thing and how people can be very spiritually inspired by some of these things. So I fits into the recent theme of this show. No, really, it's got a cool way of inducing a sense of spirituality, for lack of a better word, even among people who aren't at all religious, that can cause the same sort of reflective, what are we doing here, why are we here, how do we influence each other, how do we protect each other and work with each other kind of thing. So, yeah, totally.

Cool, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, so I have to, we're going to bug Tanya when she gets here because she did not reach out to me to market this book that you're working on. And I, even though she has a standing invitation on this show, she didn't message me. I message her. So we're going to give her some trouble for that when she gets here. But until she does, why don't you set the intro up here?

What are you doing with this project? What is it all about? Yeah, so two weeks ago, I was super nervous, but also super excited to announce to the world that Tanya and I are writing a book called Mia and the Martians. It's the story of a little girl who goes to space and in particular goes to Mars. And she meets all the rovers there with the name and their rovers are the NASA rovers whose names are things like curiosity and perseverance and ingenuity, which are a whole Martian family. And she learns lessons from each of them based on their names and comes back afterward for her science fair, having learned all these lessons that are kind of now a toolkit for her when she faces hard times on Earth. So it's a less, it's a story of resilience. It's a story of emotional intelligence and growth for little kids and also a story of these rovers.

And each page that features a rover features fun little popouts and science facts about what those rovers are doing on. Mars or have done and facts about what the Martian landscape is like. And all together tells the story of Mia learning from the rovers and then bringing those lessons back here on earth. Are we really talking like the lessons of the actual name? Like this is how you be curious. This is how you persevere. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. So I love the names of the rovers because they're named by little kids. Like NASA for every mission solicits all these ideas for rover names from kids. And the fact that they've come back with names like curiosity and perseverance and ingenuity and spirit and opportunity is so cool to me because I think that the lessons we learn by doing space exploration are those exact lessons that are embodied by the names. And they're also the lessons that we need to be able to like go through life. So in my mind, the best kids books are fun. They're entertaining, but they also teach something.

And so my hope is that this book can be something that a little girl who's having a hard day in school can think, oh, Mia, she persevered. Like she learned some perseverance. I can do that too. I can keep going to. That's the like ultimate dream with this book. That's awesome. It's funny because I have like a take with space mission names. Like I have all I'm very opinionated about it.

And I think that the. Cool. Let's hear it. I think the Mars rovers are like the, that's like, that's like, model for me, I've always kind of said, like, this is the right track for how you name spacecraft because, like, they're just like, they're kind of, there are traits that are kind of like values, though, in a way, right? Like, you know, they're very much like value-based kind of thing. And like the opposite end of the spectrum for me, like the worst way to name a spacecraft is naming

it after people. And that's like, it's just like, it's so fraught with problems where like, even just like centuries later, things can pop up or it's like, oh, now this person's problematic and we've got a whole mission named after it. So, so yeah, curiosity, ingenuity. perfect names. Kepler, Hubble. No, no, let's not do those ones. Let's stay away from those ones. And now it's an extra reason for my big argument is that it can make a cool book like this. Yeah, I mean, they lend itself so well. And they're also, they've conveniently picked ones that nickname really well. Like, I love that opportunity became opi or perseverance is Percy. If you talk to people on the street and you say like, oh, Percy's on Mars, it can be a little weird

out of context. But it's very cute when you know their context and really fun to you. Yeah, yeah. That's great. Can you give us an example? What is what is some of the lessons that they learn in the book? Like, what's that? Yeah, so the plot of the book is that Mia lands on Mars and then just like you would experience like pretty much any any rover that has gone to Mars is experienced is there's these huge dust storms that are really common on the surface of Mars and the dust storm blows away her rocket. So she lands on the surface of Mars. She's there with her cat Nebula who is actually the sister of this cat that's laying right here. and she and Nebula are lost in this like landscape of Mars without their rocket and their way to get back home. And she hears a little beep, beep, beep. And there come Sojourner, helping her start this journey across the surface of Mars. And they go along and meet all the different rovers and think like curiosity, like, where do we look?

How do we learn to be curious about different places or perseverance? I mean, how do we keep going when things are hard? So it's a very double-layered book for me in that it's designed to be a fun, like, sparkly little girl goes to Mars to, like, meet the rovers and be inspired by it and kind of switch up that narrative of who does science. But at the same time, it's also teaching a toolkit

for little girls who are interested in science of the things that they're going to need to be able to make it through a career in science. Because you have to have curiosity and you have to be resilient and you have to like persevere and you have to have ingenuity. So it fits both ways and it's tied to my own personal story because I fell in love of space because of spirit and opportunity as rovers. So I know the power of these little metallic buddies on Mars to make a difference in somebody's path.

Yeah, they do have that power. I will fully fully on board with that take for sure. So why why do something like this? Like is it, have you always wanted to do a children's book? Like I always think children's book to me is like one of those paths where I just like I never seem to see it coming. Like I know, I don't have kids and I'm one of those like old people that don't have kids. So I just like never think about a child's journey, I guess. So I've always kind of like, how did you get there?

Like are you a parent? Do you, I don't know, give us a little bit about the background of that. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not a parent yet. I want to be someday. But the background for me personally comes from my mom and my grandma actually. So my grandma was a school librarian. And so she loves children's books. And my mom is a professor of education. So between the two of them, I was surrounded by books as a kid. And not only was I surrounded by them, they were read to me all the time. And they were like they were the best of the best kids books. Because my grandma went out of her way to know, like, which were the ones that won all these awards, ever. year and like made sure that I had ones that had interesting illustrations and things like that. And but despite their best efforts, there were very few books about girls in science. So if you look back at the book collection that I had when I was little, there were a lot of books about like girls who followed their dreams or who are like just kind of like fun,

random, almost sci-fi-ish kind of kids books. But there weren't any, that I can actually think about girls in science. So fast forward a couple decades. I in grad school have always kind of had this fascination with the anthropomorphization of rovers. The fact that all of them have their own Twitter accounts and people love it. Like the world goes crazy when Curiosity sings herself,

happy birthday on Mars. Or when Cassini, not one of the rovers, but the orbiter around Saturn, When it died and crashed into Saturn, people sobbed for this little box of metal. And then when Opi, Opportunity, when she died because her solar panels were covered in dust and sent back the message that was like, it's getting dark. The whole world was like, oh, my God, this little thing is like dying on Mars. Like we feel so sad.

And I think that's so interesting because it connects us to how the exploration is happening. happening. So I would love to write a book about that someday and probably we'll try to do that. But for now, I put that fascination into my desire to increase the number of girls that are in science and put it all together into Mia and the Martians. And then who better to have on as somebody who can help write the stories of these rovers than the professional Martian, Tanya. So that's how she and I started working on this together because I was like, I want to write this with somebody and you are the perfect person for this. Excellent.

I have to, I'll send you this, I read a paper about anthropomorphization of rovers. It's older now. It's probably 10 years old now, but it's by Dr. Melissa Rice. I don't know if you've read it. She works on the,

on the rovers. It's talking about Casey Dyer. It's Casey Dyer's wife, so Melissa Rice, right? Oh, cool. Up in Washington. So I'll have to send that to you. You can read that as a primer for.

it so but yeah I love that even like even the shapes of the rovers right so you think of the mass with the cameras like they're very much they're very easy to add the moreifies let's just put it that way yeah I've that's been one of the interesting things with the illustrations for this book is we were talking with the illustrator about how do we keep the rovers scientifically accurate enough that a kid can look at the rover in the book and then look at the rover in real life and like on photos from NASA or something and be able to see which one it is but at the same time really make them come alive in the book and it is so easy because like the cam cam cam on curiosity looks just like an eye or even like the front of sojourner like looks just like an eye

and the little like when curiosity took a selfie like that's such a human thing to do that it makes it easy to draw those parallels with like literal hunks of metal, which is so fine. Okay, we have someone joining us here. So let's see if I can get this right. Tanya, you made it. Hey, how's it going? Great. We're really excited to have you.

We were joking that you got pulled into one of your many very, very important meetings. It's just the very important Tanya Harrison meeting situation, which we all, Anyone who's worked with you knows well. Literally had to go to a meeting about moon rovers. It's like just like you do, you know. Cool. I thought the moon rovers were canceled. I don't know how there could be any meetings about it.

Only NASA's moon rover. Other people build rovers too. That's fair. That's fair. Awesome. Well, yeah, we're glad to have here. So Emma has given us a bit of background about herself, and she's primed us on what this book is.

And so we're deep in it here. Tanya, do you want to maybe talk a little bit about, not to make you rehash anything, but like, why, why did you get involved with writing a children's book? That's the question I just kind of asked Emma, because I always think it's weird how people get onto the path of children's books, which are, you know, they're never about them, right? Yeah. I mean, this was completely because of Emma. Emma approached me saying that she'd had this dream to write this book. And I told her initially, you know, I was really pumped about the idea. And when I started my journey, like, writing books, I was sort of against writing children's books.

Or at least I didn't want my first book to be a children's book because I didn't want to, like, fall into a stereotype. But- Be typecast? Yeah, I didn't want to be typecast by, like, only writing children's books. So, like, I got to write something else first. So, like, the For All Human Kind book, it's targeted toward a younger audience, but it wasn't specifically, like, only written for kids. It's also written for just non-space people. So I felt like since I had checked that box, it was okay now to venture into the children's space. And as Emma described to the storyline, I was like, okay, this is beautiful.

And then reading what she had written, I was like, yes, I'm totally down to get on board with this. And we're so glad you said yes. So can you tell me a little bit about the process for writing a children's book? like I imagine that you have to really think about it differently or at least like like putting yourself into the shoes of a child reading it. I don't think I would be very good at that. And so I'm just kind of like curious how you think about that and how you approach that when you put something that's like this together. Well, the first thing that was really hard about it is that children's books are short. Like if you look at the average word count for a kid's book,

most of the communication comes from the illustrations. So, what is on the page is usually not that much. And that was a really big challenge at the beginning was trying to condense it down because I tend to be pretty verbose when I write. So figuring out how to condense that down. And we ultimately, I mean, I can talk more about this to you, but the popouts are an interesting feature of this book that were a way to get around that and include more science facts and be able to have feature boxes about all of them.

There was also a whole process, which could be like a whole podcast in and of itself, about figuring out how to publish. We ultimately went the route of South publishing after a couple of conversations about how much easier it is to do that than it used to be. But there's many different types of publishers, types of self-publishing that you can do. And that also kind of complicated the journey. But, yeah, having somebody to do it with also makes it easier because you have accountability. and that honestly was what made this go from idea to on paper. Yeah, yeah. I imagine that self-publishing does seem much easier than it used to be.

Although I imagine there's all sorts of like pitfalls you get there that is, you know, unique to the self-publishing route. So maybe a little bit of a pro-con list that you have to kind of go through for that. But Tanya's done it before. So she'll be able to guide you through, I guess. I've never done self-publishing. So this is a new venture for me too. But I think there were a lot of lessons learned that we had from the first book that I wrote with Danny Berner of what it's like to work with a publisher.

And I think I had all these ideas of like the level of support that you would get from somebody that's taking the vast majority of the money from you selling a book. That actually just turned out to not be there. So it almost feels like unless you are writing something that a publisher is, you are writing something that a publisher knows is going to be like a New York Times bestseller, they're not really giving you much support on their side of things. So it's like, well, then why not just take advantage of our own audiences and just talk to them directly and make sure that we can create the thing that we want to create and have total control over that and not give a bunch of money to somebody else

that has no desire to necessarily see and be successful? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I've never published a book, but I have no trouble believing all of those kind of dark corners that you can get yourself into with a publisher. I imagine that's a very fraught path. Yikes. All right. It's also fun to go down the self-publishing route because you get to bring people along for the process in a different way. And because we're like going through the process of illustrations right now, like the people who have already backed our campaign to raise money for the illustrations and for the marketing,

they're going to get to be the first to see the illustrations of Mia when she's finalized, which are the rovers when they're finalized. So you kind of get to take the communities that are already existing and bring them on this process with you, which is ultimately what you like the goal of the book is to bring people into this like world of the rovers and you get to do it in a much more intimate way through self-publishing than I think through traditional publishing. So that's been an unexpected first silver lining now like definite benefit. Yeah, I build up a little bit of a community around the book, right, instead of just

kind of dumping it out into the world. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I can imagine that. We're big into the, you know, the like community building when they're show, we have, we have our own kind of group and we're all, we're all self-funded by listeners and stuff too, so I feel like we can gel on that. Tell me about the illustrations. So this, this is interesting to me too, because, yeah, like you said, most information is going to come through the pictures, which means that the pictures are very, very important. You can't, you can't cut corners on those. So you said you have an illustrator. Can you tell us a little bit about who that is and how that works? Yeah. So his name is Walter Possman. He is from the Netherlands,

dad of two little kids and children's book illustrator. He loves writing kids books and came into that pathway through reading books to his own kids, which I thought was really cool and very much resonated with my own story of falling in love with kids books from my grandma. He is also a space nerd, which is really fun because it meant that he was all in on diving into what are the different parts of the rovers and how do we show them how do we humanize them and how do we show their movement where can we have the artistic license where do we um like rein that in a little bit and keep it realistic um and i am not somebody who like my creativity does not show up in the form of drawing so it has been absolutely amazing to me to watch him take these ideas and just be able to visualize

visualized so clearly and quickly exactly what this could look like. Yeah, I've loved seeing the process. I'm excited to get to share the illustrations with the world. Yeah. It seems like, yeah, I'm just thinking, I'm thinking it through everything. This is what happens when I do interviews is like, you tell me about stuff, and then my gears turn and I'm like, what about this one? But I'm just kind of like thinking that that is definitely got to be a skill of an illustrator,

especially with a topic like this where you have like a Mars rover is, is not a trivial piece of technology and understanding like how it works and what what is kind of you know i don't i don't want to make this illustrator read like an entire emily lock de walla book about the rover just to figure how to how to how to do it right you want to you want to be able to get some sort of like succinct parsing of that information quickly so i don't know i guess tanya that's probably where you have to step in a lot is to give some expertise on how these things drive around and move and stuff right yeah like i mean he proactively asked us for a list of you know types of images that to look at to get inspiration for things like,

does the terrain around curiosity look like rather than just drawing, you know, kind of a generic orange Martian, with boulders all over the place. And so the fact that he was already asking those sorts of questions definitely warmed my heart. It's like, okay, he wants to make sure at the Mars that we convey to these kids

is as realistic as possible, but will also be like beautiful, visually engaging, even just his first sort of concept sketches that he sent us initially, We were both, like, I think squeeing with excitement, like as Emma was showing them to me. I was like, this is so incredible. Like it feels so much more real.

I mean, we just had text in a word document. Like that was our contribution. And now you have a character and you have like the drawing of Sojourner, because of course, as we've talked about like when I've been, I don't know if it was on Off-Nominal or one of the other podcasts I've done with you. But I always talk about how much I love Sojourner. So of course, when he chose that is the first thing to draw. I was like, oh, okay, we need to work with this person.

He's amazing. I'm curious, Tanya, from your perspective, like, I have to ask this question first. So what age are we targeting with this book? Like, are we talking preschoolers, elementary? Where are we going after here? Like four to eight. So a little bit of a broad range, but enough where kids can be like beyond picture book style. When you get younger than that, you really don't have any words.

Yeah. So enough to follow a storyline. I, to be fair, I don't think there's really an age limit for kids books because I as an adult still really enjoy reading kids books. But the nominal target audience is 48. The nominal target 48, the off nominal, anything above that is fine. Yeah. Yep. Anybody that loves me.

Okay. So that laid down now. So maybe Tanya, how do you decide and then how do you decide and then how do you, how do you decide? And then how do you approach doing like these, you know, these little pullouts you talk about these like science fact droplets or these little injections of whatever you want to do? How do you, again, how do you translate that from your adult brain to a 40 year old in a way that is useful and fun and good? You know, this seems really hard to me. I think this is where being on Twitter in the early days when it was, you know, 140 character limit really helps because you have to think, how can I convey a complex concept in as few. characters as possible. And like around that same time, I was working as a web editor intern for Emily

Lactawala at the Planetary Society. And one of my jobs was to remove the academies from blog articles written by professors. And so you would read these things that were written like it was an academic paper and you're like, how do I possibly translate this into a blog article that somebody, you know, just a casual enthusiast is going to want to read? And I think that those two things were such valuable exercises in science communication in general. And you know, you don't have to dump things down all that much for kids, I think, when it comes to space. Because whether you're five or 85, we all kind of ask the same questions and have the same dreams about space. And I'm also just always surprised about how smart kids are when it comes to the questions they ask about space.

When you go and do an outreach event, kids are incredible. So I just think, about that, like what are the kinds of questions they ask when you've been in those settings? What are they interested in? What can you say without using any jargon, but still convey that this is something really cool and interesting that hopefully then they'll take and, you know, go tell their parents about if they're reading the book on their own or go tell their friends at school about like, oh, I learned this cool thing about the Mars rovers or about Mars itself and encourage them to maybe pick up the book as well. I imagine you have to do some of the same stuff, Emma, with your talks and everything, right?

Yeah, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to communicate, like Tony said, without dummy down, because you don't really need to dumb down. You just kind of have to change language to be more direct. Scientists love to invent their own lingo, and in particular, astronomers really love that.

And once you make it just English, it's really understandable. And what you said about how kids ask the best questions, my favorite talks to get are to, like, libraries where you get like three or four year olds even who are listening to a talk that's targeted at like the 60 or 70 year olds who regularly come to library talks but then the three and four year olds are the ones who really drive the questions and ask just like the most interesting things because they haven't had that trained out of them yet yeah yeah five-year-olds love black holes

like they will ask you the best questions about just the nature of the universe it's beautiful Yeah, I met black holes. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of different narrative paths. You can go down with a black hole. So no matter what kind of question you want to ask, you can probably make it about black holes. I imagine that's, whether it's about the creation of galaxies or just like, you know, the end of human existence. You can go there with a black hole. Oh, man.

Okay. Yeah, I imagine you have to just like, I don't know, like one thing that I've always found helpful in doing. communication is just like get to the point I call it that's I call it just like what you know if you ask why seven times that's another way to kind of think it's like oh you know the rover's going up and sell why well it's going to look for this rock why's looking for that rock well that rock is important because why why why you know why why and eventually you get to a part where it's like well because I want my life to be better it's like there we go okay now we're here right and you can you can get there eventually with it so but with kids I don't know you have to there's got to be still be some

sort of like different worldview that you get to right because you know the the desires and needs of a kid or even their their hopes and dreams they're a little bit different than ours they're not yeah like you said they're on hammered out yet right so so uh i would love to hear um you know i know you're you're not done the book yet but kind of like so far in the journey what has been maybe each of you can take a turn what has been something you've learned or that surprised you as part of this project i always like to kind of hear how the project changes changes you i don't know let's take a crack at that first I'm going to let Emma go first since this is like her baby. Yeah.

What is surprising the most? I think actually what we talked about a little bit before, about how much you have to condense things down. And it's actually, it's that same lesson about how what would be a really much longer book if you were targeting middle schoolers, when you're targeting four to eight-year-olds, your average length of a kid's book is like 500 to 700 words. which is about a page of text, page and a half, if it's double spaced.

And so our book ended up being longer than that, especially with the popouts, but being forced to say, okay, what is the real goal of every spread and every page? And drilling down like you were saying with the Y, why, why? It was kind of a different perspective on that because it was, why do I want to tell this story? Why do I want to include this rover? why do I want to have this thing happen to Mia? And then switching to asking, how do I convey that?

Really condensed, but also interesting. And for me as a writer, it's been really interesting to go through that process and read a lot of kids' books that did this and see which worked, which didn't, and learn from those lessons as we write Mia. And, yeah, I think just, how to condense it has been such an interesting process that was an unexpected challenge. I thought that finding an illustrator would be hard. Finding a publisher would be hard. Figuring out how to market it would be hard. And like, yes, I've learned a lot through all of

those. But the thing that was actually the most challenging and surprisingly challenging was condensing the information and the goal onto those little sheets of paper. Yeah. Well, I'm just framing it that way is a page of text. That's like mind-blowing to me. Like it's like, okay, well, I can write a page, I can spew that out in 10 minutes, you know, if I'm on a topic that I know something about, right? So I almost want to be like, well, it shouldn't take you very long to write this book then, but that's obviously not true. Right. I think that's why there's a lot of really good. Oh, sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, I think that that's why there's a lot of like really good kids literature

and then there's a lot of like very okay kids literature. And the difference is that time spent, I would like to think it's that time spent with that page. text making it really engaging. I think of it in context of like a conference abstract versus writing an academic paper, right? Like a lot of conference abstracts tend to be around a 500 word limit. And it's so hard when you're saying, hey, condense your entire PhD thesis into a 500 word abstract. It's kind of the same in trying to do something like this for a children's book. It's like you have this big story that you want to tell. You have a message you want to get through at the end. How do you fit that in such a tiny word count. And even with the pop-outs, you know, they're, they're kind of separate from just the rest

of the text. But then the challenge there is, okay, if you only have one or two maybe pop-outs per rover, what is the one fact that you think is the most interesting? Like if you could tell somebody about anything that happened in the 15 years that opportunity was on Mars, what's the one thing that you think the general public or the general five-year-olds would find most exciting? And I found that, like, tricky because obviously I just think everything is cool. Okay, I think I've figured out now how I can relate to communicating with a child now because you bring up this conference abstract. And when I used to like go to LPSC and cover these talks and these pages, the conference

abstract was about as much as I could digest. I'm not usually going to bring out the entire paper and go because I just, I'm not, you know, I'm not a trained scientist or anything. Right. So I was just like, okay, give me the, give me the Coles notes. Okay, I think I have a gist of a year. Now I can just talk to the person and get the rest of the information that way, because I'm not going to go through all these charts and everything.

So I am the child in this conversation, I guess, is where we got to with that. A mentor once told me, it, like, the best science papers. If you read the abstract, the conclusion, and the figure captions and look at the figures, you should be able to pull out everything that is most important about the, like, paper. And I think that that is why conference abstracts are so valuable. and like especially in the context you're talking about because I don't think a lot of scientists read the papers cover to cover either not at all like speaking from personal experience you skim them so having those like easily digestible things is really important even even like in like a poster session where you just walking around and someone will give you like a five minute talk and you go okay yeah I got about 5% of that this is a nice picture great thanks for sharing me with your your entire PhD work I'm going to move

away now. The best poster I ever saw was somebody that did it in the style of an IKEA like handbook to build something. So there were no words on the poster except like in the figure captions. And it was all just like little figurines that are like the IKEA style demonstrating what was going on. And it was about like exoplanet dynamics and tides and like how do you model it on a computer. But it was the most digestible poster I've ever seen. That's amazing. I would like that. Yeah, I'd be into that. That's something I could figure out.

It's like the Lego instructions are similar, right? So they don't have to translate them. There's no words, right? Yeah. It's a hidden cost benefit to doing it that way. Yikes. Okay, cool. Now I'm thinking about posters,

and I forgot where I was in my own train of thought. Hmm. Posters. Yeah, I haven't been to a post session. a while. I need to go back to one. It's been a couple years now. You should come to AGU in December because something exciting might be happening there. Oh, is there something you can tease or are we just going to leave it at that? I don't know if you want to say anything, Emma. Yeah, let's tease it. We're going to make it a reality. So we might as well go ahead and tease it. Go for it. We're going to try to do a book launch event in D.C. during AGU. So to try to catch people while they're in town in person.

If you want to come and crash it, you're obviously invited. Yes. All right. You might be on to something there, depending on how Anthony, so we've been talking about trying to get back to DC for something. So it's been, yeah, maybe that's the one. There you go. We could revive Mars House.

Hey, yeah. This is bringing back all of my LPSC memories now. I'm going back like five years now and thinking about all the shenanigans that we got up to in the, those things. Oh, man. Okay. So I want to talk a little bit about the campaign and stuff, right? So I've got this little bit up here. Tell us about Indiegogo and what's going on with this and why we should be looking at it here. Yeah. So part of the self-publishing is that we have to raise money to cover the costs of an illustrator and a marketer. So we opted to use Indiegogo for that. And this is our publishing campaign, which is,

active right now where people can donate as possible and as they desire. We have things like signed copies or thank you pages or video messages or like having us read the book to a classroom for people who are interested in those like special perks as part of being an early backer of the project. It is the first time that I've ever done crowdfunding and I was quite nervous to launch it. It's not all that easy to ask people for money, but it has been so fun to see people get excited about this. And like we talked about the community, like the community that has shown up and said, yeah, this is a cool idea. We want to support it. Just like

literally the first day we launched it, I was in tears that night because I was like, wow, this is my baby going out to the world. And the world likes it so far. This is really cool. Yeah. So it's a raising money to cover all those costs and be able to do an awesome book launch party and to help cover the cost of illustration and things like that. That's awesome. I know I wanted to have you guys on because I know that we have like, like our demographic for this show is, well, for better or for worse, it's a lot of people that look and are like me basically, right? You know, it's my age group and my gender and all that kind of thing. But I know a lot of them are parents.

A lot of them will probably have kids in this range. And so this is like a good opportunity to have you on to talk about it. And so we always talk about that when we have book tour people on. that it's important to kind of get in early, right? So the, so, if you're just launching on Amazon, even, it's like the pre-order counts as like first day orders. And so it juices up your numbers. The algorithm goes, oh, this is really popular because it has all these pre-orders and

then it fires it up the thing. So, but now in your case, it literally is important just because this is where the money starts, right? So yeah, we'll have to make sure everyone gets this link to this for sure. Can you tell us a bit of some of the rewards? Like what do you get? Yeah. So we have a digital thank you pack, which is going to be like,

stickers and backgrounds for computers, things like that, like digital stick for backgrounds for computers, based on the illustrations from the book. Signed copy is the easiest way to pre-order a book is to buy a signed copy. And that will also come with a little pack of stickers, again, based on the characters in the book. And I'm so excited about that. We're going to have a special page at the back of the book thanking some of the early backers with the thank you page for really showing up for this project. And we also have an option for a video message. especially people who are have little kids who I mean I've recorded videos before for parents who want to show their kids like this is what a scientist can look

like it's not just like your old white man in the lab coat and be able to get so those video messages can serve that purpose and then the classroom readings if you want to sponsor us to go read this book virtually in a classroom because ultimately that's the like right target age is that elementary school kids who can listen to this with their friends and then get excited about the rovers and hopefully spark a lifelong interest in space. Yeah. That's the other thing.

It's cool. Are you going to get stuck like every self-publishing author? Are you going to have just boxes and boxes of these books in your garage that you're just going to be hawking for the rest of your life? You know, that was one of the lessons that I learned as we were going through the start of this process because my grandparents actually published a book about the history of the lake where they have a cottage, like kind of randomly. They put together this oral history and then put it into a book. And they did have literal boxes of that book in the garage for years. And I thought that that was the

only way to self-publish is like you upfront this huge amount of money and you end up with all these books and you're responsible for selling them all. And you're like, you end up just like feeling this huge pressure to get all these books out the door because they're taking up space and they're like sitting there without having returned their value on how much. you spent on them. But one of the really cool things about self-publishing now is that the upfront costs are really just the illustrator and the marketing. Amazon and then Ingram, which is the like backhouse publisher for Barnes & Noble and most bookstores, have a self-publishing avenue where you can upload a book manuscript and then it becomes available on Amazon and on Ingram and therefore the

bookstores. And then they do all the printing and then they do all the printing and then, they deal with the royalties through their back end versus the printing costs. And it means that we don't have to have boxes of books in our houses. It's funny you talk about that book, about the lake house. I had a, I don't know, it's got to be like a great aunt or someone. Someone in my family who I don't really know very well, but, you know, like semi-distently related. But she wrote a book about our family history, like this whole story about, you know, the people that came from England to Canada and then travel.

across and built those houses and stuff. But she made this book and then, you know, printed whatever, how many hundreds of copies. But like the target demographic of the history of my family is basically some people in my family. And so she would always, every time we had a family reunion as a kid, she showed up with box of these books trying to get rid of them. Like, please buy this book. And they got cheaper and cheaper every four years that we had this reunion. I was like, well, man, that is the absolute wrong marketing strategy for a book. You need to have broader reach than your own family. Let me just,

that's my tip for all you would-be authors out there. I think, I'm just about to try to sell it to your own family. I know. I think the publisher that we worked with, Danny and I worked with on the first book, I think they said something like most books never sell more than 100 copies.

And like a very small percentage ever sell more than, it's like 500 or 1,000 copies. So when we finally passed like the 1,000, copy mark we were like oh we're we're we're successful authors um which like doesn't feel like that many in the grand scheme of things but it just tells you i don't know just how many books are out there how hard it is to market a book in like these oversaturated markets um like it's it's easy to do in terms of the process nowadays of like actually writing the book and you know putting it out on these platforms like emma was talking about i think that was all probably much easier than we

were expecting. But the harder part is the visibility aspect. You know, there are tons of people that are self-publishing and probably not getting anywhere because they don't realize they have to take those next steps of, oh, I need to market it to somebody. I can't just put it on Amazon and then the internet takes it from there. So there's a lot of legwork to go in after you've actually written the thing. We were teasing you before you got here, M&I, because I told her that you you didn't reach out to me for this. I had to reach out to you, and I was going to give you a hard time about that

because you have an open invitation on this show, and you didn't say, hey, I want to hawk my book. Get me on the show. You got to take your own advice down here. Yeah. Got to sell it. Got to get out there.

Get the Popska stand going here. We'll keep that in mind for the next one. Yeah, for the next one. We'll see. We'll see. Cool. Okay. Well, this is really exciting.

I guess maybe as we're getting close to the end here, I'll just kind of throw some open questions out there. Like, what did I not ask about? What is something that you want to shout to the world about this book and, you know, before people go and buy this, buy this pre-order? Well, I can talk a little bit about the like connection to my story with space because we did, we like, I touched on that at the beginning. But I do think it's an important part of it. Like, why this book exists. So when I was little, I was only allowed on like a couple of websites. My parents were pretty strict about what TV I could consume and what internet I could consume. And NASA's website was one of them. And so that means that one of my earliest memories is watching Spirit and Opportunity land on Mars.

And if you haven't watched the video, they land in these like bubble wrap looking things. So it's just like the goofiest landing video because NASA is just like, let's just like drop this bubble wrapped rover onto the surface of Mars. And it's been like kind of tip over and around a little bit until it levels out and it's a pyramid. So it will level out the right way we want it to. But it was just like the goofiest landing video. And then it opens and this little rover like goes out on to Mars. And that video is like what I credit with why I love space. I have never ever forgotten watching the like animations of that when I was a kid. And while I didn't like think about a career in space, till I was in like I didn't even know what Astrophysics was until I was in high school.

Those little rovers have always been a huge part of my story, which is part of why this book is something I hold so near and dear to my heart because Mia is not me, but she's like certainly tied to my background and like why I got into space. And that's why I really care about using this story to inspire other little girls and little kids in general into a fascination for space. maybe a career in it too. Well, I can see how you two found each other. I'm pretty sure talking it's only the exact same story at one point. It's the same story, but about like Sojourner.

So it's kind of it's cool to see like this generational. I mean, not that I don't think I'm that much older than Emma, but generational in terms of the rovers, right? Rover generations. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sojourner inspired a certain chunk of people and then you have spirit and opportunity inspiring another chunk of people.

And so having something else to see like what's going to be the future. How can this inspire more people? And I think, you know, there's nothing about the book that is inherently like, oh, this is only for little girls. Like the message that's in this could inspire anybody. It just happens to be that the main character is a girl, which is great to hopefully inspire more little girls and help them realize. Like the rovers are cool regardless of, you know, what gender you are. Everybody should love to. Well, I will happily throw my hat in as being the third generation because the first rover that I got to watch land being into space was perseverance is when Tanya, you and I did it together on the live stream.

We watched that, watch it come back. That was your first? That was my first rover landing, yeah. Rover, okay. I was not paying attention to spirit and opportunity back then. Okay. Yeah, I wasn't into it yet. I was around that time I was mostly interested in girls and stuff.

So rock and roll. That's fair. Later in life, Mars Convert. Yeah, I was. Yeah, yeah. I was a full adult. I would not have been a target market for me and the Martians. That's fair sure.

But that goes to the point that the rovers can inspire anybody. So this book, like, yeah, targeted for, like, little kids, but, like, anybody can read it and hopefully be inspired. Yeah. I've preserved my inspiration online in a video format forever. So you can watch me do this. in real time, which is really good. There's seven minutes of terror. Yikes.

Okay, cool. Tanya, did I miss anything? Anything you want to talk about in terms of this book? Before we go? I feel like I had something, like, when Emma was talking, and I feel like I lost it in our tangent. I don't know. I'm really excited to see this come into the world,

like, especially after seeing Walter's illustrations. Like, I just, I hope that we can share this with as many people as possible. I'm so, like, grateful to Emma for reaching out to, like, ask me to be a part of this. Because I think, like, the pop-out element especially is very inspired by the Magic School Bus books. I don't know about the newer ones because I was a little too old for that, but the original ones, like, from the 80s. That's originally what really got me into space, like a constellation of things. Star Trek, Next Generation started when I was, like, to. But magic school bus lost in the solar system.

I reread that book every week, probably, if not more. And if I had my dad read it to me, if he tried to skip over the fact parts and would only read the text, I'm like, no, no, no, you got to go back. Like, read me the facts about Pluto. And he'd be like, it's going to take me 10 times longer to read this book if I have to read you all of the facts. But I was so insistent. And I think that that's a great thing. Like kids love to just memorize facts. And so having that alongside this like really inspirational story and these beautiful illustrations,

like I think it's taking a bunch of pieces from the things that inspired us as kids and being able to present that to a new generation of kids. Take too long to read that one page of text. Yeah. After you finish this, you can go back to your dad and be like, it's really not that hard. It wouldn't have taken that way. Yeah. man cool all right um yeah well we got about five minutes left here so uh i don't know i'm trying

to think of if there's any any fun tangents you want to get on just to to close this out here um i don't always get to talk to uh practicing scientists and stuff so is there is there anything fun in space besides your book like what else is on your mind right now that isn't book related in space that you're paying attention to and are excited about Oh, Europa Clipper launch. I'm very tired. Yeah, Europa Clipper. Coming up.

Launch readiness review, green checkmark. Well, is that for October. Yeah, that is going to be a good one. Big rocket, big spacecraft. Yeah. I wish I could go down and see the launch live, but it's a little difficult to get there from Ottawa. Yes.

Yeah, it's a little bit farther. Yeah, that's going to be good. I'm excited for that one because it's like, I don't know. It's been a little bit. while since we had like a state of the art like brand new kind of spacecraft doing that that fine grain of stuff at jupor like and we have juno right but that's like that's a high that's high that's that's really uh not close to the planets the moons uh themselves right so this is gonna be yeah i can't wait for that yeah like truly visiting a place that we haven't directly gone to before i think it's

been a while since NASA's done that and so hopefully people will get hyped about it granted you know they're gonna have to wait what six seven years for it to get there Yeah, the same sort of... We'll have time to build up the height. Well, I'll get excited for the launch and then just park it for, yeah, almost a decade. We need better propulsion. What about you, Emma? I am tired today because I woke up really early to watch the Polaris Dawn EBA.

And that was the first commercial spacewalk in commercial space suits. And it was so cool. SpaceX does a really good job getting the cameras in all the right places. So they had the camera on Jared's helmet as he like popped his head out of the capsule and looked back down at the earth. And it was like such a reminiscent vibe to the blue marble images, the earthrise images, the pale blue dot images to just see the edge of the spacecraft, his helmet coming out and then the earth and like a little bit of atmosphere. you're like our atmosphere but like the reflections you see yeah that it was so cool you're more committed than me i did not get up for this one i watched it when i got up on a normal time i was so nervous for them oh my gosh yeah i was uh i was a little bummed though so just talking about this

picture i mean like the pictures they do look awesome and kind of their own kind of unique way but i i was kind of bummed to learn that they like they did this on purpose where they like pointed the trunk at the sun and the whole nose is in shadow, right? Because I think they had some thermal stuff that they were thinking about. And so I'm kind of sad. These are also like dark. But I don't know. I think that's just kind of how it goes with some of these.

Yeah, it's a prototype. I have to remember that. Like I always sometimes think like, oh, SpaceX is doing it. It'll be like just amazing when it's like, well, no, they got to work up to it. That's how they do. That's why they do such a good job as they iterate and, you know, incrementally grow their capabilities. And so the very first EVA space suit is not going to be a knockout right out of the gates.

The fact that it's so much smaller. And that alone makes it a knockout. Which is the fact that it's so much smaller than your old school EVA suits is remarkable. Like it doesn't look all that different from the, you know, regular dragon space suit, which is mind blowing. Yeah, it doesn't. No, you're right. I'm curious to see how much it bulks up when they put like a backpack on it, like when you can do like a, you know, because this is like, had an umbellicle so they're just kind of like doing the again it's prototype right so they i think

shunted like you know the life support the portable life support and uh probably of some of the thermal stuff that comes with that you know that's probably like the next the next thing that they do with it right and so it'll be interesting to see how much bigger it gets but you're totally right because like the the NASA ones are like i call them like little mini submarines right like they're these huge sort of like bo do do do do the thing and uh yeah they're bigger for sure yes space x cares far more about aesthetics than NASA does, I think. Yeah, NASA is very much a form before function things. Or form after function, I guess is the way you say it right. But cool. Well, this has been awesome. I'm so excited for your book, the both of you. I'm going to, I think I'm going to have to

order this for my nephew. My nephew is going to be, I think, four in December. So that seems like the right age. We're just just aging into it. Perfect timing. I think I'm going to have to order that for him and get it out to him. But yeah, I'm excited for it. So everyone should go to Indiegogo, right? Let's get this back up here. Indie Gogo. And you can search for Mia and the Martians.

I'll put the link in the show notes and everything, obviously. And you should get that pre-order in there. I'll get some autographed copies. Thank you so much for sharing it with the audience and for having us on here today. It's been so fun to chat. Yeah, yeah. I'm super stoked that we made this happen for sure. Cool.

All right. Next week, everybody, we have a pre-recorded episode. So we've already had the interview, again, just because Anthony is, you know, spending time with his recently grown family. So we have Eric Berger coming on next week to talk about his book. We're on a book tour sprint here. But he wrote a book called Reentry, which is the next in this saga of his covering SpaceX rockets.

So this is the story of Falcon 9. It's going to be a good one. And so we'll put that up there. and then we'll see where it goes from there. All right. So thanks, everybody. Thanks.