The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Daphne Byrne (Hill House Comics) by Laura Marks Interview

Episode Date: October 25, 2020

Daphne Byrne (Hill House Comics) by Laura Marks Interview When grieving, support can come in many ways. For Daphne, it came as a demon. Turn-of-the-century New York is a growing metropolis for many, but not for Daphne Byrne. After her father's death, her mother is drawn to a spirtualistic group that claims to speak to the dead. Daphne sees through their act right away, but something from the other side sees her too. Or someone? Daphne finds herself in new company, Brother. He offers support and encourages Daphne to stand up for herself...and to use the powers he has too. About Laura Marks Laura Marks is a PEN Award winning playwright, television writer and comic book writer. Her debut comic series for DC's Hill House Comics, DAPHNE BYRNE (with art by Kelley Jones), will be released as a hardcover graphic novel in November 2020. Her plays BETHANY and MINE have garnered acclaim from critics and been published and produced across the US and overseas. For TV, she's written episodes of THE GOOD FIGHT, THE EXPANSE, RAY DONOVAN, THE EXORCIST, and BRAINDEAD. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Brooklyn.

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This is going to be a fun departure that I think you'll definitely enjoy. There's a new series out from DC Comics, and it's a graphic comic book, if you will, called Daphne Byrne. And we have one of the writers with us, Laura Marks. She's with us today to talk about all the writing that went into this product and some of the cool features and why you want to take and pick it up. Let me tell you a little bit more about Laura. Laura is a Penn Award-winning playwright and TV writer. She's had a lifelong fascination with the horror gene since she saw George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead at age 12. Remember that? That was scary. She went on to write a psychological horror play called Mine, which led to work on horror TV shows

such as The Exorcist, Braindead, and currently Servant on Apple tv plus now she's made a graphic novel debut as the author of daphne baron uh which joe hill's hill house imprint of dc comics will publish on november 3rd 2020 just in time for the horror of the election so there you go you can you can have something i don't know what that means uh she's a horror horror comics legend kelly jones created the book stunning artwork which is pretty scary i've been looking at it so it's giving me nightmares but it's fun uh set in the gilded age of new york city daphne byrne is the haunting terrifying story of a 14 year old girl who's grieving after the sudden death of her father, emotionally drift and living outside of her means. Her mother becomes easy prey for a group of occultists who, who,

who promised they can contact her dead husband while fighting to disentangle her mother from these charlatans. Daphne experiences a genuine supernatural encounter brother Brother, a charming Jungian shadow self, visits her in her dreams and whispers in her ear, leading her through phantasmagorical scenes. I clearly went to public school. Soon, Daphne is experiencing terrifying power. Nice.

Power is always fun, especially when it's terrifying. That's even better. Anyway, it's a character-driven story that's focused on the family in the spirit of recent films, such as A Quiet Place, Hereditary, and Us. It's also a feminist story, as Laura Marks explains, sending the story at the turn of the century in the world of Edith Wharton and Henry James gave us the opportunity to explore gender roles because it was a time when rage is something that a nice young woman was not supposed to express. And for me, the mother of two young girls and someone who is seeing a time now in the world where feminine rage feels more potent and present than ever, it felt like a really exciting aspect to explore through the period lens. Welcome Laura to the show. How are you? Thank you. I'm great.

I'm like reading your quote to you. I know it's a little weird. Laura says, according to this, I'm going, when did I say that? I can't remember saying that. I'm right here. Seriously. Laura, give us your plugs so people can find you on the interweb. My plugs. Well, I have this little website, lauram here. Seriously. Laura, give us your plugs so people can find you on the interweb. My plugs?

Well, I have this little website, lauramarks.net, so you can find me there. I'm on Instagram at thatlauramarks because there's a lot of Laura Markses. So I'm thatlauramarks. We talked about this, you know, the multiplicity of Chris Vosses. Yeah. So, yeah, that's how to find me there you go there you go and uh they can find the new series on amazon or your local booksellers or comic book stores i guess as well i'll even hold it up for you because i have it right here there you go look at that oh that's scary man

excuse me nightmares i might have to run i'm gonna hide behind the mic over here just so nothing happens. So you got interested in horror at an early age. You know, I grew up in Utah, so that was my version of horror. But tell us why you decided to write the book. What motivated you? I grew up in Kentucky. Was that the same thing? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

I've always thought the horror genre was kind of fascinating. I mean, like a lot of people, I grew up reading Stephen King and all that sort of thing. Um, and, uh, and then as it happens, so I work primarily as a TV writer and playwright. And, um, I had this job a couple of years ago working, um, in a developmental writer's room for the show called Lock and Key. Now, you may, if you've been paying attention, have noticed there's a show called Lock and Key on Netflix right now. This was not that. This was a different network that was developing Lock and Key as a potential TV series.

So what they'll do sometimes is get a bunch of writers together to kind of kick the tires on an idea for a show and see if it's going to go anywhere. It was a wonderful job and tough job all at the same time. Tough because I was doing what's called the JetBlue commute. So I live in New York and I have two daughters who were in school. I wasn't going to move my whole family to LA for a job. So I would fly back and forth every weekend. Oh, wow. Yeah, I would get on a plane in Burbank Airport, Friday night, get back to New York Saturday morning, crawl into bed with my youngest and say good morning. And then I'd have to go back Sunday night. So anyway, that's the life of a TV writer. So it was a rough job in that respect and also in the fact that they didn't end up making the show at that network. But it was a fantastic job because I got to get to know

the Lock and Key comic series, or I guess now we can call it a graphic novel series because they collect the comics into graphic novels. If you like horror comics or you just like good comics, you've got to check these out. They're by Joe Hill, who is now better known probably as a novelist, short story writer, a guy who created two successful TV series. But these comics really put Joe on the map. And they are horror comics, but they're also just beautifully written, character-driven, very much about a family, really evocative and disturbing. And I read these comics that we were basing a TV show on. I thought, God, comics are a really great vehicle for this kind of elevated, character-driven, psychological

horror with fantastical elements. It's just a really great way to get that across. And I had this secret wish to write a comic someday from that point on. So cut to some time later after the room disbanded and Joe emailed me out of the blue and he said, Hey, have you ever thought about writing a comic? Because I am curating this new imprint for DC Comics. It's going to be called Hill House Comics because of Joe Hill. And, and I feel like TV writers would probably be good at writing comics because it's some of the same story muscle. And what do you think? Do you have an idea for a comic? And I was like, yes, absolutely. No,

I didn't have an idea for a comic, but I was going to come up with one really quickly. Right. So, so I thought, okay, what do I want to write about um I have always loved the 19th century really thought you know this would be a great opportunity to do something set in the late 19th century because in tv if you want to do that you know you gotta hire a bunch of horses and carriages and make the street look a different way and dress everybody and fix their hair and all that in comics it doesn't cost any more to draw a horse and carriage versus a late model car. You can do whatever you want.

So I thought, well, this is the perfect chance to get that out of my system. And I live in Brooklyn in this area with a lot of 19th century architecture. So really, you can just walk the streets and almost be in the 19th century sometimes. And I thought, this is just something I've always wanted to do. This is my chance. I've also really been fascinated by the spiritualist movement for a while, this movement of people who were really, really wanting to connect with the dead that kind of first blossomed in the mid 19th century and then continued on through the early 20th century. Houdini was a famous debunker of this. So,

so all this was kind of rattling around in my head. And I thought, well, who would be a good protagonist in this world? And I almost always write a female protagonist. I love a high stakes story, whether it's thriller or horror or whatever it is, but just, you know, a girl with a huge problem is the story that I like to keep telling over and over for whatever reason. And I thought, for some reason, a teenage girl protagonist feels just right. Maybe because I have two teenage girls in the house right now. But, you know, it just happens to be a lens that I'm seeing the world through a lot right now. There you go.

So, yeah. So teenage girl who's just lost her dad and it's just her and her mom. And her mom is getting sucked into this group of spiritualist occultists. Daphne goes with her to a seance and very quickly figures out these guys are full of shit. Is it okay? There you go. That's fine. Okay. All right. Just making sure there's no FCC you know issue um so

uh uh but while she's there at this uh phony seance with her mother she does experience some weird moment that she can't quite understand and then later in a dream this this figure comes to her this this boy about her age who calls himself her brother. I don't think he means that literally, but he's almost like this kind of shadow self for Daphne, or he's something else. It's never quite clear, really, whether he's, well, I should say that I love stories where you're constantly asking yourself, am I crazy or am I having a supernatural experience? I being the protagonist.

So there's a little of that going on. But whatever is going on, Daphne and this boy, brother, become very quickly intimately intertwined. He can hear her thoughts. He's with her all the time. No one else can see him, but he confers these odd kinds of powers on her where she can accomplish things, get her revenge against these schoolmates who always annoyed the living shit out of her. And, um, and then finally accomplish things that are much more serious. But does she want to be this person who, uh, who has these powers and who sees sort of a much darker, bloodier side of humanity than most people see.

Wow. So that is the sort of central question of the story. She's an anti-heroine, which is also my favorite thing to write. You know, I find her very relatable and sympathetic. And, you know, she's written to be that way, hopefully. But she's also a little bit monstrous and i think that's super interesting she has a kind of the the side that's maybe in denial or or whatever and but then when she gets really angry she can turn and become monstrous is that how it works yeah you could call it that i mean i think she's got really good reasons for

when she sort of um uh gets her back up Here, I could show you a picture of her. Sure, yeah. And then I have to tell you about this artist, Kelly Jones, who I worked with, who's just extraordinary. He's like a DC Comics legend. So here's the sort of title page of chapter one. And there she is in school, making a little collage um kind of gazing off into the distance as one does in school um you know she's got a little bit of Wednesday Addams quality to her a little bit of uh Winona Ryder and Heather's kind of vibe there you go maybe they can play him in the movie right yeah well I don't know. So the book is interesting.

Right now, it's a six series book series on Amazon. Is there going to be more books or is it going to be capped at six? Or do you see how it goes? Yeah, the idea was just to write a limited series. I mean, it's open-ended at the end because I like sort of imagining into the future what would happen next. But yeah, the idea was just to tell this story in six comic issues and then have it compiled into a single hardcover graphic novel oh wow yeah and hill house comics uh has several titles that they've done this with so joe himself wrote a couple of them he wrote basket full of heads and plunge uh this wonderful writer uh carbon maria

machado wrote the low low woods and then mr carrie wrote the dollhouse family so you've got these five horror titles all wildly different genres all these six issue limited series you can get in these groovy hard covers great um great halloween gift if you're this is wild and it's got the six different versions they're 399 on amazon and then you you can buy the whole series in a big thing where it comes all together. Or does it come in pieces? Or how does it work on the website? It depends if you like those soft cover, you know, comics.

If you're into collecting those sort of things. This is the hardcover version, which the nice thing about that is there's no ads. Because, you know, when you're writing a comic, this is something I had to discover as a first time comics writer. You're thinking about what you put on the even numbered pages, because you're thinking about the experience of the reader as they turn a page. If you're leafing through a book, you know, the odd numbered pages, you might kind of see in advance what's there. Even numbered page, you have to pull the page all the way over and then you go oh my god look what's on that page right so you want your even numbered pages to be where you land

the thing that's really surprising or shocking that was a cool thing to learn um so so yeah when you're spending all that time trying to mold the experience of the reader and then they turn the page and there's an ad for something it's a little like um you know a little like when you're watching a tv show and then suddenly it's ax body spray or whatever yeah well it keeps you turning the pages if you you know like hey we're talking about turning the page or something really good on the next page keeps that those pages doing and then all of a sudden you're through the book i think it's pretty i think it's pretty cool i grew up with comic books and of

course back then we just had like superman and spider-man and the the basics i i don't know if you call them the basics but the first ones and and back then they were starting to collect the comic books and then for a while there it kind of seemed like comic books were becoming blasé but now they're back again they're like huge i have friends that collect them and pay like stupid amounts of money for you know original versions of of uh you know like superman spider-man batman all that sort of stuff it's really great because all the adults grew up and now they got adult money and yeah right totally well um the artist that i worked with on this kelly jones now he's he's a ringer he's been doing this for a long time. And he's just extraordinary. But he did a lot of really iconic work on Batman. He was the guy who drew Batman with like the really long pointy ears. If anyone's a Batman fan, also did a lot of really iconic swamp thing work. I was I met him at San Diego Comic Con. I went out there to meet him in person when we started working together.

This was not this past year. This was the year before, back when people could go places. Remember that? That was nice. Yeah. So, yeah. So, and, you know, we're there talking and this guy comes up to him. Hi, would you sign my Batman comic from the 90s?

It was very cool. Very sweet to see that. That's awesome. Well, hopefully once we get back on track, maybe a year, maybe two, you'll be back at Comic-Con and maybe there'll be people dressing up as the character or the characters in the- You know, that would be a real deep cut.

Yeah, I don't know if, you know, Daphne's not exactly a household name, you know, she's not Poison Ivy, but sure. That would be lovely. I've just always been extraordinarily blown away by the talent and the work that people put into their outfits to Comic-Con and their commitment to that whole thing. Like me, I'm just like, you know, I like certain things, but I really don't want to be wearing them for an afternoon or I don't want to design them. But you look at a lot of my friends are nerdy friends in the tech

business and so they you look at the stuff they do and you're just like that's really freaking off the chain oh yeah it's just so impressive yeah and then you just and then you sit there and you just want to take everybody's picture everybody Everybody looks so amazing. So these are out. People can order them on Amazon. So it just kind of depends on how it goes. There might be more, there might not be more, just kind of.

Yeah. People just. Yeah. Just buy them now, get them now early on. They might, there might be the next Superman character in the future. And I like the Wednesday.

Is it Wednesday? She might be more like a super villain i'm not really sure i like her though i find her very relatable well we need more super villains in this in this world especially if they i don't take care of some other evil people that might be nice um so what what sort of things did you uh think people will learn from reading the books and and what was sort of takeaway that they might have, or what were some things that stood out for you that you learned that you were like, wow, this is really cool. And maybe a genre that you'd write for in the future. Yeah. Well, I mean, as far as what people will learn from the book, I'm not really sure. Um, hopefully they'll just have a, hopefully they'll just have a good time and it'll be a really tense gripping ride to go on. That I think is one of the

most fun things to manipulate as a writer is the tension, you know, the experience of the reader. But yeah, I did want to write about a world that was really challenging for women and girls. And I think that you sense that in terms of what Daphne's going through, what her mom is going through, you know, they're just really adrift without a male protector or a source of income. You see how vulnerable these women are, you know, through whatever financial choices that were made before the husband's death, they're totally out of money living way above their means. And so there's this sense of like, something bad's going to happen to these, this woman and this girl, you just don't know exactly what. And then of course, it ended up being probably much worse than what you expected, I hope. But, but yeah, you really do, I think, get a sense of how vulnerable they are, not only to these supernatural things in this group of occultists, but also to just the real world challenges, the guys who think they

can take advantage of them in a commonplace way that women encounter every day in the real world challenges, the guys who think they can take advantage of them in a commonplace way that women encounter every day in the real world. So yeah, yeah. And as far as what I learned, I guess, working in comics, you know, I didn't know how similar it would be to TV writing or how different it would be. I would say it's similar in the sense that both of those media require a certain economy. You can't just sort of have a character Yammer on for no reason because you only have X number of minutes in a TV show or in a comic. You have 22 pages, firm. You cannot deviate from that. Or at least in this TC model that I was working in. So, so you gotta be really disciplined and, and precise. I really enjoyed that. I feel like limitations are paradoxically

the most freeing thing you can have when you're trying to create something, you know? So, so that was really satisfying. And also working with an artist, especially an artist of Kelly's caliber, who's just extraordinary. I mean, this material fits his style so well. He writes, I mean, he draws just this very detailed world. His panels are just packed with creepy little surprises. And so this sort of, these overstuffed interiors of the Victorian era are perfect for him.

And the colorist that we worked with, Michelle Madsen, she really took it to the next level with her colors. If you look at them, it's a lot of like reds and purples and oranges. And it really has this feeling of, oh, I am in the late 19th century. Everything's a little muddy and lit by candlelight or gaslight. So, yeah, working with Kelly, I would say as a screenwriter, it felt a little bit like getting to direct because you're getting to storyboard everything. That is part of the scripting process of a comic is you tell the artist,

this is exactly what should go in this panel. This is how many panels on this page. And then Kelly was sort of acting in the role of cinematographer you know and like let me let me put it at this weird dutch angle and and you know and then uh and then he was also all of the actors you know um because he had to put whatever needed to happen into every character's face and he's so good at that that it was incredibly freeing for me as a writer, because I didn't have to always spell everything out in dialogue or in a little thought caption. It's really satisfying, I think, when you can be like, hey, the reader is getting everything they need to know about this moment from the look on Daphne's face. So I don't need to have her say I'm sad or whatever. So, so yeah,

that, that was just incredibly fun seeing Kelly bring this world to life. And then also the back and forth of sometimes he draws something at a panel that makes me go, oh, that would be a great stimulus for a story moment later on. Like one example is the first time you see this group of satanic cultists, right? I had just written in the script, like, you know, they should be a group of various ages and classes.

That's all I said. So Kelly being the demented soul that he is, God bless him, decided one of them would be a very nicely dressed little girl because every satanic cult has one of those apparently. So I was like, little girl, that'sanic cult has one of those apparently so and I was like little girl that's so freaky how did she get there um but I immediately started thinking wow I really want to know what that little girl is doing there and maybe she'd be

a useful character later on and as it turns out she was so like a female woman child yeah yeah so the the back and forth with collaborators i mean it's definitely one of my favorite things about being in a tv writer's room but um but it was also one of the real benefits of comics as well and then you know i didn't know how much the work went into that where people really think through that much of it because you you yeah you you just i mean i've always appreciated comics and you sit and you look at them. Like mad comic books were like one of my favorite things to do. And you could spend hours just looking at the background and the detail. And you'd see, you know, little Easter eggs and different things.

And it's amazing how much work goes into that. Yeah. Well, you look at like Neil Gaiman's original scripts for his comics, and they're just pages and pages, like he really gets granular about exactly what's going to be in every panel. I didn't go quite to that level. But, but I did try to, you know, really get in there as much as I could with Kelly, I sent him pages and pages of visual references, because I love doing period research. And so I sent him, this is the actual cemetery in New York that she goes to. This is what their parlor might look like. This is what she'd probably be wearing. I never want to dictate to him because his creativity and his poetic license is far better than anything in real life. But just to give him a sense of the kind of evocative elements of the period and what I'm seeing in my head. And then he takes it and runs with it and does something much more incredible than I ever could have imagined. And then you get these pages in your email inbox and it's just like

Christmas morning. It's like, look at this. Holy crap. There it is in graphic detail. Yeah. That is awesome sauce. You're going to give me a whole new appreciation. I'm sure my audience, a whole new appreciation of the work that goes into creating these comics. Cause sometimes you just, I always had to appreciate the people that can draw because I can like, like maybe stick figures. And even then I'm going to horribly, you know, just they're going to look awful.

And so people I've always admired people that can take something out of their head and they can put it to paper, a pen to paper, people that can design stuff, you know, like they're like in this room, we're going to do this. And, you know, they turn into some beautiful restaurant. I'm just like, I don't know. I always, even in my businesses, I always had this business sense that was really, what would you call it? Sterile. Or I'm just like, people come in and be like, you're going to paint the walls in this stupid office. I'm like, I don't care, man.

We're trying to make money here. I don't care what it looks like. But that whole artistic thing that people get into and the talent they have, it's just extraordinary. And the thing about comic books too is I used to spend so much time when I was a kid just looking at the panels, just looking at every one and you go back and reread it and and sometimes you notice stuff that you hadn't seen there before nuances of the storyline uh and it was always a lot of fun we used to keep a collection of them

out of the tree house we had out back of our house and uh you know we we go buy and refine it was weird back in those days you you go places and find boxes of comic books and stuff it was weird adventure yeah yeah and uh so that's cool that's cool stuff that goes into it uh anything more we need to know about the series um no i guess not i don't want to say too much because i don't want to spoil anything you know um there's something great about not being too spoiled when you encounter something right yeah and even the covers are scary as all get out give you some nightmares but people that love the horror genre this i know people like this they love this stuff they just eat it up i love it too yeah there you go so what other things are you working on or do

you want to tell us about anything you're working on or do you plan to do or anything else you have going on with your projects? Sure. Well, right now I'm finishing up a stint in the writer's room for Servant, which is this show that M. Night Shyamalan is executive producing for Apple TV+. The first season already aired. I didn't work on that. the second season is in production um but that was uh delayed due to covid i'm writing for the third season which uh who knows that'll come out way in the future because the second season hasn't even come out yet but it's been super fun to work on the entire writer's room has been over zoom which is a new thing for me like a lot of people have to adjust to that new world. But it's funny after creating with people over zoom for X number of months, you really feel like you know them and you forget that you haven't met them in person. It's kind of cool. So yeah. And then when that wraps up right after our election takes place,

I'm going to go back to working on the good fight, which is a show that I've worked on the past couple of seasons. This is a show, it's on CBS All Access, which is their streaming platform. It's a spinoff of The Good Wife. And Robert and Michelle King created it, also created The Good Wife and this horror show called Evil, which I also love on regular CBS. The Kings were actually my very first TV bosses, funnily enough. They hired me to work on this show called Braindead, which was a one season limited series on CBS leading up to the 2016 election. And it was a sort of horror satire that took place in the U.S. Senate. Wow. What if the senators were having their brains eaten by alien bugs?

I can think of a few I want to have eaten by alien bugs. You and me both. So, yeah, it was oddly prescient, this show, really ahead of its time. And I remember being in that writer's room just going, God, I love writing for TV. This is so demented. It's so fun to just sit around a table with all of these people all day and bad ideas around and crack each other up. And at the end of every day of that, I would come home and go, wow, I can't wait to go

to work again tomorrow, which is about a lot of jobs, right? Not a lot of people feel that way about their work. Yeah. The creativity part of it. So it's Hollywood starting to kind of get the gears going to get a lot more projects going to figure out how to work them in the age of coronavirus. Absolutely. Yeah. Production is starting up again. I mean, it's a very different event. You know, a lot of shows are having everybody quarantine and bubble for a couple of weeks. Like everybody goes into a hotel and like they take their key card. You know, it's like you're going to be in the hotel now.

Some movies are doing that as well. Jury duty, basically. Yeah, it's totally like that. Yes, you're sequestered. Yeah. You know, if you're shooting a scene now you know how they do coverage they're covering one person and then the camera's like the other person whoever's not on camera is wearing a full face shield and mask so while they're acting they just can't be seen um there's a lot of that going

on uh yeah everything takes a lot longer and then shutdown happens out of nowhere because somebody turns up sick anyway so uh so it's effortful, but it's definitely happening. The gears are grinding and thankfully they still want writers to work because they're looking at this as a chance to bank some scripts. So that's good. You know, the, the hardest thing for me for a long time was watching like all the late night show hosts that I kind of relied on for my sanity, you know, and they're working on their homes and I'm just like, can we at least just put you guys in the studio alone? I know.

Right. Yeah. I like, I need that. And so they, they've slowly been crawling back to that, I guess. And that's been so refreshing to just,

I remember Bill Maher got back in his studio and I'm like, thank God there's, there's a future. You know, he's just the feeling of being back to normal sort of thing i think is what we're all kind of wishing and hoping for so it'll be cool to see what what'll happen it'll be cool to see your other projects um i imagine you have control of this project so that you can shape it in the future is that correct um sort of yeah if something were to happen with Daphne Byrne, I would, I would be involved with it. Yeah. I should, I should mention, I'm also developing another couple of little projects who, you know,

maybe those will reach your screen at some point, but so I'm co-writing a new project right now with Carlton Hughes, who is one of the creators of Lost and Bates Motel and Jack Ryan, a bunch of a wonderful guy. Remember I was talking about that the lock and key room where the show didn't get made but it ended up being great because I met Joe. Well that's also how I met Carlton. So you just never know like a law of unintended consequences kind of thing right um yeah um the jet blue commute was was definitely worth it so carlton is a terrific uh guy just a dream collaborator um we've been having so much fun developing this uh this series and i i can't really say much about it but it does have

a teenage girl protagonist and it does take place in a fantastical world but it's definitely not as dark as daphne burn um definitely more hopeful so well we'll see how it goes then and so your fans well we're going to build you out a giant fan group and and they'll be following you wherever you go and maybe you'll have a whole comic-con group of fans will show up dressed in the characters that you know what's funny too is on tiktok they have a lot of people that do the cosplay thing and dress up as their favorite characters on on tiktok have you seen that uh i only know tiktok from my daughters you've got to see this tiktok of this baby otter or whatever so yeah yeah they have people on tiktok that they go full comic-con and they dress up as whatever sometimes they have their own characters and stuff and they go like

full deep makeup like i don't know how many hours it looks like they spent like eight hours in a chair in hollywood and they'll do like a whole series of tiktoks and it's quite extraordinary especially when the storytelling is only like what is it a minute i think it is um but they they build these characters in this comic-con stuff it's just, oh my God, it's just blows your mind. I love that. I respect that so much. I worked on this show called, um, are you a science fiction fan at all? I used to be when I was a kid.

Oh, well, there's this terrific show called the expanse on Amazon used to be on sci-fi. It's like a sort of hard science fiction show. Um, you know, like if you liked Battlestar Galactica yeah it's kind of um anyway i i worked on that and um and that was the first time i worked on something where you see people dressed up at comic-con like the characters you know wearing the flight suit or having the particular tattoo or whatever that was a really cool experience i think you're bringing back to me my childhood was it there was a science fiction writer that I loved. I read all his books.

Alan Dean Foster? Is that the name? Foster? Alan Dean Foster? But they wrote like a ton of science fiction. Then I was in fantasy, so I was into Tolkien and some malaria, and I think it was, or something sort of scenario or some crap. You know, all that sort of thing.

Now I'm into boring politics books and how the world burns and i probably should get into something that isn't so real because then i would probably be much happier you know sometimes a little escapism is just what the doctor ordered definitely definitely we need more escapism because uh this is its own horror show these days and it's real. So there you go. Anything more you want to share with us, Laura, before we go out? No, it's been a super treat talking to you. Funnily enough, this book comes out on election day. So yeah. So if you need a break from real life that day. Definitely. And hopefully it will be just a wonderful distraction. Uh, give us your plugs

again where people can find you on the interwebs and order the book as well. Oh, sure. Um, well the book is available wherever fine books are sold. Um, and, uh, my website is lauramarks.net and my Instagram is that lauramarks. All right. Well pick it up guys or pre-ordered, I should say at this time. So you can, uh, get your copies early and all that good stuff. People that love this genre, I'm sure, will have a lot of fun with it. To my audience, be sure to watch the video version of this at youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification.

Go to thecvpn.com. Subscribe to online podcasts over there. And you can follow me at goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss as well. And you can follow, there's a bunch of groups we have on Facebook under the Chris Voss show so just go google the Chris Voss show and you'll find all these crazy groups that we have it's been wonderful to have you on the show Laura thank you very

much for coming on thank you so much for having me it was really so much fun awesome sauce I learned a lot about comics you're giving me a whole new appreciation for them and now they're going to mean all that much more to me thanks for tuning in stay safe register to vote get out there and vote change the world make the world a better place and we'll see you guys next time