18.40: How To Make Money From Your Hobby (with special guest Sandra Tayler!)
Or, The Business of the End of Schlock Mercenary
How did Howard start making money from his hobby of drawing and writing comics? How did he self-publish? We have a special guest on this episode! Sandra Tayler—Howard’s wife, the editor and publisher for Schlock Mercenary, and a published author—talks about starting their business. We dive into uncertainty, quality of life, and “manic optimism.” We learn about how to use pre-ordering, PayPal, and Kickstarter. Howard also shares about his experience with long covid, how to generate multiple income streams, and what comes next.
Homework:
Make a plan for how to monetize one aspect of your work. Start thinking like Sandra! This could be submitting a short story for publication or making a plan to submit your novel or making a plan for a paid newsletter. It doesn’t have to be something you do today or tomorrow, but start thinking about what you can be doing to make this creative work part of your future income.
Prepare for our next Deep Dive with Host Erin Roberts (starting next week)! Read Erin’s short stories: Wolfy Things, Sour Milk Girls, Snake Season. Note: these stories involve some darker themes. All of these short stories are available for free online and also have audio versions available.
Thing of the Week:
Fluent Pet buttons – go to fluent.pet and use code “elsiewant” for a discount!
Liner Notes:
Sandra Tayler, who also offers one-on-one creative business consulting
“Risk Assessment”—tthe Schlock Mercenary bonus story that Sandra wrote
The Alchemy of Creativity, Writing Excuses episode with Sandra
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key points: What did it feel like to conclude Schlock Mercenary? Layers. One of the biggest was relief. Staggered experience. Like having a child that comes back and does their laundry. Where did it start? Howard said, “I think I’m going to take up doodling as a hobby.” How did it transition into income? The first book. Self-publishing, with Paypal and Kickstarter. The core business now. Sketch editions! Slip cases. What comes next? These three books. And infrastructure and plans for other projects. You need to prepare for this pivot point, where a large project finishes or something happens and suddenly you have to make a sharp left turn. You did it once, you can do it again! Be joyful and creative, and be smart!
[Season XX, Episode XX]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Business At the End of Schlock Mercenary.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Howard] And joining us is my business partner, partner in crime, boss, the person who makes all of the business work, Sandra Tayler.
[Sandra] Hello.
[Mary Robinette] Yay, Sandra.
[Hoo-hoo!]
[DongWon] Welcome.
[Sandra] Howard, we’re not supposed to talk about the crime.
[Laughter]
[Sandra] On tape.
[Howard] If you’ve got it on tape, you shouldn’t have recorded it.
[Sandra] [garbled]
[Howard] Exactly.
[DongWon] Howard, I would love to start with a bigger question that… Before we dive into the business end of things, you spent many many years on this project. It’s 20 volumes. What did it feel like to conclude it? Like, what was that moment like for you?
[Howard] Um… It’s… There’s layers here. Unfortunately, the biggest layer is that I imagined it in July of 2020, when there was this global pandemic happening…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Howard] I was sick. I came down with… In late January, early February, I got sick, went to the emergency room, and they said, “It’s some virus. It’s not influenza, it’s not a pneumonia virus, it’s not bacterial. Some virus we don’t know, we can’t identify. You haven’t been to China, have you? Ha ha ha.” Then I never really got better. By June, July of 2020, I was tired all the time. So, wrapping this up kind of felt like, boy, it’s a good thing that I chose to end it when I did, because I couldn’t have kept going. I know that’s kind of a terrible sad way to describe it, because I would love to have kept drawing forever. But one of the biggest feelings I had was relief. Yay, I finished it before dying.
[Chuckles, laughter]
[DongWon] I think even without getting sick, I think relief is a big part of finishing a big project like that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I don’t think that’s an unusual thing to feel at that stage. I mean, this thing you’ve been thinking about every day for however many years, there has to be some aspect of that to be done with it.
[Sandra] Right. It’s a weirdly staggered experience. Because we had an emotional reaction 3 years before the comic ended, when Howard realized he needed to end it. So we had an emotional process to do at that point. Then there was the pandemic… We were going to end it, we planned to end it in 2020, and then we had a pandemic and there was this moment of, “Should we [garbled] back from that decision?” Very, very brief moment, because there were so many reasons it was right, we’ll get into. But… Then it’s been ended for years now, and yet we are still putting out books. So in one way, it’s not yet done. Until we have all of the books in our hands. Then, today, I confess to listening through the door to the last episode so that I could get my head into the recording space, and I had this weird moment of, “Oh, wow, it’s really over.” As, like, today. This moment, I’m actually a little bit teary here, like, thinking, “Oh, my gosh, we did this thing and it’s done.” So I actually think that’s a useful realization with large… Especially large, long extending projects, you rarely get that moment of we’re done. Yay. Triumph. That happens in a recognizable way. It gets fractured.
[DongWon] It can be kind of diffused. Right? Publishing a book is like this, too. You publish a book, then you go on tour, you do events or whatever it is, then the paperback comes out. There’s all this like little things so it’s hard to like have that one declarative moment where you feel like, “Oh, we did this thing and now we can rest.”
[Howard] I can contrast it very starkly against quitting the day job at Novell.
[Sandra] Right.
[Howard] In… On Talk like a Pirate day in 2004.
[DongWon] I hope you handed in your resignation in pirate speech.
[Howard] I… It did not actually occur to me to do that. Because I did not want to jeopardize severance. The… I left and the very first day home was just relief oh, I’m done with that. Then I had friends telling me, “Hey, while you’re… While the information you have in your head is still fresh, you could do some contracting work for us. You could do some advising.” I remember thinking, no, I need this to be dead. I need this to be done. I need this… When an author finishes a book and the publisher says now you need to do some contracting for us, where you go out and do signings and go do this and go do this, as an author, maybe you want to say no, but there’s also, yay, I love this thing. I made it. Now let me help you sell it. When I was done with Novell, I was done. With the end of Schlock Mercenary, it was not that. It was not that at all. It was still huge.
[Sandra] Well, in stories, it never will be. This whole series will continue to exist. People will continue to discover it. So it is more like having a child that leaves the house and you still get notes and they come back and do their laundry and so on than it is like leaving a job. Because it continues to exist and we can continue to interact with both the stories as they exist and with the people who love the stories.
[Howard] I need Schlock to get a scholarship and go to college on his own dang money. And not to need to come home and do laundry…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And then to immediately start funding my retirement.
[Sandra] I like this plan.
[Howard] That’s a better metaphor.
[Sandra] Okay. Cool. We’ll roll with that one.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I mean, Schlock can’t really come home to do laundry because he wears no clothes.
[Sandra] This is true.
[Erin] To run with that metaphor, though, how is Schlock funding your retirement? Let’s talk about sort of… We’re talking a little bit about the business of the end, but I feel like we probably want to start with the business of the beginning. In order for us to get where we are now, you started somewhere. So how do you get from I’m going to do this creative thing to I’m going to build a business out of this?
[Sandra] Well, from my perspective, the beginning of Schlock Mercenary was Howard Tayler coming to me and saying, “I think I’m going to take up doodling as a hobby.” I said, “You do that. That sounds lovely.” He was in a space where we’d had some health issues and he was no longer traveling. He was still working at Novell and he had some extra time and our record production, the business, had finally fully failed. So he had time. It was like, “You need hobbies. Hobbies are good.” Within a month…
[Laughter]
[Sandra] Yeah, I know, I’d… We later in life had to set up a rule that he had to stop making jobs out of his hobbies. So that was the very beginning. It was probably 2 years into the project before… I always supported him, but it was 2 years in where I was like, “Oh, yeah, you are an artist. Okay.” Where I could see the skills had built. So that was the abrupt beginning as Howard picks up with an idea and runs with it, and I get trailed after and keep up and start building logistical track and structure around the thing. Starting with a cardboard box that the drawing supplies went in, so that he could pull it to the table and draw at the kitchen table, and then put everything in the box so that the kids…
[Howard] That’s where that box came from!
[Sandra] Yes. That’s where the box…
[Howard] It just materialized one day.
[Sandra] Right.
[Chuckles]
[Sandra] Right. Exactly. Then buying the desk, and then… Yeah. Logistics are a lot of what I do. A lot of them are literally Howard runs and I figure out, “Well, he’s going to need this.” By the time he realizes he needs this, I’ve got it to hand to him. So…
[DongWon] How did that sucker transition into income for you guys? What were those initial sources, was it advertising on the site, was it paid subscribers…
[Howard] It was the first book. I had contracted with Steve Jackson Games for them to be the publisher, and their distribution and whatever. Then we looked at the numbers and I realized I… I had already quit Novell at that point. I was like, by the time this hits print, we will be out of money and I will have to go get another job. This is… They were offering me royalty money, but they were saying… Even at a really good royalty of 10% on the cover price, they were saying it will probably only sell 2500 books. That’s not enough to live off. Steve Jackson, bless his heart, I’ve said this before, said to us, “If you want to make a living off of this, you’re going to have to self publish. Here, talk to my partner, Monica, about some of the intricacies of self-publishing.” We self published, and, yeah, that first book sold 1900 copies at 20 bucks each, and they cost us like a buck 80, buck 90…
[Sandra] Yeah.
[Howard] And suddenly we had 6 months of money. I remember Sandra looking at that and saying, “Well. Can we have another book ready in 6 months?”
[Sandra] Yeah. That was the… That’s the model we’ve done ever since, which is release a book. Get a big pile of money. Make it last until you can do the next book. And… I mean, which is the core, but also built into that is as you have that big pile of money and you’re making decisions about how to spend it, some of it has to go into infrastructure. Some of it goes into paying down your house or paying off your student loans, or all of the things that make your under structure financially more stable. So that the next time Howard grabs an idea and runs with it, I already have some structure out there that I can tap rather than making it up on the fly.
[Howard] Before we grab any more ideas and run with them, we need to take a break.
[DongWon] Hey, writers. I love to cook. It’s one of my main ways of winding down from a hectic week, and it’s a way I show care for my favorite people. But a busy fall schedule doesn’t always leave me with a lot of time to spare. With Hello Fresh, I can actually get a wholesome meal together even when I haven’t had time to run to the store or figure out a menu. With their quick and easy recipes and 15 minute meals, you can get a tasty dinner on the table in less time than it takes to get take-out or delivery. And Hello Fresh is more than just dinners. You can also stock your fridge with easy breakfasts, quick lunches, and fresh snacks. Just shop Hello Fresh Market and add any of these tasty time-saving solutions to your weekly box. To start enjoying America’s number one meal kit, you can go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use code 50WX for 50% off plus 15% off for the next 2 months.
[Mary Robinette] I want to talk to you about something that is not a book. These are called Fluent Pet Buttons. Anyone who follows me on social media knows that I have a cat who talks. Elsie, my cat, uses buttons in a thing called augmented… Augmentative Interspecies Communication. Which is basically, each button has a word on it and she presses the buttons and she has 104 words that she uses to communicate with me. I’m very excited about this. But the reason I’m bringing it up, partly because I think everybody with a pet should actually do this. It’s fun enrichment. But also, as a science fiction writer, I am having a conversation with a nonhuman intelligence on a daily basis. The way she parses language, the way she thinks about things is completely different than the way people do. It’s fascinating, it’s fun, and I have a code that you can use to get a discount. So if you want to try a journey with your pet, you can go to fluent.pet and use the code “elsiewant” at checkout.
[Howard] Welcome back. I promised I would grab an idea and run away with it. What is, for you, Sandra, was there a turning point between the scrambling every 6 months for a book and suddenly this felt stable? I don’t feel like it was stable with the first couple of books.
[Sandra] No.
[Howard] I felt very panicked.
[Sandra] Yes. No, the… I think the stability really started feeling stable with the challenge coin kickstarter in 2013.
[DongWon] How did you fund the first couple of books? Were those kickstarters or were those direct customer sales?
[Howard] Direct preorder with PayPal.
[Sandra] Yeah. PayPal was new.
[DongWon] Got it.
[Sandra] We are very old.
[Laughter]
[Sandra] PayPal was new, and the existence of PayPal let us do preorders.
[Howard] It was April of 2006 was the first PayPal. There’s an important financial principal here. We had… We opened the preorders and within hours, I got a phone call from PayPal. They were asking if I was making a thing called Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management. I said, “Yes, that’s a real product. You can go out to the website and you can read the web comic.” They said, “Okay. Good. Just wanted to make sure, because we’d already accumulated $10,000 worth of…
[Sandra] Yeah.
[Howard] Preorders. But the thing that changed was this realization that credit card companies… If you take more than 30 days to deliver after you’ve taken payments, the credit card companies get very cross. We were taking preorders, and then we’d have like a 3 month delivery cycle. PayPal, for a while, sort of accidentally underwrote that. Then…
[Sandra] We actually…
[Howard] Everybody was called to account on it. It was Kickstarter that changed it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Where Kickstarter said you can accept money and you can take a year or more to deliver the product.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] So…
[Sandra] The other things that were in to play… We actually would have to front the money. A lot of times, we would front the money for the printing, and because we were printing in China, our books would take 3 months from printing to actual delivery. We wouldn’t start the preorder until the books got on the boat. So there was that terrifying we’ve spent a pile of money in the checking accounts are getting low. The other thing was those first 2 or 3 books, I would have to yank… We’d get preorders through PayPal, and then I would have to yank the money out of PayPal as quickly as possible, because PayPal would, in fact, freeze our account. It’s like the annual, like it’s time to do the phone call to PayPal…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Sandra] Then, on the shipping end, there was the regular phone calls to the credit card companies. I was using credit cards to buy the… So I would spend $7000 on postage…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Sandra] And they would think that that’s fraudulent… Because it completely looks… Finally, one of our credit cards just put a note on “Don’t freeze this…”
[Laughter]
[Sandra] “Let them spend the money.”
[Howard] At some point, they realized, oh. We turn off their credit card, and they start spending money in some other way.
[Sandra] Yeah! That was…
[Howard] Maybe…
[Sandra] To a different card. Yeah.
[DongWon] As someone who… It’s coming up on 20 years in publishing, I’m deeply resisting the urge to drill you on all the logistics of all these things.
[Howard] Oh, there’s so many…
[DongWon] For me, there’s a lot of fascinating stuff here. But I do feel like we should probably move on to sort of the evolution of this business of how you guys got from printing your own books initially doing this. Where is the business at now? It’s been 2006 to… Almost 20 years for you guys as well. How has that business evolved to what the business looks like today, now that you’re reaching sort of the end of the publication cycle here?
[Sandra] The core business remains the same. We run a crowdfunding or preorder, and pile of money and pile of books. Then we buy books by a thousand at a time, and slowly sell them. I have a physical warehouse that I pay rent on. It is full of tens of thousands of books. It’s not a very… I mean, that sounds very big in our head, but it’s small for a warehouse. But that giant stacks of paper, we can continue selling those for years. That is actually one of the reasons that we are profitable, is because we can buy them by the thousand.
[DongWon] Backlist.
[Sandra] Backlist. We’ve had to reprint books 1, 2, 3, and 4… And 5, because we ran out and we had to reprint them.
[Howard] It’s a good problem to have.
[Sandra] It’s a good problem to have.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Howard] It sucks at the time, but…
[Sandra] But the other thing that I’m juggling right now is as we’re doing books 18, 19, 20, we’re finishing out the way we began. But then once everything is in print, that opens the possibility for collectors editions and collected sets eventually. We won’t do that until I’ve sold through the inventory that’s sitting in my warehouse, because I do not want to end up with thousands of dollars of inventory that… Or tens of thousands of dollars of inventory.
[DongWon] Box sets can be very good, though.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Sandra] They can be. That’s one of the possible future things that we potentially could do.
[Howard] One of the smartest things that we did… There were 2 things that were really kind of brilliant. One was making the last page blank so that I could sketch in a book. We charged an extra 10 bucks for that at first. Now it’s an extra…
[Sandra] 20.
[Howard] Now it’s an extra 20.
[Sandra] I think. Might be 25.
[Howard] I’m no longer in charge of that.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I stopped asking how much it’s worth. I can do those sketches in less than 2 minutes each, and people understand they’re not getting a commission. They are getting essentially a very fancy signature that personalizes their book. That’s… You sell a thousand sketch editions. That’s $20,000 of extra money. That was super useful to have, especially early on. The second really good decision we made was slip cases for the sets of books. Because at a convention, having a slipcase for books one through 5, and offering a $10 discount when you buy them this way, removes decision paralysis from people who are looking at this huge raft of books, and they’re like, “Oh. Oh, I can just buy this thing. That’s heavy. That’s a giant brick of whatever.” “Yes, it’s heavy, and it’s only $95 or whatever…”
[DongWon] Can you define slipcase for our audience?
[Howard] Oh, sorry. Slipcase. It’s a… It’s essentially a cardboard box that’s open on one end. Very heavy, shiny, attractive cardboard box that exactly fits the books, so they slip in and out.
[Sandra] Yeah. Like a box set. The question of what comes next is imminent in our brains, kind of constantly right now.
[Howard] [groan] Yeah.
[Sandra] Because the answer…
[Laughter]
[Sandra] The answer is until we get these last 3 books out, what comes next is these 3 books. That gives me 3 more piles of money with which I can build infrastructure and plans and hopefully some runway on other projects. Howard has got some prose novels that are in the Schlockiverse that he’s working towards. I have got a book that I’m working on. We are building additional… Trying to build income streams that don’t depend on Howard’s being on the pen point…
[Howard] That don’t involve me needing to spend quite as much time as I used to be able to spend.
[Sandra] Right.
[Howard] In 2017, I was able to do a weekly comic… Sorry, weekly. A daily comic with no… Missing no days, while drawing over the course of 6 weeks 250 cards for Steve Jackson Games, the Starfinder, Munchkin Starfinder. I was literally working from 6 AM to midnight every day and loving it. Because my job involves sitting and drawing and just… I cannot physically do that anymore. Long Covid has stolen at least 8 of those 14 hours from me, and it used to be that we look at a project like this, yeah, these last 3 books, and while we’re doing covers and marginalia and whatever, I’m also going to be working on new thing.
[Sandra] Right. Howard is one track, he used to be multi track, and now he is one track. Which… I could delve into 20 or 30 minutes just talking about my own career positioning that I am attempting to do. The infrastructure I’m building for me to support more of the income generation work. But that would be an entirely separate discussion. An interesting one, but the… I think, bringing it back, it’s this pivot point that I think every creative ends up in at some point where you’ve either finished a large project or your publisher dropped you, or life changed or whatever, where you suddenly had a way you were going, and you had momentum, and suddenly you have to left turn which requires the brakes and everything shifts in the vehicle and you have to figure out what comes next. Which is one of the huge reasons for when you have that pile of money, building infrastructure so that when you hit that hard left turn, there’s a… Metaphor falls apart.
[Howard] You don’t go buy a midlife crisis car.
[Sandra] Right.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You…
[Sandra] Right.
[Howard] [gasp] Yeah.
[Sandra] That is where we are. Yes, when I look beyond the next 3 books, there’s giant question marks out there. However, I also… That’s very familiar. Because, pulling all the way back to the very beginning, in 2004 when Howard quit Novell, we’d made negative $600 on cartooning that year, and he quit his comfortable corporate job to be a cartoonist. So, while it’s tiring to be back at that point…
[Howard] Negative 3 figures.
[Sandra] Yes. Negative 300 dollars.
[Howard] Negative 600… It was 600. We were $600… I thought you said negative 6 figures.
[Mary Robinette] No, it was $600.
[DongWon] Negative 600 dollars.
[Howard] Okay.
[Well, in that case…]
[Howard] Versus a six-figure income at Novell.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[DongWon] Right, right, right. Yes.
[Howard] That was…
[Sandra] He’d just cracked 6 figures.
[DongWon] The delta was negative six figures.
[Laughter]
[Sandra] There’s a reason I came on this…
[Laughter]
[Howard] It was a delta.
[Sandra] It was very… Oh, and 4 young children. And a house. We did not yet have a cat. But… That’s the difference.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Sandra] So, in one way the future is terrifying. In another way, it’s full of opportunity.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Sandra] And in another way, it is familiar.
[Yeah]
[Sandra] So, learning how to be comfortable with the uncertainty of it all…
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Sandra] And to focus on… I do a lot of this. I get to put out the next Schlock book. I get to… Right now, I’m in the middle of drafting my nonfiction book, and I get to do that. Then I’m going to get to send it to a writers group. And I’m going to get to… There’s another novel I’m going to write and I’m going to get to send it to agents…
[Howard] There are so many parts of this that we love so much.
[Sandra] When you focus on the fact that you get to do the piece that’s in front of you, and once it’s done, it is safely into the past and you will always have gotten to do that, no matter what happens to the project in the future, you’ve got to do that piece.
[Howard] Yeah. There is a huge difference between the quality of life of uncertainty about layoffs, uncertainty about what your boss is going to assign you to do, and the quality of life of I’m doing something I love, but I don’t know where the paychecks are going to come from 18 months from now. There is a huge difference there. Uncertainty in both cases, but I’m just full of gratitude to be on this path. I’m reminded of something that Phil Folio said, in a private forum of professional cartoonists, where we were having this exact conversation. Someone was ending a project, and other people were like, “Why? How can you ever…” Phil Folio said, “Hey. Guys. Guys. Every one of us here has created something whose pictures and story are paying our bills. You did it once. You can just do it again.”
[Chuckles] Which is very Phil Folio for ignore the fact that I got lucky, ignore the fact that opportunity… No. I did this one time. I can find a way to do it again. I love channeling that level of manic optimism.
[DongWon] It’s sort of required. Because if you spend too long looking at the ways that this could go wrong, you’ll never get anything done. Right? There’s a little bit of a mental state you have to put yourself in that has that incredible optimism and confidence in your work. You also need to be realistic. You also need to be planning for when things don’t go well and so you can make that hard turn when you need to.
[Sandra] Right.
[DongWon] But to put your work out in the world and ask people for money for it, to focus on a creative work in a business world, it requires a little bit of exactly what you’re talking about, of I’ve done it, I can do it, I believe this is going to work.
[Sandra] When I was talking about building that infrastructure, and you were talking about being smart about money, one of the pieces of infrastructure that we have in place that’s invisible, is I have a highly employable skill set that I am not afraid to use, and go get a corporate job with benefits if that is what our family needs in order to keep the roof over the head, because I love the creative career, but also I like eating and I like my house.
[Laughter]
[Sandra] So… That is… That… When I talk about infrastructure, that’s some of it. I have been building job skills the whole way across. I am very employable right now. The economy is a different issue, but that is a piece of the be smart while being joyful and creative. What is your fallback? What is [garbled]
[Howard] We could… Oh, gosh. We could talk about the business angles of this for hours and hours and hours. I think, Sandra, what we ought to do is send people to your Patreon. Patreon.com/sandratayler… Spell Tayler with an er. The creative community tier, you talk about these things all the time, you’ve got creative check ins and…
[Sandra] Yes.
[Howard] Business discussions and…
[Sandra] Well, I’m… Many of my recorded classes go up there. I have started a once a month, people can vote on what you would like me to write a thing about, and I’m happy to host meet and greets and Q&A’s and things like that, because, yeah, there’s a lot to unpack here.
[Howard] There’s so much involved in turning the wondrous world we come up with into money…
[Laughter]
[Howard] I think that’s where our homework is.
[DongWon] So, our homework this week is I want you to start thinking a little bit like Sandra. I want you to make a plan for how to monetize one aspect of your work. This could be submitting a short story for publication, figuring out how you’re going to send out your novel, designing a paid newsletter or Patreon. It doesn’t have to be something you do today or tomorrow, but start thinking and making a plan about what you can be doing to make this creative work that you’re doing part of your future income.
[Erin] But wait! There’s more. What it is is that this is the conclusion of our Howard deep dive, which wish we could deep dive even deeper, but we’re going into my deep dive next, which will be about 3 short stories that I’ve written. So I’m letting you know now so that you can read them. We will put the link to them in the liner notes, but they are the story Wolfy Things, Which Was Originally Published in Podcastle, Sour Milk Girls which was published in Clarke’s World, and Snake Season, which was published in The Dark. All of them have audio versions in addition to print versions, and are available for free online. I also want to note, I tend to write things that are on the darker side. Wolfy Things involves wolves and violence in it, so if you don’t like violence and wolves being combined, it may not be for you. Snake Season deals with child death, so that also may not be for you. It’s if it’s not, you can listen in any way. We’ll be talking about sort of what’s going on beneath the surface and the craft. So even if you don’t have… That’s not the thing that you want to be reading or listening to, please come back as we talk about it and dive deeply into it, starting next week.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.