20.17: An Interview with Christopher Schwarz
This season, we’ve been exploring different approaches to writing through the lens of other crafts and their respective toolkits. We had the pleasure of speaking with furniture-maker, writer, and publisher Christopher Schwarz. Christopher is an incredible artist, writer, and is also the founder of Lost Arts Press, which publishes books on hand tool woodworking.
We talked with Christopher about his creative trajectory, and the intersection of tools, methods, and crafts.
P.S. Want to come write with us in 2025?! Our retreat registration is open, and we are starting to fill up! We are going to unlock our creative processes in Minnesota and explore Story Refinement as we cruise down the Mexican Riviera! Learn more here.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were DongWon Song and Howard Tayler. Your guest was Christopher Schwarz. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key Points: Keep your day job while you jump off the cliff into working for yourself. Say what you are going to say upfront, and then support it. Think about weird things, how to explain them to people, and then make it applicable. Look at How-to through the lens of social commentary. Don’t be afraid to self-publish.
[Season 20, Episode 17]
[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I’m going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We’re going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you’re revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you’ll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 20, Episode 17]
[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] An Interview with Christopher Schwarz
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[DongWon] And today, we are very lucky to have a special guest with us. We have Christopher Schwarz. Would you like to introduce yourself for us?
[Chris] Yeah. I’m Chris. I am a furniture maker and writer and publisher and I clean the toilets at Lost Art Press.
[DongWon] Multi-talented, for sure. I’m very excited to have…
[Howard] I’m feeling it because I’m the toilet cleaner here at our house.
[Laughter]
[Chris] I’m the corporate toilet cleaner, so, yeah.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Sometimes that’s what it takes when you’re in that publisher role, you know?
[Chris] Yup.
[DongWon] Anyways, I am very excited to have Christopher on with us today. As I’ve talked about on the show at various points, I’m an amateur woodworker, and one of the ways I think about what we talk about here in terms of the craft of writing is sort of filtered through that craft as well. So when I first started getting into woodworking as a hobby, one of the first books I read was… Or actually, I think the first book I read was The Anarchist Toolbox by Christopher. And then I just sort of learned more about what you do as a writer and as a publisher and as somebody who obviously builds incredible furniture. And when we started doing this more of our interview series, looking at the craft of writing through the lens of other things that we do in our lives, I just thought you would be a really perfect guest to have on the show. So I couldn’t be more excited to have you here.
[Chris] Well, thanks for having me, Dong.
[DongWon] Yeah. So, just to get into it, we were chatting before, you obviously make furniture, that’s been a lifelong practice for you, but also, one of your early entrances sort of to this industry was as a writer. So how do you think about that divide between what you do as a craftsman and as a writer?
[Chris] I started as a newspaper journalist. That was my training, and so I was the dead body of the week reporter in newspapers. No, I love and miss the smell of a good trailer fire. But…
[Laughter]
[Chris] I eventually sort of the need to build furniture kind of took over which came from my background with my family as hippies in Arkansas, and so I tried to find a way to meld those two things. So I could write because that was something I could do to make a little bit of money and then I could build furniture which is also something to make another little bit of money. And so combining two really well paying professions, that’s sort of how it happened. And I got a job with a magazine, woodworking magazine called Popular Woodworking, was there for 15 years, and then decided the corporate publishing was really messed up and started my own publishing company, which I’ve run for 18 years now.
[DongWon] Was starting the publishing company something that you did immediately after leaving or was there a time where you were trying to figure out, once you decided to lower longer be at Popular Woodworking?
[Chris] I’m not brave enough to just jump off the cliff, so I had started the publishing company in 2007, and then kind of figured out how to do things there, and I quit in 2011. So I really… It was about four years where I was doing both, which I think is the best way to quit your job.
[DongWon] Yeah, I…
[Howard] That is a nice window. I was a corporate software middle manager from 2000 to 2004, and I had started cartooning in 2000. It was 2004 when we went ahead and took the plunge. You don’t just decide on a new career and throw the switch when you’re working for yourself. It’s… Takes a lot of courage. I like the jump off the cliff aspect of it, because, yeah, that’s what it feels like.
[Chris] It does. And if you have something going, even if it’s a little, that gave me a lot more courage to make the step. So, I encourage people to keep their day job when they want to become a full-time whatever for themselves. Keep your day job for a while. As long as you can, until it just absolutely destroys your soul, and then leave.
[Howard] One of the aspects… Sorry, you mentioned journalism. One of the aspects of writing for newspapers that I think fiction writers need to wrap their head around fairly quickly is the idea that in a newspaper, you’re not allowed to write your way into the thesis. You have to say what you are going to say upfront, and then start supporting it. There are a lot of times when I look at the prose I’ve written and I realize, oh! Oh, the paragraph is upside down. The chapter is upside down.
[Chris] Yeah.
[Howard] I just gotta reverse the order of things. And it’s not that I want it to sound like newspaper writing, it’s that I’ve forgotten that certain things you just need to say something big and clear and important upfront so that people will follow you for the rest of the page.
[Chris] Yeah, I mean, you just say it, and then you need to support it.
[Yeah]
[Chris] You need to have the underpinnings to it, and that’s what makes for good writing. Even if it’s not written upside down or right side up. There’s… It can all be quite hidden too, if you’re good at it. But, yeah, that’s the underpinnings of I think a lot of really good writing.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, just getting that message across as clearly as you can. When it came to leaving and starting the press, what were your goals in starting an independent publisher and what was the thought behind that? I mean, I’m someone who comes from 20 years of working in corporate traditional publishing, and so I have some guesses as to what those frustrations were and some guesses as to what your goals were, but I would love to hear from you sort of, like, what did that look like for you and what went into that decision to sort of really build your own path there?
[Chris] Well, I knew that corporate publishing was not what I wanted to do, because that’s what I had been doing [garbled] medium, and pretty much what I did for the first 10 years of Lost Art Press was do everything that was the opposite of what corporate publishing did. Everything we do, we make everything in the United States. The books we make are beyond the library grade, as far as, like, how they’re made, as far as having… We don’t do perfect bindings, we do [Smyth stone], we do case bound, we do hardbacks, we try to make books that look like they’re a 100 years old and that will last forever. That’s really expensive and hard to do. It’s not that expensive. Like, surprisingly, only a few dollars more, which is a lot in corporate America, but not a lot in real terms.
[Howard] There’s a reason why you don’t see that in the quote mass-market unquote.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Chris] Well, it’s just that…
[Howard] It’s not easy.
[Chris] It’s just a few pennies. It’s not easy, because the factories aren’t there. I mean, it’s hard to do that in the United States because we don’t have the… We’ve lost a lot of that.
[Yeah]
[Chris] Most of the good publishing is in Korea or in China or in Italy. But we’ve managed to do it, and do it well, but… And it was also that I saw that authors were getting screwed. I was an author, and I was getting screwed, and I was also a publisher and screwing other authors. Sort of, like, this human millipede or whatever.
[Yeah]
[Chris] And so, yeah, we decided to, like, give… Pretty much double or triple the royalties that we give to authors. And to make it worthwhile for them to spend two or three years on a book so that he… We wouldn’t get rich, I mean, that’s why I still build furniture, is because I still have to make… Do that to make ends meet, even though we ship out 60,000 books a year. That’s just the way we’re structured.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Chris] So that the authors get a really good cut. And we get really good books…
[Yeah]
[Chris] As a result. Our first book is still in print from 18 years ago.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I own several of your books. I have the Anarchist’s Workbench sitting right here in front of me, and I… It’s always been remarkable to me how beautiful the additions are, and the amount of care that you guys put into making what you make. So it’s really nice to hear what that process is like from your end. I can sort of see a connection in between you as a furniture maker and you as a bookmaker, as a publisher. How do you think about making objects in that way? I mean, how do you think about the intersection between those two things, whether you’re building a chair or making a book?
[Chris] It has to last 200 years. That’s really the baseline for me, and I don’t know how many perfect bound books that I’ve owned and just been so disappointed in that they fall apart after the first or second reading. So when we design a physical book, we’re going to use everything in our power to make sure that the book can survive floods, babies, dogs, locusts, whatever you can throw at it. But also that the writing itself is worth having around for 200 years. That these are things that haven’t been said in the craft, things that have been hidden. That’s a big thing in our craft is that a lot of stuff has been squirreled away or most of the knowledge of woodworking is in the graveyard. And so our job has been trying to tease that out through a variety of archaeological research and other kinds of methods. So we’re trying to find stuff that’s worthwhile to carry the craft forward and then put it into a time capsule, which is the book, that will make the journey.
[DongWon] Yeah. And I think it’s something that’s easy to forget, and one thing I’ve realized over my years in publishing is that we’re in a physical goods business in a lot of ways. Right? Like, the physical book as an object is still the absolute core of what our industry does. E-books and audio are very important as well, and… But, at the end of the day, what we’re mostly doing is making and distributing books to thousands of bookstores throughout the country. So it’s really nice to hear that you’re putting that front and center and thinking about the book as an object first and sort of the leading…
[Howard] Michael Stackpole once said… Chris, I’m pretty sure this will offend you on two counts.
[Laughter]
[Howard] He said that writers… Publishing is the business of shipping blocks of wood all over the country.
[Laughter]
[Chris] Yeah, he’s not wrong. Stackpole was…
[DongWon] He’s not wrong. Yeah.
[Chris] He’s not wrong. Yeah. It’s a different form of wood, for sure. But the physical media is hugely important to me. And… But I love digital this, that, or the other. I’m not discounting it. It’s so portable and allows so many other things. But I think that, like, albums and like cassettes… My kids are into cassettes. What is wrong with them?
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] They’re back.
[Chris] Yeah. What… Didn’t we get into eight tracks yet? So, physical media is going to have its day, I think, fully, because you can’t take it away from us. My phone, all the time, is losing this song or that song or something from years ago. It’s like, no, I want to carry this around, it’s an object that I revere. I have Susanna Clarke’s first novel that I just carry around with me, like a… I don’t know, a love letter. So that’s important.
[DongWon] That’s really wonderful. Yeah, I mean, speaking of Susanna Clarke, I… You as a reader, like, what kind of things do you like to read and engage with on your own time? I mean, we were talking a little bit about, before this, that you see a connection between science fiction and the work that you do, and I’m kind of curious to hear more about that.
[Chris] Yeah. I’m a science-fiction nerd to the core, and I don’t get to read it as much now because when you’re a publisher… Well, I spend all day reading, and so sometimes the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is pick up a book, which sucks.
[DongWon] I feel that. I don’t know when the last time I read a book for pleasure was.
[Chris] Oh, it’s so hard. Because when I was a kid I… I mean, I read the library’s limit every week. And that was me. So my pleasure is just few and far between. I mean, Susanna Clarke, that book, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I don’t know how many times I’ve read that book, and some of the follow-ups, the little small novella she did. I mean, I’m reading… I, like you were saying, I read the whole series. I pick my battles, because I only have so much time, because I read mostly stuff on JSTOR, archaeological stuff about eighteenth century apprenticeships and stuff like that. But you were trying to… We were talking a little bit about the intersection between science fiction and what I do. And what I feel like I do is that I feel like I am kind of living in a post-apocalyptic society right now. Like, all of us right here, as far as woodworking goes. And 100 years ago, hundred and 20 years ago, the level of knowledge about how things were made out of wood is that everything in the world was made out of wood. It was this advanced civilization that existed before us. Literally everything. People… Everybody knew how to sharpen tools, then… Our baskets were made of wood, everything around us was made out of wood, little pieces of metal, and some stone. And almost all of the good knowledge about that was lost. I mean, there’s a… Because of the Guild system in the eighteenth century, there… We look at these pieces of furniture from the eighteenth century and the seventeenth century and we’re standing here and we don’t know how they’re made. We can’t understand how they did them. Like, what tool… We don’t understand the tools they used, we don’t understand the methods, we don’t understand how quickly they did them. It’s that we today are this retrograde society, this kind of… These kind of cave creatures…
[Howard] And yet…
[Chris] And we get to go back… No, go ahead.
[Howard] And yet we feel so incredibly advanced because we can make things digital.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And on that note, we’re going to take a quick break.
[Chris] Oh, sorry.
[Howard] While our engineer checks to see if we have a digital problem.
[Chris] So, hey, the thing of the week? I’m reading a book right now called The Bookmakers by Adam Smith which… Basic Books, came out in 2024. And if you like books, if you’re interested in the physical book, this is like a mind blowing book. It’s like 18 little nonfiction vignettes of the history of bookmaking. And if you thought you knew who Benjamin Franklin was or who William Morris was or how paper was made, it’s just going to blow your mind about what books were before, and they’re not like… They’ve changed so much to what we have today. So it’s just a delightful little read about how we don’t know anything.
[DongWon] That sounds incredible, and it sounds like essential reading for me in particular.
[Chris] It’s awesome. I mean, yeah. I hate Benjamin Franklin now, but that’s okay.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Pretty much everybody should go into the reading of a book with the idea that they don’t know anything.
[Chris] Yup.
[Howard] I love… Love, love, love learning new things. On the woodworking front, I just need to share this anecdote real quick. We decided to do some finish-it-yourself cabinetry. No, we can’t build cabinets. We do not have that skill set. But we figured we could learn how to sand and varnish. And we just could not get what felt like a furniture grade finish on what we were doing. So I did a little reading and realized [gasp] there’s a stage of sanding after you varnish.
[Chris] Yeah.
[Howard] You sand and you buff the book… Who knew? And we started doing that, and now the cabinets that… Sandra has to get all the credit, because she’s done all the work. All I did was find the information and say, hey, guess what? I found a step that we didn’t think existed. And I guess, circling back, it’s just so cool to learn something that flies in the face of everything you thought you knew, and then you try it, and you realize, oh, I was so wrong, and now I can do a thing.
[DongWon] I was going to say, my little exposure to it I find that finishing can be an infinitely deep rabbit hole. And this kind of connects to what you were saying, Christopher, about so much of what you do is archaeology. Right? So much of what you do…
[Chris] Right.
[DongWon] Is going back and trying to understand how they did it in ways that we’ve lost for a variety of different reasons. And that puts you in this post-apocalyptic mindset. Right?
[Chris] Yeah.
[DongWon] So, it’s really cool to sort of here how those things connect. What does that process look like for you? When you’re doing that archaeology, when you’re trying to get back to understanding not only what did they do before, but how to explicate that to a modern reader?
[Chris] Yeah. This is… So, a good example is the first workbenches that we know about were drawn on frescoes in Pompeii. And they look totally different than the workbenches we use now. They’re really low and squat and simple. And I’m thinking, how did these things work? There’s no manual. Nobody’s ever written down how the Romans used these workbenches, but, they built furniture that is just like ours. Frame and panel. Just really high-end stuff. So, after a lot of research, I found there was this old Roman fort in Germany, [on the lemus] that still had three original Roman workbenches that they had dug up from a well. So, I got to go there, and had a full period rush where I got to hold the workbench. Pick it up. And measure it and examine it very closely. Then I came back to Kentucky, and I built the thing. And it’s just like the Romans had it. And then I tried building furniture with it. And then I invented… Invited all my friends over who were furniture makers, and I was like, how would you build a cabinet on this? And we kind of worked it out. So it’s a lot of experimental archaeology, but it’s not just like, oh, what… It’s not random. It’s stuff that we have a long history of doing this stuff, but… How do you adapt it to this really foreign way? And try to get in their shoes. Use their tools, and produce that work. And it’s really just kind of… You get this [garbled] you don’t feel like a Roman or anything, but you’re just like… The deep connection to somebody 2000 years ago that knew more than you. A lot more than you.
[DongWon] Yeah. A thing I run into fiction, in fiction, all the time, that really frustrates me is when people kind of don’t think about the material design of the world that they live in. Right? When you have… When you introduce and object into your fictional world, there’s all these implications that descend from it about how people exist in that world. Right? If you have a workbench like this, then you’re going to operate in a different way. I mean, I remember the first time I saw a video of a Japanese woodworker working on a workbench, which was, like, very low to the floor. They’re usually operating barefoot in those studios and using their feet to hold the workpiece and things like that, and it really just had all these different implications about how Japanese society operates, the physical environments that they’re in, what they value and all of that. And so, I love that your sort of doing that process in reverse. Right? You’re taking the object and rebuilding the lived experience of these people around it. And I think that is so applicable to thinking about fiction and thinking about worldbuilding and the kind of work that we do on our end.
[Chris] Yeah. I mean, starting with an object that you don’t know how it was created. It’s like finding a laser gun in a desert, and you’re like, where did this come from? That’s really what I do. That’s what gets me up in the morning, is, like, just thinking about these weird things and how to explain them to people. And then make it applicable. Because, like, who cares that the Romans had a workbench this way. But this workbench actually turns out to be something that’s great for apartment woodworkers. If you want to start making furniture you don’t have a shop, this little bench looks like a coffee table. So you can do it in your apartment. You could do it if you are in a wheelchair. You could do it if you’re disabled. This workbench opens up the craft for a huge swath of people that were restricted to this mindset of I need a garage with the tablesaw and the planer and all this other crap. So that’s the value that you get from going back and doing this archaeology, is, you build a bigger world today.
[Howard] The value is actually… It’s actually bigger than that. There was a… I can’t remember the documentary, but I’ve seen a documentary, I’ve read a couple of articles about it. Roman concrete…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Chris] Oh, yeah. Roman concrete. Yeah.
[Howard] They did some stuff with their concrete that makes the concrete heal when it cracked.
[Chris] [Gypsum] water. Yeah.
[Howard] And I don’t remember the details of it. But the modern engineers who were looking at it were saying, okay, we need to figure out how to apply this. Because it will make our concrete better. It will make our buildings sturdier. This is a secret that’s been lost to us for 2000 years and we need to employ it now.
[Chris] Yeah. And that’s science fiction is undiscovered worlds. And our… I mean, it’s just writing about this undiscovered world that is just all around us.
[DongWon] And the technology is not linear. Right? There’s things that we understood that get lost over time, and we have to reinvent or rediscover them. And I think we have this idea of history as progressive and it just keeps marching forward. And I think there’s a lot more ups and downs and cycles to it.
[Chris] Absolutely.
[DongWon] One thing I’ve always loved about your writing, Christopher, is that you really managed to put your point of view into the books that you’re writing. Right? It’s never just ABC, here’s how to do the steps of the thing that you’re making. I always can feel your worldview and perspective coming through that. How do you think about that design process, the writing process, and how you as a creator tie into those things?
[Chris] Well, how to has got to be as dry as a popcorn fart. As a…
[Chuckles]
[Chris] Way of writing. It’s just slot A, tab B, blah blah blah, like an IKEA instruction manual. So when I came to it, I was like, I want to look at it… How to through a different lens. I know you guys are talking about lenses this season and… So the lens that I look through how to in this case… It could be science fiction in one case. In that case, it’s social commentary. So, how do you critique modern society through a how to book? And I do that all the time. The Anarchist Toolchest is about consumption, and about how we consume too much. And so, if you build this chest and you fill it with good tools and if you don’t have room for another tool, that should tell you something. That you don’t need anything more. So it’s a way of making a critique without… But also giving them something that they really need. Which is, what tools should I buy?
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it’s what made a book that I thought was just going to be about how do I build a toolbox kind of life-changing for me in a lot of ways. It reframed how to think about this craft in this hobby that I was getting into, and really gave me a lot of perspective on that. So thank you for that.
[Chris] No problem.
[DongWon] And I love hearing sort of, like, how your approaching that in terms of how to make a how to more engaging. Right? And also… So there’s, like, the practical component, but then there’s also you, as a writer, are [accentuating] your worldview and engaging with the world around you.
[Chris] Yeah. There’s a lot of ways to do that. I mean, you can take how to and look at it through a variety of lenses, and it’s all fun. I mean, it’s a fun way to… And that sort of the homework I’m going to be talking about.
[DongWon] And I love hearing you talk. I mean, you’re talking about approaching writing from a journalistic perspective, from this how to perspective, from the research and archaeology perspective. Is there a key to sort of combining those different aspects into your work, or do you see it all as the same practice, or are these different lenses that you’re bringing to how to think about your writing and how to think about the publishing work you do?
[Chris] Well, I’m… [Garbled] I’m a journalist, and so…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Chris] That’s the lens that I look at the world through, is, like, how can I present what I think is true? What I think is true. I know that there’s always subjectivity. But it is, like, trying to shine a light on things. So that’s always the most important thing to me. But I also just think it’s important as a writer to take on other perspectives. Even though I don’t write fiction, I try to slip into other perspectives. Like, I try to write something like a recall letter, like for your car. And… But do it in woodworking terms. Like somebody was… Your something was getting recalled. How will I write like a corporate memo? Can I write this like an obituary? As an exercise to try to get my head out of writing just the way that I always write. So I’m always messing around. And that’s my blog, is messing around with different writing forms.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Chris] And… To experiment. And without any consequences, other than trolls.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Chris] But…
[Howard] I’ve got a question, and it’s one of my favorites to ask. Has there been a really memorable failure for you that you’ve learned from? And has there been a really memorable triumph about which you justifiably feel incredibly smug?
[Chuckles]
[Chris] I’ve had so many failures. I started a newspaper with a partner before I started Lost Art Press, before I worked in woodworking, and I just had my butt handed to me. I knew nothing about finances, I knew how to write, but it was a complete failure on so many levels. It ruined so many people’s lives, including mine. It was just… It was terrible. I ended up beating up a paper folding machine with a table leg. There a lot of bad stories that go with it. But I got up after that and I started another business and this time I knew what I had done wrong. Or I thought I knew what I had done wrong. And, so far, 18 years, it’s doing great. So I’m glad that I failed.
[Howard] You keep the loose table legs away from the paper folding machines.
[Chris] Yeah. I… There are no table legs in our whole factory here.
[Chuckles]
[Chris] No, I’m… I won’t allow them.
[Laughter]
[Chris] But, the triumph, I think, that I feel smug about is, sometimes I can poop out a book and people think it’s not going to be a good book and then it runs away. Like, sometimes you spend two or three years making a book and then you write it… Like, my most recent book. It’s not going to sell. But I’ve worked two or three years on it, and it’s going to just be fine, whatever. But I wrote a book a few years ago called Sharpen This, which is about sharpening, which is a dumb topic, but… It’s an important topic. And I wrote this book in two weeks. And we’ve sold like 10,000, 12,000 copies in the last couple years. Which is a lot for a little press. And… So, yeah, I feel pretty smug about doing two weeks of work and having something that has just broken a lot of sales records. But that’s lucky. You don’t get to poop out a book every… You have to eat a lot to poop out a book.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] That’s for sure, and I’m familiar with the things that you have no reason to think is going to take off suddenly blows up, and it’s always those little passion projects that just sort of catch you by surprise.
[Chris] Oh, yeah.
[DongWon] And it’s always… It’s such a delight when that happens. Yeah. Publishing is an always evolving landscape, and I’m curious to hear from you, as an independent publisher, running a small press, doing the kind of work that you do, what are… How have you seen that change over the last few years and do you have any thoughts about where we’re headed in the years to come? Like, advice for writers as to thinking about getting into this space, for new writers, even people who are more established, how to navigate and survive this ever-changing landscape?
[Chris] Yeah. Well, don’t be afraid to self publish. I would say that. That’s really becoming a good way to make a good living is that if you can reach an audience through social media, through a blog or sub stack or whatnot, you can sell a book, and you can make a really good living, and there’s no stink on publishing yourself. Sorry, I know you work for a corporate publisher, but…
[DongWon] [garbled] I’m very clear eyed about the business I work in.
[Chris] Yeah. I mean, you don’t have to have that big organization behind you to… If you are not trying to sell a million copies. If you just want to, like, get your ideas out. And… There’s a lot of scams out there that will try to take your money. But there are a lot of other good organizations that can help you work through that and get your novel self published. But I would say try to do everything yourself as much as possible. I mean, we do our own distribution. We don’t do… We don’t go through any… We don’t go through Ingram, we don’t go through any of the traditional distribution channels, we don’t sell through Amazon. The only people that we sell through our people I’ve had a meal with who sell woodworking tools.
[Chuckles]
[Chris] The closer that you can keep it to the chest, and the more real, the less you… You’ll make a lot more money, but you won’t get a lot of glory, I guess. And I’m much more interested in making good things that a few people enjoy, and I don’t care if I’m not a household name among every housewife in Schenectady, New York. So…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I mean, I think that’s a good way to approach this business. I think that’s a good way to approach a writing career. And so, I just want to say thank you so much for your time and for joining us here. If people want to find your work, where should they look online?
[Chris] You just go to lostartpress.com or some people will say Löst Art Press, and all our stuff is there. Links to our blogs and our substack and our whole world.
[DongWon] Fantastic. And before we let you go, I believe you have some homework for us.
[Chris] I do have some homework. I think that a lot of writers, and I do this with some of our people, is I assign them a little piece of homework, which is, like… Go to wikiHow.com or one of the other how to things and pick out one of the weird how to things and use it as you do a writing prompt for a way to explore one of your characters. Like, if you got on wikiHow… I went on the wikiHow page today, and there was how to use a belt as handcuffs.
[Laughter]
[Chris] And I’m like, come on, that is a writing prompt right there. I mean, you can… You should… Or have a character encounter that. On one side…
[Howard] That’s a great dialogue moment…
[Garbled]
[Howard] You’re wearing a belt.
[Laughter]
[Chris] Right. But you can see being on either side of that equation, that it would be really interesting. Or how… There was a wikiHow on how to make a [prism writer] from a battery. This stuff writes itself. So if you just go to this wikiHow, you could… Like I was… I did one once for myself, where I was a white supremacist making wood bleach to turn wood whiter.
[Chuckles]
[Chris] And going through the mental things of why would a white supremacist do this? He doesn’t like walnut, it’s too dark? But, yeah. Use wikiHow as an enormous source, and it also like… It’s how to do stuff. That’s… You’ve got a structure there to work from that you can just pile some meat on, some narrative meat.
[DongWon] Excellent. I really…
[Howard]. Summarizing your homework. Go to wikiHow, learn a new thing, and then work it into a story.
[Chris] Yeah.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] I love it.
[DongWon] Thank you again for joining us. It’s been a real pleasure having you here.
[Chris] Thanks, guys.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go learn to do a thing and then write about it.