Scribe

Oh, that. That dude totally goes on MSNBC and is just, like, super smarmy.

Thank you for having me, Harry.

It's been a while.

It has been a while. Far too long.

I feel like we've been, we've been, like, trying to will this into being for a while. Like, I remember we talked at NaNoWriMo about having you on about your novel and then your new job. So I'm excited that we're making it happen.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's great to be back.

Yeah.

Harry's kind of a blowhard. Do we, do we talk about.

Oh, okay, okay.

I get that.

Expectations.

It's a bit of a personal question. You know, I can tell you about myself. I am. I'm Harry Marks. I am a writer, I am a podcaster, I am a YouTuber on occasion. I do a lot of stuff, and I'm a frequent screamer on social media, so I am all over the place. So, yeah, I. And, and I know you guys are going to talk about it later, but I am currently an associate producer at Grim and Mild, the podcast production company that puts Lore and Bridgewater and Unobscured and a whole bunch of other shows.

So cool. I can't wait to dig into that.

Yeah, it's great. I'm so, so happy.

So we are. We're skipping some of that front matter over the time, but I, I would like to know lately, nowadays, Harry, what are you reading? What are, what kind of media are you consuming and what are you writing with?

Reading, I'm not even going to address because I haven't been able to finish a book since the Pandemic started. So yeah, it's a combination of anxiety and, you know, possible adhd. I've never been formally diagnosed, but just my. I don't know if it was exacerbated by the pandemic or it was like long dormant stuff that was just finally came to light. But my inability to focus, you know, to sit down and you know, just read something for more than two seconds before jumping into something else. And I was dealing with it at work and all sorts of things. I feel like I have undiagnosed adhd. I'm not using it as like a joke thing. Like I, I think there's something there and definitely anxiety and stuff. So I just, I haven't been able to finish a book in a long time and so instead I'll say I'm using the Blackwing Exquisite Corpse Pencil. I've got one of those down to the nub and I have it in the maker's cabinet Feral, which I've been really enjoying. It's getting a nice patina on it. It's got a nice weight to it. I also have a, and we'll talk about this in that other show you, you guys produce, but I have a Twisby Eco on my desk with some nice, some nice blue ink in it. I'm also using. I just got two letter sized pads, one from Rhod, from Claire Fontaine, which I haven't dug into yet. But I'm, I'm excited to. I wanted something big that I could really write on at my desk that wasn't like a field notes or anything like that.

Yeah.

And then in terms of, of media, Harley Quinn is back on HBO Max. So I've been watching that, watching the Orville. I never watched Star Trek as a kid, but we've been watching Next Generation and so we've been watching like one or two episodes a night. And I've been catching up on that.

The pairing of the Orville with the Next Generation is just so perfect.

It is. I love it. I love the Orville. I really love Seth MacFarlane stuff. I feel like I've outgrown Family Guy, but his singing is fantastic. He is a brilliant crooner and has put out some really wonderful jazz albums. And then the Orville is just this phenomenal, like homage to Next Generation and it's really well done.

I was at the first season of the Orville. Like there were some early episodes where I'm just like, he's just trying to make Family Guy in space. Like he had this one that was. And then it just kept getting more serious and more serious. And I think it was the episode where the Doctor and Isaac and the kids like, crash landed on a planet. I was like, this is just an episode of the Next Generation, like, just with different characters.

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's definitely comedic moments and like one liners and stuff here and there. And it's, it's kind of Sad because nor MacDonald was a voice on the show. He was the voice of Yaphet, the, the blob that works on the ship. And he, he's still in this season because they recorded it so far before he passed away. So every time he shows up or says something, it's like, norm, I miss you, Norm. But it's so, it's so well done. And it really grew into its own after it stopped trying to be Family Guy in space. And it really just tried to be like, like a new version of Next Generation, but really, it really found its own. And I gotta say, it's so funny to hear people complain about Woke Trek and like, oh, they're doing all these woke things and, and you know, it's all these. This virtue signaling, dude, they had entire character arcs on trans characters. And you know, LGBTQ Riker got with

a non binary character in the 80s.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. I totally forgot about that. You know, it's. And that's the other thing. You know, Nichelle Nichols just died and you know, they're talking about Woke Trek. Trek has always been on the cutting edge of social and progressive issues and like to say, like, they lost something with this new stuff. It's the people don't understand what they're talking about. So. And so I've been watching that and I've been doing a Daredevil season 2 rewatch. I rewatched the first season not long ago and I've been rewatching the new season because they put out a trailer for the new she Hulk series coming to Disney. And at the very end of the

trailer, it's the attorney at law.

Attorney she Hulk's attorney at law. At the very end of the trailer, you see Daredevil's red and yellow costume pop up at the, like the tail end right before they cut to the. The Disney plus logo. And I'm very excited to see him come back. So. And then for drinkies, I have been drinking. I'm a subscriber to Bottomless Coffee. So Bottomless is a service that they give. They send you a WI FI enabled scale and then you can put your coffee bag on the scale. And it measures. Every time you scoop it out, it takes a new measurement. And so when it hits a certain threshold, they automatically mail you a brand new bag of coffee from a independent roaster somewhere in the United States. So I've been able to try coffee from all over the country that I never would have had the chance to drink before. So the current blend is a Victrola. Yeah, Victrola coffee, which I hadn't had. They're very good. Once in a while, they send me something that's a little dark. It's almost an espresso roast, and I don't love that. But for the most part, they're very good. And you can tailor, you know, how. How dark you want your coffee, how often you want it sent to you, if you want it on like a biweekly schedule or to just monitor what the scale is doing, or, you know, even if it's monitoring what the scale is doing, if you want to make sure you never run out of coffee because the mail system is terrible, they'll just like send you one. When it hits, like a third of the bag down, they'll just send you a new bag of coffee so you don't have to worry about waiting. It's really fantastic, and I love it. And the customer support is excellent. After we flooded back in September, I had said, can we put pause on the stuff? I'm not living at the house right now. I don't have my coffee with me. And they said, sure, no problem. And then they sent me a T shirt and a cold brew machine set up. Like, they sent me a. It was. It was a cold brew, like a. Like a. Not Pyrex. What's the Chemex Like a Chemex cold brew apparatus. And I was like, this is unnecessary, but welcome. Thank you so much. And like, just their. Their customer service is really great. And then the last thing I'll mention is I never drank enough water. I usually go for seltzer or something else. And so I got a hydrate spark water bottle. Have you ever heard of those? So they're. It's a stainless steel thermos, like a Contigo thermos. And on the bottom is this little puck with a WI fi chip in it and a battery. And it hooks up to an app on my phone, and it monitors my water intake throughout the day and prompts me if I'm not drinking enough. Hey, schmuck, drink more water. And so I get these notifications all throughout the day. And what's Great is it glows on the bottom. So as you take a sip and set it down, it registers sort of like bottomless. It registers that there's a little bit has been taken out and then it glows, it pulsates. And then it pulsates again really wildly. If you haven't had a sip in like an hour and a half and it nags you to keep drinking water, keep drinking water, which is great because I need that. Yeah. Hey, hey. A hole. Like, you know, drink more water. You need to stay hydrated. Especially because we've had like several hundred degree plus days in New Jersey over the last couple of weeks. So I've been upping my water intake thanks to hydrate.

So between your coffee and your water intake both being WI FI enabled, it's pretty, pretty safe to say that you're just like drinking the cloud.

I. Oh God. I'm surprised. Like I don't have some like a third eye or a tail growing out of me right now. I've got smart home stuff. I have a whole eero mesh network throughout the house. I've got video doorbells and cameras and everything. I, the other night I was, I was setting timers at, in, in the kitchen. I was cooking and I'm talking to my phone saying, hey, dingus Play X podcast. None of them are doing anything I want them to do. There's, you know, they're, the alarms are going off. I'm saying, hey, a turn off timer or hey, a stop. She's not listening to me. You know, I, I have three women in my house who don't listen to anything I say and two of them are machines.

So, so we've, I mean we have. There's always so many things we could talk to you about. But what, you know, two specific topics we want to talk about are your writing process. Talk to us about your new book and then we're going to talk about a new venture that you've got. I mean you're, you're always involved in so many awesome things. I mean, we had Shelf Life and other podcasts and in your writing. So let's focus just for now, let's focus on your writing process in general. Lately. And we've talked about it before back in the day, but what is kind of changed about it and how is this the process? What was the process like for writing the new novel and kind of what's the elevator pitch for the book in general?

Yeah, I. There's a saying. Every book teaches you how to write a book. So every book you write, teaches you how to write a book. It's sort of like starting over every single time. And so every time I write a book, I always change something about it, whether it's the materials I use or how I approach the, you know, the. The narrative, if I'm writing it linearly or if I, like, start with a scene in the middle and then, you know, go back. And so in the past, I had written by hand, and I had posted photos and stuff and updates into the Facebook group over time. One of the. One of my novels, I can't. I don't believe it was this one that I had written by hand, and I written it all in pencil, and it took me like 18 black wings, and I had a stub jar filled with them, and I used the. The Baron fig composition books to do it. So. So I had like six or nine of those. And I went through about seven, maybe seven and a half this one. I honestly can't remember how I did the first draft. I believe it had all started in Scrivener. It had just been in Scrivener from beginning to end. And so I did the entire thing on the computer between iPad and my MacBook Air. And yeah, I mean, that was how I wrote it from start to finish. In the past, I had done it in a Moleskine notebook in Penn. There used to be a Barnes and Noble down the street from the office I worked in in New York, and that closed. They shut it down. But I was in there from. It was one of the few Barnes and nobles open at 7 o' clock in the morning. So I'd go in 7 o', clock, go into the cafe, get, you know, a muffin and a cup of coffee, and I'd sit there for two hours and I would just write, just hand write straight through. And I finished the book in probably four months. And I missed that like, that. I was so devastated when they shut that down because it was like watching your childhood home burn down. I was just. And they never reopened it, so. But ever since then, I was like, you know what? I don't want to make this harder on myself. I. I do enjoy. Like, I'd love to do it on the typewriter. At one point, I'd love to type an entire book out on the typewriter or, you know, do it handwritten again. But I'm getting old. My hands hurt. I got carpal tunnel. I don't have time for this. I just want to get the words on the page. And so I. I have been just doing it more on the computer as much as I can, especially with the new job. All I do is write all day in the computer. And so to have to, like, bounce from one paradigm to another is. It's too much for my brain to take. So if it's all done in one place, it's so much easier.

Cool.

I'm not someone who remembers where the idea for something came from, usually this one. I think I had been watching National Treasure, and I was like, I really want to write one of those. I really want to write a national treasure movie or a national treasure book. And so I was just thinking about American history, and, you know, what. What I could do that wasn't just a rehash of what that movie series is about, which is hunting for treasure and, you know, stuff that's been hidden away for a long period of time. And I think at the same time, I was either watching the show the Librarians or it was just in the back of my mind. But if anyone has seen the TV show or the movie series the Librarians, it's about this library, which is really just like a magical repository of artifacts from the Bible and from all these different, you know, there's like, King Arthur's sword, there's Excalibur, and there's, you know, the. The Judas Chalice, and, you know, all this different stuff. But I wanted to do something that was a little more grounded in reality. And so I came up with this idea of a library that was essentially a facility run. A clandestine facility run in part by the US Government, in part by private benefactors, where, you know, all the top medical research is being done, historical artifacts are being stored. All, you know, all the stuff that you think is being done out in the open is really being done under. Literally underground, under our. Under our feet, under our noses.

A little bit Men in Black, too?

A little bit, yeah. Because they. They sort of erase you as, you know, if you join. And so I. I wanted to combine the. The treasure hunting aspect of it, you know, solving clues and. And that. Which is a lot of fun to come up with with this idea of, you know, there's this facility that's, you know, no one knows about, but there's this person who is basically supposed to be there. And she goes on this after she's framed for. I'm not really swallowing anything because it's on the. The blurb. But, you know, after she's framed for her father's murder. She goes on this cross country hunt to solve the clues and try and make it into the library before this other guy can get there first.

I really, I was texting with you a little bit yesterday, Harry, when I, when I finished it, and the kind of like main bad guy. I, I think I told you in my head, he looks exactly like Harvey Corman. Like just sort of like a vaudeville style, kind of like, like bad guy. Like, oh, like the, he's the, the governor in Blazing Saddles. And yeah, he's just. I don't know, it just reminds me.

But.

Okay, here's, here's my question I've been building up to. So, so yeah, at one point you're talking about. I'm really interested to know the, the kind of research that you were doing for this book because at one point you're talking about a car that had fallen into water and you talk about how, you know, they're, they're. You're just kind of setting the scene and you talk about how, you know, driftwood and branches have been building up along the coastline. Like a dam of Czech hedgehogs.

Yes.

And I'm really wondering what kind of hedgehogs did you research in order to arrive at like, hedgehogs from Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic?

So a Czech hedgehog are, if you've ever seen like the invasion of Normandy, those giant metal cross beams that are lined up on the beach. That's what they're called.

For blocking tanks and other artillery. That's what they're called.

Oh, I had no idea. I was just staring at this and staring at this. I'm just like, what is it about a Czech hedgehog?

This is like a Sonic knockoff.

Yeah. No, I like to put things in my book that force people to go online and Google or Wikipedia and like, what is a Czech hedgehog? And then. Yeah, that's what they are. They're those giant metal cross beams to keep tanks from crossing or. Yeah, so that's what those are shipped.

Well, I, of course, did not go and look this up. I just was like, well, I'm going to be talking to the author here pretty soon.

You just thought I was a dumbass. So that's why I was like, this

is just a really specific reference. And I'm really interested to know, of

all the countries in Europe, why does Czechoslovakia.

Yeah.

Do they have Czech Republic have its own hedgehog?

Yeah. Gotcha.

Where did they get that? So the hedgehog's name refers to its origin in Czechoslovakia. They were originally used on the Czech German border by the Czechoslovak Border Fortifications, a massive but never completed fortification system that was turned over to Germany in 1938 after the occupation of Sutterdenland as a consequence of the Munich agreement. So there you go.

I always thought those things look like giant jacks.

They do. Yeah. And I might have said that, but I wanted to go for the historically accurate term. So there you go.

Perfect. That was one of the two highlights that I had in this book.

You can now sleep at night,

staying up just like, what is a Czech hedgehog? And why is Harry referencing this specifically in his book? Okay, all right, so I got that answered.

So you've talked about how you got where the idea might have rooted from, but can you talk to us about where the book started? Like the actual process of writing the books? I know that sometimes that can come in like a non linear way or maybe you started with some sort of scene. Just talk to us about where the book started. Or was it very much just a point A to point B kind of writing?

This one really was an A to Z beginning to end, written linearly kind of process. I wrote the first, that opening scene where she comes home and she sees him on the floor. In fact, the beginning of the book now is new. It was written a couple of weeks before I published it where she's in the grocery store solving clues that her father had given her to, you know, to, to pick up things while she's out there. And it sort of establishes her character as, you know, this puzzle solver coming from a puzzle solver family. The original opening of the book is her coming home, dropping everything on the ground and seeing her father covered in blood and you know, his, his body there. And that was, that was the opening to the book from the beginning. And then right up until I published it, I. It. That's how it stayed. And then, yeah, I just wrote it, you know, beginning to end that way. And there was a lot of, there was a lot of Google Earth or Google Maps searching and making sure I had, you know, I would literally like walk through the, the Roanoke Village, you know, to make sure that, you know, the pathways were proper and the, the visitor center was where it was supposed to be. And so, you know, anyone who was from that area, because that's, that's one thing I hate. If I read a book set New York or watch a movie set in New York and they have cobblestone streets and it's like you have never been to New York City. There are no Cobblestone streets and you know, that I didn't want that kind of inauthenticness in the, in the book. So I did as much research as I could. You know, I looked at architectural drawings of Mount Vernon, which I had been to before, but it was a, it's a very quick tour that they, they breeze you through. So I was looking at like the architectural drawings of the windows and the ballroom and you know, how the river is situated and how the light comes in. And it was just like, there was so much research to go in there. So make sure that the clues rang true and the history rang true.

Yeah, I thought that was really fun. You like, it's a, like you truly take people on like kind of a cross country tour at some point and it's just like the, the travel is just sort of dizzying. I assume you did a lot of like itinerary planning and like driving directions in Google Maps.

Yeah, I mean, and that's, that's really what it was. It was like, you know, I need, I come up with this clue. It needs to be in a certain place with a certain thing. So let me look up like what statues are in this town or, you know, I'd like it to be set, I'd like the next clue to be in a particularly historical place. And so what can I look around for there that might fit the bill? So there was that, there's that one statue in there, I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. When I write something, and I'll tell you about this, when we talk about grim and mild, like if I write something for cabinet, don't ask me about it. As soon as I hand it in, it leaves my mind and then something else fills it. So if you ask me like particular details about this book that I published a couple of months ago, I couldn't tell you. It's sort of like, yeah, it's like when Comic Book guy asks, you know, William Shatner specific things about Star Trek, he's like, I don't know, it was 50 years ago. Just shut up. Like, that's how I feel sometimes.

I try. It's. It's hard right now to have a routine. My son is, is homeschooled. We kept him home because of the pandemic. He's going back to in person school in September. But, you know, mornings are hectic. Getting everyone out the door is, or getting my wife out the door, it can be just, it takes a lot because everyone's running around and doing something else. And you know, his schooling doesn't start until 12:30 and then she adjusted her hours to be home with him in the morning. And so there's just, there's so much going on. And so for me it's very hard to like build a routine around that. What I've tried to do, if I can get to bed early enough is I'll get up at like 5 o' clock in the morning and I'll get as much writing done for Grim and Mild as I can from like 5 to 8. And then I'll get breakfast going and get clothes for people and all this stuff. And then the rest of the day is sort of me playing catch up on other stuff, you know, either around the house or, you know, other writing for Grim and Mild. And then if I'm lucky, there's time for my own fiction or for the shelf life or whatever it is I'm working on. My personal stuff has taken a back seat. I'm about 12,000 words into a new book and I started it months ago and I just haven't been able to get back to it with any regularity. So like half the time I go back to this book now it's me rereading what I wrote to remember what it is I put in it so that I don't screw it up going forward. So yeah, I, I've tried to build a routine, but until he goes back to school and he's out the door, you know, at 7:30 every morning, I, I, there's no way.

Yeah, so, so I definitely, like, I, when I was writing, I mean, the book that I wrote was a, a much, much different sort of book and I think exercised probably different, different parts of my brain than like a, a creative book. But I definitely understood like the importance of, of a routine. Like I, for me it was getting to the office like an hour and a half, two hours early and just trying to like wake up and have the quiet to write. But like, what do you, what do you see as the importance of routine for writers? Do you, do you think that like, insisting on a routine can get in your way? Like creativity doesn't strike if you have to do it this time, or how do you, how do you see that routine as being useful?

No, I, I'm not, I'm not one to believe in writer's block. I don't believe it. Like, you know, suddenly the word stop flowing. I think routine is absolutely important because otherwise you will make an excuse to not do the thing. You will. You will make an excuse. And it's sort of a running joke among writers is the procrastination of it all, you know, oh, I need to clean. Once it's clean, then I can sit down and write. Oh, my desk is a mess now I have to tidy up my desk. Oh, I should probably get dinner started. You know, it's almost six o'. Clock. You know, there's always something else to be done. But if you set that time like when I was working in the city and I had that time from 7 to 9am that was my time to write, my time to focus on my book. And I managed to get the book done in three, four, five months maybe now I'm. Now I'm lucky if I can get it done in a year. A first draft. And I'm not saying that as a joke, like I literally cannot get it done in. You know, you could probably. Someone could have a child in the time it takes me to finish a first draft now like a human than

it is to make a book.

It really is sometimes. And I would love to go back to having that dedicated routine, like to get up at the same time every morning, get out the door on the train into the city, button chair in a Starbucks or a Barnes and Noble, whatever it is, and have that time back to myself. Because right now I don't have it.

Yeah.

And now I'm sort of like squeezing moments where I can, where if I can sneak away for five minutes and no one will know where I am or, you know, no one's going to come asking for me. Like I can't go to the bathroom in peace in my house, you know, for more than two seconds. So there's no way I can, I can get time to write especially my own fiction, you know, on my own, you know, if it's for, if it's for work, it's. If it's for grim and mile, then it's like, okay, fine, you know, we'll leave you alone. But for myself, it's almost impossible.

Yeah.

So this is an unscripted question, but I'm really interested to know if there's any one single piece of writing advice that has been just super useful to you. I'd love to hear what you have. And then I want to share one of my Own

one piece of writing advice that has been useful to me. I mean, it hasn't been useful to me because it's something that still bothers the hell out of me. But I will say don't, don't judge your. Don't judge other people's success as your failures. So I see a lot of people who are like, oh, I have this, this book deal or I got an agent or, you know, I'm number one on the bestseller list or whatever it is. And it feels like, well, when's it going to be my turn? You know? And I, same thing with the two books I, I self published. Part of the reason I self published them was because I was, you know, out of work and I needed money. But I had, I didn't want to at first. I didn't want to self publish them because I, my goal was to be on a shelf at Barnes and Noble and to, you know, see it in paper, you know, on, you know, someone reading it on the train. And so I sort of felt like I had lost something by doing it, by self publishing. But I don't regret doing it. It's really nice to see my words out there and especially if someone likes it and says so on Amazon. P.S. if you've read my book or bought it or whatever, just please leave a review on Amazon. It helps. I would like to go. This, this next book I'm writing, I'll say is, is going to be queried. I'm not going to self publish it. I say that now, but, you know, the goal is not to self publish it. The goal is to go through the traditional channels, but angry at the traditional channels for like ignoring me. But publishing Dinesh d', Souza, like, that kind of stuff really pissed me off. You know, it's, when is it going to be my turn? Is just what I keep coming back to. And you know, one day it will be my turn, I, I guarantee. Because I get better with every book I've written. I've been writing for Grim and mild for four years now. I've written seven, over 700 stories for Cabinet of Curiosities. So you're talking three quarters of a million words. I've gotten very good in that time. And you know how to tell a story, especially how to tell a story in a short amount of time. You know, short stories, flash fiction, I've gotten very good at. And so I, I know that my time will come. And just to remind myself, like, seeing my friends do well does not mean, like they're taking my spot. They're they're not doing it instead of me. It's just, it's not my turn yet.

Well, you know, it's really hard for, you know, a white man to get published anymore.

So I've heard. So I have heard.

Was that Grisham was.

Oh yeah, it was Grisham. And then Joyce Taylor outside of had a thing too like.

Yeah, because she, she had heard from a friend of her. Oh no, it was James Patterson. It was James Patterson.

Wow.

So just all white people write the same to you?

Do they all look the same to you, Tim?

Exactly. I can't tell.

Yeah.

Lived on either side of Jeffrey Epps.

No. But you know, it's funny, I, I think Grisham did say something at one point recently. He also had some really tone deaf take on, on current events.

Lucky guess.

So my, my best piece of writing advice for me personally was actually not from something I read in like some Stephen King or Neil Gaiman book about writing, but it's something that also a friend of the show Toffer told me, which was when I was trying to write this book about UX writing. Toffer said that I should always like end my writing session knowing what I'm going to write tomorrow. And I had never thought about that. So like I started at the bottom of my like each day the thing that I was writing, just a bullet point list of the thing that I was going to try to hit the next day. It was so useful and it just like helped me keep a momentum that I didn't, I didn't feel like I had before. So I. What are you saying, Johnny?

I thought that that was his.

Yeah, well I was, it was, it was useful advice. It's what I needed in the Times.

Yeah, for sure.

Now. So with your like, I mean, fully loaded status as a professional writer right now, I mean you're writing in both realms of your work life and creative life. You've talked a little bit about this. Can you speak, can you say a little bit more about the transition into doing this full time work for Grim and Mild and how you sort of manage your writing energy that you use up, or I shouldn't say use up because it has a negative connotation.

But do you feel used up words

Grim and I, I do, I feel used up on a daily basis. I, it's, it's hard not to get burned out. It's hard like I'm doing that, that thing that people always say to do, which is do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. It's nonsense. You work every day even if you love what you do. It's hard work. It's, it's dedicated work and it's very, you know, when it's your livelihood, you don't get the luxury of saying, I don't feel like doing it right now. The muse hasn't struck me. So I'm going to, I'm gonna go, you know, eat a san and you know, watch Daredevil. I don't get that luxury. So I, I have to force myself to find a way into a story or look for, for pitches for the next week of Cabinet stories or whatever it is. And so it takes a lot out of you, especially now that it's my full time job. It was hard enough when I had a 9 to 5 and cabinet of Curiosities and that, you know, you're asking where do I find the time I had to make the time. I would be up until 11 or 12 o' clock at night some nights, you know, writing cabinet stories just because I didn't have the time during the day. Because in my old job I had meetings, literally, I would have meetings some days from 8:00 until 5:30, just back to back to back with barely any time to squeeze in a lunch. And I'm so glad to be out of that. But you know, it's hard. And so I spend almost all of my energy now writing Grim and Mild, which is great. And don't read into that as like me not thinking that's great. I am living my best life right now and I am doing the job I've always wanted to do, but it takes a lot out of, you know, and you know, by the end of the night after I've made dinner and put the kid to bed and you know, all that, I just want to veg on the TV and watch something or, you know, I would love to read a book. I can't even, I don't have the energy for that either. So I, I try on the weekends, if I can, to squeeze in here and there, you know, a couple hundred words in the novel or maybe if I get the inkling to write a short story or a flash fiction piece, I'll do that. I mean, even if I get, you know, two minutes on My phone, you know, standing around in the basement, moving laundry over. I'll try and get some words down. But it's, it's really hard. It's really hard when writing is your job and then your side hobby is writing.

You, Doug, we heard you like writing.

We put writing in your writing so you could write while you're writing.

Yeah, so I, I didn't do it the way a lot of, like, people who go into self publishing whole hog, you know, they don't, they don't have acid. They, you know, like, this is how they're doing it. They have no dream of being traditionally published. So everything they do is with the goal of self publishing what looks like a traditionally published novel. I didn't do it that way. I. The first time I did it was my book, the Prophet. It was a. It's a thriller about a cult and I highly recommend people read it. It's a, It's a rollicking read. But I went into that book saying I need money because I'm unemployed. So how can I get this done as quickly but as professionally looking and fudged as possible? So I have a Canva account. I recommend anybody who wants to self publish or anything you want to do artistically where you need to put a cover on it or create a social media image for it or whatever, get a Canva account or Adobe Express or Adobe. I hate Adobe. I'm sorry, but I, and I know you work for them, but I, I'm not a fan of their tools. I apologize. But I. Canva is really great because on the free account you can do quite a bit. And I pay for. I pay for the Pro account, so I get access to like certain logos and vector images and stuff, and I can upload certain images of a specific size or, you know, within a range. And it's. I. The world is fully unlocked to me now. And so I created a cover. It's really easy to create the COVID for digital because you really only need the front of it. The. The paperback is difficult because I had to find a template. And then it was probably an hour and a half of trial and error on Amazon's website of uploading different iterations of my paperback cover to make sure that the spine and the front and the back all bled the right way and nothing was cropped off. Nothing was cut off. And then I had to order myself an author copy for like three and a half bucks. Sent, have them send it to me. And that, you know, Amazon prime is two days. Amazon wants to send a book you wrote a book, which they made their living off of in the beginning. It takes a week and a half, so. Because they have to print it. So I had to wait a week and a half for my book to show up in the hopes that it looked the way it was supposed to. And there's like a side of it where it's like, it's a little short on the blue background. And it's like, I'm not doing this again. It's fine. You know, I'm not looking for perfection here. The words inside look great, and that's what matters. And so, you know, the first one with the Prophet, I did it as quickly as possible. It was digital only. Scrivener has great options for exporting. So I looked up on an article on how to export from Scrivener into epub so that it looked like a real book of the inside. And that whole process probably took me a night, you know, just to do it all in, in one shot. And then I created my account on Amazon, my seller account on Amazon, uploaded everything, and we were off to the races. This one, I decided, you know, it wasn't as. As dire for me to get the book out, but I wanted it out there. I. I hadn't written. I hadn't published a book in like three years, two years. I wanted something else out there and this was sitting here. It had been re. It had been rejected by like 75 agents. And I was like, I don't want to deal with this anymore and I want people to read this. So I put it out there and I. It just. I gave myself more Runway with it. I, you know, took. I took more time doing the COVID It's a more involved cover also done in Canva, but it looks really good, you know, laying everything out. Doing the paperback cover. And then I did some marketing around it too. I bought ads on Kindle, so I don't know if anyone has seen it. If you have, I'd love to know. But if you have a Kindle and you have one that has the ads on the front. I bought Kindle ads so my cover would pop up with a link to buy. And it worked.

I wish I would get ads for that. I get ads for some of the, like, the crappiest books.

Oh, they're, they're sending me ads for like romance novels and paranormal romance stuff and I don't read that. And if you do, great, I, no judgment. It's just, it's not my, my stuff I want to read. So it's just really funny what they pitch to me where it's like if I go on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, even like I'm pitched ads that were. I will buy something right there because that's exactly what I wanted. And Kindle, Kindle knows what I published and they're like, maybe you would like Forbidden Hearts. Like no, I don't want to read that.

My cur.

Like Kindle, you know, you have access to my whole library.

Right, right, exactly. You know what I buy?

The one that it says, the one that I have right now is, it says Dark the dream. More than 2.5 million copies downloaded. Dive into this sizzling, action packed paranormal romance series.

There are six too many abs in this advertisement for me.

Six too many abs.

It's, yeah, it's, it's really just awful the way they do their, their advertising. But it, it's worked. I've, I've sold, I bought a hundred dollars worth of ads. I still have like $50 left on the, the, the, the account and I've probably sold four or five copies using it. So it's, it's, it's done some numbers that way, but honestly, I've sold more via Twitter and word of mouth and you know, my CO work, my old coworkers, when they heard that I had published a book, they went out and bought it on, on Kindle, which is really nice. So yeah, I've done more that way than, you know, doing it through the advertising stuff.

It's really reasonably priced too. Like it's not a break the bank kind of a. Kind of a thing.

Yeah, it's.

I, I had it originally like a dime a click, which wasn't doing numbers. Then I jacked it up to like 50 cents a click and then I started getting some hits and so I'm

sorry, the novel itself, it's like three bucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah. It's. It's the cost of a co. It's the cost of a cup of coffee. Like it's. And it'll last longer too. So the fact that I can't get anyone, you know, it's not that I can't get anyone, but I can't do certain numbers. You know, I don't know what it is, but like, no matter what you do on Twitter, you know, saying, hey, it's only $3. You know, please support me. And, you know, half the people don't even see it or they don't interact with it. They won't even retweet, retweet the tweet. And it's anyone who says that, you know, a high social media following means, you know, high number of people who buy your books or buy whatever you're selling, it's not true. It doesn't matter how many Twitter followers you have. Half of them are bots anyway. No one's going to buy your stuff. I've heard the best way to market your book, if you have it, is a mailing list, an email list. That's where you will get numbers because those people specifically signed up to receive word from you. And so you already have that audience there. They have to go in there. Even if they're going to delete it, they have to see it. So they're going to. They're going to go in, they're going to see your email, they're going to see that cover at the top. And then you say, oh, three bucks. All right, I'll buy it. You know, it's so much better than Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or any of that.

Yeah. So, Harry, I would be neglectful in my job if I. If I didn't ask you, since you said you're already working on your next novel, is there anything at all you can. You can share about it? Like just any. Any small detail we can hold on to?

It is a retelling of the. And I always pronounce it Sharon, but like the Charon myth, the person who takes you to the afterlife in the River Styx. Yeah. So it's a retelling of him. And the basic premise is he is banished to Earth to carve keys out for the terminally ill. So they come to him for their key to the afterlife. And he carves the key from the boat, from his gondola. And so he meets this woman who comes for a key. And for some reason, it's never happened before, but for some reason, he falls for her. He develops feelings for her. And he has lived for thousands and thousands of years. He has never. And. But, you know, he doesn't age, but he has never felt feelings for a human being before until now. And then as the book goes on, you learn. You learn what her illness is and everything, but he. He decides he wants to. He goes through this. This choice of, do I give up? Everything and stop making these keys and basically stop death from.

Nobody dies anymore.

Well, that's what he thinks. You know, if I stop making these keys, do people stop dying? Will she live her full life if I stop doing this so I can be with her? Or am I giving up my, my duty and you know, the job I do, you know, for love. While people die and have no way back to the after way into the afterlife, they just sort of linger in limbo.

Yeah.

So that's what I'm working on right now.

That's really cool. I can't read. Wait to read that. And in like six years when you

finish it, pretty much that's, that's how it's looking right now. Yeah, like I said, I'm about. Yeah, I'm about 12,000 words in and you know, I might get another 200 words in over the next six months.

Yeah.

Well, to reference the thing that is taking all that time, can. Can you tell us a little more or as much as you can, I guess, about what you do with Grim and Mild, like what your work looks like day to day, what your tasks are that you're usually dealing with as a writer and. Yeah, just how you approach.

Yeah. So I, I'm still writing for Cabinet of Curiosities, where, where I was a contractor before. I'm now a full time employee of Grim and Mild.

Yay.

And so that's. The majority of my time is spent on Cabinet of Curiosities. And then I'm also writing from about episode 32 up until episode 50. Aaron Manke, the. The creator of Lore and the owner of the company, he has gone back to the first 50 episodes of Lore and re recorded them. He's calling them Lore Remasters. So he rerecords them and then he adds an epilogue to the end of them, which wasn't in the original recording. So for that I've been writing the epilogues from about episode 32 to now episode 50. I just finished episode 44 today, so I'm doing that and then I'm working on other stuff that will be coming up soon. But those, those are my two main tasks right now. And then I also do like tiktoks for them. You know, I help with some research things and we sort of, you know, even though each person or a couple of people work on shows in silos, we do collaborate and coordinate regularly in Slack and you know, we help each other out and it's, you know, does someone have any information on this person who died mysteriously 30 years ago? And it's like, I have the weirdest conversations on a daily basis. And it's like, how is this my job?

It's like a Czech hedgehog is.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, what does anyone have that story on, you know, the axe murderer of. Of St. Louis, you know, from the turn of the century. And, you know, how many bodies was it? It's like, why. Why are we doing this? How did we get here? So, yeah, that's. That's what I'm doing.

Can you share how many other writers there are?

There are. So not everybody writes yet. Some people are researchers and outliners, but there's probably like eight or nine of us.

Oh, wow. It's bigger than I thought.

Yeah, it's. He's got. And then, you know, he. Because the company is. Is works with iHeartMedia, we also have people from iHeart who help some of our stuff as well with, like, some research and audio mixing, mostly on that side of things. So the grim and mild piece of it is really, you know, writing and producing the episodes.

Does your writing take the form of like. Like scripts or like, screenplays without the screen? Like, how.

So they. It's. It's prose. It's all prose. Because he's reading it directly into the microphone. So my. The scripts don't read like, interior, day, you know, it's nothing like that because it's not fiction. It's. It's a story he's. He's telling. It's. It's an audiobook, basically. So he's just reading the. The prose that I'm writing for him.

That makes sense. That's cool.

I mean, first and foremost, it's creative nonfiction versus fiction. So the. What I do for grim and mild is create a nonfiction. So there are facts I have to hit. There are. You know, I can. There's some. I get some wiggle room in how I tell the story, but I can't alter the facts. So I can. You know, there's turns of phrase. If you've listened to Cabinet of Curiosities, you'll notice that most episodes end with some sort of dad joke. That's me. Aaron even told me, yeah, some of your dad jokes I had to edit down because they were even too cringy for me. And I was like, oh, that's. I will not be censored. So I. How dare you, sir? So I. I write those. I write those. You know, there's a Lot of research that goes into those across all sorts of. Of articles. You know, it might be. Might be a newspaper, an old newspaper I'm looking through from the 1800s. It. It's Wikipedia, it's mysterious universe. It's Atlas Obscura, you know, all these different places where, you know, and. And the real trouble comes in when, like, Wikipedia says one thing, but Atlas Obscurus has something completely different about the same fact. And so you're trying to find, like, a third or fourth corroboration to get to the root of the fact you're trying to tell. And so for Cabinet, that's. It's. I'm doing the research and the writing at the same time with Lore, with the epilogues, those I'm working from an outline someone has already written. And so I'll do some research as I'm going just to make sure, like, if I have to add something or if I have to spin the way, you know, for example, let's say the fact is this person had a particular. So this person had a particular talent for lighting things on fire with his mouth, and he did this indoors. I'm going to. Or the spin I'm putting on it is, you know, sitting at his kitchen table. I now have to look. Did he sit at his kitchen table when he did this? You know, that kind of stuff, just to make sure that I'm not taking liberties that I'm not at liberty to take. So that's the tricky part of it. And then also trying to write it so it doesn't sound like a Wikipedia article. You know, trying to write it where it sounds like a story. Like, you're, like, you're. You're telling someone what happened. You know, did you hear about that time, you know, Joe hacked seven people to death? Like, that's. That's what I'm doing is, is I'm telling a story in a. In a fictional style with nonfiction.

Yeah, that's really cool. So speaking of, of scripts, speaking of screenplays, when is Shelf Life season two happening? Yes.

I've got the first screen. The first episodes. Right. The first episode written. And then that was another thing, like the book, where it just. It had to take a back seat because when I had started getting back into it, I got let go from my last job. So I. I put that to the side. And then it's funny, I lost my job. And then that day, because I said to Aaron is like, oh, they cut me loose. They're restructuring all this stuff. He's like, well, you know, I Can offer you this. Do you want to come work for me? I was like, yes. Yeah. And so I had worked in legal marketing for 12 years, and I am finally free of it. And I have honestly never been happier in my life. I used to. I was getting. By the end, like, I was looking anyway to get out of that particular firm and go into some other industry, be it medical or, you know, whatever it was. Not a law firm. I can't work for a law firm ever again. But I was. I was looking around and, yeah, he just. He offered it to me and I could never. I wasn't. I'll say this. It was getting to that point on Sunday nights where like, five, six o' clock would roll around and I would get this heart palpitation. Like, oh, God. I. Yep. The Sunday scaries. I got to log in tomorrow. I got to have my morning meeting or my weekly meeting with my boss and all this stuff. And I just. I was getting such anxiety from it. And it was almost a relief when they pulled me into the meeting and said, yeah, we're. We're letting you go. And I was like, okay. And I was. I was pissed at the, at the time. And then the more I thought about it, especially after I was hired that day at Grim and Mild, I was like, no, this is, this is the way it was supposed to go. Like, everything led up to this, and I've never been happier.

Wow. Yeah, that's really. That's really great that, that, that aligned.

It's remarkable. That's. That's. And we're so happy.

That's remarks.

I know.

All right, well, before we let you go, Harry, is there anything else you'd like to bring up or any grievances you want to air or anything you

want to mention before long standing personal beef with Johnny doing. And do you need to say anything?

He knows what he did. Yeah.

Question. Is Johnny still the worst? That's the.

I don't think I need to say anything more about that. He. He's aware.

I love Johnny. I. I gotta say, as much as I've turned into J.D. salinger and I just. I've become a recluse and I don't talk to anybody or go anywhere. I do miss, you know, those times where, like, Johnny would come into the city or, you know, Andy, you would come into New York and, you know, when you were working at Facebook and, like, I'd get to see you guys. I miss that. And, you know, being able to, like, go see Caroline store when it was still around and, and all of that. Like, I, I do miss those, those moments. I, I don't miss the commute, but I do miss seeing those, you know, you and, and the people I, I care about, you know.

Yeah.

On a fairly regular basis.

I need to get back to New York. If I can avoid the monkeypox, I will.

Yeah, it's always something.

It's always something.

It's pizza rat. It's monkey pox.

Pizza rat.

Yeah.

Meet me too.

Yeah, I mean, I'm hcmarks on Twitter and Instagram and pretty much everywhere else, but all of my links are at linktree, so linktr.ee hcmarks. You get links to my books and my social media and all that fun stuff.

If you want to see his frequent screaming on Twitter.

My frequent screaming on Twitter. That's twitter.com hcmarx awesome.

Woohoo.

Am I paying for this?

This is your show.

Thank you.

Do you like our podcast? Most people like our podcast, but if you like our podcast, David will turn it off.