This episode of Other People is brought to you by Pretty, the new novel from best-selling author Jillian Lauren, now available from plume books wherever books are sold. Jillian's first book, a memoir called Some Girls, was a New York Times bestseller, a runaway hit. Now she comes out with her debut novel, which Jerry Stahl, author of permanent midnight hails as "utterly riveting and compulsively readable." Jillian Lauren renders the taste and feel of wretched excess, be it sex drugs, food, or Los Angeles with a savage veracity and style all of her own, or style all her own, end quote. Pretty, it's the new novel from Jillian Lauren, go to your local retail establishment, purchase it, go online, get your copy, hold that copy, read that copy, it's a book, oh my god. You are not alone. You have found other people. You and I have a friend in common. Every stupid thing that a writer could do, I've done. That could get really beautiful. Big, dated West, struggle, you know? It was quite a whole new, it was like your headache quoted thing, what was really there. And now here's your host, Brad listed. Just one person at just one time, right? All right, everybody here we go. This is it. I'm Brad Listy. This is other people, the new podcast in which I talk to other people, other writer people in particular, people who write stuff, people who write books, people who sit there all day long staring at a flashing cursor, people who write even though they're deep in poverty, people who continue to try to write books, even though the books they're trying to write are alluding them, people who quietly endure the monumental frustration of trying to put the words in the right order. Those are the people that I'm going to be talking with. And the reason I'm doing the show is because I find these people interesting. I work with them on a daily basis I have for years now. In addition to being a writer, run an online literary community and culture magazine called The Nervous Breakdown where this podcast can be found. It can also be found at otherpeoplepod.com, its own little website. But I run this website called The Nervous Breakdown. It started five years ago. We had like 20 writers when we got going and now we have over 700 I believe, something like that. So it's this community that's grown beyond my wildest imagination, beyond my wildest dreams when I initially started it up. And over the years I've gotten to know writers and I feel like there's a whole out there in the media world. And I feel like there is an effort being made here with this podcast to fill it. And by that I mean I think that authors are interesting and I feel like they don't often get a chance to sit there and talk about themselves, maybe by choice. But I think that this is something that readers, people interested in books, people who might be considering an interest in books would benefit from. Hearing from authors, hearing about their lives in particular, rather than the minutia of their writing work and the minutia of literature with a capital L as it is often discussed in the realm of academia. What am I saying? I think what I'm saying is that this show is going to be about the authors, about them, about them as people. And it'll also be about their work. But mostly it's about them as people. I want to know who they are, what their childhoods were like, what's going on, what happened yesterday, why they're wearing what they're wearing, things like that. I want to know what they eat. I want to know what makes them enraged. And I think that if we get to know them as people better, we'll know better whether or not we want to read their stuff. I think that this show is about perpetuating book culture by letting people know who these writers are by having intimate conversations in which they reveal stuff. That's the idea. I want candor. Don't you want candor? I want candor. So that's the show. If you have any questions about it or thoughts about it, if you want to critique it or lambast me or offer gushing praise, you can email at letters@otherpeoplepod.com. Follow us @otherpeoplepod. Visit @otherpeoplepod.com, which is the official website. We're all new shows and all news regarding the show will be located. You can also go to the nervous breakdown.com, which is the beast. The show will be broadcasted there in our little podcast section. As for the show itself, the sound of the show itself, I want to issue a fair warning that the early rounds of shows, the sound quality is not going to be as utterly ideal as I would hope it would be. That's my fault. That's me learning how to do this stuff. They're perfectly listenable. You won't have any trouble hearing and it won't be that annoying, but it's not going to sound radio quality like this what you're hearing right now, but that's coming. Bear with me. I'm an idiot. I'm learning this tech stuff as I go minute by minute. It's a bit of an ordeal, to be honest with you, but I'm getting there a message pay for by veterans for all voters. Listen to this message from Ted Delacat, former army infantryman and ranger qualified platoon leader active in the army reserves. When I enlisted in the army, I sworn oath to this country, not any political party. That's why I'm interested in citizens ballot measures around the country to reduce the power of political parties. Colorado votes on one too. Right now, election rules allow political insiders to hand pick party nominees. It's the reason we're usually stuck voting for the lesser of two evils. Colorado's plan creates an open primary where all candidates appear on one primary ballot. Every voter has the freedom to vote for any candidate, no matter which party. The Colorado plan advances four candidates to the general election, not two. That means more choices for voters in the primary and general election. Get the facts. Elections belong to the voters, not political parties. Paid for by veterans for all voters, Anthony Haas registered agent. The use of military rank and job titles does not implant endorsement by the department of the army or the Department of Defense of this ballot measure. You're sequestered in your mobile home? Yeah. Are we rolling or something? Yeah. I've got Jonathan Ebison on the line. Let me put some pants on. Yeah. Author of All About Lulu, winner of the Washington State Book Award, and the best-selling west of here, now out from Elgonquin. He is also not wearing pants currently. Are you there? Yeah, I'm wearing sweats now. I just left. The chaos left, so there's good timing on the call. Nice. Jesus, David, what a struggle. I get up at the crack of dawn these days to get any writing done. And by like, you're a dad, you're a parent. You try to work at home. I hate 30. It's just pure chaos. It's hard. Three dogs scratching at the door, duck barking, kid right upstairs, just hammering on the floor. My wife asking me, it's hard to get any work done. I mean, I love being a family man. Don't get me wrong, but I mean, I'm going to just have to stop sleeping. Well, yeah. And then what's this deal with the vertigo? Don't you have vertigo too? I did. It's all gone. I was like, I panicked for like, for like a week. I was just like really looking at my mortality. If you do all this blood work, I couldn't figure out what it was. I mean, I was like, really dizzy. I mean, I just stand up and the whole world was pitching and I thought, Oh God, all my partying finally caught up to me on my sleep station. You know, maybe the reason I'm so prolific and I work so fast is because I got one of those big brain tumors, the angel, Michael, and so all this going through my head, it was worse than the time I had blood in my semen. But it turns out, I think it was just like some kind of inner ear infection that they couldn't see in the canal because I'm better now. Wait a minute. I got to stop you like blood in your semen. Yeah, that's a different story. That happened once. It's a real buzz kill too. And you're gonna imagine having to check if there's blood in your semen. It's not a fun exercise. That was just that I had my prostate irritated in it. Another virus. Gotcha. Gotcha, get an old, get an old. They call me a doctor. Yeah, yeah. Well, your phone's breaking up a little bit. Are you on a cell phone? Yeah, I'm sorry. I'll talk. Okay. How's that? Yeah, that's good. That's good. Well, I'm glad you're feeling better, man. I was like getting, you know, these kind of cryptic Facebook updates on my wall about. Well, that was a plan, you know, just in case. Just in case you went down. It's weird. It makes sure I was still interesting. No, you know, it's weird to say that. Everybody cared. You go to the doctor's desperate. You go to the doctor or something happens and it's a, you know, even the slightest thing. Like, I remember I went to get a physical and the doctor was like, we think you have a slight heart murmur. And for the next week, all I could think, I could feel it. I was like, oh my God, I can feel my heart. You know, it's going to, it's something's going to go, you know, and I started noticing things that I didn't notice previously. I felt fine prior to that. And then suddenly I can feel like tightness in my chest, you know, it's a good thing. All of a sudden you're like holding the cheeseburger going, I can't eat this. And you're like, I got to lay off the beer. I got to, I actually passed out in the doctor's office and we took my blood. I guess it's not that rare. They take guys do it all the time because they forget to breathe. Right. I've never been good with giving blood, but I was already at Vertico. And they said I just like pitched over and started snoring and they couldn't wake me up for like 10 minutes and as light as she. So it scared the lifestyle right out of me for about a week. You know, I was just like drinking milk, thistle and eating vegetables that I know is just a virus and my blood pressure is fine and all the blood work came up fine and I got a clean bill of help. I'm here to pack my old race. That's your old list. So did they give you medication for a near infection? Is that what happened? No, they didn't give me, they gave me that, you know, meck was eating or whatever. You know, the stuff they give you for sea sickness or whatever, it didn't do anything. Right. I mean, dude, the room is just spinning, which normally is like a good thing, you know? I mean, normally I'd build for hours just to get to that point. But like this is a, it's just not good. Well, I asked it about, I don't know, about eight ten days possible to write impossible. I was going to say you weren't getting any work done. No, I mean, I would have said in the moment that I couldn't, you know, I mean, if I'm not busy, I should then I write, you know. So what's, I mean, give us a sense because I don't know if everybody understands the force of nature, you know, that is Jonathan Everson, the amount of work you do, your work schedule, like you're up at five. Is that what you do? Like, what happens with you? Yeah, I cheated until like five fifteen this morning. These days, at least, I'm trying to get to bed earlier. What happens is, I mean, I was touring for like basically like, you know, pretty much five months, you know, just on the road a lot. And, you know, coming home to see my family whenever I could. And then I went through a period of intense, just really family time, like where we went out of town and camped and like just really good quality family time. And then now I'm back still getting all that quality family time, but in order to really get the work I need to get done and catch up, I just really got to get up early. But there's a few months there when I was touring, at least I didn't have to get up at five a.m. But I was going to bed at five a.m. You know, right? Well, that's the thing. It's like, I find that most writers, it's got to be either first thing in the morning or late at night. It's hard to work during work hours because the phone's ringing and the internet's, you know, happening and it's hard to kind of tune everything out. Oh, yeah. My neighbor drops it in. My neighbor is a long way away because, you know, I live way up with my neighbor's, you know, 200 yards away through the creek. He drops his barbecue lid and all three of my dogs are just how? So wait, you're in like Bainbridge, Bainbridge Island? Is that correct out in Washington? Yeah. Just middle of no, that's just very, it's very bucolic. I've never been up there. What is it? What's the same? Well, you know, it's become sort of a bedroom community. It's a lot bigger than it was in the 70s when I grew up there. But like, you know, my place is still way up in the woods. There's like 140 acres of woods right there on my, butting my house on all sides. And it's still, you know, it's one of the last really big green belts on the island. It's become a little more suburban on the outskirts. I mean, suburban by my standards. So no way. I'm always complaining about the traffic. I'm looking at a less, a less populated island for some kind of weekend cabin sort of situation if I can make it happen. Because I mean, I'm just getting crotchety and old and it's just like, you know, I must walk my kid about four miles a day in the stroller. Because that's my thinking time. That's how I make up for the time where I can't be sitting at the typewriter. I just push him in the stroller and my gears will be spinning. Sure. There's too much traffic now. Damn school buses. So what are you talking about? Are you so you're strollering along the road? Are you on some sort of like nature trail? Sometimes trails, but usually just a road. It's like a really beautiful wooded road, but it doesn't have huge bike lanes. And it's not like traffic like the kind of traffic you're used to. But like even like one car a minute, it's just annoying because you get across lanes. Right. Yeah. It's just the little vagaries in my life. No one probably cares about Brad. Maybe you because you're a father. Well, I like the idea of getting a visual read on your situation. Like I always did picture you living on some sort of, you know, nature preserve or some more, you know, in a wooded enclave, if that's actually a term. You know what I'm saying? I like to get a visual read on people's situation. Where are you in space? Yeah, I'm a wooded. So now do you wake up in the morning with an alarm or did you just pop up the bed? Yeah, I do. You do. Okay. I wake up in the morning with the lamp. Some morning it doesn't go off though. And I beat it up. And you know, I mean, because your body gets trained up to a discipline for me and keeping on a schedule. You know, that's that's because each day I stay on my schedule, I just become more and more productive. It's just more like conditioning yourself. I have to eat or something I mean, if I get up at five in the morning, the first morning, I mean, I really get cooked until 645. But like by the seventh or eighth morning for doing that, I'm like really, I can get there quicker, you know what I mean? Right. It's like a boxer training, you know, you just got to get yourself hammered into that routine. But yeah, and I did try to get hammered the night before I get a little punch drunk. I like to work like a knuckle baller to use more tired sports analogies. Right. I like my arm to be tired. I like to throw on my off this. So they like to slow the mania down a little bit, you know? Sure, sure. I mean, when you say that I am better, that works. Well, I mean, we're talking about mania and like energy, you obviously have a high level of energy. I've heard you use the word mania when it comes to, you know, your energy levels and your work habits and whatnot. Like, do you feel like you have an abnormal amount of mental and physical energy? Do you feel that? I don't know, maybe it's, I wouldn't, I'd call it electrical energy, maybe. It's kind of frenetic. It's like, I saw it there a past a while back, you know, a couple of years ago, and he's like, you're up the charts. He's like, you know, you got a tiger by the tail. I mean, and which is what it feels like, which is awesome. I'm just glad that tiger's there. That tiger wasn't there, dude. I'd be like, ID drug user, like talking to parking meters. I would just totally spin out of control. Well, that's a thing. I'm sure it's unconvinced. I mean, really, without writing, I mean, without that one, without that focus, I mean, who knows? What would I do? It's probably a lot of no good. Well, sure. Yeah, no, it's like, it's like an organizing principle. Serial masturbating, all the normal stuff. Yeah, you know, I think about that with regard to a lot of different things, whether it's this, you know, high energy mania, a way to channel it and focus it, or whether it's a writer who has some sort of central issue, a grief issue, a relationship thing, something to do with their family or their parents, and they work it out through their writing. And I think sometimes that if you didn't have that, if a writer doesn't have writing to go to as a way to work through all that stuff, it would be a much worse situation. It's therapeutic. I guess is what I'm trying to say. You know, it's a matter of self-care. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And just a matter of, you know, we are our patterns, basically, you know, at the end of the day. And so it's, it's, it's reflective time. Like, when you're always going as fast as I go and like talking as fast and, and, and, and moving as fast, it's like, you know, writing is the one thing that really slows me down. I mean, I kind of hate the way I talk out loud. Like, I, because I don't think my mouth is just already moving, you know, in unison with my thoughts, whereas when I sit down to write, I actually get to edit myself. Sure. Ran it in. Which is like better for everybody. So it's like, it works good. So now what, speaking of motivation, like obviously you've got this thing, you love to do it. I mean, is that really the motivation? You just love to write. You love to write fiction. That's what gets you up in the morning. Or is there something deeper that drives you that you're trying to, to say or do, you know, in your work? Well, I mean, a little of both. I mean, I really, I do. Obviously, it's really because at the end of the day, I love to do it. Because otherwise, you know, like, I wrote like six on published novels, you know, and I had my share of projections. I was trying, but, you know, more as a matter of due diligence. It didn't really matter to me that they weren't. I would have quit it a long time ago, you know, at that way, the case. But, you know, at the same time, I'm ambitious. I mean, I want to push myself. And now that I have any kind of, you know, that managed to, you know, cobble together any kind of readership. And, you know, I want to, I want to, you know, make the test of that situation. It's a different dynamic. I mean, I wasn't writing in a vacuum before. I was writing to a reader and that reader was me, you know, because I really get the same thing out of writing as I do at a reading, which is empathy. I get to get outside of myself, get to experience wider parameters of the human experience through other characters and things like that. So, I get that in an even more intense way than it for me. Well, you've broken up a little bit. What did you just say? So, I guess what I'm getting at is I wasn't writing in a vacuum. To write without thinking about publication is still not to write in a vacuum. You know what I mean? And I've heard the argument, well, like, you're just writing to yourself while you bother. Of course, you want to be published. You know, that's just a different issue than why I do it. You know what I mean? So, do you think that, like, if you mean, obviously you've gotten a bit of a foothold, you're making something of a living from your, your written work? Is that correct? I mean, something of a living is about that perfect way to put it. Yeah, it's so tough. So, I mean, here's the question. Something of a living, which is not every writer, but like, you know, during status and connecting. You know, some of us teach, some of us have day jobs, some of us don't. I'm lucky enough not to. For now, you know what I mean? But we'll see. Something of a living is perfect. Well, okay. So, here's a question for you. Because now that I have a kid, I go through, I'm going through this. This is like a big issue for me right now. Like, once you have a family, you have a wife, and then you have this writing thing, which is, it's almost something of an addiction almost. How do you deal with the idea of, you know, I'm going to continue to do this. Hopefully it works. Maybe it'll work. And also manage the part of you that wants to be responsible, you know, to the family and to the wife and kid and make a living and whatnot. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, oh, yeah, that's just a really, you know, I mean, I've been blessed in terms of the timing. I mean, some might say I was cursed by the timing because it took me 20 years to get in the room as far as publication and all those buried works. But like the timing of when it happened, concurrent with the birth of my first child and the way the money lined up and the way, you know, just the way it all worked out was perfect. So I haven't had to deal with that as much as I know a lot of writers have to. Or if this had happened to me earlier, I certainly would have. I still have the anxiety of being the provider anxiety. You know, I mean, the normal logistics of getting paid as a writer, you know, you get paid twice a year. And then when you sell a book, you get to advance. Or if you make, you know, I mean, the money usually only comes to you twice a year. And anybody who's ever paid like that realizes that it's really, it's kind of a, it's a blessing, but it's kind of difficult too. Because like on a daily basis, like the odds you see is your money going one way down, you know what I mean? So you're always sort of anxious to like, I want to keep doing this. I want to keep doing this. And I have to, you know, I'm willing to do anything to support my family. But the point is like this point, fortunately, this is the thing I can do that is worth the most. Because you know, I mean, otherwise, I'm pretty much your laborer, you know, I'm going to be out digging ditches, you know, working in gardens, you know, I can't even swing a hammer, you know. So I have limited possibilities. So I guess the short answer is I make it work. I mean, when you ask, how do you deal with that? I just say, you know, I make it work. I do everything I possibly make. Sure. Sure. Now, what about, you know, hang on a second, I've got this damn phone ringing. But when you talk about, you just hate that person right now? Yeah, just hate them, love them. But listening to you talk about, you know, how you make it all work in the schedule and whatnot, you know, what goes through my head is like, what is your idea of publication schedule, you know, like, how many books do you feel like you need to be publishing, like one a year, one every two years, do you have anything like that in your head, or is it just kind of like when you come back? Yeah, I mean, I like it to your cycle. It takes me about two years to write a book, and I already had kind of a head start when I started. So I think it takes me usually about, you know, a book like West of here took a little longer, but a book like the revised fundamentals of caregiving, which is a voice novel, didn't take quite as long. I don't know, I mean, I think it's really hard to keep your profile up in this business. I mean, if I've learned anything like looking at it, you know, it's just really hard, you know, and, you know, you're going to be that guy that writes a novel every 10 years, like Jonathan Transon or Jeffrey Eugeneid, in which case they better just be blockbusters. Is that how you pronounce it? Is it Eugeneid? I don't know, Eugeneid? I call him Eugeneidus. I don't even know it. I don't know how to pronounce it. Yeah, I think it's one of the ones I said, I don't know. I feel bad. But he does a book every 10, he does a book every 10 years, and then he gets these grants? Like, how does that work? How does that mean he got it? He also teaches, you know, I don't know. I'm not going to speculate too much, but I know he probably teaches and stuff like that. So for me, on a practical level, and please, I hope no one thinks I'm hurrying, it's just that I, you know, when you write 50 to 60 hours a week, you're going to be, you know, productive. I mean, you're going to, you know, it's not like I'm tossing off genre novels. I mean, there's guys that write faster than me, for sure. But I just think that if I really apply myself, I should be able to write it, book every two, you know, any way did it, Steinbeck did it, Faulkner did it, all this, you know, I mean, all the big American writers in the 20s and 30s and 40s that I, you know, grew up on. Those guys were publishing a book every couple of years. Sure. Well, and then, you know, I was reading this New York Times piece recently about, I think her name is Amanda Hawking, that girl who's self-published, and created that vampire series, or whatever it is, and sold all these books on her own, and then got this seven-figure deal from St. Martin's. And it's this big publishing success story that's very of the moment because she started out without a deal, and she then got a deal and went from being the indie author who was selling all these e-books on Kindle, and suddenly she's got this giant New York publishing deal, and she's big stuff in that world. But she's saying in this interview, or this profile, that she writes a book in 10 days. She thinks it through, she goes over it in her head, and then winds up cranking out one of these novels in 10 days, or something like that, two weeks. And I'm thinking to myself, you've got to be fucking kidding me. Yeah, I mean, screenplay, maybe. Maybe. You know, 120 pages of mostly dialogue in a little stage direction, well-thought-out, well-plotted outline. Yeah, you could bang that out in 10 days. I could, maybe, you know, but I still wouldn't release it to the world. I'd spend the next six months pouring over it, you know. I mean, I rewrite hard. I mean, I don't really write fast. I mean, for all the hours I put in every day, like I say, I get in about three and a half hours every morning before the household just becomes too big of a distraction. And then I usually do a couple hours before that night. So, you know, I'm getting a good solid five and a half hours just on writing. And I mean, I'm happy if I get a page. A page is a good thing, you know what I mean? So it's not really, I'm not accumulating that fast. And then, like, when you rewrite, like, you finish a draft, let's say you finish your first draft, like, how radically different are subsequent drafts? Are you doing complete wrecking ball stuff on the book or is it come out pretty whole? I mean, you know, how does it go for you? No, I'd say, well, you know, it's usually pretty well developed as it goes along. I don't really move on quickly. I'm not somebody who likes to write a draft then write another draft and got it. I like the thing to develop organically, because what I find is no matter what I think the book's going to be about when I start through the process, I find more efficient ways to do the things I'm setting out to do. I discover things that I hadn't thought of before that are worthy of exploration or better than what I planned. And like, there's this constant process of reverse engineering as I discover the story, as I discover the experience. Every day when I re-enter the narrative landscape, I see it anew and I see it a little bit better. At first times, you're just pretty blind in the process. It's really hard to get those first drafts out sometimes. I think writers that write really fast are really good. They just bang out. They just kind of bang out this sort of stream of consciousness. And I do that sometimes more when I'm writing in voice. But otherwise, it's about information and making decisions. And I don't like to make decisions that quickly always. It really is about decision-making. A writer brings you into a room, a hundred writers bring you into a room. There's potentially a million different rooms or, you know, a hundred different rooms to describe there. You have to, you know, so I don't know. I just can't just let it come straight out of my head fully formed. I imagine there's people out there with that skill set. Well, yeah, but there's two sides of it. Like I get what you're saying and I think it's right. And I think that generally it makes more sense to check yourself, to sit there with it, to refine it. But I think there's also maybe the danger of making it overwrought. You know, how do you balance that? Like, how do you get to the point where you're not over tweaking it? You know, how do you know when to step away from the canvas, essentially? For me, it's about language. I mean, I'll often, you know, sometimes I'll turn a phrase that's really poetic and then I'll go back and say, you know what, I just, I avoid a purplish prose when I can, for one. I mean, when something's overwrought, I usually feel like it's the language. If the idea's overwrought, it's pretty easy to fix. It's usually just a matter of cutting. But when the sentence has become strangled with the verbiage and it, they cease to communicate, you know, I don't look at the words. I mean, of course, obviously the words are the tools I use, but I use them more like bricks, I think. It's as blunt as that sounds. I mean, it's like, maybe a better analogy is I feel like the blood is the words of the blood running through the story. And it's not always going to, sometimes that means short choppy sentences. Sometimes that means, sometimes it does means more poetic, flighty language. You know, it's, I think stuff that's overwrought is usually feels very even and that like every sentence feels like it's over-correst or over. I just don't pay, I pay attention to the sentence in so much as it attaches to the next sentence. To me, it's all about the, it's a, what's the word I'm looking for? I don't know, it's just a continuum. I mean, like, when I read aloud, I go back like six sentences before and read till the sentence I just wrote. So, is it kind of musical? Is that it? I mean, is it the sound? Totally, totally. Like it has to have a rhythm and a pulse and it has to swing, it has to be really readable. I mean, and not everybody's going to write like that and I'm glad, you know what I mean? I don't want to read every book that sounds like me. Some people are more formal with their language, but you know, for me, I don't even want to think about the fact I'm reading words, you know what I mean? It's just words in this case of the medium. I want to serve the story first. Sorry, I'm, you know, I'm going on and on. I guess I should just answer the whole question is, I'm there to serve the story before the language. Sure, sure. Well, talk a little bit about how you got into it. I'm curious, you know, you've done so many different things and you had this long road, you know, to the top or whatever, but where did this all start? Have you always wanted to do it? Have you been doing it since you were a kid or is it something you came to later in life? What's the backstory? Well, since third grade, I don't know, my dad relocated us up here and, you know, my sister died a few, few years earlier and her family was just kind of a mess, had a big family. My dad sort of moved us all up here and then he took off and moved cacked down and I had ended it up because I was in this sort of accelerated class. I had this, when I was in second grade, I had an accelerated, you know, class or whatever. So I was basically getting a third grade curriculum. So when I came, I had already, I was already the youngest person of my class and it came and they wanted to skip me ahead of grade kind of thing, but I'd already, because I'd already had the curriculum for the third grade class, but my mom was worried about social issues because I was already the youngest and I was kind of shrimpy and she was just worried I'd be, you know, just a wreck. I'm glad she made the decision she did. It always gave me an advantage and literally faithful. I mean, I was still the youngest in my class, but some of the guys were like a grade younger than me. So anyway, when I came up here, I was suddenly like in this class where I had already had the curriculum, so I really started to push all this other stuff going on in my family life. I really started to become kind of a behavioral problem, a distraction in the classroom. I mean, my high energy really started to take hold. Can you think about that whole trauma theory you were talking about earlier? Well, let me ask you, I mean, if you don't mind just like what happened with your sister? Was she, she was, I think you, I remember you telling me she was hit by a car? Is that correct or? Yeah, well, it's really weird. Nobody really, it's the way the whole thing that does a little shady. And the story always was they were pushing a car up the hill, but like stuff has come to light that, you know, I mean, I think we all really know the story. Like, I don't know if they'd been drinking up there or whatever. It happened out in a certain valley on my sister's 16th birthday. And, you know, she's kind of my primary caregiver but at that time. And, I don't know, it just, you know, anybody who's ever lost a sibling knows that it just took a hanger nade at the middle of your family. You know, I mean, it just, it just blows you up. And then, you know, more than half the time the marriages don't survive and so forth. And then we're just, so there's some turbulence, you know, I mean, it's not, you know, it was American suburban stuff basically. I mean, it's not like I was raised because of the war to the state. I mean, it was nothing too traumatizing, but like, you know, it's who I am. I mean, you know, well, it was had a big impact. When my hour out, right? Yeah, right. And you're my therapist now. But that's what happened. Third grade that my, I had this teacher and she said, well, why don't you just write? Because I'd already had an interest in writing. I decided I wanted to try to write and give voice to all this stuff. And so she let me just kind of sit in the corner and write. And, you know, I still was a behavioral problem, but I was less disruptive to the classroom. And then in fourth grade, I published the children's story, and which was an auspicious beginning. And then for, you know, what, 30 years, 31 years, I didn't publish, you know, about 30 years, I didn't publish anything else. Well, you know, but I think it's, I think it's all interesting because I feel like, you know, I lost a buddy when I was in college to suicide, which was definitely the genesis of my novel. And I think that a lot of times writers, I mean, I guess you're sort of born this way, you have it or you don't, you have the bugger, you don't. And at the same time, I feel like sometimes it's these big, difficult situations or events in our lives that trigger it, or that serve as the fodder for the writing. I mean, I know a lot of writers that work from grief or a lot of writers who at least are set on their course by that sort of thing, or they're set on their course by a family relationship or by some sort of crazy couple of years they had, or does that make sense? I mean, it seems like those kinds of things, what probably, I mean, yeah, yeah, it seems, it makes sense. I don't, I mean, I feel like people that don't have that are kind of at a disadvantage to mind the world for, for material. I mean, I think as an individual, in order to even be able to sort of channel these different characters and these different points of view and these different experiences and perspectives, you need to have experienced the widest possible dynamic yourself. So if you're somebody who's not, you experience much grief or much adversity or, or, or, or, or a crude much experience, I mean, you know, you're writing out of the void and, and it could be intellectually stimulating, but I think you're going to have a hard time really, you know, reaching some level of emotional resonance maybe because it has to feel lived. Well, it's funny because like, you know, you have, I'm sure, I don't know if you've had this, but I've had this experience where, you know, in my younger years, I sort of felt jealous of these guys who got to go off to war or got like some, you know, some terrible thing happened to them or they went through some huge cataclysm like, like Vonnegut being in Dresden when they fire bombed it and he's in a POW camp. I'm like, well, shit, you know, like lucky guy, you know, as absurd as that sounds, you know, like the more, the more insane someone's life is, the more fodder they often have, especially when it comes to memoir, you know, you read somebody's memoir, you're like, Jesus, you know, by comparison, I had the easiest childhood ever and, you know, this, this sort of like happy life, essentially, that's how I feel. Can we just dispense with the memoir? I mean, please, it's fiction and we all know it. I mean, it's a, it's a degree, it's one degree less fiction, but I mean, I mean, in this day and ages, I don't know, I'm sorry, I just think memoir is boring. Well, no, tell me about this great thing, they write a memoir about it. I'm just thinking, you know, man, great experience in the novel, because, you know, memoir, the life they, I don't know, life doesn't deliver truth as conveniently as fiction, I don't think. Well, this is the thing. I mean, I just went through this sort of, I was working on, I've been working on this, like, you know, I call it an experimental memoir and it is, it is basically an assemblage of outtakes from letters that I wrote in my 20s. I wrote a shitload of letters in my 20s, like, like, 3000 plus pages. And of course, save them all with some sort of, like, you know, hallucinatory idea that they might be worth something someday. Just like, you know, well, here you are trying to make just, yeah, I don't know what it is. It was like, and it's an act of like self archaeology. I don't know if this book is worth the shit, but I assembled it. And I'm putting it together. And there's a very conscious part of me that's like, this is bullshit. Like, even though it's letters, which I feel like, I think part of the reason why the letters were attractive to me, because it was because, or is because there was the least amount of filter, the least amount of me noodling and making it into bullshit. Totally, and to me, that's what makes fiction so, personally, that's what makes fiction so interesting. If the noodling is the decision, if the decision to tell what to tell and not to tell, whereas that the colloquial or the letter writing, I don't know, sorry, I just called your book boring. No, that's fine. Might be. Even if they're just imagining the letters, I wrote when I was 20. Oh, God, definitely hard for you to look at them. Well, no, it's kind of like, have you ever heard of mortified that show where people read from their old diaries? And it's like hysterical. That's, that's kind of what the book is. It's an extended, active, you know, self mortification or whatever you want to call it. But, you know, I, it's a courageous act, Bradley, that is courageous or stupid. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. But I, I get what you're saying about it being, the memoir, it's impossible. Even if you're trying as hard as you can to stick to the facts, it's impossible to have a memoir be called nonfiction. It's just that memory is too unreliable, unless you have total recall or some crazy thing like that. But my memory is terrible. I can't remember anything. You know, I can remember very few things. It's very spotty. And so I just, you know, having gone through that, even with letters, I feel like there's always an act of performance involved. And when you say, when you say dispense with a memoir, that sort of hits me because it's like in a good way, because I think that, you know, to some extent, it's all fiction. It's really difficult, you know, when you're read. It is our memories are so subjective. I mean, you know, would that, you know, even documentary film was proven itself a lot, great things. There's to not be very subjective or objective rather. I mean, memory is just so subjective. I mean, like every narrator that writes a memoir is an unreliable narrator. You know, I mean, it's like, so I just don't, I guess I have a personal distaste for it because I could never write it. I would just feel so trapped. I would just feel like I already lived it. So then where's the sense of discovering for me, it becomes an act of recollection and not an act of discovery. I mean, I need to discover, I'm writing to discover, and if I were just sitting down and trying to write an honest memoir as close as can, I feel like I'd just be rehashing stuff. So when you work on your, on your fiction, you're consciously choosing to write about characters who are far away from your experience as a way of trying to... Yeah, I want them, I want to get lost in the novel too. I want to be at a point where I don't feel like I'm in total control. I mean, I need there to be, you know, the craft because so far, but really the danger, it's the danger that's the heartbeat of the story. I got to throw myself up there with my set of tools as an artist and like put myself into the most uncomfortable situations, the ones where my footing feels the least sound. And I have to make my way through it, you know, I mean, because the stakes are high, you know what I mean? Again, look at it, it's like an athletic thing. I don't want to play in the fourth quarter of a blowout. I mean, I want to be tested. And so I want to get lost. And so if I was writing a memoir, I mean, it tested me how good is my memory and, you know, I just, well, things go. I like your idea of the letters better because I agree, there's less of a filter there, but it just seems like it can be so potentially unreadable. It might be. Even you, because I mean, you're a brilliant writer, but come on, 20 years old, I mean, it's tough. Like there was like, it felt at times, you know, oftentimes, almost every time, reading these things back, it was like they were hot. I had to put them down. I would get like, physically embarrassed to the point where I couldn't even keep reading. I could not keep reading. I had to put the things down. But it's exactly why I bury them. I mean, that's like, buried books. Well, I need to shred the suits. I need to get rid of them. I need to, I need to, I need to sort of publish them. Maybe you're on the something who might have said Christ. I don't know. It's, it's going to be interesting, but I mean, I'm more on list these letters. Just clips, you know, I try to cut it out. It sounds commercial. It sounds, yeah, it sounds frightening. It's a horror novel. That's what I'm going to publish it as. It's going to be a horror novel. So let me ask you this question. What's, who's a novelist? Who's a writer, whose career you would love to have? Like, who's somebody you look at? And you're like, that's what I want. Like, how does, how does this play out in a way that, you know, suits your dreams or, you know, not, not in an idealistic way, but in a, I would really like for this to happen. Who's got that story? You know, I mean, I love, I love the way I'm always talking about, I mean, I don't know. Like I said, I don't want to, I can't really, there's not that many good working examples in this day and age. I mean, I want to be a literary novelist that writes a novel every couple of years, has a lot of people read it, makes a living, keeps pushing himself as an artist. What's a lot of people? What's a, what's a, what's a readership that you think would be, like, you know, sustainable, great? Oh, I don't want to say that. I don't know. I can't say it, because it could vary, you know what I mean? I started with a smaller readership than I have now, but it was such a, uh, uh, intimate readership, you know what I mean? There's the quality of a quantity too. There's a certain baseline number of books I think a fellows kind of sell or, you know, a writer's got to sell before they're able to, like, actually, you know, pay the bills, and I don't know what that number would be. I mean, I would think that every novel would have to, you know, I don't know, man, what would you have to, it just depends on what your advances are, whether you earn them out. It's all a big quagmire. Well, I'm trying to keep what I got going on and maybe, what's that? I said, I'm also asking a writer to do math and things get sticky when you get into that. I mean, I can't, I can't figure this out. Yeah, exactly. But, uh, you know, it's, like, I think, too, there's an issue where the more books you publish, if you can build up a list, and then you start to get readers to access your work through whatever book they pick up, if they like it, you know, if they're anything like me, you read somebody you like their, their book, you wind up wanting to read other stuff and hopefully that over time, you know. Right. You create a little cottage industry by, you know, giving people links to trying to grow your audience into the future. And then, you know, and then doing so, you really, the interest in your old sweet hearts, your old babies, you know. I mean, I've seen women who reached a whole new audience, which has been wonderful. Um, you know, but my core readers are always my core readers, and there's not very many of them, you know. I mean, that's a fact. I mean, you know, I've been really fortunate, but it's just me to the math, and it's just not that many readers compared to like, you know, like what a Hollywood director's looking at, you know. It's crazy. I feel like, and I feel like it's dwindling, or there's something happening, and I can't really define, I think that's sort of what everyone's sort of, you know, grasping at. People are either spending time thinking about it, or they're, they're denying it, or they're just exhausted from the conversation, and they don't even want to think about it, and they just want to focus on whatever little thing they like. But for people who want to make a living, you look to the future, and I sometimes have it in my head that form is going to change, and, you know, some sort of mid-range form between a short story and a novella is going to wind up being really popular, because it's digestible on an iPhone. You know, I hate to reduce it like that, but it's like, it seems like people's attention spans increasingly are geared towards a shorter form, whether it's fiction, nonfiction. Yeah, well, okay, well, here's where we part, because I'm actually, and some will call this optimistic, but I just counterintuitive, like, everything else that has ever worked for me. I believe it's counterintuitive, but I believe the big novels poised for a comeback, and I believe that people really do long for that longer form narrative. If you look at the sort of TV they like to watch, I mean, the good stuff, and let's be honest, there's HBO's producing stuff today that's better than anything that's ever been on television. You know what I mean? They're telling great stories, not all of them, but like, some of them are, and these are very long-form stories, and these are a big investment, you know? Granted, it's one hour, once a week, six months a year, or whatever, but it is a big investment, and people are proving they're willing to make it. I think the key is to, you know, I don't know how you target the audience for that, but I know there's a big, I know there's a, I know there's a hunger for it. Well, yeah, it's out there, and if the story's good, you know, I mean, look at, you know, I don't know if this is the right example, but Harry Potter, with little kids reading 700-page books, it can happen. I just wonder, or I would love to see some sort of quantification of the market, but how many people out there are really, really interested in reading serious literary fiction? And what, how many of them, you know, I would love to just know the number, and if let's say there's too many more, I think I've read somewhere, there's a kind of index for this, where it's like, to define, first you got to have like a number, like a defined number, like, let's call this serious reader of literary fiction a consumer who buys six new literary fiction titles a year, you know what I mean? That, which doesn't sound like a lot, but even at that level, I'm guessing that number can't be over 10,000 people. Yeah, that's, you know. You know what I mean? I mean, I mean, I'm pulling these numbers out of my ass where I pull most stuff from, but honestly, I mean, I don't think that that's too far off. I mean, look, I've looked at so many like sales numbers and book scans and see, you know what I mean? And you just start to see a pattern form with like, you know, how much a literary title can sell, and at what point it becomes a breakout, and you know what I mean? So how many did France and Selva of freedom, like that was about as big of a push as a literary, or a work of literary fiction can get? Have you seen sales numbers on that? Do we have any idea? I know it's over 250,000. I mean, I mean, newer 250,000 in print, I think, like really early on in hardback. I don't know, you know, I mean, it's not, it's not hard for me to believe it's sold close to a million copies. So there's at least a million people who would buy it if it's on, you know, cover of Time Magazine. Right. But are those million people going to buy five other sort of timely or topical literary fiction titles this year? No. You know what I mean? The overwhelming majority of those people are not going to. Well, and because. Well, and here's a question. No, it feels, yeah, and it feels like, too, it's a time is such an issue. And I just wonder back in the day, I mean, life was clearly moving at a slower pace, and people had less options for entertainment. But I think about my own life, like having the time to sit down, especially now with a kid, to sit down and read a big book. It's tough. It's tough. Even if you love books, and it's a big deal, like, I know you may get time if it's, you know, if it's truly important to you, but I think a lot of people out there would love to have more time to read, but it's a luxury that they can't afford, it seems like. Yeah, I think they can't afford it. That's the thing that you just have to make the effort. And most people aren't going to be willing to do that. I mean, most Americans aren't really, you know, I mean, go to Texas. Nobody even wants stairs in their house because they don't want to, you know, climb up them. Is that true? I'm serious, serious. So my wife watches, he's like, HGTV shows and like all the techs with somebody. We don't want any stairs up on. I don't, I don't want to, you know, I mean, I know a lot of great people in Texas don't get me wrong. But truly, the housing market is a bigger market for one story. Is it because people are out of shape and overweight and stuff or? Yeah, they're, I think Texas is maybe among the fattest states. Christ. And those have big kitchens too. And I'm only reporting what I see on HGTV. Yeah, well, I, you know, people have time. My wife is busy mom, you know, I mean, she's a busy mom, but she still manages to bang out at least that literary fiction title week. She reads like pretty close to a book a week. And it really does take an effort. But the thing is, is it's so rewarding. I think that people, if people fall in love with a book, they don't really think, Oh, I've got to make time for this. They didn't make time, you know what I mean? They'll sneak into the bathroom at work. They'll just read it on their lunch hour and go to a place where they know they're not going to run in anybody. Just people need to remind themselves how good it is. Well, no, I wrote something about this a while back in essay on the nervous breakdown about how the toilet was the last bastion of serious reading, you know, in America, even the, but the iPad is sort of infringing on that now. I feel like a lot of people are taking the iPad into the bathroom, but it seemed like it was the one place where you could get peace and have no distractions and focus on a book. Yeah, I just do my Facebook check ins from there. Is that what you do with the laptop? You have an iPad on the toilet. I'm a toilet that again. Well, is this with a laptop? Yeah, with an iPad or it's an iPad or a phone or what is it? No, I have a, I have a giant laptop. And you put that on your lap? It's cheap. Yes. Wow, that's ambitious, man. That's, uh, I can't do it in a hotel. I can't do it in hotel bathrooms because I think I've discussed with you. I have a issue there. I don't know. I think it's because toilet, hotel toilets and a lot of hotels. They're either the water. Well, I think it's a combination thing for toilets and to be squat and the water level seems to be high. And so, you know, my boys are usually good, like in danger of submersion. They really hang that low. Yeah, I have to work some kind of reach around most times in a hotel toilet just for hygienic reasons. So, I couldn't possibly, you know, you know, like a text with one hand. You're not bringing a computer into that environment. It just wouldn't be, it wouldn't be sanitary. It'd be difficult. You should get an iPad, you know, that would solve your problem. You could have a, it's a lighter contraption. I'd rather spend the money and beer. I'm not a big buy stuff technology. I know I'm kind of a dinosaur. Dude, I'm talking you from a 75 Dodge Motorhome. I didn't even want a new motorhome. Talk about this thing. What is that? I mean, you've got a 75 Dodge motorhome. You venture out, like, so this thing is, you know, it's a mobile home. You drive it out into the woods on a fairly regular basis, correct? Oh, probably a hundred days a year. I mean, it's parked in the woods right now. As far as most of America's concerned, I'm camping. I mean, but I get kicked out a lot. And it's not huge. I don't want you to, I don't want you to pick your, I mean, it's like 23 feet long. It's got a sleeper above the cabin. It's got a little kitchen. It's got a refrigerator. And it's kind of bathroom and a sleeping berth and a little fold-off table and some more swivel chairs and three dog beds. But it's not huge. Like, I mean, I've parallel parked it in downtown Portland, right in front of Powell's before. Nice. Now, do you, do you bring the family, or is this something that you get away in? It's like a writer's retreat or both, I guess. It's about 50-50. It's about 50-50. Sometimes when it's hard for me to be getting work done, I just, I'll call Lauren. I'll take the baby to grandma's for two days. And I will just go out to the woods and I'll just work my ass out for 16 hours a day. And then, you know, during the week, I just don't have to worry about getting as much done. But like last week, we all went up to sold our hot springs. We got the whole family. I mean, brought all the dogs, but the baby brought my two nephews. And they all stayed, my nephew stayed in the motorhome. And we stayed for that. We got a little cabin. And then, you know, we just did a fire by the river at night. And that was nice. I'm really busy because I'm like the den mother. Like, when I do that, it's not very relaxing for me because I got to cook for five people and, you know, make sure all the dogs are going to the bathroom. So it's kind of, but it's a good kind of busy, you know. You got a bathroom, pretty much. What's that? There is. But, you know, once you've emptied the motorhome bathroom, you just don't even want to use it anymore. It's just, you know, the job of emptying, you know, urine and feces out of a plastic tank. But it's just, you know, I just use it for storage. I've got half of mine to just take the plumbing out. And, you know, yeah, no, I did a motorhome trip in college, you know, when I had like a year and a half where I was a hippie. And we did some sort of... I'm shooting the photos badly. Yeah, no, it wasn't pretty. I was a disaster with long hair, but I had long hair in the whole thing. And I remember we were in this camper and people were using the bathroom. It's just gross. There's no way to make that work. I don't think unless you get something. No, you know, you start to smell it. Anyway, I don't like the idea, like, you know, come to a quick stop and there's, you know, 30 pounds of shit, like, you know, agitate. I just, you know, I use the woods there. I use, you know, the, I'm usually at a national park or at the state park or something to have facilities. So, that's what I was going to say. That's what I was going to say. You're parked in the woods. You park this thing near a camp. It's got like a fire pit and whatnot. And then you just walk out into the woods and squat or there's usually like some sort of facility you have to drive to or you can walk to. I mean, it's... This walk, too. Okay. This is the Johnny Everson TMI interview. Well, hey, you know, this is what this shows about. This is what people want to hear. They want to know. By my bleeding prostrate and, you know, come on. We have touched a lot of bases, haven't we? Yes. Well, but, you know, it's all fascinating. And I guess I'm curious, like, you... You hear about that? Are you sure about that? Well, it is. It is to me. I love this kind of stuff. This is the thing. I think the kinds it is, anyway. I don't know if women will find it fascinating. No. Women will find it more fascinating. No. People... I think guys are more prone to think this sort of stuff is funny, but I think everybody likes to know little details about people's lives to get a sense of who they are. And funny stuff is funny stuff. But, you know, this show, you know, as I've conceived it so far, anyway, is about this stuff as opposed to about like a really nuanced literary discussion. Like, lit crit talk, which, you know, I would be terrible at anyway. So, I love the idea of talking to authors and finding out about their lives because, A, I think it's interesting. And then, B, I think that authors are better conversationalists than they get credit for, you know, usually are funnier and, you know, have more interesting lives than they sometimes reveal or have a chance to reveal. So, this is exactly right for the show. And I guess, like, you know, what I'd want to know next is, you know, you've got the revised fundamentals of caregiving, which is your next novel, correct? Yep. And that's in the can. That's done. Yeah. I think that comes out probably next fall. Okay. And it's from Elgonquin as well. Yep. And then you've got another book or two? Or what's the deal? How many books ahead of you? This one. I mean, I'm not even there yet. I'm about 60, because I'm 2/3 of the way through it. As of today, I'm almost exactly 2/3 of the way there. And it's 60k this morning. And it's really starting to come together and coalesce. And I'm really excited about it. Still a lot of grunt work to be done, though. We got a title? I imagine it'll be done in 3, 4, 5 months. Well, what's it called? You got a name or is it classified? It's called the dream life of Huntington's sales. The dream life? Okay. So that's a lock. Yeah, the marketing is going to probably try to talk me out of that, you know? What? That's what it's called. I don't know. It's got the word dream in the title. Oh, that's true. It's got the word sales in the title. It's got the word marriage in the title, no. Yeah, you see exactly the love life of good sales. Change his name to good or great, you know? Then you'll be good. Your marketing people will love that. So 60,000 words, 2/3 of the way down. So this is a fairly big book. I mean, you're going to get into the- Yeah, it's about the size of Lulu or the revised fundamental of the care. You're running around 300 pages. It's a real comfortable blank for me generally. West of here with much bigger in scope. And I think that I'm sprying out the last bigger book I undertake. But like I think generally speaking, you know, 300 pages feels really pretty good to me intuitively. And like I've got my next book, I've got tons of notes on my next book. And I already know, you know, the voice and I'm really excited to see where it takes me. But I'm trying not to get ahead of myself, you know? Nice to have that kind of stewing in the back burner, though. Well, it's not yet. So it's got to be- It's kind of a comfort. I think that's a smart way to go where you get ahead of yourself with a book, just because it takes so long anyway. And you want to feel like there's something next to serve up, you know, without the pressure of having to create it from thin air, you know? I think that's- Yeah, I feel like a battery has got a couple of hits in his bag instead of a- I mean, it's a really tough position to be in more like, you don't know or, you know? I don't want to ever have to start pressing, like, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, it's just a conspiral. It can just like destroy writers' self-confidence and, you know? And athletes and anybody else. I mean, it's like scary. Yeah. I had- I met an unnamed writer in San Francisco. It had some success, maybe, you know, quite a deal of success with a debut novel five or six years before I met them and had not gotten anywhere writing their next anomaly yet. And this person was just kind of a wreck. Right. Like, I talked to this person. You know, I'm feeling so sly about not telling the sex here. Right. You're going gender-neutral. I mean, at least the sex. Yeah. After you hear what this guy did to me, you're going to wonder why I'm protecting him. So I'm just trying to get this guy at Peptock at the bar, like, dude, no pressure, all right? I mean, like, this person, the guy was really pressing and like, he's just getting really hammered. And, uh, at the end of the night, the guy tried to steal my bag. And he totally knew it was mine. We knew we were talking, I was talking about the notes I had in there and things like, I mean, this guy literally waited till I wasn't looking, put my bag on his shoulder. And somebody goes, dude, is that your bag? Something happened to see it. And like, I caught him out, out front, stealing my bag. You got to be shitty. It was just really, no, it was really weird. But this is just giving you an idea of how much this guy was struggling. I didn't know if his plan was to steal my notes and get some inspiration, or if it was just despite me, because, you know, I already had my next book done, but this guy was pretty fucked up. I just, that kid the shit out of me, like, I never want to be there. Was he hammered? Was he hammered? He was, he was hammered by the tiny stole the bag. Yeah. That's it. I mean, he didn't bring a bag. He didn't bring a bag, dude. I mean, this guy, it was, because it was really uncomfortable. And I caught him too, and I killed him with kindness. I sat him back down at the bar, bought him another beer, and talked to him. But secretly, I just wanted to punch his lights at trying to steal my bag. There's so much work, you know what I mean? But somebody would do that. You know, my notes, like, notes come in these flashes of inspiration, where I don't, if you don't scribble them down, you may never remember them kind of thing. Sure. It's, it's a terrible thing to lose those, and I think somebody actually went out of their way to try to steal them. It was just weird. Was it, no, was this guy coherent? I'm picturing a sloppy drunk. It's the only way that I can make sense of this. Was he coherent? Pretty sloppy, but I didn't think the guy was a sloppy drunk, because he's just been pressing for five years after the success of one novel to, like, reinvent himself. You know what I'm saying? I just, whenever I'm at riders that are in or any kind of deadline, or the pressure to, you know, I just feel bad for them, because I think about being a hitter that needs a hit, like, you're, oh, for 23, dude, I've been on the, I've been on my softball team until last night. I swear, I couldn't buy a hit. This is, like, fat men's league softball, you know, and I'm dropping my shoulder, pulling my head off the ball, you know, uh, uh, lunging, doing everything wrong in men's softball. And last night, I finally got a couple of hits, and it's like, oh, I hope it's over. But the way I felt in the batter's bucket, I didn't believe I could get a hit. You know what I mean? Right. It's the worst place to be dealing from as a performer or an artist or a, you know. Did you, did you steal somebody else's bat? Did we thinking of doing something like that? Yeah. Well, I'd give it, I mean, I could borrow it, and still get it back. Nothing was working, Bradley. Last night, I just stayed back, and it felt so good. I just hammered a ball in the middle, and I was like, oh, well, dug out, collected, shy of relief. Well, I'm glad to hear it. And, uh, you know, you've definitely been a great inspiration to a lot of people, a lot of writers with all of your energy and good work. And, uh, you know, I think everybody's sort of predicting big things for you, more and more big things. So thanks for spending, uh, some time chatting. Thanks for all your help with, uh, T&B and the book club and everything else. And, you know, we'll, uh, we'll talk again some point down the road. Always a pleasure, Bradley. Thanks so much for having me. Just enjoyed the conversation. Excellent. We'll talk to you soon. See you, baby, betterment. All right, everybody. There you have it. Jonathan Avison, author of all about Lulu and West of here, the guy, uh, he's got an incredible level of energy, an almost legendary level of manic energy than anybody who's ever been around him can attest to. Uh, he's the kind of guy who gets stuff done quickly and who wakes up at the crack of dawn with out an alarm clock, writes for eight hours, then goes out and walks six miles and thinks about writing and then comes home and finally eats something. That's the kind of guy he is. We go way back. Uh, Jonathan and I met on MySpace of all places. We used to be MySpace buddies back when people were MySpace buddies. And from there, a relationship flowered. We've met in person several times. He's the executive editor of the nervous breakdown, which makes him a logical place for us to start with this show. He's also a fine writer. Go get his books. That does it. Thanks for listening. It's going to get better and better as we go. I'm getting my sea legs. I'm learning how this works. Uh, don't forget, you can email me letters at otherpeoplepod.com. Follow me on Twitter at otherpeoplepod. You can also follow me personally at Brad Listi on the Twitter, uh, the nervous breakdown.com. That's got a Twitter feed at TNB tweets. It's also got a Facebook presence that's fairly robust. Get in there and then don't forget, most of all, subscribe to other people on iTunes. This show is free. It's twice a week. That's what we're gunning for Sunday and Wednesday. You can listen to it unless something crazy happens and there's not enough time, but that's the plan at this point. Two shows a week, two authors a week, hour long interviews. You can listen. It's free. Subscribe. If you like it, give us a good rating on the iTunes and then other people will find out about it and then maybe they'll subscribe and then it'll snowball back in a couple of days, folks, signing off. I'm going to get something to eat. I think I'm a little bit hungry. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. [Music] What if you could poke, prod and explore the mysteries of nature from wherever you are? I'm Nate Hedgy, host of Outside In, an award-winning podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. We cover all kinds of topics related to our environment, with a healthy dose of goofing off, of course. Outside In isn't just a chauffeur through hikers and conservationists. It's a podcast for anyone who's ready to embrace their curiosity about the natural world and have some fun doing it. Listen every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. 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