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Michèle Laframboise on the novel Grass
51 Plays1 year ago
Mark and Joe talk to Quebec author, Michèle Laframboise, about the novel that got her writing science fiction, Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper.
Find out more about this episode at https://re-creative.ca/grass/
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Mark A. Rayner.
Contact us at: joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
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Transcript
Introductions and Icebreaker Question
00:00:09
Speaker
Joe. Hey, Mark. Are you well? I'm going to assume you're well. Well, today, yes, I am. Okay, good. All right. Now, you usually start these podcasts with some kind of a very pertinent question for me. Are you going to do that today? Okay, I'll come up with something off the fly. If you had to be any animal,
00:00:26
Speaker
What would you be? I'd be a wolf. A wolf? That was really fast. That was crazy fast. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. Okay. All right. Okay. Then explain, explain, please. One of my favorite books as a, as a kid was the Valley of Creation, Edmund Hamilton. And in it, the main character turns into an animal. I think it was a wolf, but it made me think, you know, what animal would I turn into? And I love dogs, but dogs are basically immature wolves.
00:00:52
Speaker
So I don't want to be an immature animal. I want to be a mature animal, hence the wolf. Aren't they really just more like sucky wolves that have people do things for them? That depends on the breed. Okay, fair enough. What about you? Speaking of dogs, I think I'd like to come back as one of my pets.
00:01:16
Speaker
I'm told by the woman who used to walk my dog that she would also would want to come back as one of my pets because they're such- What are your pets? Well, at this point, it's just two cats, Max and Milo, but I had a dog, 1.2. Yeah. It looks like a good life. Yeah. If they're anything like our cat. Now, should we ask our guest? I
Guest Introduction and Personal Journey
00:01:40
Speaker
think we should. Michelle Leframboise, what kind of animal would you like to be?
00:01:45
Speaker
I don't have an idea. I was thinking about the space missus or something with eyes. Look at the wonder of the universe, a butterfly, maybe something very short live or something very long live. I haven't chosen. You don't have to. It's not required. No, because this isn't actually the point of the podcast. It's not the question that we asked you to come prepared for. As usual, we're being unfair to our guests.
00:02:13
Speaker
So, Michel, what we usually do is we ask our guests to introduce themselves so that they can represent themselves to our audience the way they would like to be represented. Oh, okay. First, my name is Michel Lafremboise, which is like the fruit raspberry in French. And I really like my name, even if as a child you get a lot of problems with it.
00:02:39
Speaker
And at first I wanted to be a scientist, but I learned science fiction by reading my father's collections. And I read Asimov, the robots from Isaac Asimov, one of my first readings. And eventually I started to read a lot of books.
00:02:59
Speaker
But that direct me toward the science. I studied the geography and then later in engineering, but I never could really work on those fields. And eventually I found out that I prefer to tell stories. And you're not just a writer, but you're also a visual artist, aren't you?
Graphic Novel and Publishing Journey
00:03:21
Speaker
Yes, I just put out my graphic novel, Metérez des Vans, which is a mistress of the winds in English. And I'm preparing the hardcover version with a Kickstarter soon, I hope. And I'm also working toward another comics, which is a real, not real, but almost autobiographic story about who
00:03:51
Speaker
you interact with your fans at the book fairs. And there was a lot of question, a lot of situation, not so funny situation. So it's a graphic novel about dealing with those situations. Yes, exactly. Could you give us like a hint, like a teaser of one episode?
00:04:11
Speaker
Like many people ask, oh, you're doing comics. Are you doing the drawings? And you said, yes. And are you doing the words, the text? I said, yes. Oh, so you're doing the two. I'm one of the most frequent when I was a comic artist before I became a writer. Do you have a preference just doing the writing or doing the graphic novels or does it matter?
00:04:38
Speaker
First of all, I became a graphic novellist because I wanted to be a writer, but there was only science fiction space apero with tons of laser guns and ships and battles in it. And my French teacher or English teacher for you
00:04:55
Speaker
would say, this is not literature. Literature was old stories written by a very old, some often dead white guys in Europe. That was literature.
Literary Preferences and Influences
00:05:07
Speaker
Nothing else. I didn't film. And eventually, as I love science, I started in science and did a lot of publishers, some comic books, graphic novels in French mainly.
00:05:18
Speaker
And eventually, one of those was so complicated, I did not have the ability at the time to draw complex backgrounds. And I finally, I decided, okay, I will do it as a novel. It would be easier. It was not easier. But it's very wise to go, I can't quite do this yet, so I'm going to leave it till I can do it.
00:05:41
Speaker
Yes, and now I have become a little better at drawing, even if I publish about 20 novels of young adult and adult science fiction. In French, all in French, I publish also a lot of stories and I started publishing in English. Yay! Well done. Yeah, I can't speak for Mark, but I couldn't imagine publishing in French as well. I've had a couple of stories published in French and one in Spanish.
00:06:12
Speaker
I did have one translated into Greek, but I didn't do it myself. It was translated. Yeah, exactly. What I did, I translated some of my stories myself toward English or sometime towards French, and they got published in magazines. Last year, I put up
00:06:32
Speaker
like five of the stories in English that were also published in French by totally different magazines. And I put out the hard and crunchy science fiction story. That's a great title. I have a copy of that actually right in my bookshelf over there. And it's because I like what they call hard science fiction. But when you see hard science fiction, it does not mean hardness science fiction. It means like science fiction is like chocolate.
00:07:03
Speaker
You have the cacao, cocoa, and you have the sugar and the other ingredients. And when you have the ideas, the concept, the high concept, then you have the cocoa in it. But if you just put only cocoa in your science fiction, you cannot taste, don't have that.
00:07:22
Speaker
good taste, you feel it, it's a bit sour. And so you put some sugar, some human interaction, some funny things and some human drama also, but it can be more for me. And then you have a story that is well balanced.
00:07:41
Speaker
And especially for my latest book that is in French, it would be in English, tender and melting science fiction tales. Those are also scientific, but with a lot more sugar. You're making me really hungry here. It's the milk chocolate version of your stories, not the dark chocolate. I like that metaphor an awful lot. Yes, it's good. That's really good.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah i do it with my own presentation because i do presentation in school and at first it was to explain because a lot of people.
00:08:16
Speaker
Don't understand what is science fiction and they say, oh, it's not real literature. And I say, oh, you don't eat only vanilla ice cream. Mark, would you be so kind just to do the honors today of posing the question? Well, yeah, that's the next part of the podcast, which is what piece of artwork did you want to bring to us today to talk about the art that inspired you? Oh, yes.
00:08:40
Speaker
When we write science fiction, you fade from the work of many other fantastic people. And when I was a young reader, before I even thought of writing science fiction myself, I found out a book called Grass.
00:09:00
Speaker
And this is the equivalent of Dune, but written by a woman. And I love that story by Sherry Tapper. It was a first story by Sherry Tapper I ever read. And it took me to a planet so different. And the presentation, it was in the 90s. Okay. The presentations took a certain time and I have to try twice before finishing the first chapter. But oh my God, was in life for a ride.
00:09:28
Speaker
And what Sherry Tepper, what she did was showing to me, for the first time, I saw what science fiction could really do, because I was really engulfed, swallowed in the story. I couldn't put the book down.
Influence of Sherry Tepper
00:09:49
Speaker
And it was a story, the kind of story I like with many different characters that you follow in different settings.
00:09:57
Speaker
And one of the characters was a young man who had to, every morning, he had to descend like a thousand rungs on the ladder to go serve the high priest at the bottom of something. And then he had every evening, he climbed up. He's not the main character, but it was a secondary, fascinating secondary character. And the main character was also a woman, very interesting, who loved
00:10:27
Speaker
horses and there were horses in that story and strange aliens too.
00:10:44
Speaker
It's one of those books where the setting is almost a character, right? Oh, yes. It's a grass planet, right?
00:11:04
Speaker
It has been compared to Dune. I was going to say it's like Dune, yeah. You've read it, Mark? Yeah, I did. I don't remember all of the story threads. What I remember is the planet, and that was my takeaway. It was like, oh my God, that's like, that's like just a different kind of... And the hunting. Yeah. There was a kind of aristocracy living in a big, big mansion, and there are several mansions, and there was those strange hunting parties.
00:11:32
Speaker
And you find out that the mounds that they are mounting are not horses at all, they are other creatures. And, well, I don't want to tell more, but really there was a lot of threads and the author took all those threads and did not let one drop until the end. She relates all the threads.
00:11:54
Speaker
And it was such a satisfying reading that I wanted to write that way. And that's exactly what this podcast is about. It's about the stories that just lit you up and made you go, that is what I want to do. I want to write something that good. She did another book called Raising the Stones.
00:12:14
Speaker
And that is almost as fascinating as grass because every one of our books has a strange world and stranger aliens and sometimes stranger humans. And in Raising the Stones, you have all the idea of their religion. The fanatics also, there are people and they are a strange creator.
00:12:37
Speaker
That might be a gut, but you don't know it, don't you? And this is really fascinating stories also, a fascinating social engineering construction. Sometimes you construct a house and you don't take the time to lay the foundations of the stories. But I can say that the foundations of Sherry Tepper's story are very present, very solid,
00:13:03
Speaker
There are many other authors that are very impressive for her, like Nizio Corafar in her Binti trilogy. I was quite impressed. I'm reading a Derik Kudzkan, the House of Sticks, right now.
00:13:19
Speaker
It was very fun to have a kid because swearing in French.
French Authors and Cultural Impact
00:13:25
Speaker
Derek Kunstin, the co-chair of CanCon, super nice guy and evidently a terrific writer as well. It seems like a great opportunity to ask, is there some French writers from Quebec that you would recommend, particularly ones that translated because I think some of our readers might not. Yes, I think I'm trying just to find because I am a little bit vulnerable.
00:13:49
Speaker
which is a very, and her books, some of her books have a really complex social engineering in it.
00:13:57
Speaker
and the relations between people. And she has a lot of books translated in English. Oh, I like that kind of science fiction, actually. I really like that. Oh, yes. And I say Yves Menard, but it's not exactly science fiction, but the book of the Chevalier, I read it in English, Books of Nights. It's really strange, fantasy. It doesn't do fantasy. Nobody does fantasy like Yves Menard.
00:14:24
Speaker
Jean-Louis Trudel has been a good influence on me because he has a lot of cultural message in his stories, a deep, deep cultural background, like the roots of every of his stories for a big deal.
00:14:43
Speaker
I hope to be able to do it like he does. Yeah, another very accomplished Quebecois author. I want to go back to Sherry Tepper, if I may. Do you know much about, you're obviously a fan, do you know much about her? Can you tell us about her? Okay, Sherry Tepper is an example of someone who started science fiction to write science fiction later in life because before she was like a cantatrice, a theater organizer, she organized
00:15:12
Speaker
for theater representation, and I think she sang also. And it was in her fifties or sixties that she started to write and to publish science fiction. When I read her first book, it was not dress, it was another book that I read later. And you can see the first novel, there was such a difference between dress and between raising the stones and between
00:15:38
Speaker
sideshow which is like the third link stories but there is a lot of other stories and oh my god sometimes the cruel traditional um how do you say that the cruel you know some tradition were very cruel in those stories and you have always young people or people trying to raise against that cruelty and find another way to live
00:16:07
Speaker
And no, there are beautiful encounters also in the Charitable Stories. Are all her books ecologically based the way that grass is? Yes, mainly. In one of her interviews, she said that as in energy consumption, that we are the equivalent of a sperm whale, a weight of energy consumption.
00:16:28
Speaker
She explained that she was very, very, very aware of the overpopulation problem in the
00:16:38
Speaker
her stories and I'm presently reading stories that called The Companions and I read reading it. Even if I have a tons of friends that I should read out not the most of it. It's okay. We can't read everything. Yeah, that's a problem. We're all up against that one. But I must say that in the English side, I owe a lot to a couple of writers from America called Tristan Catherine Rush and her husband Dean Wesley Smith.
00:17:08
Speaker
Because if I haven't found their blog, I would not be writing today. I would not have published, like, five stories in Asimov. The fifth is upcoming sometimes. And I do have the pleasure of writing stories.
00:17:27
Speaker
Yeah, her blog is excellent. It's yeah. And what's great about her is she's a she's what's called a hybrid author. So she self publishes as well as traditionally publishes and she writes in several genres too. So she's very knowledgeable about a bunch of genres and
00:17:42
Speaker
About how to publish yourself and how to publish with the traditional. Yeah, it's it's you see her blog is I'd recommend it too So why do you say that you wouldn't be a writer
Pulp Writing and Self-Publishing
00:17:52
Speaker
without her? What what did she do specifically? It's because at the time you see you as a writer you wait three years for your novels to be accepted and then you wait more year for another novel and you sign a contract and
00:18:06
Speaker
It was very slow, and I found out that I like to write short stories. And the way they see it is you have two schools of thought. You have the writers who are very serious and take seven years to get one novel out, like the Balkans. And you have the writers who are pulp writer. And I found, I discovered when I saw Wachodin with his work that I'm a pulp writer,
00:18:35
Speaker
I like to write relatively fast. Sometimes it's fun writing, and you do your best, and you revise a bit, and you send the text. I learned to do that, and I have now close to 70-story short stories published, so I'm proud of that. Yes, that's very prolific. Because you should be. Actually, I started my own house.
00:18:58
Speaker
simply to put my short story and make my short story available to the public, because sometimes the magazine that published the short story, it was 20 years ago, go find it. And they're gone. Yeah, I would say I've published about 24, 25 short stories, and most of those smaller publishers are gone. Yes. And also I have five collection of five stories, just for the pleasure of putting up the nice, beautiful books
00:19:28
Speaker
And those books I'm quite proud of. I'm just showing it to the screen. It's chocolate-covered moon. That's great. Just to extend the metaphor, the moon is covered with chocolate.
00:19:43
Speaker
I'm doing every steps of the process and I love doing that. What I found out also is that some of my novels, on my 20 or so novels, there are like 15 or 16 that are fans. Because you see in the action movie, you know that rope bridge in action movies all over a gopher.
00:20:09
Speaker
those actions. So my publisher is like those road bridge and sometimes they fall and I have to run fast for a while. And this is why I will have to republish an ebook, the novels that have already been published by my older companies. And sometimes it's not the publisher's fault. One of my favorite publisher, which is called Michel Lavoie from the Midwest, he died three years ago.
00:20:37
Speaker
It was not the COVID, it was at the beginning, but it was so sad. And as he did most of the work of the house, the house failed two weeks after. So now I had three novels that I didn't know what to do with them. So as my company called Ecofictions.
00:20:55
Speaker
I distribute those novels also by myself. Wow, I think that's somewhat common. That's how I got into self-publishing too. Yeah, it is. Because the publisher of my second novel went out of business and he was lovely and it's a shame because he was doing such interesting work. Most all of my comic books publisher were small houses that either fell or the last one Vermilion, which is Nontario.
00:21:21
Speaker
also failed because one of the founders died and the other was not able to represent. It's a real problem that we couldn't discuss at another CanCon about at what age we start over eventually to publish because I'm about your slice of age. You're in your 30s as well. Yeah, okay. We're all 29 here, aren't we?
00:21:48
Speaker
Just a bunch of wonderkins. Or sometimes the other recycled teenagers. I like that. That's right. Yeah. But it's just that I like to put those books available. And as I said, I don't, because of course, when I began in the field, you have all those grooves, you tell you, do something, do that, do this, and you will sell millions. And I found out that it doesn't work always that way.
00:22:16
Speaker
And I think I will be quite happy if maybe a few hundreds of people like what I do and buy what I publish because it would be enough to buy because I don't need a million or billions of readers. I need.
00:22:34
Speaker
I need only maybe a few thousand would be more than enough. Let me ask you about, because I do think this is a fascinating conversation and I think Marc and I have touched on this before.
Building a Readership and Promotion
00:22:50
Speaker
which is in the field of music, indie music has a ton of street cred and ton of respect, but indie publishing writing, I don't feel is there yet. Do you feel any stigma in doing that? Yes, there is a stigma in auto publishing, especially on the French side. There are two reasons. When the Kindle started, maybe 12 years ago,
00:23:16
Speaker
anyone published any kind of crafts in its own, because there were so, so few novels. Now that you have like 10 million books on Amazon or solo, there are a lot of books. And what I like about my indie publishing is that I have, that you have to work as professionally as possible.
00:23:40
Speaker
And because I have already published and edited and had some text, it professionally edited for the Renaissance. So most of my collections, there are not many typos in it because, and the fun I have is finding my own cover. You have the control of your own cover.
00:24:02
Speaker
Mark is clapping because he loves that as well and is good at it. It's one of my favorite things about self-publishing is you have total control over the cover and you're wearing a very cute hat in the back. The author picture is very adorable. The author picture was like a candid picture taken by my son one day and I find that it's a very good work each. Yeah.
00:24:26
Speaker
So yes, there is a problem, but there are some people who chose to publish direct novels. I published two English novels, and because there was not like a market interested in the kind of story, and especially the romance. There are some doing romance, of course, but I found out that the kind of story I do would not work very well.
00:24:54
Speaker
So eventually, it's not science fiction, so I'm passing on it fast. But in science fiction, I want to republish my own space affair. The space affair was written almost 20 years ago, so it might have been age a little, but it has a feel of a good, gold, classical space affair. You got to like those. Yeah, a ripping good yarn, as I call them. Oh, yeah. Yeah, just a good story. Just a page turner. That's what you want.
00:25:22
Speaker
The first book is translated already, but by myself. So the only point is the editing. I need to have it edited by someone who is not me. Oh yeah, I agree. I think that if you do want to, this is advice for people who are thinking about this. If you're going to self publish, certainly.
00:25:39
Speaker
use the process that professional, traditional publishers use, which is there's an editor, and then there's a proofreader. Once the editor is done, and you're done making the edits, then you send it to a proofreader and probably another proofreader once you get the galleys ready to go. And you work with the cover designer. And if you can't do it yourself, you hire a book designer too, because those are all different kinds of skill sets that not everybody has. But I have the fun to do it myself for now and
00:26:08
Speaker
I can do the guts of a book myself, but I always, I've done a couple covers, but I just know that I'm not as good at it as a good cover designer. That's proved out with the covers that I've produced in the last three or four books. I've had professional designers and they're all great covers. Yeah. Award winning covers, in fact. Yeah. That is the challenge to me of publishing. We're all hybrid authors here. We've had- Yeah, you published a young adult novel a few years ago.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yes, the publisher classified it as young adult, but the hero was actually 39 years old. I don't agree with that. I've read that book. I don't agree. My first piece of paper, I wrote it for adults. It was an adventure, but when they read it, they told me, well, it's totally suitable for young adults. Yeah, well.
00:27:00
Speaker
We are on the Jules Verne Sagre, which is a big ship called the Jules Verne.
00:27:06
Speaker
The story, they are all adults. They help people. They're going to a dangerous mission, like a Star Trek finale. But that's kind of another point of, so when you're with a publisher, it's their prerogative to market it as they see fit. Whereas when you indie publish, you do have control over that as well. But I wanted to make one point about the whole indie publishing. The way I feel about it is that if you're indie publishing, you have to do it better than the traditional publishers.
00:27:35
Speaker
That's the only way to succeed, you know, to, to kind of get over that, that stigma. Yeah. It's also, uh, there are some things that, uh, I, I'm not as good as some of the gurus who are very good because I do have a newsletter, but I have maybe 100 people. Uh, and I'm happy because those are fans and those are good friends. And, uh, I'm working through very, very slowly to grow it, but organically not, uh,
00:28:05
Speaker
I'm not trying to buy people or buy followers. And the social media that I do is simply because I live very far away from everyone in my family. So it's a way to talk to family members and it's a way to talk to my friends, to the writer, a sense fiction writer's friends also. So it's a way.
00:28:30
Speaker
too late, but not that much to my readers. So sometimes I don't exactly know who my readers are. I try to find out, but I have fun writing the things. But that might be the kind of thing that your readers are actually interested in.
00:28:51
Speaker
that they actually might really want to know more about you personally. Yes, exactly. So that might be good for your readers. Oh, yes. Also, sometime I tell myself, okay, someday a literary luminary will raise my book and find it good.
00:29:10
Speaker
you will tell is millions of fans and over those millions of fans, 100 of them will have a look and over that 100, maybe one or 10 will buy the book. That's the dream, isn't it? Yeah, that's the whole, that famous promotion called BookBub, that seems to be the way it works. It's like, you know, they send emails out to a million people and then a hundred people buy it.
00:29:34
Speaker
But you have to submit, you have to pay some money. And at the point when I started my company, I did not want to pay money for those kind of scheme. I wanted to have a certain number of texts behind me before doing that. And I find out that, yes, and we have a series like my
00:29:57
Speaker
My collections, they are the first ones that sold really better than the other books because I began to start with very, very thin checkbooks. It was for readers who has a short attention span or who are learning the French or who are learning English.
00:30:20
Speaker
And so all my first, well the three first year, all my books were thin little books and some of them sold, but not all of them. And eventually when I started the collections and then they start like selling just a little more. They are always the price points. And I have just so many hours in a day. So I don't have the time to do that much promotion on the social media.
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah. I'm pretty sure that there's other people, other authors who have more hours in the day. I don't know how they do it. It's some kind of weird. They have a cloning machine. Yeah. But those of us like me who only have like, you know, six hours in the day. Yeah. It's pretty difficult. Yeah. Who is going to event like that are not too far from my own home. And like there was the Toronto French book fair and I had my own stand.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yes, and I sold quite well at that event. And it's not simply to make money and sell books, but it has to gain new readers that eventually will like and get information and eventually receive the newsletter also. Yeah.
00:31:37
Speaker
But as myself, I do receive like maybe three writers, three or four writers newsletter, but at the point, you don't have the time to read that many newsletters. So the very good guru, they have a niche and they get their millions or thousands of readers to... I don't like all the money funneling things. There was one place where
00:32:05
Speaker
You catch the people who visit your website and you suck them in. Oh yeah, the funnel. Oh yeah, you're talking to the funnel, right? But yeah, you get them to this page, then they do this and then they do that. And you've got them. Exactly. More and more, I think there's just one secret to success, which is how do you turn a book into a bestseller? You write a bestseller.
00:32:44
Speaker
a writer with 22 steps and it was very funny to read and it just helped you like in the just get the knowledge a little but when you write you create something and it comes naturally it's when you do exercising sometime you find out that the movement comes naturally but you have to master each step
00:32:59
Speaker
Yeah, just write the best book you can write. That's all you can do.
00:33:11
Speaker
of the move or the dance for dancing, for instance. To bring it back to Sherry Tepper. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, because she obviously did it right because here we are talking about Sherry Tepper. Why? Because she wrote great books. Yeah. She's a real late bloomer from what you said. I didn't realize that. I don't know why I didn't know that, but I didn't know that yet. I find that very reassuring.
00:33:37
Speaker
It was incredible. Yeah, me too. And she lasts long. She published at least 20, 30 books, 30 novels, and every... I'm keeping some for later because there's a kind of writer that you want to return to. Yeah. And I found out that Chévita Perre, sometimes I reread her when
00:34:01
Speaker
Like right now, I'm not at a good place and we were worried about my mother. So I reread that writer sometimes to recapture the sense of where's the first time you read.
00:34:15
Speaker
It's like a little bit of comfort food in terms of books. Yes, exactly. And so I say to my writer's friends who are listening right now, I'm sorry, I haven't read your book too soon. I have a disclaimer that nobody is under any obligation to read by my books or read them. You're expressing the anxiety all of us have.
00:34:40
Speaker
in this business. You can only read so much. Yeah, you can't read everything. So I will certainly eventually taste your stories. Even if you have some short stories out there, I can taste because I read a lot of short stories, but I have the same problem with magazines. A few years ago, I was, well, I subscribed to like five different magazines, two in French and three in English.
00:35:08
Speaker
I'm not able to follow. I have a very simple solution for the whole problem of what to do about your friend's books. I won't read your damn books, but I will have you on my podcast.
00:35:23
Speaker
The very least we could do. Yeah. Also, when I read a good book from a friend and I promote it on Goodreads and on the platform that helps you talk about the book. And I always, as a writer, I never diss another writer's book. I never tell. It's always good things I tell about the friends. Oh, of course. I have the same policy.
00:35:49
Speaker
The only way you know if I didn't like a book was I didn't review it and you know I read
Growth as a Writer and Storytelling Goals
00:35:53
Speaker
it. That's right. I will never give up anyone less than four stars because I just can't. There's also something to the idea that
00:36:09
Speaker
We're creators, we're not critics, you know? And I think that's kind of a different job and it really should be a different job. A critic is kind of a different thing. Yeah, exactly. I'm not a critic, but when I write a book, I can say, okay, this doesn't work for me. But for instance, I read some space opera by
00:36:33
Speaker
a writer that had did something, he didn't like anything that looks too socialist to him. And eventually, it was annoying because he repeated that in 15 pages in his space of error. And at the point I say, okay, I know.
00:36:51
Speaker
This is what an editor is for. Yeah, yeah, exactly. My editor would never let me get away with that shit. It'd be like, no, you said that twice. You're done. You can't say it again. Yeah, it's a good example, yeah.
00:37:03
Speaker
Somebody pointed out with my book that I use the word particularly too much. And now you'll note that the word particularly never shows up in any of my other books. It's wonderful. As I started writing maybe more than 20 years ago, I was like, I started late. I didn't start at 16, like some of my friends, but I started like late and then
00:37:29
Speaker
There are some things that I didn't see when I read and even reading, rereading myself. And now I can't, I'm unable to like see some things that I could not distinguish before, that I did not notice before. And so it's good to read a lot anyway. I love to read and to taste as many different voices as I can. And sometimes you make good discoveries.
00:37:57
Speaker
Absolutely. Now, Michel Lafonambois, do you have any final words you want to say about your, the inspiration that you brought to the table? Sherry Tepper. Funny words. My own writing is not at all like Sherry Tepper's, even if she inspired me. I grew into my own kind of writer, if I can say, and my own brand of chocolate.
00:38:21
Speaker
science fiction and I really hope and I'm still continuing to do also drawings and so I'm producing graphic novels. Not at a fast pop writing, pop writer speed but at least I have the pleasure to not waiting until it's perfect. You do your best and then you send it and then you work on the other. I love to tell story
00:38:51
Speaker
I love to make barriers fall, especially the artificial barriers, the fences that are all around us sometime and that separates people from the others. And this is what science fiction does very well. It's like attacking our own world's problem and then presenting it
00:39:17
Speaker
in another way that makes it more evident. I know that after reading Sherry Tepper's Grass and that at the other level, I am a better human being. And this is what I wish for all of you listening to the podcast. That's wonderful. Thank you. That's a wonderful sentiment. Mark, any final thoughts or observations? I can't top that. Come on. I should have gone to you first, right? That's insane. Top that beautiful thought, Mark.
00:39:49
Speaker
Basket full of kittens and basket full of puppies? I don't know. Michelle, thank you very much for being on our podcast. Thank you, Drew. Thank you, Mark. Thank you so much, Michelle. Lovely meeting you.
00:40:14
Speaker
Joe, I'm really enjoying this. This has been fun, but I don't want to do this podcast anymore. You're talking about stopping the podcast. No, I'm just kidding. But I do want to take August off. I just had like a heart attack, Mark. I was just trying to get that rise out of you. So yeah, I think we should take August off. I think we should end of July and come back after Labor Day. I think that's a terrific idea. Why don't we do a special episode to finish the whole thing off? A very special episode? Very special episode, yes. And we're going to launch your book, right?
00:40:41
Speaker
Yes, we're going to launch my book, Adventures in the Radio Trade with a special live edition of Recreative. That sounds perfect. So we'll do that on the 30th. Sunday the 30th will be a special live edition of Recreative, after which we'll take August off. And then we'll be back on... After Labor Day. After Labor Day. I'll take my white pants off at that point. Your white pants. Right? Because you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day. Do I look like someone who pays any attention to that kind of... Do I look like someone who has white pants?