Transcript
Speaker: I got shit to do.
Speaker: Gotta raise these onions, bitch.
Speaker: You know who else has to raise onions.
Speaker: Who?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back.
Speaker: To Pixel It.
Speaker: That was the best one so far.
Speaker: That was the best one so far.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: Alongside with me, as always, is Phil.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: And today we have a very special episode for y'all.
Speaker: We are talking to author William C. Dietz, the writer of Halo the Flood.
Speaker: He's going to be on the show talking to us, us two podcasters.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Two schmucks with microphones.
Speaker: How that book happened.
Speaker: And I think I think he answered some some pretty interesting questions.
Speaker: Don't you think I was?
Speaker: Yeah, he was.
Speaker: He was a very informative, very knowledgeable, really stoked to be here.
Speaker: He was so generous with his time and.
Speaker: It was terrific to actually be able to put the person to the book that we talked about for five hours.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So it was good to put a face and a voice to the name and the words of the book.
Speaker: He confirmed some suspicions that we have and have had out loud, not just about this book, but previous books that we've read regarding involvement of others, let's just say, in the writing process, in the adaptation process.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think it's a fun conversation.
Speaker: And, you know, we'll we'll we'll talk to you.
Speaker: We'll talk to you next week with what are we doing next week?
Speaker: Oh, we got Ninja Gaiden with our next week.
Speaker: We got Ninja Gaiden.
Speaker: with our with our good friend aaron hess from oops all monsters so hell yes so this is gonna be a really good episode yes yes all right well take care everybody and uh enjoy the interview have fun yeah thanks for thanks for jumping on this is this is i think i kind of mentioned to kevin and you know that uh you know there's a thing in in the writing community
Speaker: has been for a long time that work for hire is not thought of highly in literary circles.
Speaker: It's scut work in the view of many.
Speaker: I disagree.
Speaker: You know, I think that it's participation typically in some kind of an effort that a whole bunch of people have already been involved in and they've created something cool and it's a lot of fun and it's very creative to, you know, add your little touch to it.
Speaker: And I don't see that as being in some way, you know, scut work.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: It makes me think a little bit about it makes me think of like pulp novels, you know, where it at the time it was, you know, it's pulp.
Speaker: It was very, you know, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am style writing.
Speaker: But nowadays, you know, the authors, you know, H.P.
Speaker: Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, people like that are legends now.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: So it makes it it's really in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: I mean, the line between a Heinlein science fiction novel and the kind of thing you're talking about is very thin, you know, and it's very easy to go across the line and go to pulp, but it's also easy to do something without knowing it that's really great.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, let's just get into it then.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We got some questions.
Speaker: Actually, I mean, based on what we're just talking about right now, maybe for our listeners, explain a little bit about the work for hire process, how that differs from just sitting down and writing a book.
Speaker: Well, you know, so a typical book, and that's what I do is typical books.
Speaker: And I've written like more than 60 novels at this point.
Speaker: A typical book for a publishing company like, let's say, Penguin, who I worked for for 30 years, is a deal where you pitch an idea and if they like it, they say, hey, that sounds pretty interesting.
Speaker: Give us some more depth on that.
Speaker: You do an outline, you do a treatment, you talk to your editor and so on.
Speaker: Eventually, that turns into a contract.
Speaker: And you sign it and you get some money up front and you go write the book and then you turn it in and hopefully it does well.
Speaker: But everything in that book is determined, the content of the book is determined by you.
Speaker: The cover of the book, the way it's edited, the typography, all of that is determined by the publisher.
Speaker: work for hire is different from that model and that um what you're doing is you are being hired like you might hire a brick mason to build a wall you're being hired to uh to do a job and uh that building a wall of words yeah perfect exactly that's that's that's a really good uh simile so um
Speaker: And because you're a workman or work woman, as the case may be, the terms of the contract are basically do what we say and deliver a certain kind of product at a certain time for a certain price and please be on time and all of that, you know.
Speaker: So that's one thing that makes it different is that they're telling you what to write.
Speaker: You're not coming up with that on your own.
Speaker: They're basically usually in early meetings.
Speaker: They're saying, okay, Bill, we've now brought you a board to write this novel, but here's what we have in mind.
Speaker: And then they pitch you with whatever it is, except it's not a pitch in the sense that I can say no.
Speaker: It's a description really of how they want me to take their character, their universe and all of that and, you know, work with it.
Speaker: So that makes it a lot different.
Speaker: And another thing that makes it different is that instead of working all by yourself and, you know, wherever you like to work, you're working in an environment, maybe virtual, but nonetheless, you're working in an environment where you're part of a team.
Speaker: So, you know, let's take Halo the Flood as an example of that.
Speaker: So, you know, the Bungie team at that time, you know, had whatever number, let's just say 15 people.
Speaker: I don't know what it really was.
Speaker: But there's something in that area.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And these people had already, when I came on the scene, put out two games that were very successful.
Speaker: They had a subculture, like you do at work, right?
Speaker: And their personalities and there's people with talents and there's people with flaws and there's all of that.
Speaker: And so you're walking into a team situation
Speaker: because we're all human beings and there's a lot of nuance and a lot of stuff.
Speaker: And you're trying to learn very quickly, particularly if you get to meet face to face, which I did in the case of Halo the Flood, because Bungie was up here right outside Seattle and I live in that area.
Speaker: So, you know, I could go see them directly.
Speaker: But
Speaker: You know, in that kind of a thing, though, you start to run into this, not only a culture, but a shared understanding of the project that you don't have.
Speaker: So you walk in the door and you say, Hey, here I am.
Speaker: And boy, it's fun to be here.
Speaker: And I have seven great ideas, you know, and you roll those out and I'm not dumping on bungee here.
Speaker: I'm just using them as an example.
Speaker: They go, you know, well, I don't like that first one that master chief would never do that.
Speaker: And then, you know, I don't like the second one.
Speaker: The covenant doesn't work that way.
Speaker: And I don't like the third one, you know, and so on.
Speaker: And you, you know, um,
Speaker: And that's the deal is work for hire.
Speaker: They are right.
Speaker: You are wrong.
Speaker: And you need to accept that.
Speaker: You have to come humbly to the situation.
Speaker: That's really it.
Speaker: You know, Kevin and I both went to grad school together.
Speaker: We met in a TV writing class.
Speaker: And one of the things they told us when we were writing spec scripts was
Speaker: As they said, if you have your heart set on a certain TV show that you want to write for, don't write an episode of their show because they already have in mind everything and they'll be able to pick every good idea you have apart.
Speaker: But another TV show might look at that and go, oh, this is a great episode.
Speaker: I'll I ought to tell them about you or something like that.
Speaker: That's right on.
Speaker: I think that was good advice.
Speaker: Did you have any preconceived ideas about the Halo universe that they just shot down beforehand?
Speaker: Or did you kind of go into it fresh?
Speaker: Well, yes and no.
Speaker: So can we back up for a second?
Speaker: Do you want to talk about how I even got involved?
Speaker: Yeah, please.
Speaker: Go right ahead.
Speaker: So at the time, you know, this all went down in 2002.
Speaker: I had a reputation for writing military science fiction.
Speaker: And so that qualified me, I guess, in their eyes.
Speaker: And so I got a call from my agent indicating that there was this possibility of this work.
Speaker: And it was this thing called Halo of the Flood.
Speaker: And I said, I've never heard of it.
Speaker: And I never had.
Speaker: And he said, well, it's supposedly a really cool property and it's going to be really great.
Speaker: But it's not, you know, you're not writing a novel, you're writing a novelization.
Speaker: Well, I knew what that meant.
Speaker: And that's something too, your listeners might be interested to kind of sort out for themselves is this notion that, you know, a novel for hire is like,
Speaker: You're inside a universe that somebody owns, but you're allowed to create something fresh, a novel from start to finish.
Speaker: But a novelization is taking the game, in this case, Halo of the Flood, and simply turning the game into a novel.
Speaker: And I'll come back to that in a minute.
Speaker: That's like considered by literary people to be even one step lower than
Speaker: You know, scum.
Speaker: That's like the scum that lives under the scum.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that's not considered to be a real thing that you want to advertise with your career typically, but I do.
Speaker: Anyway, so I got this thing from my agent and I said, well, I need to think about it.
Speaker: And particularly given that he already knew that the timeline was
Speaker: was gonna be basically three months.
Speaker: And typically even a fast, I'm a pretty fast writer, that is my nature.
Speaker: And I often write a book in half a year, but three months is really, really- That's a lot.
Speaker: No joke.
Speaker: And so I went to the source of all knowledge where games are concerned, which is the GameStop in my neighborhood, right?
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: You know, go to the guy behind the counter who's got the long hair, the tattoos, and all the requisite stuff going.
Speaker: And I said, you know, I've been asked to work on a project called Halo the Flood.
Speaker: And I said, you know, is that game any good?
Speaker: He goes, oh, dude, that game is fabulous.
Speaker: We can't even keep copies here.
Speaker: I mean, it just flies off the shelf and people love it and everything, you know.
Speaker: And I thought, okay, well, you know, if the guy at GameStop loves it, then, you know, it must be good.
Speaker: People like it, yeah.
Speaker: So that's all the research I did there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I went back and I said that I would do it.
Speaker: And so now coming back to your original question, there were meetings off the top with the team to kind of establish what was what and what the tone was, what they were looking for and all of that.
Speaker: And they were looking for a straight on novelization of the game.
Speaker: And I said, I can't, I just cannot
Speaker: get completely there.
Speaker: I said, is there any opportunity for, you know, me to inject new material in the cut scenes?
Speaker: You guys, you know, um, have a background in television writing.
Speaker: So, you know, what a cut scene is, but it's at, you know, point where everything dips to black and, um, you know, time passes and the, um,
Speaker: computer technology that runs games, you know, rewinds itself, so to speak, and gets ready for the next level of the game.
Speaker: And I said, right there at those points, it's a natural place where I could introduce characters that don't exist in the books and, you know, and give a different perspective, maybe, you know, take the point of view of some covenant, you know,
Speaker: characters and so on, none of which had been done up to that point.
Speaker: And I said, I really need that in order to do this project.
Speaker: Otherwise it's just mind numbing, you know, craziness to just grind my way through and,
Speaker: you know, say, and then he turned the corner and drew his pistol and then he shot, you know, all of that.
Speaker: So they, you know, to their credit, I think they said, yeah, okay, obviously we want to approve what you do and we don't want you can't kill off the chief and, you know, stuff like that, obviously.
Speaker: but go for it and let's see how that turns out.
Speaker: And so I did and it depends, so you can go online, look at the reviews and some people say, look at the novel on Amazon and their reviews say, this is a piece of crap.
Speaker: It's just a retelling of the game.
Speaker: If you've played the game, you don't need the book.
Speaker: But then other people do give me credit
Speaker: for having inserted the additional stuff.
Speaker: And they clearly enjoyed it.
Speaker: And I would say that if you look at the Halo games now,
Speaker: Some of the things that I put in there, like politics between the different alien species and each other, you know, that, the emphasis on Marines and that whole thing.
Speaker: You know, some of those things I think I can claim a little bit of credit for.
Speaker: And here I am claiming it.
Speaker: So, you know.
Speaker: No, and it's it.
Speaker: And that's the thing.
Speaker: That's kind of actually where we landed as we were reading through the book and kind of recapping it episode by episode.
Speaker: We we loved this.
Speaker: Basically, any scene that didn't have Master Chief in it, we were like,
Speaker: this is great.
Speaker: And then when we, when we, when it got to mastery, he's like, well, this is basically, this is just what you do in the game.
Speaker: And it's, and, and that's one of the things with that we found is that when you have a game, like the things that he does in the game are thrilling and interesting for game sake, but,
Speaker: But when you're reading them, they become less so only because it's like, well, there's no it almost feels like there's no stakes, you know, for him.
Speaker: But for all the other characters, you have McKay, you have even Yaya who became our favorite character of all time.
Speaker: We loved it.
Speaker: Every time we had a yay-yap section, it was like, all right, we're back with yay-yap.
Speaker: It was great.
Speaker: We loved it.
Speaker: You can see that character.
Speaker: Have you guys played Halo Infinite?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Okay, well, when you play it, which I assume you will at some point.
Speaker: Eventually, yeah.
Speaker: You'll notice that all of those little grunts running around, they share a certain common characteristics with the original.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And then it works well to this day.
Speaker: Oh, that's amazing.
Speaker: So at least that's my subjective opinion.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm glad you guys like that.
Speaker: It was something that that meant a lot to me.
Speaker: Well, that really is the challenge, isn't it?
Speaker: You know, when you're now to get the main plot line of the game, did you play through it yourself?
Speaker: Did you watch a play through?
Speaker: How did or both?
Speaker: You know, how did you go with that?
Speaker: That's a really great question, Phil.
Speaker: The you know, so like I said, I'd never heard of it.
Speaker: So the first thing I had to do is buy an Xbox.
Speaker: And the second thing I had to do was to, you know, play through the game, as you suggested, just see if I could get through how hard was it to get through, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, I started out like on normal and, you know, which I was used to playing.
Speaker: And then I thought, oh, this is stupid.
Speaker: What you want to do is go on easy so that, you know, you can just see the outlines of everything, pay more attention to the flow and so on than the actual action.
Speaker: do that first and then play it on normal and, you know, and, and, uh,
Speaker: and ramp it up.
Speaker: So I did that.
Speaker: And then the really hard part came where having got the feel for it and understanding how it works and all of that, I had to go through, you know, and actually write down, you know, everything that happened.
Speaker: So, you know, like a little bit, stop and say, you know, and then the master chief went up over the hill and wow, then suddenly there was this construct there and
Speaker: You know, there was a great blue light around it and a spaceship.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know what I'm saying?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: We actually had a specific moment that we talked about in the game where Master Chief is sniping people from a distance.
Speaker: He's sniping Covenant from a distance and then he's lost track.
Speaker: He's got blinders on, basically, loses track of what's right around him and basically gets jumped on by some jackals or something along those lines.
Speaker: And I said to Kevin, I said,
Speaker: That happened to me when I was playing the game.
Speaker: Do you suppose that happened to him when he was playing it?
Speaker: But that's one of the interesting things.
Speaker: We all know this, of course, because we've played a lot of games.
Speaker: But there's enough variation in what could happen to you in that game that, you know, that might have happened to you or it might not.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: That's helpful.
Speaker: So the version that people saw
Speaker: of the game was the one that happened to me, but they probably experienced it slightly differently.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We found out.
Speaker: So it was three months to turn around 85000 words.
Speaker: Is that what the contract said?
Speaker: That's what the contract called for.
Speaker: I sent you that little snippet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do you find that in other work-for-hire jobs similar to this one, maybe in the video games industry, that that kind of follows a route?
Speaker: That's about right?
Speaker: Yes, about $85,000 to $90,000 is very typical.
Speaker: I wrote a Hitman novel, which was not a novelization.
Speaker: It was a novel.
Speaker: It was about that long.
Speaker: For example... But in three months?
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: No, I think I had six months or maybe even more to write that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it was fun.
Speaker: And that had its own strange flavorings and everything, too, you know.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Hitman.
Speaker: We actually in the process of looking you up, that was me finding out that you'd written a Hitman novel.
Speaker: And I think that was me finding out there was a Hitman novel.
Speaker: So we better put that on the list.
Speaker: Bill, did you have any Bill, did you have any contact or discussion with Eric Nyland who?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: No, I know Eric or I haven't seen him in years.
Speaker: I used to see him all the time.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: In conventions, but.
Speaker: You know, as you know, we haven't had any science fiction convention in a while.
Speaker: Sadly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, sadly, indeed.
Speaker: But no, and, you know, he was very much involved in part of the team there and an important part of the team.
Speaker: And he, of course, wrote Halo, you know, Reach, which was a great book.
Speaker: Everybody loved that book.
Speaker: And it was the precursor for what I did.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: You know, so, yeah, he did a great job and he'd be a great guy to talk to.
Speaker: He'd be able to give you a lot of that, you know, inside stuff, you know, about what it was like to be on the team and be writing.
Speaker: you know, a novelization at the same time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cause I was curious if he had to provide you, cause I noticed you had a couple of tie-ins to events that happened in fall of reach around the character of major Silva.
Speaker: So yeah, it, it was a, it was a neat little thread to follow.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Keep some sort of a Bible or something.
Speaker: Good question.
Speaker: I'm trying to remember.
Speaker: I know they gave me materials.
Speaker: It's been 20 years.
Speaker: I know they gave me materials.
Speaker: Yeah, fair enough.
Speaker: Yeah, but not on the scale that Lucasfilms did when I wrote the novellas for Jedi Knight.
Speaker: You know, I mean, box after box got shipped to my door.
Speaker: Art, you know, got shipped, you know, stuff that I have hanging on my wall, which is, I could probably sell it at a convention for a lot of money, you know.
Speaker: Probably.
Speaker: That's, you know, it, that was, and then they had a Bible so strict, you know, and so complicated.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: You know, it just covered every single book that had been done, all the movies, fit the whole thing together.
Speaker: You know, it was intense.
Speaker: And that sounds about right, because when I talked to David Fox, who was one of the earliest members of Lucasfilm Games and ran the studio briefly, he was talking about how at Skywalker Ranch, they just have material and...
Speaker: Like all of this material set aside and even even him just as a force of habit.
Speaker: When I when I interviewed him several years ago, he said, oh, yeah, I have photocopies of literally everything I ever did for Lucasfilm.
Speaker: That's how they rolled.
Speaker: And the ranch.
Speaker: I got to go to the ranch, guys.
Speaker: I just.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: That's too cool.
Speaker: Tell us about the ranch.
Speaker: Tell us about the ranch.
Speaker: Don't leave anything out.
Speaker: And, you know, it's great.
Speaker: I went with my editor.
Speaker: She flew in from New York to San Francisco and I came down from Seattle.
Speaker: And, you know, and so we rented a car and we drive out there and she's navigating and she's saying, so this place doesn't have a sign, Bill.
Speaker: There's no sign.
Speaker: There's no anything.
Speaker: All there is is a black post office box, you know, mailbox.
Speaker: And, you know, it has, I forget, some numbers on it.
Speaker: And that's what we have to watch for.
Speaker: And sure enough, up comes this thing and it looks like you're turning into a driveway, maybe to a trailer home or something like that.
Speaker: And you turn in and the road gets bigger and everything.
Speaker: And then this house that Lucas built appears and then the library next to it.
Speaker: And then the shed, you know, the big buildings where all the computer stuff is going on.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Yeah, it was pretty cool.
Speaker: Now, you were talking about the team before.
Speaker: How often, you know, writing for hire, working with this team, how often would you say you were going in and meeting with them versus just, you know, writing from home or something like that?
Speaker: Yeah, not that often.
Speaker: You know, there was the initial meetings and then it was mostly just from home and on the phone and that kind of stuff.
Speaker: Zoom and stuff wasn't what it is today, obviously 20 years ago.
Speaker: So there wasn't as much of that kind of video meeting or whatever.
Speaker: In fact, I'm not sure there were any back then.
Speaker: And once it was on track, and of course I had an editor back in New York who was tracking what I was doing.
Speaker: And I think I was sharing stuff as it came out and he was sharing it with them.
Speaker: And so there was some real time editing and checking and feedback.
Speaker: And they're telling me, hey, back off on this bill or hey, this is this works.
Speaker: You can keep that.
Speaker: And, you know, so that was that was that was going on.
Speaker: But I have to say that, you know, I came to to writing late.
Speaker: I my first novel was published when I was 40.
Speaker: So I've never been a young man in science fiction.
Speaker: You hear that, Kevin?
Speaker: I got eight months.
Speaker: I got eight months.
Speaker: You have eight months, Phil.
Speaker: And I'll be on the same schedule as Bill here.
Speaker: Because, you know, like I had promised myself when I was in my 20s that I would write a book, but I got to be 39.
Speaker: I hadn't started.
Speaker: And I sat down and wrote the book.
Speaker: I said, I got to keep that promise to myself.
Speaker: I'll write the book.
Speaker: It won't get published, but I'll write the book.
Speaker: So I wrote the book and I sent it in and Ace bought it the first place I sent it the first time I sent it.
Speaker: Holy cow.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: It wasn't because I was really, really great that I was some amazing author.
Speaker: A couple of years later, I was having lunch with my then editor at Ace Books.
Speaker: And by that time, we knew each other.
Speaker: And, you know, so she felt she could say this to me.
Speaker: You know, she said, I was recounting how wonderful it was when I sold that book.
Speaker: And she said, well, you know, the thing about that book was, Bill, it wasn't that great a book, but we needed some of that shit right at that time, you know.
Speaker: Right place, right time.
Speaker: I'll take it.
Speaker: Take it, baby.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: So, yeah, I get no respect, but anyway.
Speaker: Hey, man, you're the one who decided you wanted to write sci fi.
Speaker: We can't.
Speaker: There's that's just an ingrateful fan base.
Speaker: But so anyway, we we digress.
Speaker: Oh, I got a good I got a question for you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Without without breaking any NDAs or anything like that.
Speaker: Was there anything that you wanted to put in the book that they just came down on hard and just went, no, absolutely not.
Speaker: That's a good question.
Speaker: I don't remember them saying no to any of my little segments, but I remember them giving guidance about aspects of those things that they liked and didn't like.
Speaker: I don't remember all the refinements of that.
Speaker: I think the one thing that bugged me that I felt badly about, you know, was the end of Halo the Flood, as you know, they blow the ring up.
Speaker: And they told me everybody that you create in these interstitial spaces, for lack of a better description, is going to have to die when the ring blows up.
Speaker: And, you know, I didn't like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, we're, we're still holding out hope that yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like pulled a Boba Fett somehow and crawled out of the pit and maybe he did get some one shots.
Speaker: I think, I think I I'm, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and, and, and that's something that we, we, we agreed with was that it was because it was, it was such a nice dramatic arc with all of these interstitial characters, um,
Speaker: And then it ends up that they kind of have to have a quick, like their loose ends have to get tied up really quickly at the end as Master Chief is basically finishing everything up.
Speaker: So it was a bargain that I had to agree to if I wanted to have that additional material, and I thought it was worth it.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Well, in a way, it kind of frees you up, doesn't it?
Speaker: Because whatever choices you make, it all just kind of, the slate's wiped clean in the end.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: And of course, to the extent that you do that, and this is something that probably people who...
Speaker: read the novel and played the game, probably didn't think about, but from a strategic aspect, a writing aspect, which you guys would understand, you know, in a story, if you kill off a few people that folks like, it really adds a certain amount of, you know, suspense and tension and all of that to the book because they go,
Speaker: This crazy son of a gun will kill anybody off in this book.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: We don't know what's coming.
Speaker: Ask George R.R.
Speaker: Martin.
Speaker: Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I actually remember when R.A.
Speaker: Salvatore killed Chewbacca in, what was it, Nettla...
Speaker: Oh, right.
Speaker: It was one of the later books, one of the new Jedi order books.
Speaker: But yeah, he prime vector prime.
Speaker: He had a planet.
Speaker: He had a planet crushed Chewbacca.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The only way you could kill that furry son of a bitch.
Speaker: You had to crush him with a moon, man.
Speaker: Yeah, that was a turning point with certain geeks.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, you know, none of us bought that.
Speaker: So what are any, any other difficulties of adapting a video game to a novel that you didn't run into with the other adaptations?
Speaker: Well, sometimes, and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I wrote one, you know, that I'm not gonna get into because I don't wanna name names here.
Speaker: Sure, of course.
Speaker: I don't know all that.
Speaker: But I mean, sometimes the companies, they'll be the person who's kind of the owner of the franchise, you know, the big boss or whatever is exerting so much control that, you know, that they're basically telling you how to do everything and they're not satisfied
Speaker: with anything they haven't done and so on.
Speaker: And, you know, that just, that really can kill something.
Speaker: That's one possibility.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, you know, another one is where you sign on, and I'm thinking of a different book now, you sign on to do, you know, something and they give you orders.
Speaker: And we were talking about kill off characters.
Speaker: They give you orders to kill somebody off and to accomplish certain things for their overarching plot.
Speaker: You do that and all of their fans go crazy, you know, and spend your idea.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Send us spend the next six months flaming you as a result.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, you know, there are dangers, you know, definitely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I didn't even think about that, that one of the inherent challenges is the fan base.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You got to keep everybody happy.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: They can get really, really up in your grill without a doubt.
Speaker: I absolutely believe that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think one of the other challenges of writing when you're older is, and I've had this experience, I wrote,
Speaker: The two or three novels in the Resistance series that Sony had, the Resistance games, you know, and which I liked a lot.
Speaker: I love first person shooters and those were really good first person shooters.
Speaker: I don't know why Sony hasn't brought those back via Steam or via, you know, Microsoft's new online, you know, service.
Speaker: I mean, those those deserve to be preserved.
Speaker: But
Speaker: But anyway, sometimes you get so involved and you become such an expert because you were hired to do these books that amazing things happen.
Speaker: I wound up co-writing a game for Sony based on a resistance game.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Just because I'd written these books and I knew it so well and I was always correcting people on the team.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I know it's better than you at that point.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: But that isn't where I was going.
Speaker: Where I was going to go was, I remember that team, you know, I went to meet with them off the top when I was first hired and you walk into the room.
Speaker: And at that time, I think I was in my 60s and everybody goes, you just see all these faces, everybody in there is under 30 and they're all going...
Speaker: brought grandpa to the party you know what in the world is going on here you know and so you have to you have to you have to do a good job to overcome yeah the built-in well what are you playing now right now i'm playing far cry five oh nice that's fiddle's favorite game i uh you know i
Speaker: For a long time, th is is just, you know, it's so crazy.
Speaker: For a long time, I love first-person shooters.
Speaker: For a long time, I'd be in the game store, I'd be online, and I'd see, like, the cover art for Far Cry 2, and I thought, that looks sucky.
Speaker: I mean, it just didn't look that great to me.
Speaker: But but finally, out of desperation, because there was only so many first person shooters around, you know, I I gave it a try and I fell in love with that game.
Speaker: You know, I mean, because it really allows you to use stealth.
Speaker: which I enjoy.
Speaker: I'm not a guy who loves to always just go in guns blazing.
Speaker: I don't try to get through games in half an hour, play the whole game through in half an hour or an hour and set a record or something.
Speaker: I don't care about that.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: So not only did I play it, I played it like three times.
Speaker: And then I said, you need to stop this.
Speaker: You know, and move on.
Speaker: So I thought, well, I'll try another Far Cry game.
Speaker: And so I tried...
Speaker: I tried five and I'm enjoying it a lot.
Speaker: It's, you know, the Far Cry games have a really for me, I'm not the brightest soul when it comes to games and they have a steep learning curve for me.
Speaker: You know, I mean, like sometimes I'm going, what?
Speaker: How do you do this?
Speaker: You know, what's a you know, I don't understand this point system or this thing or that thing.
Speaker: But but, you know, eventually I figure it out about.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a learning curve, but they get you there eventually.
Speaker: They get you there, and so I'm having a great time with it now.
Speaker: I got the learning curve behind me.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That was actually one of, was that the third book we read?
Speaker: The third book we covered was Far Cry Absolution.
Speaker: Oh, cool.
Speaker: Who wrote that?
Speaker: Urban Weight.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: It was terrific.
Speaker: Very Cormac McCarthy.
Speaker: Really, really liked it.
Speaker: It's a prequel to Far Cry 5.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I haven't played that game.
Speaker: What enabled me to play 5 was that I got a new computer.
Speaker: My old computer could have anything past 2.
Speaker: Just didn't have enough processing power, enough speed, you know, memory and all that.
Speaker: Beyond gaming influences, that sort of thing.
Speaker: Who are your authors?
Speaker: Who are your guys who influenced you the most?
Speaker: Well, you know, I'd break them into two sets.
Speaker: You know, I was a huge Heinlein fan as a kid, you know, and Asimov and, you know, and just, you know, all the greats, you know, Dick, you know, on and on.
Speaker: You know, I would say since I'm a military science fiction writer, I was a huge and am a huge Dave Drake fan.
Speaker: And Dave and I actually, I got invited at one point to co-write a book with Dave, which was a big thrill.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He was just such a generous man.
Speaker: And I was in the service during Vietnam, but I didn't go.
Speaker: He was in the service Vietnam and he went.
Speaker: He was a tanker.
Speaker: Um, and you know, if you know anything about the war in Vietnam, you guys are too young, but, uh, they had this highway one-on-one or whatever it was that ran through the middle of, you know, Vietnam and the tanks couldn't really go anywhere except up and down this highway.
Speaker: And, you know, so that's where they spent a huge amount.
Speaker: That's where Dave spent a huge amount of his time and so on.
Speaker: It's going up and down that highway, I believe.
Speaker: But, um, so, um,
Speaker: So I like that kind of, I like that kind of book.
Speaker: I like Campbell.
Speaker: I like, you know, a lot of the people who work for Bain cause they're all military science fiction.
Speaker: Um, and, um, I should be able to think of more names right now, but you know, it's a good lineup.
Speaker: It's a very good lineup.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Are you, uh, you working on anything right now?
Speaker: Anything in particular?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, I'm writing, um,
Speaker: a series.
Speaker: I'm on book seven of a series called Winds of War.
Speaker: And you know, it's really interesting these days the way the business breaks down into these very specialized subcategories.
Speaker: So this is called
Speaker: Amazon came up with this.
Speaker: This is called near future alternative fiction.
Speaker: So, you know, and they also put it up on the science fiction thing where it doesn't do that well.
Speaker: But in the alternative fiction,
Speaker: fiction category, these books are doing very well.
Speaker: And what makes them a little bit different is they're about a fictional, thank God, fictional World War III.
Speaker: But instead of the usual thing of following some individual hero or heroine, you know, who
Speaker: goes Tom Clancy style.
Speaker: I remember how his hero was just a CIA guy and then he got promoted and then he winds up as president.
Speaker: You're going, what?
Speaker: It's a jump.
Speaker: What the hell happened there?
Speaker: I could never get over that.
Speaker: kind of boggled my mind well they took that they took that idea for a tv show later with uh what was it the uh keifer sutherland there's a show called 24 no designated survivor with keifer sutherland used the same idea as as that tom clancy novel where uh what's his face harrison ford's character jack ryan becomes president
Speaker: Well, so I didn't want to do that, but I wanted to write in the very near future, but just a little bit over the hill, so to speak, just a little bit over the horizon.
Speaker: And so each book is about somebody different and each book is set in a different place.
Speaker: And often I change between all the different military groups.
Speaker: You know, one will be about the Navy, one will be about the Air Force, one will be about, you know, the Army and so on with different characters.
Speaker: And people seem, a lot of people seem to like that.
Speaker: It's doing pretty well.
Speaker: With a series that big, I mean, you're on the seventh book now.
Speaker: How much pre-planning do you do before you even get started?
Speaker: Well, you know, as you guys know, having, you know, writing, being, having, you know, gone to graduate school and also I can tell, you know, you do your own writing and stuff.
Speaker: There's really two kinds of writers, those who write outlines and those who don't, you know, and.
Speaker: You're an organic writer.
Speaker: See the pants writers?
Speaker: Who are they?
Speaker: I don't know anything about them.
Speaker: So you're an organic writer, right, Phil?
Speaker: I mean, that's your deal.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I get that and it works for some people, but I'm so insecure, you know, I don't want to just dive in there, not being able to know where I'm going or, you know,
Speaker: or whatever, if the muse doesn't show up for work, what the hell do I do?
Speaker: So I write an outline, but now I'm gonna cop out a bit.
Speaker: I write the outline, but it's fairly high level.
Speaker: So that means that day to day, I'm often writing in an organic fashion.
Speaker: And, you know, and I'll come back to the outline maybe every five or six days, look at it, see if I'm on track, also look ahead and see what I'm doing.
Speaker: But it gives me that sense of I can get this done.
Speaker: You know, I can get there because I know what the big stepping stones towards the end of the book are.
Speaker: It's just guideposts.
Speaker: It's got guardrails for you to follow, basically.
Speaker: But, you know, as I think Phil would probably testify, you know, the thing about the organic writing is that that's when the magic can happen.
Speaker: You know, you haven't planned it.
Speaker: It's just, you know, something really good happens and you go with it and you feel it.
Speaker: And it comes from wherever it comes from.
Speaker: I don't feel it comes from me.
Speaker: That's why I talk about a muse.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like it comes somewhere.
Speaker: It's definitely the most feast and famine style of writing.
Speaker: You are either like on this role where you're like, oh, I'm a genius.
Speaker: This is the greatest thing I've ever written.
Speaker: Or you're just sitting there staring at a blinking cursor going, oh, I'm terrible.
Speaker: This is the one.
Speaker: So, yeah, I do think about that.
Speaker: I want to be an outline writer.
Speaker: I really do.
Speaker: I think that would be so much easier if I was like, OK, here's A and B. And my job is to get from there to there.
Speaker: That's so much easier.
Speaker: And I just never bring myself to do it.
Speaker: I just can't do it.
Speaker: It's just jumbled notes hidden in various corners of a notebook like that's just.
Speaker: It's madness.
Speaker: Only real men can be organic writers.
Speaker: I mean, you know, are kind of just wussies who go, no, I need railings.
Speaker: I need rails and crutches.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
Speaker: Phil, do you think Bukowski had an outline?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: He had a whiskey bottle.
Speaker: I think he had a lot less than that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But anyway, it is a pleasure.
Speaker: I feel I just can't tell you how much I enjoy writing.
Speaker: I still pop out of bed in the morning and ready to go.
Speaker: And I love doing it.
Speaker: And that's fantastic.
Speaker: Privilege.
Speaker: And I mean, and that's that's that's been your life for the past.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: 35 years, something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I had a real job, you know, being a manager for a big corporation and everything.
Speaker: And I put in my 20 years to get a defined pension.
Speaker: And then I became a full-time writer.
Speaker: So I've only been a full-time writer for about 20 years.
Speaker: Before that, I wrote a book a year.
Speaker: while having a full-time job and being a dad and all of that.
Speaker: And it can be done.
Speaker: I've written articles about how to do it.
Speaker: That's a smart way to do it.
Speaker: One page a day, Phil.
Speaker: One page a day.
Speaker: One page a day.
Speaker: 365 days and you have a book.
Speaker: That is true.
Speaker: That is a book right there.
Speaker: That's all you have to do.
Speaker: I might have to.
Speaker: I might actually have to take that challenge.
Speaker: Do it that way.
Speaker: Do it.
Speaker: Do it one page a day.
Speaker: I believe in you, Phil.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, and you can do it.
Speaker: You know, you know, if you've got a day job, you can do it at the boring staff meeting.
Speaker: You can do it on the train.
Speaker: You can do it.
Speaker: Now that we're working remotely for work, I mean, that makes it a lot easier.
Speaker: Yeah, because you can carve out some time to do that.
Speaker: So no excuses, guys.
Speaker: There really is none.
Speaker: And yet.
Speaker: And yet.
Speaker: This is where you could throw it back at me and say, but what were you doing up till age 39, Bill?
Speaker: And I would have to say writing television news, writing corporate stuff, but not writing fiction.
Speaker: Writing other people's stuff.
Speaker: Writing other people's stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You have had a very varied background based on what I've seen.
Speaker: I mean, that's got to play into your abilities as a writer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's so many things to draw from.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It certainly helps.
Speaker: I remember when I went to grad school, which I didn't finish, but I got halfway through before my wife and I ran off to Africa.
Speaker: But, you know.
Speaker: Halfway through is really all you need.
Speaker: Halfway through is good enough, if you ask me.
Speaker: But I remember this guy that I always sat next to.
Speaker: You know, he was kind of a young, studly kind of guy.
Speaker: And we would talk and he, you know, he told me and I would say, so what are you going to do after you finish your master's?
Speaker: And he said, well, I'm going to become a tuna fisherman.
Speaker: And I said, what?
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: He says, because it'll look good when I write a book.
Speaker: It'll look good on my on the.
Speaker: Yeah, yes.
Speaker: You know, people love that sexy background.
Speaker: So tuna fisherman turned novelist.
Speaker: He was just going to do it for that reason.
Speaker: That just kind of.
Speaker: You know, like, but anyway.
Speaker: I can't argue with too much of that motivation.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: No, not at all.
Speaker: I absolutely get it.
Speaker: Let me see.
Speaker: Kevin, you got anything else?
Speaker: You guys are podcasters now, and that's very happening.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That goes right on the book cover, so.
Speaker: True, true.
Speaker: Yeah, there is.
Speaker: This is not a topic that is heavily covered either.
Speaker: So we're.
Speaker: But that's the thing, though.
Speaker: You know, and that is, I mean, we live in a time of mass customization.
Speaker: We live in a time making this up where there's a magazine for left handed bike riders, you know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, you know, it's those micro, micro audiences.
Speaker: And basically.
Speaker: Since I started self-publishing on Amazon, that's what I'm finding really works well.
Speaker: You're not getting the mass market, but you're getting a large mini market.
Speaker: People who really like that particular type of thing and like what you're doing.
Speaker: and are willing to keep paying for it.
Speaker: I remember my producing professor, I believe it was Professor Meyer, once saying in a class, you need about 10,000 dedicated fans and you have a career.
Speaker: The man had it right.
Speaker: Yeah, I can tell that some of your professors were better than mine.
Speaker: We had a very unique grad school career.
Speaker: It was a good time.
Speaker: It was a good time.
Speaker: And I remember of it was pretty good.
Speaker: I went to a communication school where very few of my professors had ever done any communicating.
Speaker: You know, they'd never worked in radio or television or anything.
Speaker: They'd
Speaker: you know, they were all theory oriented and that's not what I was looking for.
Speaker: All of our, all of our professors were, were literal Hollywood burnouts as it had, it had serious, like, yeah, they were, they were ex pros, uh, that just couldn't, they just didn't want to do it.
Speaker: They were just so tired.
Speaker: They were so tired.
Speaker: You'd get some really practical advice, but maybe sometimes the teaching abilities weren't quite as simple.
Speaker: I know what you mean there.
Speaker: When you're 25 years old and you come in and realize the professor is every bit as hungover as you are.
Speaker: Okay, this is grad school.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: At the time when I was going to grad school, I was also working full time as a TV director at a local television station directing two evening news shows a day.
Speaker: And so when I became a teaching assistant and they hired me to teach television production,
Speaker: My class could actually go to the studios, crowd into the booth, and watch me get through a live show.
Speaker: Now that's when you actually, you know, can lay claim to having taught something.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I totally agree.
Speaker: It's right there.
Speaker: You're doing it right in front of you.
Speaker: That's as practical as it gets.
Speaker: Oh, now you did mention, to be fair, that Resistance was kind of your baby in the sense like a franchise you really enjoyed.
Speaker: Were there any others that you've worked on that if they called you up,
Speaker: tomorrow to work on something for them, you'd say yes without any hesitation.
Speaker: Well, of course, this boat has sailed, but I still love Star Wars.
Speaker: You know, I'm a big Star Wars fan, so I would certainly have to, you know, listen to their story and so on.
Speaker: But that's not going to happen.
Speaker: Sadly, you know, the number of tie in books has dwindled a great deal.
Speaker: I mean, there was work there for quite a few people.
Speaker: And now
Speaker: It seems like just, you know, it just has kind of vanished for whatever reason.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But that's certainly one I might, you know, entertain Hitman if that if that came up.
Speaker: That was kind of fun to write.
Speaker: It was so different.
Speaker: Different team was a European team.
Speaker: And it just had it that caused things to be different in the way that what they would accept and what they wouldn't.
Speaker: I'll give you an example.
Speaker: So
Speaker: I give the hit man, you know, a Beamer to drive, you know, and it's a real fancy Beamer and everything.
Speaker: And I thought, you know, this is cool.
Speaker: I mean, it's the kind of thing a guy like him would drive, right?
Speaker: I mean, you know, and no, I get this email coming back, you know, bag the Beamer.
Speaker: It's a Volvo.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because these guys are over there in Volvo land, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I had to school myself on Volvos and find out, you know, if there was a sexy one.
Speaker: Thanks, Bill.
Speaker: Thank you very much, Bill.
Speaker: It was terrific meeting you.
Speaker: It was a pleasure meeting you too.
Speaker: Maybe we'll bump into each other down the line sometime.
Speaker: I hope so.
Speaker: I'd like that.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Take care.
Speaker: Once again, we want to thank Bill for coming on the show.
Speaker: If you want more information about his work, please check out his website, WilliamCDietz.com, or his Twitter, at WCDietz.
Speaker: Links to those will be in the description below.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to Pixel It.
Speaker: Good night, everyone.
