Transcript
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: You know what else is a sensible chuckle?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome to Pixel.
Speaker: It's a sensible chuckle.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me as always is Phil.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: And today we got a very...
Speaker: Very special episode for you.
Speaker: We do.
Speaker: A very special episode.
Speaker: We are talking to the king, the master of the media tie-in novelization, Alan Dean Foster.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And it was a tremendous conversation.
Speaker: I came away from it thoroughly inspired.
Speaker: How do you feel about that, Phil?
Speaker: I am also deeply inspired.
Speaker: That was that was such an amazing conversation we had.
Speaker: That was so great.
Speaker: So, yeah, we're just going to go.
Speaker: We're going to roll right into it.
Speaker: So ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, kings, queens and emperors, without much further inspired, the inspired Alan Dean Foster.
Speaker: Writing the novelization of a video game.
Speaker: was something I'd never done before, obviously, because nobody had done it before.
Speaker: And I was presented immediately with a real serious problem.
Speaker: How do you write the novelization of a game without turning it into a game book?
Speaker: George the blacksmith puts a horseshoe on the anvil and hits it.
Speaker: And then you have a secret thing that turns it into a sword.
Speaker: How do you write that without giving away the fact that if you put it on the anvil, it turns it into a sword?
Speaker: And so the entire book had to be written with that.
Speaker: with that in mind.
Speaker: And then later the dig was the same problem, which I wasn't going to do.
Speaker: And I only did it because Spielberg was involved.
Speaker: And I figured, all right, last act, a little more work than usual.
Speaker: I'll give it my best shot.
Speaker: And that turned out pretty well too.
Speaker: But you guys seem primarily interested in Shadowkeep or whatever.
Speaker: You can ask what we had for dinner Friday night.
Speaker: I don't care.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That was the fourth question.
Speaker: Yeah, so let's just get right into Shadowkeep.
Speaker: So what was the... So let me back up a little bit.
Speaker: The reason we got turned on to Shadowkeep, reading about it, was we were talking to Seth Godin, who did the Worlds of Power books for Nintendo.
Speaker: And he was like, oh, well, that wasn't my first time doing something like that.
Speaker: I was working for Spinnaker Software.
Speaker: And we had an adaptation of Shadowkeep.
Speaker: And we were like, we just, Phil and I kind of looked at each other like, wait a minute.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: So we dug it up.
Speaker: Phil sent me a copy that he found on eBay.
Speaker: It lasted just long enough for me to read it.
Speaker: It ended up falling apart into two pieces.
Speaker: But we were wondering, how did you end up getting a book?
Speaker: It's a well-loved book.
Speaker: How did you get involved with it?
Speaker: I had done some novelizations before, and this seemed like a new challenge.
Speaker: And I was also intrigued by the fact that it appeared to be the first time anybody was asked to do a novelization of an original computer game.
Speaker: Now, there were four games that came out simultaneously, or more or less simultaneously, from Spinnaker way back in the Jurassic.
Speaker: Besides Shadowkeep, there was one based on Michael Crichton's sphere, if I remember correctly, and two others based on very well-known science fiction books.
Speaker: So the other three games were all based on existing books.
Speaker: Shadowkeep was the only original one.
Speaker: And I thought, well, that's very good company.
Speaker: I don't remember the titles of the other two, but you guys probably have them or will look them up.
Speaker: but it was all big stuff.
Speaker: I mean, besides Crichton, it was in kind of that league.
Speaker: And I thought, as a young writer, I thought, well, that would be very nice company to be in, in a simultaneous release.
Speaker: And that was another reason I did it.
Speaker: But the request went directly to my agency, the Virginia Kid Agency, which was then passed on to me, I presume because I had been doing some novelizations.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Nobody really knew who to go to at that time for that sort of thing.
Speaker: Asimov did Fantastic Voyage, but he wasn't going to do this.
Speaker: No real biology involved.
Speaker: Fantasy.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: So I took the job on not realizing what I was getting myself into.
Speaker: That's one reason why it was so fun listening, so much fun listening to you guys reprise the first part of it a couple of days ago.
Speaker: All this stuff came back and I'm thinking to myself, well, yeah, that wasn't in the game, but I did that.
Speaker: That wasn't in the game, but I did that.
Speaker: And in fact, a great deal of what's in there as far as characterization.
Speaker: And story and action was stuff that I had to come up with, not only to make a little game story into a full length novel, but also to do it without giving the game away.
Speaker: Every time I sat down to do a scene, I had to think, OK, this is what happens in this scene.
Speaker: How can I write it without having that happen?
Speaker: And, you know, my mental state at the time was just a little bit on edge because of all of that.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So that actually brings up one of the questions because we, you know, everything we do in this show is about adaptation and that sort of thing.
Speaker: So I imagine when you're adapting from a film, for example, you're working with a shooting script, something like that.
Speaker: How much flexibility do you have in a video game novelization versus a film, for example?
Speaker: It sounds like you had a lot more.
Speaker: You have to have a lot more.
Speaker: If you're adapting, s ay, a full-length film, say, I don't know, Chronicles of Riddick.
Speaker: There's an enormous amount of material in the story.
Speaker: Plus, there was actually kind of an addendum to the whole screenplay in which the screenwriter director, David Toohey, had laid out a whole background for this universe of the necromongers, a lot of which material I was able to use in the book.
Speaker: and which was so good that I included that in the end of the book.
Speaker: So there's a lot to work with there.
Speaker: Uh, and that's typical of any, any novelization, uh, adapting the thing, John Carpenter's version of the thing.
Speaker: Oh, it's the best.
Speaker: Yes, indeed.
Speaker: Using the shooting script.
Speaker: Uh, in fact, Buzzfeed just had something come out today.
Speaker: something like 10 films that were dissed when they came out but considered great now and vice versa.
Speaker: And one of the ones that was dissed when it came out and is now considered great is Carpenter's version of The Thing, which I completely agree with.
Speaker: But it was a different script from the final shoot because of money reasons and time-consuming, time reasons.
Speaker: So I had a lot of flexibility there to expand stuff that didn't end up in the final film but was already there.
Speaker: As far as the game goes, and particularly with these very early video games, there isn't anything there.
Speaker: As you guys discussed a couple of days ago, main character moves from point A to point B, opens, pick one, treasure chest, kills troll, gets horse, moves on.
Speaker: Story-wise, there's not a lot there to work with.
Speaker: So I had a tremendous amount of flexibility.
Speaker: Because nobody knew what to do with it, I guess.
Speaker: What choice did they have?
Speaker: Well, that's what I like.
Speaker: We all don't know what's going on here, so we better let that, what do you call them, writer do something with it.
Speaker: And that's wonderful when I get that kind of freedom.
Speaker: Albeit, it was very difficult in that particular case because there was so much to fill in.
Speaker: So I had a lot of it.
Speaker: It makes a lot of sense, too.
Speaker: And that actually carries over into the novelizations that we've been reading that are, you know, more recent.
Speaker: Because the thing that we seem to agree on for the most part, the one consistency with them is when it's altered from the game itself and the writers allowed to play with it and have fun.
Speaker: Those tend to be our favorite parts in the book.
Speaker: Well, you're getting more stuff.
Speaker: If you're playing a game you like, even if it's something like say Red Dead Redemption, you get to do, if you're writing an adaptation of it, you get to do all the characters.
Speaker: Now, admittedly, there's a lot more character development in modern video games than there was in the days of Shadowkeep.
Speaker: But you still, as the writer, it's the only way you can get inside the characters' heads, really.
Speaker: It won't work in a game.
Speaker: At least I don't think it works in a game.
Speaker: If you suddenly stop the game,
Speaker: The character freezes, sits down on a bench like, say, outside a saloon and does five minutes on his early childhood explaining why he became a bandit.
Speaker: His parents were terrible and abandoned and all that.
Speaker: You have to show that stuff in a game.
Speaker: But in a book, you don't have to do that.
Speaker: You can have the character sit down and you can show the character's thoughts.
Speaker: And that's true of any adaptation.
Speaker: Book, TV, show, game, anything.
Speaker: What was the start of your writing career like?
Speaker: Who were your guys?
Speaker: Who were your influences?
Speaker: Where did you get started?
Speaker: Where did you begin?
Speaker: I wasn't going to be a writer.
Speaker: I was going to be a lawyer, but I got saved.
Speaker: Good for you.
Speaker: Lawyers in the family.
Speaker: Nobody knows where I came from in my family.
Speaker: Everybody in my family was either a lawyer or a business person.
Speaker: And then here comes somebody who wants to write about aliens instead of going to law school.
Speaker: And I wasn't shunned, but I got sideways looks at birthday parties and things like that.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Anyway, I didn't read much science fiction until I was a junior in high school, senior in high school.
Speaker: I was reading classics.
Speaker: And when I really encountered adult science fiction for the first time, I devoured everything I could read.
Speaker: My favorite writers were, and still are, a British writer named Eric Frank Russell, who's the only one who could make me both laugh and cry.
Speaker: Murray, not necessarily in the same story.
Speaker: Murray Leinster, real name was Will F. Jenkins, did a lot of writing for Collier's and Saturday Evening Post, from which he made a lot more money, for example, but loved science fiction.
Speaker: And Robert Checkley, who I think was the greatest short story writer in the field has ever produced.
Speaker: Those were my main influences in as far as books were concerned.
Speaker: My other main influence was Karl Barks.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: All the great Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comic books.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: Barks kind of like a secret handshake in the creative community.
Speaker: You'll talk to people and say, which comics did you read when you were a kid?
Speaker: Oh, I read Sergeant Rock and I read Green Lantern and I read Wonder Woman and I read this and that.
Speaker: You read.
Speaker: read Uncle Scrooge?
Speaker: Oh, you read Uncle Scrooge.
Speaker: And he influenced Spielberg and George Lucas and a whole host of other people.
Speaker: But because he wrote comics, especially back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, before comics became something regarded for its literary value, which it is now, pre-Neil Gaiman, let's say.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Barks was a huge influence on people.
Speaker: So those three writers and Barks were
Speaker: and my principal influences.
Speaker: When I got to UCLA, I was studying political sciences as the equivalent of pre-law.
Speaker: My senior year, I just needed so many credits to get my degree.
Speaker: They didn't have to be in anything in particular.
Speaker: And I discovered the film department.
Speaker: And I found out, hey, they'll give me four units.
Speaker: I go in, the professor talks for 15 minutes, and then I watch Buster Keaton for three and a half hours.
Speaker: Four units.
Speaker: What a racket.
Speaker: This is great.
Speaker: Same as four units of physics.
Speaker: So I took a lot of history courses and I tried to write, I took one writing course just for the credits because I'd always been a facile writer.
Speaker: It always been easy for me.
Speaker: Probably the only kid in my high school who looked forward to essay tests.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And did well in the class and was lucky enough to encounter a wonderful man named Larry Thor, who became kind of my mentor
Speaker: in absentia.
Speaker: He see after the first assignment I turned in in that first class, he looked at me said, you can write.
Speaker: This is the assignment for the semester.
Speaker: Go home and write something.
Speaker: And that was great.
Speaker: That was wonderful.
Speaker: So I took some more writing classes and I did well and I thought, why don't you try some prose instead of screenplays and teleplays.
Speaker: I wrote a dozen short stories, none of which sold.
Speaker: And I had just discovered H.P.
Speaker: Lovecraft.
Speaker: That'll do it.
Speaker: Reading a lot of Lovecraft.
Speaker: I thought, well, August Derleth, because I started collecting books.
Speaker: You could buy really good books cheap on Hollywood Boulevard.
Speaker: There were a dozen really good used bookstores.
Speaker: And so I bought a bunch of Lovecraft and I found out about August Derleth, who edited Arkham House, published a lot of similar material.
Speaker: And I wrote this long letter in Lovecraftian style and sent it off to Derleth, hoping he would write me something back and saying, I found this very amusing.
Speaker: This was very nice of you.
Speaker: Heard nothing, forgot about it.
Speaker: Months go by, I get a letter from August Derlitz saying, dear Mr. Foster, I liked your story.
Speaker: I'd like to publish it in the next issue of the Arkham Collector, which was a semi-annual magazine he put out.
Speaker: And I'm looking around frantically in my one file, trying to find the story that I sent August Derlitz, realized it was the letter.
Speaker: And he published it as a story.
Speaker: Taught me a good lesson.
Speaker: Write what you love.
Speaker: Don't try to write to the market.
Speaker: That was my first sale.
Speaker: My first published story was actually in Analog.
Speaker: John W. Campbell bought it because Analog came out monthly and the Arkham Collector came out semi-annually.
Speaker: So that story actually beat the first sale.
Speaker: That's how I got started.
Speaker: Wow, that's fantastic.
Speaker: I was doing a little research about Splinter of the Mind's Eye.
Speaker: Were you, you've heard of it.
Speaker: Familiar.
Speaker: Familiar.
Speaker: Were you at all disappointed when it didn't get picked up to be the actual sequel to Star Wars?
Speaker: Or were you well aware that it wasn't going to happen by the time it came out?
Speaker: By the time Empire came out or by the time Star Wars?
Speaker: Well, by the time the book was published.
Speaker: No, no, by the time Splinter of the Minds Eye was published, I mean.
Speaker: No, of course I was disappointed.
Speaker: Who wouldn't be disappointed?
Speaker: I loved Star Wars when it came out.
Speaker: I recognized it as science fantasy, not science fiction, but I didn't care.
Speaker: It was the film that everyone was looking for if you grew up reading science fiction.
Speaker: And little minor things like how Cessna-sized spacecraft
Speaker: go halfway across the galaxy in two minutes, and why lightsabers are a terribly impractical weapon, and all of that stuff nobody cared about.
Speaker: It was a great film.
Speaker: Everybody loved it.
Speaker: It had the right spirit.
Speaker: It respected the genre, if not the science.
Speaker: And it was wonderful.
Speaker: And, of course, I was disappointed Splinter didn't get made, but I completely understood why.
Speaker: First of all, it's not my universe.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Second of all, the reason Splinter came about
Speaker: as I'm sure you probably know, is because George was looking to have backup material, in addition to having a book come out, backup material to keep fan interest.
Speaker: George was looking for something that he could fall back on if Star Wars was neither a great success nor a terrible failure, something that he could film on a low budget, utilizing as many props and costumes and backgrounds and effects as possible from the first film.
Speaker: He had that plan in the back of his mind.
Speaker: Once Star Wars came out and made two or three dollars, he no longer had that problem and he could do whatever he wanted.
Speaker: I thought as all this was going on, I thought that Splinter with some adjustments to take into account changes that George made in relation to things like sibling relationships and so on, could have been fixed.
Speaker: I thought it would have made a lovely film for TV, which they were doing a lot of back then, set between episodes four and five, as they call them now.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But it didn't happen.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's okay.
Speaker: There's now a drink at Disney World in the Star Wars area called the Kyber Crystal.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Have you not heard about that yet?
Speaker: It's five grand.
Speaker: I did actually, I did see some story about that recently.
Speaker: Five grand and it's not just one drink, it's a whole little grouping of drinks in a special container.
Speaker: There's some Pappy Van Winkle, there's some expensive cognac, there's some other stuff and I don't drink.
Speaker: Right, well there you go.
Speaker: But it would be fun to show up there and say, hey guys, you're using something I created name wise for this drink
Speaker: How about a comp?
Speaker: And then I would pass everything out to friends and family and around the house.
Speaker: I mean, you know, Disney owes you.
Speaker: I'd say so, yeah.
Speaker: Disney paid me.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: People need to understand.
Speaker: Everybody takes things not out of context, but they get blown all over the place.
Speaker: My little disagreement, which people may be familiar with,
Speaker: was with Disney accounting and to a lesser extent with Disney legal.
Speaker: I love Disney stuff.
Speaker: I have no problem with Disney creative.
Speaker: Sure, sure.
Speaker: Or even Disney administration.
Speaker: If somebody high up in Disney had heard about this, it would all have been settled in 60 seconds instead of becoming a whole thing.
Speaker: True, yeah.
Speaker: I just thought it was funny to see Kyber Crystal is the name of the guy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: Even the spelling is right, so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One thing you can say for people who work in that universe, they generally have an attention to detail, at least nowadays, because they'll hear about it for a million years on the internet if they don't.
Speaker: Oh, sure.
Speaker: And that's one thing you have to be careful with as a writer, whether it's a novelization of something or an original.
Speaker: Many years ago, I wrote a book and I mentioned something about fungi.
Speaker: And I got this was pre-internet.
Speaker: And I got a two-page letter from some mermecologist in upstate New York
Speaker: berating me for how I gotten this mushroom entirely wrong.
Speaker: And you have to be careful because especially nowadays, anybody will call you on a mistake.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That's why I keep a lot of notes in the event that I'm going to do a sequel or particularly if I'm doing a novelization, I want to make sure everything is as accurate as possible in the novelization, let's say as true as possible to the finished film as I can make it because
Speaker: That's the way I am as a writer.
Speaker: That's the way I am as a fan.
Speaker: And I don't want people sending me angry letters or angry emails or angry texts because I got the color of somebody's pants wrong.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: I understand that.
Speaker: Well, then actually, you are pretty much indisputably recognized as the king of the media tie-in authors, the right-for-hire men.
Speaker: Where did that start?
Speaker: What was the first novelization you did, and how did that come about?
Speaker: I had done three original novels for what is now Del Rey Books, what then was Ballantyne Books.
Speaker: Still Del Rey Books now.
Speaker: And Judy Lynn Del Rey, a very remarkable woman, had come in and taken over editorship of the science fiction line at Del Rey at Ballantyne.
Speaker: And her husband Lester did the fantasy.
Speaker: Judy Lynn took care of the science fiction.
Speaker: Someone prior to Judy Lynn's arrival had bought the book rights to a really awful Italian movie called Luana.
Speaker: This movie was so bad that if you're invited to a free showing, don't go.
Speaker: It'll cost you money.
Speaker: Judy Lynn knew that I had an MFA in screenwriting.
Speaker: She thought, well, this guy is young, he's hungry, he knows his way around a screenplay.
Speaker: Let's throw this at him.
Speaker: I don't know what else to do with it.
Speaker: See if he can make something out of it.
Speaker: And that's essentially what she asked me.
Speaker: I think you can turn the screenplay of this film into a book.
Speaker: And I said, sure.
Speaker: And I said, just send me the script.
Speaker: She said, well, there is no script, but
Speaker: We'll set up a private showing.
Speaker: Yeah, we'll set up a private showing for you in Hollywood.
Speaker: I was not married yet.
Speaker: I was still living in Santa Monica, California, part of L.A.
Speaker: So they set up a private showing and I got to the address and it was like a second or third floor walk up, at which point I'm deciding this is not an MGM or a Warner production.
Speaker: Got there, met the younger than I was, director of PR and advertising film.
Speaker: He said, come on in here.
Speaker: We've got the showing all set up for you.
Speaker: It's like a classroom with those long tables and hard chairs.
Speaker: There's a guy up there actually is a little projection booth and they start showing the film.
Speaker: I've got paper and pencil, no computers then to make as many notes as I can as fast as I can.
Speaker: What do you think?
Speaker: The film's in Italian.
Speaker: With no subtitles.
Speaker: I'm sitting here watching this really bad film, having only the slightest idea what's going on because I spoke no Italian.
Speaker: And eventually the guy comes out and I said, can't you get me a script?
Speaker: He said, we don't have any copies of the script.
Speaker: These are the people who are releasing the film.
Speaker: They bought the rights to release the film in the United States.
Speaker: The original producers are in Italy somewhere.
Speaker: But this young guy was a guy in his mid 20s was a fan.
Speaker: And he said, I can show you the pre-production material we have and so forth.
Speaker: And he brings out the pre-production material and a program book.
Speaker: And on the cover is a Frank Frazetta painting.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Of the lead character.
Speaker: Really, really good.
Speaker: So you're using this or Valentine is using this as the cover for the proposed book.
Speaker: And on the back cover is a rough color rough that Frazetta did that wasn't used.
Speaker: So there's two Frazettas going to be used on this one on the front, one on the back.
Speaker: And I go home and it's like, what am I going to do?
Speaker: And I thought about it and I couldn't get the Frazetta painting out of my mind because the main character in Luana, which is basically a female Tarzan story in which the main character Luana appears for maybe 15 minutes.
Speaker: The rest of it is just bad Italian actors wandering around fake Africa.
Speaker: But here's cover, it's a Frazetta painting, and the Frazetta girl does not look like the little Vietnamese actress in the movie who's playing the lead character.
Speaker: She's got a lion on one side and a black leopard on the other side, and in the middle is a Frazetta woman.
Speaker: That's all I can say.
Speaker: For those of you who don't know Frank Frazetta, you're missing a lot.
Speaker: So I ended up novelizing the cover painting.
Speaker: That was probably the best thing you could have done, honestly.
Speaker: It's dedicated to Frazetta.
Speaker: That's why I used that as my inspiration.
Speaker: And I went and wrote my own female Tarzan story using the outline of the film as best I could remember it because I didn't get any copy of the film.
Speaker: And the kicker to this is after the book came out, somebody from Disney called Random House, got a hold of Judy Lin and wanted to know if the film rights to the book were available.
Speaker: So Judy Lynn and I had both a good laugh and a good cry over that one.
Speaker: That was my first novelization.
Speaker: Del Rey was happy with it.
Speaker: I made something out of nothing, if I can boast for a minute.
Speaker: The next one they threw at me was this whole Star Trek vlog series.
Speaker: And in the midst of that came, no, just before that, excuse me, came John Carpenter's Dark Star.
Speaker: which was just as hard to novelize as Shadowkeep because Darkstar, if you haven't seen the film, is basically about four guys, three guys really, sitting around in space talking about how bored they are.
Speaker: And to get a 70,000, 80,000 word novel out of that was a real, real job.
Speaker: It really was.
Speaker: I loved the film, knew the history a little bit,
Speaker: The guy, the one guy did some of the special effects for that film, a guy named Bob Greenberg, had the best Hollywood business card I've ever seen.
Speaker: It said, Bob Greenberg, special effects, barbecued ribs.
Speaker: Probably accurate, too.
Speaker: And of course, Greg Jean, who built the little ship.
Speaker: Jane built the little ship in Dark Star, went on to build the mothership in Close Encounters.
Speaker: And Rod Cobb, who did some of the designs, went on to do Conan and have a whole long Hollywood career.
Speaker: That film, if you look at the credits of that film, it's pretty amazing for what was originally a student film.
Speaker: Yeah, it really was kind of an incubator for some greats that came out of it.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And of course, John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, O'Bannon played the character Pinback in there and also authored the script.
Speaker: After I had, they had me go to a showing of Dark Star in Hollywood and John was there and we were a lot closer in age than some of the people he was trying to hit up for money and stuff.
Speaker: After it was all over, John and I went to the Hamburger Hamlet restaurant, which was a very nice chain that used to be in LA.
Speaker: I went across from Grauman's Chinese.
Speaker: And we sat there and had chocolate shakes and he talked about how he wanted to be a director.
Speaker: And I talked about how I wanted to be a writer.
Speaker: Oh, that's great.
Speaker: That's all I can remember from that conversation.
Speaker: But it worked out.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I'd say it worked out for both of you.
Speaker: Yeah, I'd argue that, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Are you still in touch with John Carpenter?
Speaker: No, I've seen John a couple of times in the last millennium.
Speaker: We move in different circles.
Speaker: I live in Arizona.
Speaker: He lives in LA.
Speaker: I saw him at Comic-Con, actually.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: And it was kind of like, you know, there are certain people you cannot see for a very long time.
Speaker: And then you see him.
Speaker: It's like no time has passed.
Speaker: And you go ahead and talk.
Speaker: But he was very busy signing stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I didn't want, as much as I would have liked to have had a long chat, I didn't want to interrupt.
Speaker: So, no, we don't keep in touch.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: You know, he could come over tomorrow, I go over to his place and we could sit down and talk movies and stuff for hours.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I was so delighted when I had a chance to do the novelization of his version of the thing.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: Renew that kind of creative contact after all those years.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So which novelization would you say you're most proud of across your storied career?
Speaker: Creative people are usually not the best ones to ask for.
Speaker: No, no, absolutely not.
Speaker: Accurate appraisal of their work.
Speaker: Tchaikovsky thought the Nutcracker's ballet was the worst thing he'd ever written.
Speaker: Everything's terrible.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, there's the old Theodore Sturgeon line too, of course, which I'm not going to repeat here.
Speaker: But well, Phil, you look querulous, so I will repeat it.
Speaker: Yeah, I need you.
Speaker: Sturgeon's law says that 90% of everything is shit.
Speaker: Yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You asked the question, I would have to say alien for various reasons.
Speaker: The main reason was that they gave me six weeks to do the book.
Speaker: And I was in a very strange state of mind at that time.
Speaker: And I thought I'm going to show these people I'm going to do it in three weeks.
Speaker: The other thing was
Speaker: When I got my packet of materials from 20th Century Fox, which for some reason did not arrive under armed guard, that's how studios treat this stuff, understandably.
Speaker: It had still shots from the set, from the sets.
Speaker: It had the script, screenplay, the most recent one up to that point anyway.
Speaker: And that was pretty much it.
Speaker: So I'm going through this
Speaker: pile of stuff and I'm looking for pictures of the alien.
Speaker: There's no pictures of the alien.
Speaker: So I called somebody, got ahold of somebody at Fox and I said, look, I'd kind of like when I write the book to be able to describe what the main character in the book looks like.
Speaker: And they said, I'm sorry.
Speaker: Sorry, we're not sending out any pictures of the alien.
Speaker: Fox wants to get the secret.
Speaker: I understand that, but I'm writing the book and I need to be able to describe what
Speaker: alien looks like because it's in more than one or two scenes.
Speaker: And- Sure.
Speaker: Sorry, nobody gets to see the alien until the film comes out.
Speaker: So it's impossible for a bullet to travel through a phone line, so I couldn't do that.
Speaker: But I'm given this short period of time in which to write the novelization.
Speaker: I've set myself a much faster task.
Speaker: So the book Alien, if you read the book, there is no description of the alien in the book Alien.
Speaker: And that was really tough.
Speaker: I think it came off very well, considering I would much rather have described the alien.
Speaker: But on the other hand, there are people who say, well, you know, I couldn't imagine what it looked like.
Speaker: And your descriptions of nothing, basically, were much more terrifying than if it had been an actual linear description of the alien.
Speaker: So there are two reasons there why I'm particularly proud of that novelization.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: Do you find that you do that a lot when you're adapting?
Speaker: You set those kind of weird bars for you to jump over just to keep things interesting?
Speaker: Or was that just a moment?
Speaker: Not so much time-wise.
Speaker: Because even though they don't give you a lot of time, I've done this enough to where I know I'm going to get it done in time.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: If it's a bad screenplay,
Speaker: It takes longer.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Goes just like you're looking at the film.
Speaker: It goes really fast.
Speaker: So as far as setting myself in any bars, as you say, I just try, as I explain to people, when I'm writing a novelization, it's a combination of an experienced pro writer and a 14 year old kid.
Speaker: The 14 year old kid is sitting in the back of the theater with his friends.
Speaker: just got out of the ninth grade classes, and we're all complaining about the lousy special effects.
Speaker: So it's that person and the writer working together.
Speaker: I think that's one reason why people like those who do like my novelizations as much as they do.
Speaker: It's because that enthusiasm and Spanish energy is honest.
Speaker: When I go to see the film or I won't read the screenplay,
Speaker: I want it to be as best as possible.
Speaker: The fan in me wants it to be as good as possible.
Speaker: Not because I'm writing the book, not because I've got another title come out or I might make some more money, but because I, as a fan of the film, want to see the best film possible.
Speaker: That's why I get angry.
Speaker: When I'm writing a novelization and it doesn't live up to what I think it should live up to.
Speaker: Not because, you know, I have nothing to do with it financially at that point.
Speaker: I'll give you an example.
Speaker: Terminator Salvation, they made 463,000 changes in that film while it was shooting before they finally put it in the can, so to speak, and sent it out to theaters.
Speaker: And I kept getting new updates as I'm writing the book.
Speaker: I'd be on page 233 and here would be something that they changed completely.
Speaker: They've referred to page 136.
Speaker: I don't have to do anything at this point, really.
Speaker: I could argue, but I go back and I change it because it's got my name on the front of the book and I'm a fan.
Speaker: So I turn it finished manuscript and it's accepted.
Speaker: I get my, or my agency gets the unacceptance check and a whole bunch more changes apparently come down the line in the editing room while they're still shooting.
Speaker: And the editor asks, you know, they've made a couple of changes here.
Speaker: Do you think there's any way, this is like a week before they have to go print the book.
Speaker: Do you think there's any way you could incorporate this a little bit into the finished book?
Speaker: So I read the changes and it's a complete change of practically
Speaker: half the major things that happened in the story.
Speaker: I went back and over a weekend, I did nothing but work on that manuscript.
Speaker: I went through from page one because it had to be from page one, given the extreme changes they had made.
Speaker: And I changed stuff throughout the entire manuscript before I turned it back in.
Speaker: Did not have to do that.
Speaker: I'd been paid already.
Speaker: book had been accepted already.
Speaker: But as a fan, knowing that other people would read this and then see the movie, I wanted the book to accord as much as possible with the film they were going to see as could be.
Speaker: So at the time, I've done it to that degree.
Speaker: But I wasn't going to leave, you know, the readers going, where the hell did this come from?
Speaker: And what the hell happened to that character?
Speaker: I just couldn't do it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Were there any moments that stick out in your mind of surprises, of changes that you didn't know about until you watched it in the theater?
Speaker: Well, the thing, the screenplay that they gave me, the script that they gave me, was not the final script.
Speaker: And they did have to make a number of changes.
Speaker: It was a difficult shoot.
Speaker: under difficult conditions and they were forced to make some changes.
Speaker: So there were a fair number of changes in the finished film from the screenplay that I worked from.
Speaker: Some character changes, some things that happened to some of the characters and most particularly the ending.
Speaker: And that's the one where I really stood up and took notice.
Speaker: And I found out later that the original ending that had been written by Bill Lancaster, which I thought was terrific, had to be changed for reasons of budget.
Speaker: It would have been too expensive to film.
Speaker: Not that there's anything wrong with the way the film ends now.
Speaker: It ends just fine.
Speaker: But the original ending was much more dramatic, lots more action, and I thought would have been just a killer way to end the film.
Speaker: But you read it, it would have been, it was basically a fight on the ice with our last surviving character in a bulldozer and the thing, and it would have been great.
Speaker: But you can see why it would have been really expensive to film.
Speaker: So that really surprised.
Speaker: I wish that had been in the finished film.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: You'd have to ask John.
Speaker: Maybe he does too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe.
Speaker: You know, when you're writing a novelization, you have an unlimited budget.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I want to throw.
Speaker: If I'm writing a space opera and I want to throw a thousand starships in there, it's just a few taps of the keyboard.
Speaker: But development is a whole other matter.
Speaker: So when people say, well, why isn't this in the finished film?
Speaker: That's one of the reasons why.
Speaker: It's usually because it's too expensive to film.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that actually makes it kind of makes sense as to why there have been so many efforts to adapt something like Dune into a film.
Speaker: And it didn't really seem totally plausible until recently, I feel like.
Speaker: I mean, not to not to.
Speaker: I mean, David Lynch gave it his best weird, weird shot.
Speaker: Sometimes that's tough.
Speaker: Dune's problems, I think the problem with adapting Dune was not so much special effects and budget, although this certainly was there as a consideration.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: As the fact that it's an extremely complicated book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: To boil it down story-wise, that was tough.
Speaker: Yes, the special effects now are infinitely better than they were when Lynch did his.
Speaker: and adds so much to the story, and most importantly because Denis Le Nouveau loves science fiction.
Speaker: The best science fiction film in the last 10, 20 years is Arrival, which is an adaption of a science fiction story by an actual science fiction writer.
Speaker: But other stories that haven't been made yet, Skylark of the Linsman series by Doc Smith,
Speaker: which is very old and this is the first series that really took science fiction out of the solar system and into the galaxy at large.
Speaker: Very expensive to film.
Speaker: It would be very expensive to film.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Lovecraft.
Speaker: I know that... Sorry, Guillermo.
Speaker: I've been trying to do At the Mountains of Madness for years, which is Lovecraft's best book.
Speaker: Lovecraft didn't do many full-length novels.
Speaker: And apparently the budget was just too much.
Speaker: Now, if Guillermo del Toro can't get budget for film, nobody can.
Speaker: And incidentally, nobody has done a really good adaptation of any of Lovecraft's work yet.
Speaker: There have been a lot of films.
Speaker: It's kind of impossible.
Speaker: It doesn't always make... I think that budget or no, del Toro is probably one of the only people who would be able to pull it off.
Speaker: And even then, it's iffy.
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's a tough call because so much of Lovecraft's impact results from his use of language, the way he writes as opposed to being visual.
Speaker: But yeah, if anybody could do it, Del Toro could.
Speaker: In fact, I was at a screening of Alien at a major book convention in Los Angeles, and they had a screening for teachers.
Speaker: And I left I walked out in the hall.
Speaker: It was an old, big old building in Los Angeles.
Speaker: Lift and walked out in the hall after it was about halfway through.
Speaker: I'd seen it and what was going to happen.
Speaker: There's nobody in the hall.
Speaker: I see this little guy dressed all in black kind of wandering around looking a little bit lost.
Speaker: So walk over.
Speaker: It's Giger.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: And he was concerned about how this audience was still no wide release of the film yet.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Concerned about how the audience was going to respond, but he was a little too nervous apparently to go inside.
Speaker: and sit with the audience, private person anyway.
Speaker: So I walked over and I speak a little German.
Speaker: He didn't speak hardly any English.
Speaker: We had a brief conversation in German and I mentioned Lovecraft.
Speaker: And he said, I'd love to do a Lovecraft film.
Speaker: I'm thinking to myself, if he did the art design for a Lovecraft film, it would be so scary, people would pay to get out of the theater.
Speaker: It would be a nightmare in all the best ways.
Speaker: Oh, my gosh.
Speaker: But it never happened.
Speaker: So that was a missed opportunity, I think, horror was.
Speaker: But yeah, nowadays, Guillermo could certainly do it.
Speaker: But if it had that Giger-ish feel, I think that's what it needs.
Speaker: It needs to feel truly alien.
Speaker: And I was not asked to know, well, it's a book.
Speaker: That's happened.
Speaker: It's a book.
Speaker: That happened with, almost happened...
Speaker: with Blade Runner.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: They just wanted to do a movie novelization of it as opposed to... That's right.
Speaker: There was talk of that, and fortunately it never got beyond that stage as far as I know, because I couldn't have done it.
Speaker: Because I would have gone to him and said, hey, this is Phil Dick's book.
Speaker: Why do you want a different version of Phil Dick's book from me?
Speaker: And I would have had to turn it down anyway.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: No, you...
Speaker: You talk about the pressure of being a fan and writing for a franchise you're a fan of.
Speaker: I can't even imagine someone having the audacity to ask me to rewrite something by one of the greats like that.
Speaker: That's just, no, no.
Speaker: The only time I ever did anything like that was I was down to the last Star Trek log, Star Trek log 10.
Speaker: These are novelizations of the animated Star Trek that ran on Saturday mornings.
Speaker: And I had saved what I thought were the four best episodes for the last four books.
Speaker: The whole story how one episode became one book.
Speaker: It didn't start out that way.
Speaker: And two of them were by people who wrote science fiction, David Gerrold and Larry Niven.
Speaker: Well, the last one I used, Larry Niven had incorporated, I'm remembering this correctly, some characters from his Kazin universe into the Star Trek universe.
Speaker: So in adapting that screenplay, I was adapting a story by another science fiction writer without his input.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I was real queasy about that.
Speaker: But having been around that business for a while, I knew that once you sell your story, if you don't have any exceptions in the contract, then it's not your story anymore.
Speaker: It's whoever bought the rights to the story.
Speaker: And I was contracted to do this.
Speaker: So in the end, I did it.
Speaker: But I still felt a little funny about it.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: I bet.
Speaker: Good Lord.
Speaker: And that actually tells us a little bit.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Go ahead, Kevin.
Speaker: I was just going to ask about balance in writing projects.
Speaker: How do you balance your work for hire projects versus your own projects?
Speaker: When do you decide to go the work for hire route versus creating something whole cloth of your own?
Speaker: Well, I go the work for hire route when I'm offered to work.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: But from a creative standpoint,
Speaker: What I prefer to do is finish whatever major project I'm working on.
Speaker: If I'm writing an original novel, I really try to get to the point and get it in the contract time-wise so that I can finish the original novel before I start the novelization.
Speaker: And vice versa.
Speaker: If I'm doing a novelization, I won't start an original book until I finish the novelization.
Speaker: Now, I can break while I'm doing either one of those and do short fiction or an article, but I can't do an entire book
Speaker: I can't do two books at the same time, in other words, whether they're two originals or two novelizations or one of each.
Speaker: I just can't do that.
Speaker: So I try to space those out as best I can.
Speaker: I try to space them out as best I can.
Speaker: If it's a real pressure situation, let's say I'm halfway through an original novel and we get offered a novelization and it has to be in in two or three months, then I will sit down and I'll do the novelization and go back to the original novel later.
Speaker: Because with the original novel, I have really no pressure anymore.
Speaker: It's like when it's done, everybody knows I'm going to get the book done by a certain time anyway.
Speaker: So that's not an issue.
Speaker: So I'll stop the original work and I'll do the novelization because I know not so much the studio, but publishers go crazy with this because the studio give you three weeks or six weeks or three months or whatever, and then they expect the book to come out the next week after you've turned in the manuscripts.
Speaker: It's not all e-publishing, even today.
Speaker: Publisher has to be proofed, has to go through several different readers, has to be set, has to be printed, has to be found.
Speaker: Cover artist has to be engaged in all of a month.
Speaker: Ten months is a good timeline from when you turn in an original novel to when it shows up for sale in a bookstore.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Now, with Shadowkeep, you briefly touched on this at the beginning of what we were talking about.
Speaker: How did that adaptation go?
Speaker: Did you literally write the book side by side as the game was being developed?
Speaker: How did that process go?
Speaker: Because that's totally different from getting a script in the mail.
Speaker: Well, they sent me a copy of the game, which was kind of futile since I didn't have a computer.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: These are the early days.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was a real smart guy.
Speaker: I don't need a computer.
Speaker: I can type really fast.
Speaker: And the first time I tried one and found out that I could change the character's name 146 times throughout the entire manuscript by pressing a couple of buttons, that sold me on computers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I believe that.
Speaker: But at that point, I don't remember if I was still working on an IBM Selectric.
Speaker: That's a typewriter for those of you listeners who need to go to Wikipedia.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or I had my first computer, which was a Zenith laptop, black and white screen, which was hot stuff in the days of green screens and amber screens.
Speaker: Either way, I couldn't play the game, but they sent me a lot of stills and I had the game cheat book.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: That's primarily what I worked from.
Speaker: And that was very helpful because it told me what not to write too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As we discussed earlier on, okay, this is how you solve this mystery.
Speaker: Well, I can't say that directly.
Speaker: I have to work around it somehow, still make it come out, but I can't give the actual key to that sequence away.
Speaker: So that's primarily what I had to work from.
Speaker: So you begin to see how this was such a difficult job.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: That's completely different.
Speaker: I mean, today, if you're doing a novelization of something like a Halo story,
Speaker: Some of the characters have detailed background biographies that are much more in-depth in characters and novels.
Speaker: It would be much easier to do.
Speaker: Well, that actually leads pretty easily into the next question.
Speaker: Did your experience with Shadowkeep lead you into gaming at all?
Speaker: Do you game these days?
Speaker: You've got plenty of reference points, I've noticed.
Speaker: I can't.
Speaker: I don't have enough time.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: Aside from domestic considerations, I still write fiction.
Speaker: I've been writing some nonfiction.
Speaker: Another nonfiction book coming out later this year.
Speaker: And at the start of this pandemic, I decided to do something that I had always wanted to do, but I hadn't had time for, and that was write orchestral music.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: And I think you played some of it at the start of the podcast.
Speaker: Start in the end of your review of the first part of Shadowkeep.
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: Is that what it sounds like?
Speaker: I have to go back and check.
Speaker: Anyway, this is complicated.
Speaker: Oh, we have to do that now, though.
Speaker: It's complicated by the fact that I have no musical education and can't play an instrument.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But it's amazing what software will let you do.
Speaker: I've had a lot of fun doing it, but it takes up more time.
Speaker: There's a possibility of an orchestral performance of one of my symphonies later this year.
Speaker: So it's been a very rewarding period of time.
Speaker: So between taking care of necessary household duties, writing books and writing music, I really don't have a lot of time for games, which I regret.
Speaker: I really enjoy everything that's happened in gaming.
Speaker: I mentioned Red Dead Redemption.
Speaker: I know enough about that, even though I've never played the game to at least mention it.
Speaker: And Halo and other, I'd love to play a lot of these things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Older Gods, all of this stuff.
Speaker: But they just eat up time.
Speaker: And I know myself, if I got into one of them, that would be the end of this book.
Speaker: And that would be the end of this composition.
Speaker: And I would just sit there and play games.
Speaker: And at this point in time,
Speaker: When people say, well, now you should have lots of time.
Speaker: I have less time than I ever had.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're a smart man.
Speaker: Stick to the creation, if you ask me.
Speaker: That makes a lot more sense.
Speaker: I wish that I could say the same for myself, to be completely honest.
Speaker: So aside from the symphony, you mentioned that you're writing some nonfiction work as well.
Speaker: What else are you working on right now?
Speaker: Do you have anything that you want to talk about?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Well, as far as nonfiction go, I should mention a book that came out last year from Centipede Press called The Director Should Have Shot You.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Promising title.
Speaker: As much as I could remember of everything I've done in relation to novelizations.
Speaker: Starting with Luana, which I already mentioned.
Speaker: I mean, I didn't keep notes.
Speaker: This was just my life.
Speaker: But as much as I could remember, I realized this is history for a certain number of people.
Speaker: And I should get these things down so that people can at least read about them when I can no longer talk about them.
Speaker: So that book came out last year from Centipede Press.
Speaker: And it goes from Luana up to the last novelization I did, which was Alien Covenant.
Speaker: So if people want more information about some of these things, that's a book they can pick up.
Speaker: Um.
Speaker: I have a book, a novel, science fiction novel called Prodigals, which is a standalone, which will be out from WordFire Press any day now that you can already preorder the audible, the audiobook version of it.
Speaker: I'm currently working on a fantasy novel.
Speaker: I'm about a quarter of the way through called Over There.
Speaker: I can't, I'm just having a ball with this.
Speaker: I'm not trying to impress anybody with this.
Speaker: I'm just having fun.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It's pure fantasy, but the main character, just to give you a little preview example, even though the book's not near finished, there's the main character is a character named Himner the Bear, and he's a big, strong, bluff guy with a big beard, and he gets into a confrontation with basically a sorcerer, and the sorcerer names all the terrible things that he can do,
Speaker: And Hinder comes back and who's not a real bright guy, but comes back and says, well, I have a monkey.
Speaker: And he does.
Speaker: So I'm not going to go any further into that.
Speaker: Well, we have to know what happens next.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Of course, but that book isn't even finished, so I can't send you to buy it.
Speaker: I write a monthly column for a local paper called Senses on Art, Science, and whatever else irritates me at the time.
Speaker: Or pleases me.
Speaker: So that's what I'm doing right now.
Speaker: And I'm working on a string quartet.
Speaker: I'm halfway through.
Speaker: Oh, that's fantastic.
Speaker: About my hometown.
Speaker: Where can we find your music?
Speaker: There's no place.
Speaker: YouTube will not let you post just an audio file.
Speaker: Video accompaniment.
Speaker: And I'm not going to go to Spotify or something like that and mess around with something like that.
Speaker: So I really, there really isn't any place.
Speaker: There's, if you go to my face, go to my Facebook page and go to video, there's an early symphonic suite I wrote, which consists of it's, I think there's six movements.
Speaker: Each one of which is a little symphonic impression of one of the members of my favorite band, which is a Finnish symphonic metal band called Nightwish.
Speaker: Oh, Nightwish.
Speaker: I know Nightwish.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Anybody who knows gaming should know Nightwish, not only because a lot of it is fantasy oriented, but because the front woman, the lead singer,
Speaker: Dutch gal named Flor Jansen actually looks like she stepped out of the elder dogs.
Speaker: She's six feet tall.
Speaker: She works out and she has an incredible voice.
Speaker: People call her the Swiss army knife of singing because she can sing anything.
Speaker: And when she's performing on stage or when she used to, she'd wear three, four inch heels.
Speaker: So she is a very impressive stage presence.
Speaker: And she'll wear the sort of thing you might see at a fantasy con too when she's singing.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: If you love gaming, you should look at some Nightwish videos on YouTube.
Speaker: And in fact, she does some singing for one video game.
Speaker: I forget which one.
Speaker: But if you were to Google Flory Anson video game, you'd probably find that bit too.
Speaker: No joke.
Speaker: I used to have a radio show in college and I did a graveyard shift kind of middle of night.
Speaker: No one's listening to me, so I can basically play whatever I want.
Speaker: And I was really big into their song Nemo.
Speaker: And I played that one night.
Speaker: It must have been three in the morning.
Speaker: And no one called in for requests.
Speaker: No one called in for anything.
Speaker: And suddenly my phone starts ringing.
Speaker: And I pick it up and I was in a little town called Indiana in western Pennsylvania.
Speaker: And I picked up the phone and this voice on the other end said, you have received a call from...
Speaker: the Indiana County Jail.
Speaker: Will you accept the phone call?
Speaker: And I went, you bet your ass I'll accept the phone call.
Speaker: And I pick it up and there's this dude on the other end who says, hey, what was that song you just played with the real heavy one with the woman singing?
Speaker: And I said, that was Nightwish.
Speaker: There was a song called Nemo.
Speaker: He goes, dude, play that song again.
Speaker: And I went, yeah, man, you got it.
Speaker: And I hung up and I played it again.
Speaker: Didn't even ask what he was in for.
Speaker: Good for you.
Speaker: Not a thing.
Speaker: Not a thing.
Speaker: Maybe I didn't need to know, you know?
Speaker: I think they're the best band in the world.
Speaker: Oh, they're great.
Speaker: And they do a lot of very fantasy-oriented stuff.
Speaker: Wonderful fantasy-oriented stuff.
Speaker: Not just fantasy.
Speaker: I mean, they have a whole song, The Greatest Show on Earth, which is a 20-minute song about evolution.
Speaker: How many bands could bring that off?
Speaker: Not many.
Speaker: Not many at all.
Speaker: So go listen to some, go look at some Nightwish videos on YouTube.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, I mean, is there anything else you want the people to know about or just we're going to end it on Nightwish?
Speaker: Well, just that Prodigals is coming out in a very short period of time.
Speaker: I think people will like that.
Speaker: There are at least two surprises in the book that hopefully nobody will see coming.
Speaker: And, you know, that's the newest thing.
Speaker: That's the next thing.
Speaker: There's some short stuff coming out.
Speaker: in various places and I'm keeping busy.
Speaker: People say you should take it easy, you should relax.
Speaker: And I'm unfortunately one of these people who wouldn't, you know, could sit on the most beautiful beach in the world, which I did, for an hour and get totally bored and have to go do something.
Speaker: I understand that.
Speaker: I understand that.
Speaker: Well, Alan, thanks so much for being on the show.
Speaker: And it was a pleasure to talk to you.
Speaker: Well, that was a hell of a conversation.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, dude, and you guys don't even know the half of it because he might be the first person to very directly after the recording went off.
Speaker: He was like, all right, we're off the record.
Speaker: What else you guys want to know?
Speaker: It was amazing.
Speaker: Seriously?
Speaker: He's like, yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker: He told us things.
Speaker: He told us things that we can't not remember.
Speaker: We will never let you know them because they are, we take the record seriously.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Between us and Foster, sir.
Speaker: It was between us, Foster, and Belial.
Speaker: And Belial.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My God, that was fun.
Speaker: Hail Satan.
Speaker: Hail Satan.
Speaker: But yeah, if you really enjoyed that, you know what would be really helpful is go ahead and give us a follow on Twitter and Instagram at PixelitPod.
Speaker: Go to our website, PixelitPod.com.
Speaker: We got links to all the episodes where you can also read through the automated transcripts, which, you know, they're there for accessibility purposes.
Speaker: But because they're automated, they also have some fun, weird mistakes.
Speaker: So if you if you find any, just check it out.
Speaker: Have a nice sensible chuckle.
Speaker: See, I brought it all full circle.
Speaker: Ah, I like it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Enjoy those and tell no one because nobody cares.
Speaker: Nobody cares.
Speaker: Also, you'll find links to our Discord, our Steam group,
Speaker: We have a Steam Curator page where we throw our what are you playing stuff up there.
Speaker: But other than that, that was a fun conversation.
Speaker: And we will see you all next week for a brand new book.
Speaker: I believe it's going to be a one shot.
Speaker: So it should be it should be fun.
Speaker: It should be.
Speaker: It should be.
Speaker: Should be.
Speaker: Will it be?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Good night.
Speaker: Good night.
Speaker: Bye.
