Transcript
Speaker: Hello everybody and welcome to Crohn's Cast, the official podcast for SFF Chronicles, the world's largest online SFF community. I'm Dan Jones. I'm Christopher Bean and we will be your hosts for this podcast and we'll be looking at fantasy, science fiction and horror. You probably want to know what to expect. So this episode is just going to be laying out the kind of format and members will be able to choose, pick and choose what episodes they want to dial into.
Speaker: hopefully everybody was going to listen to all of them. It might help though if you hear a little bit about us first, what you can expect from us as people. So Dan, do you want to give a short bio of yourself? Yeah, we're both authors actually, so we've got that in common and we're both members of the SFFChronicles community and we have been for a number of years. I'm a published author, my
Speaker: Um, maybe
Speaker: My only book that's been published is a science fiction thriller called Manowar, which was published in 2018 by Snowbooks. So I've gone down the traditional publishing route. I've also had a number of short stories published in anthologies online and in a couple of magazines.
Speaker: And I've done a couple of self -published bits and pieces as well. So I've got a bit of experience in dealing with the industry and a little bit of experience in dealing in self -publishing. But I've got a lot of writing under my belt as well.
Speaker: I'll be coming to the podcast from the perspective of still a sort of, I'm not even a jobbing writer, I'd say. I mean, even though I've got the credit under my belt of having a book published traditionally, I wouldn't say that I'm a professional author. I've got a day job. I work in the UK Space Agency, which is very cool and has helped in coming up with a couple of science fiction short story ideas in the past, actually. But I'm very much
Speaker: interested in starting this podcast to talk to other writers and sort of not demystify the process because I don't think that's the right word but just figure out what's going on with some of the great books that are out there and also figure out what's going on with the industry as well and helping to sort of wend our way through what is quite a difficult environment for writers because there's a lot of conflicting information out there
Speaker: We want to know how to be able to write a great book, so I think part of what this podcast is about is looking at some of the great books that are out there in our genres, science fiction, fantasy and horror, and the sort of sub -genres that are encompassed under them as well, and sort of picking out what are the
Speaker: what makes the book great, what's going on underneath the surface, what are the authors thinking about, and then thinking about maybe what's going on in the industry as well. We're going to have a series of guests on on the podcast. It won't just be us, every episode we're going to have a special guest and sometimes there'll be a writer, probably most of the time there'll be a writer actually, an author, a published author of some description,
Speaker: But we're also anticipating having other podcasters on, maybe some bloggers. We will hopefully have some publishers and some literary agents as well. So it's going to be a little bit of a mixture and hopefully we're going to get a bigger picture of how writers fit into it, how the agents fit into it, and see what we can get out of it.
Speaker: And you've also got a little bit of a background in academic appreciation of literature as well, haven't you? So I know you'll be bringing some of that to the podcast. Yeah, well, we've been bringing different things. I mean, you should. Yeah, I've got my I've got a degree in in literature and a master's in literature. So, yeah, I do have a kind of academic leaning towards the reading of the books, but I'm also really interested in the industrial side and talking to the publishers and talking to agents. And I've also I've always found that really
Speaker: important and interesting to just the writing yeah i think it was will self who said that writing is a solitary pursuit and if you can't deal with the self -isolation then you need not apply to do it and you know that's that's that's true to an extent it's true to the extent that you need to be able to sit down by yourself and write the damn manuscript out but i've always found it really useful to get out there and talk to as many people as possible and i see the the podcasters
Speaker: Kind of being an extension of that, talking to other writers and communicating in a way that we as writers don't usually do, which is talking. We usually communicate with the written word, but talking is just as important in a different way. Anyway, Chris, tell us about your writing experience as well, because everybody needs to hear that too.
Speaker: Much like you, without the fancy credits, I suppose, I've had a few credits in anthologies and literary journals in America. There's a university that I've had short stories published in microfiction. I came to writing quite late, actually,
Speaker: I wonder how many people this is true for, actually, is because I've always felt I should write. It's not I should or I could write, but it wasn't until 2011, I think, I started trying. And my way of trying was to join the Science Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles website, which is how I met you and all these other people. And here we are 10 years later, it's led to this podcast to try and
Speaker: expand that sort of community because it really is a community. It's people from all over the world and they're not just writers, they're also people who like to watch say Doctor Who or movies or just read.
Speaker: There's war gamers, you know, all that kind of stuff. Very sort of genre specific website. If you like one thing, you tend to like the other. One thing I found is there's not much of a preponderance of horror discussion, which is my genre, particularly with fiction. So I'm hoping that we'll get a bit more of that in the podcast. And as far as my interest in writing,
Speaker: I don't have your nose for critical thought on certain texts and stuff, but what I do find comes easy to me is
Speaker: contextualizing the writer's journey in terms of the human condition, in terms of everything that we go through in life. I mean, obviously, that's in genre fiction, that's quite easy, because you've got it's such a strong area for metaphor, especially with horror, you know, the other being othered. So I find it very easy, or enjoyable, I should say, to experience writing as a way of contextualizing life. And
Speaker: I think the reason why I don't really know how we ended up doing this together, I think it was because we just both felt that there should be something more for the it's such a. It was I'll be cards on the table with this. I was.
Speaker: I've written a manuscript. You know this because you've read it in a manuscript called The Green Man, and I've been in the process of trying to sell it for the past six to 12 months or so. And I was looking at self -publishing options, possibilities, and anybody who's done self -publishing will know that promotion and marketing is
Speaker: is arguably the most difficult aspect of it. Putting the book together, there's a lot of tasks involved in that, in actually producing the thing.
Speaker: getting it noticed is a different kind of official together. It's extremely difficult. And I was chatting with my wife and I said, oh, I'm thinking of doing a podcast. And she said, well, you can't do it about yourself. And of course, she's right. She's always right, of course. She said, you can't do it about yourself. You have to do it about something that's bigger than you.
Speaker: She's completely right, she's on the money as usual. And so the idea grew from there and the funny thing is, as it grew, I realised that it wasn't really about me at all. I don't have any plans to self -publish this manuscript called The Green Man at the moment.
Speaker: I will try and pursue a couple more roots of publishing it traditionally but you know that one thing that I was clear about well I just said that one thing I'm clear about this podcast is not about me and it's not about you Chris it's about what we're going to talk about and we're not going to talk about our own books
Speaker: because it's not going to be that sort of onanistic podcast. People can smell promotion a mile off. We're not interested in that. We're going to talk about the books and the films because we'll be doing a few films. We're going to be talking about what interests us and what interests our guests.
Speaker: Yeah, full disclosure, it did come out of an idea that I wanted to do about promotion of my own work, but it's actually moved on from that. And we'll be talking about other stuff and we'll be talking about other authors. And actually, as the momentum has grown, you know, we've already got a load of guests booked up for the first season, which will be 2022.
Speaker: it's it's much much more interesting it's more interesting talking to other people and about all these great books that are out there so yeah that's that's where it came from and and i asked uh asked a few people including yourself chris and well you jumped at it as i knew you would
Speaker: Well, I'm an absolute addict for podcasts. You and I listen to a lot of the same podcasts. And I think also, because it's democratized, anybody can do one. But there's a lot of podcasts where there's a lot of excess facts. And we all have our preferences. And I wanted to be part of something that was representing the community, but also that was not just
Speaker: self -indulgent, you know, us talking, having in jokes and stuff. But just on that note, actually, I wanted to talk about the self promotion side, not necessarily self promotion, but promote, you know, there is a promotional side to this, which is we're trying to promote the website, the science fiction fantasy chronicles website, because
Speaker: having been members of that forum and talked to the massive, the broad wealth of knowledge on there in different genre fiction over the past 10 years.
Speaker: I wouldn't be the writer I am if it hadn't been for that website and it's free. You just sign up, just join in, it's just a forum. It's also quite a rare thing these days on the internet because people flock to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook or whatever, whereas this is a very well moderated website. Brian Turner, the owner,
Speaker: has done a fantastic job of having a great cadre of staff who moderate. There's no tolerance for any flame wars, for any trolling. I suspect there tends to be an older audience, older membership there. I mean, there are plenty of new members coming through all the time. I mean, the membership is currently around 20 ,000. But I believe the average age rather than
Speaker: how long they've been. I'm talking about the age of us. There's quite a lot of us who can remember things in the 70s and saw Star Wars at the cinema. More than there are, you know, people who just growing up now with the, you know, the 18 year olds or whatever. But yeah, you're right. There's a wide, there's a wide base, a wide community base. But yeah, we're gonna try and cater for everybody. But the
Speaker: That's, we do want to drive the membership towards Crohn's because it's, I've found it an invaluable resource for several reasons, for finding people to read over my manuscripts. Certainly for Manowar, I had beta readers, and we'll talk about beta readers maybe on particular episodes when we're talking about writer, but I found beta readers from my Manowar manuscript, which was invaluable. There was no way I would have published that book
Speaker: without SFF chronicles, it just would not have happened. In fact, the seed of the book came from one of the writing challenges.
Speaker: on Chronicles. So every month there's a 75 -word challenge. Anyone can enter. You write a story that's 75 words maximum and the theme and the genre of the style is decided by the previous winner. And you don't win anything except a bit of glory and then you get the right to send the next challenge. And one of my entries
Speaker: had something about it, it didn't actually win. And I can't remember how well it did, but I know it didn't win, but it had the seed and somebody said, there's something in that, you should extrapolate it. And I did, and I got a novel out of it. And then there are so many experts on chronicles as well. You know, people who've worked in
Speaker: all different sectors who will have sector -specific expertise, people who are scientists, who are historians, lawyers. It's a real... Dancers. Dancers, yeah. I mean, how can you forget dance? If you're doing your horror dance, then where are you going to go other than Chris? It's true. So we're trying to drive people towards that. So where should... Sorry, go on.
Speaker: No, we should mention the challenges with respect to the podcast as well, because we want these challenges, the 75 -worder, and there's also a 300 -word challenge that happens every quarter of the year. They will feature on the podcast.
Speaker: If you're lucky enough to win one of the challenges, then you'll have the option to record yourself reading your winning entry and you can send it into the podcast and we'll feature it every month. That will happen. So that's something that it's just, you know, we want this to be about.
Speaker: the community. It's not just us two talking about books. I mean, that will be obviously part of it, but we want to make sure that it's engaging with the members of Crohn's and making sure it lands. Yeah, and I think it's important as well to
Speaker: get some kind of engagement both ways. So, you know, people engaging with the podcast, you know, signing up to Crohn's or visiting us there and people from the website, from the forums listening to this, because it is such an incredible resource. There is so much support, like you said, from this wide array of experiences of careers.
Speaker: established authors who visit the Crohn's editors, and you're constantly getting your eyes open for things that will take you outside of your, not your comfort zone, but what you expect. We've had members joined recently, and I'm thinking about Pete and the kind of stuff that he reviews and talks about in his, I'm not particularly well read when it comes to fantasy, but there's a lot of fantasy in, and yourself as well, that you've talked about.
Speaker: This is the Big Pete, isn't it? He's a member on Crohn's. He's massive into fantasy, is extremely well -read in the genre, to the point where, if you want to know anything about the genre of modern fantasy, the Big Pete is your man. Yeah, and I've read things I wouldn't entertain a few years ago, or 10 years ago, because I was so stuck in, oh, this is what I like to read. And I'm not really into this specific type of subgenre.
Speaker: So you're always, always being exposed to something new on crimes. And I think, you know, it should be shared.
Speaker: The other thing that we'll have on on each episode is a section called the judges corner. Anybody who's been on cons will not have failed to see a member called the judge, a staff member, no less called the judge, roams the boards looking for a little discrepancy to penalize and bang a gavel about. Yeah, her name is not really the judge. Her name's Damaris Brown.
Speaker: and she's going to be giving us a section every month to talk about some of the legal aspects of writing, publishing, and that sort of side of the industry. She's been a solicitor for her whole career, her long distinguished career, and I think her main area was contractual law, I believe, but she has a lot of
Speaker: lot of experience which will be very useful. So she's going to be dropping in and helping us out with things like copyright, contracting, all the sorts of things that those writers don't really think about. It's just another
Speaker: The thing that we need to be a bit clued up about as writers, because if we do happen to get a foot into the industry somehow, we're not always the best forearmed of people when it comes to negotiating with agents, with publishers, et cetera, et cetera. So she'll be dropping in. Yeah. And that's probably it for the introductions. Is there anything? No, I think that's about
Speaker: That about does it. We don't want to go on too much and bore you. No, we want people to dive into the proper episodes. The first one is Up. It's with Stephen Palmer, who's a great author. He's been publishing for a long time. And he's talking about Northern Lights by Philip Pullman with us.
Speaker: yeah give it a listen and come with us on the journey we hope to see you in the podcast we hope you subscribe like what we're doing give us feedback on the um feedback on the chronicles join get your membership participate yeah go to sffchronicles .com sign up it's free there is a
Speaker: There is a tiered membership. You can become a supporter. It's £15 a year at the moment. It does get you a couple of extra. It opens a couple of secret doors on the website and your subscription just helps to keep it going. And it's well worth doing. See you there. See you there.
Speaker: you
