[00:00:08] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to small publishing in a Big Universe. I am your host, Lisa Jacob. This month we have an interview with collaborating authors Doug Reese and Mark Williams talking about their book and Mark's new release, Max Random and the Zombie 500 coming from our sponsors this month, Water Dragon Publishing. The Abduction of Joshua Bloom by Michael Fall From Paper Angel Press. My Only Friend the End by Stephen Owad From Graveside Press. Max Random and the Zombie 500 by Mark London Williams. In its tiny Terrors program, A Knight Errant by Ryan Van Ellis and the Last of the Real Ones by Hannah Rebecca Graves.
The Abduction of Joshua Bloom by Michael Thal. Abducted by aliens, a high school track star explores strange worlds, uncovers genocide on a planetary scale and is thrust into extraterrestrial politics that decides the fate of an Earth on the brink of war or unification. The Abduction of Joshua Bloom by Michael Thal is available in hardcover, paperback and ebook editions. It is also available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and other online booksellers. Or support your local independent bookstores by ordering it through bookshop.org for more information, visit their website at waterdragonpublishing.com.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: This is small publishing in a big universe and we have with us today two authors who are collaborative authors, Douglas Reese and Mark Williams. Thank you for coming guys.
[00:02:11] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:02:11] Speaker D: Thanks for having us.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: You both have an upcoming novel. Noir is the word. Can you give me an idea of what that novel is about?
[00:02:21] Speaker C: It's about a couple of early teenagers. Their school dance gets bombed and one of the kids, a boy whose real name is Rupert Train but who much prefers to be known as Miles Hollywood, decides he's going to find out who did it. And his sidekick is the far more intelligent and sensible girl, JX Jones. Jennifer Swan Jones. She's Afro American, Vietnamese. So it's a mystery story. Who blew up the school dance? Who blew up the Gay Pride center, or tried to. That one didn't go off as I recall. And can we stop them before they strike again?
[00:02:58] Speaker D: It was also this idea to take tropes and ideas we love from noir, which is usually thought of as sort of a grown up genre or sub genre. Certainly they're mysteries for kids, thrillers at middle grade and YA level, but we wanted the idea of actually taking kind of more noir specific notions and maybe even some of that bleakness and see if we could put that in a kind of a middle grade setting with this meta aspect. So Rupert wants to be Niles Hollywood. He's a kid, he grows up, he's a Film nerd. A film geek, which I suppose I was growing up as well. But he watches old detective movies that most kids his age don't watch because they're in black and white and whatnot. So he's modeling his behavior on this. These known to readership, known to audience, types of arcs and behaviors. So whether he conforms to them or subverts them, there's also this kind of dialogue or give and take between our expectations of that genre versus what our characters who are behaving in a moment, which they think they are sort of living out the genre, what they choose to do from this. This imperfect knowledge they have of what they think an adult private eye would do. That's right. I want a private eye. What an investigator would do as a next step.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Why did you choose to write this kind of a book?
[00:04:07] Speaker C: Because my agent told me that publishers were really interested in a middle grade noir mystery story. Mark and I have been friends for a long time and he often comes up to visit us wherever we're living. And I really like that. So I thought, you know, if we collaborated on this novel, we could have fun together. Only took us, what, 10 years?
[00:04:31] Speaker D: That's right. Well, there's other reasons for that, but yes, we were kind of riding it between other projects, but we're looking for something to collaborate on. We'd known each other for years. We'd met through the avenues and alleyways of being kid lit authors ourselves. And this deep and wonderful friendship was born out of that. And we're both Californians, so we visited a lot over the years. And so here this is the idea we decided to collaborate on. One aspect of it, though, is the external politics. We thought we were taking what used to be kind of fringe political behavior, which is these neo Nazis who were the bombers. And over the course of working on the book and revising the book, these are the sort of people now that had become Congress members, cabinet members, one could argue, maybe even Supreme Court justices in a case or two. But that kind of ideology now had been sadly and shockingly mainstream over the course of the years that we had now had to recalibrate for the kind of world that our protagonists were living in. As opposed to this behavior being anomalous. Now it's part of these sort of brewing storm clouds on the horizon.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: What do you think the inspiration was, other than your agent saying, this is a good idea to choose noir and this particular kind of character and the female character? How did you actually finagle your way into getting those characters?
[00:05:43] Speaker C: My only Memory of that is we talked to each other a lot over numerous cups of coffee and things just came forth as they will. Rupert I recall as being mostly my idea at first. But I think that Jennifer as she is was chiefly Marx. It's been a long time, but that's what I think I recall. And I was just enchanted with her because she seemed like such a perfect character for now.
[00:06:10] Speaker D: His name also came to us early on. I think we had Niles Hollywood as a name as sort of a nom de guerre before we had Rupert's name figured out. And Niles we should mention it's set in the Bay Area where Doug had lived but where I'd grown up in the. In the Bay Area. And I come back as a visitor a lot because I still love it up there. Being a Giants fan here in Dodger territory where I've spent most of my adult life working and writing in Los Angeles. But Niles name comes from and Doug probably has a better handle on his history. There was actually a rival in initial film industry for Hollywood but therefore it was capital H Hollywood. It was this Niles district in the Bay Area in the East Bay where kind of Fremont Hayward are now the southern end of the BART tracks because the same components, a lot of sunshine. So you didn't have the. Compared to east coast. And you could be far enough away from the people who were coming after you for copyright and patent infringement. All those, all those reasons that the initial film business fled west. So there was this Niles district in the Bay Area. And so since our story was going to be set there, we had our hero name himself after its history.
[00:07:09] Speaker C: The noir aspect. Mark is kind of an expert so that had a lot to do with it.
[00:07:14] Speaker D: Well, I don't know if I'm an expert. Becoming more and more of an avid student of noir. I write as a film journalist, I work in L. A. I wasn't smart enough to get a non writing job to support my book writing, so writing all the time. But the day job writing is working as a film journalist and I'm currently a columnist for a British film magazine. I'm like their one man Hollywood bureau now. So I'm sort of steeped in that. Being movie smitten as a kid. Kid of course helped pull me towards wanting to be a storyteller of sorts when I grew up. But I started and Doug has written probably in more genres than me. But I started in science fiction with my Danger Boy time travel series and then Max Random which is about to be reissued under Graveside Press. So sci fi, horror. Maybe I haven't written as much fantasy yet, but I was familiar with those genres initially for many years, but then I got more and more, I don't know, intrigued, smitten by noir and its possibilities. Maybe because of just growing older myself and understanding a certain sort of bleakness or finitude to the horizon around us. But it was in a genre that I wanted to explore in addition to the ones I'd already written in and had read and had grown up reading and watching now.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Douglas, are you a writer?
[00:08:22] Speaker C: Solo, quite often. I've had about between 17 and, I guess, 27 books published in different formats. Check me out on. On Amazon. There are some titles there. So, yeah, the only collaboration I've ever.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Done was with Mark, and same thing with you, Mark. This is your first collaboration with another author?
[00:08:40] Speaker D: Yeah. In terms of prose? Well, Doug and I both have playwriting backgrounds as well, so there's obviously kind of necessary collaboration once a play is in production, and we've been used to that. And also. And Doug can speak his far more extensive experience with picture books. Mine is more limited, but I have done comics and I have this sort of graphic novella, two Trickster Tango, that I did with comics artist friend, another Doug, Douglas Potter. So there is a collaboration you have with an illustrate. Even if you had the idea or she or he had the idea, there is a back and forth in the give or take there. So we done these other kinds of collaborations, but certainly this is the first time we just dove in and wrote prose. Someone else.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: How did you guys meet?
[00:09:18] Speaker C: Well, back in the.
I guess it was the early thousands. We were on the same.
So I knew who he was and I knew he'd written the Danger Boy books. Well, I'm a librarian and in those days I was working at the Biblioteca Latino Americana in San Jose. It's a bilingual branch. It was part of the library system, still is. And it was going through the children's books one day and I noticed this thing called Ancient Fire, the first of the Danger Boy books. Well, knowing that I sort of knew Mark, I pulled it off, opened it and read the first half page.
It's a description of the burning of Alexandria. And the most memorable bit of that memorable half page for me was the flaming mummies floating out on the tide. In fact, it made me think of the most famous poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafi, A Long Row of Candles. So I wrote to Mark and I said I was really impressed with your first half page. It Made me think of Constantine Cavafi's A Long Row of Candles. Did that inspire you? And he wrote back and said, who's Constantine Cavafy?
[00:10:29] Speaker B: What is the difference between writing solo and collaborating?
[00:10:34] Speaker C: Well, for one thing, writing solo is a lot faster. You're not thinking, gee, how might this fit in with what Mark likes? Because one of the upsides is that you've got a whole other person's chops, expertise and background to draw. And those are both nice, but really the big difference is back and forth with the text, back and forth with everything, time and time again, until finally you get something that you're ready to try and put out there. Plus, of course, have other things to do and that kind of had to work around to do this. When we had time to do it.
[00:11:12] Speaker D: We had other books, other work. But, yeah, there was even an. I was in the hospital. I was five years ago. I remember I had a. Well, somewhat alarming for its gravity, a summer spent in hospital and rehab and needed a major operation to kind of stagger out into the light of day again and still have some years ahead of me. And so I remember one of the first things I went when I was able to start working again was on a revision of this book. And it was actually, I will always be, even if nothing else happened with the book back. It was one of those projects that pulled me back into the world. The iteration we were working on then, I was quite grateful for it. So there's always a soft spot in my heart. You have this idea in your head of what you think your words mean or your stories mean or how your characters will be perceived. And we all understand, theoretically, intellectually, our readers will absorb these things differently than we do. So there. That's kind of amplified in a way with a writing partner, someone you've known for years. And because what we would do, I think Doug probably explained that we draft the chapter, send an email to the other one, and then he would revise that chapter and draft the next chapter. Then the person receiving it would revise that next chapter and draft a subsequent chapter. I was always delighted, surprised, the way Doug would take a thing where I'd left it, or I'm sure it was same for him, like a conversation or even the revisions, like things we'd add or edit out. And then how we'd continue where we'd left the scene. We'd leave, try dangling with a certain intensity so that the energy would just propel whatever chapter followed. But it was always a surprise, I think. I mean, I certainly just. And not in a bad way. It's like, oh, I wouldn't have thought of that. I'm sure Doug likely had that experience. So just the fact that all your assumptions, you were constantly being questioned about what you thought the story was because even your writing partner has this different radar calibration, this different set of filters approaching it than you do.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: What advice would you give to pair of writers who are thinking of collaborating?
[00:13:00] Speaker D: I would say just have a really good friendship before you go into it. But of course there are circumstances where people are put together for commercial reasons or whatever. And I would be curious to know now that I've done this like how that works if you don't. Don't even really know the person prior. So I found that had this long standing friendship. Of course it was fairly easy to do, but also really have to allow yourself to be surprised in ways you wouldn't have anticipated. It's not like sometimes what we do with author friends. Do you have some ideas for this thing I'm working on? Can I send you a draft? And they might have notes. It's much more immersive. You have to be prepared for some left turns and right turns you weren't expecting. So just allow yourself that as opposed to just imagining it's mostly going to be your story and your ideas with just a little sprinkling of the same notes from your collaborator. Notes as much their story and their ideas as it is yours, I'd say.
[00:13:47] Speaker C: And I just thought of this, if you don't know each other very well, you might want to start out with some piece of writing just for practice to see how you do it. Because working out how to do it was hard for us. How do you write with somebody else on a project like this? We had to work our way toward a mode that worked for us and got some work done. Lot of rewriting with this. But another thing I will say is be Mark said be prepared to be surprised. Also be prepared to be grateful and accepting for the differences between you. I'm thinking specifically of the fact that mark is about 15 years younger than I am. We have both raised boys, but he has done it much more recently.
So he was a lot more in touch with kid things that were current than I was. And that was very helpful.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Mark, I understand you have a book.
[00:14:42] Speaker D: Coming out, Max Random and the Zombie 500 which is actually reissued.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Can you talk a little bit about that book and how it's different than noir is the word?
[00:14:53] Speaker D: Well, yeah, but it's still kind of A boy and a girl in a world falling apart, although in a different way. It's Max Random, the title character, who's sort of on the spectrum. He's neurodivergent, as we would say. And there's a zombie apocalypse that erupts there in Los Angeles. And he's an engineer, so he's been building this Go kart in this boy's home that he's been in, and he escapes. And in the first chapter, he rescues the girl Aurora, who's the narrator. Because Max doesn't like to talk, part of his neurodivergencies, there are very few conversations that he considers maybe actually worth having with grownups. So Aurora becomes the narrator of their adventure together, kind of as the co pilot in the Go Kart. And so it's about kids in Los Angeles. And I used some movie stuff. There's a sequence where they have to hide out in a studio backlot, and they think they're going to this rendezvous with one of their parents who may have survived. They have this idea that they're heading to safety in Death Valley. That's basically the book, I guess I was probably was working on that originally, concurrently with Doug and I doing early chapters of this, now that I think about it, because the book originally came out about five years ago from a different small press right ahead of COVID and an actual pandemic. So I realized when I was revising it for publication, I don't refer to Covid specifically, but the whole relationship to the idea of a pandemic or a plague and the idea of that being a rarity or anomalous, like, now, these kids have been. There have been other plague, just not zombie plagues. Yet I had a change. Some of their. Their innate attitudes about what was going on or their familiarity with that sort of a crisis.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Where can everybody get a hold of you? Douglas, do you have a website?
[00:16:20] Speaker C: I'm so computer primitive, I guess I.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Would say to look you up on Amazon.
[00:16:25] Speaker C: Sure, that could work.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: And, Mark, where can people get a hold of you if they want?
[00:16:29] Speaker D: So you can always search me out by Mark London Williams and you'll be able to come to the column. If you want to write me through the column I do for a British cinematographer magazine. You could search me out that way or you could find me on Instagra, Bluesky or some of the other talkie apps under Trickster Inc. Is a good one.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: Thank you both for your time.
[00:16:47] Speaker D: Thanks for having us.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Thanks again to our guests. If you want to know more about small publishing in a Big Universe, visit our
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[email protected] this podcast was recorded and edited by yours truly, Lisa Jacob. Executive Producer is Steven Radecki. Theme and ad music provided by melodyloops. Enhanced transcription services are provided by Lisa Jacobs. This month's episode was sponsored by Water Dragon Publishing, Graveside Press, and Paper Angel Press. You can listen to our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and most of your favorite podcast services. Thank you very much for listening and talk to you soon.
