[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to small publishing in a big universe. I am your host, Lisa Jacob. This month we have the second part of interviews from Bacon 2025 coming out this month. From Water Dragon, A Familiar Problem by Stephen D. Brewer from Paper Angel Press, from Fault Faultless by the California Writers Club, San Francisco Peninsula Chapter and from Graveside Press, Pareidolia by Demir Salkovic, A Familiar Problem by Stephen D. Breuer. When a young teenage boy is summoned by a demon to become a familiar to that demon, neither of them are aware of the repercussions.
A Familiar Problem by Stephen D. Brewer is available by Kobo, Smashwords and Amazon and other online booksellers. Or support your local bookstores by contacting.
[00:01:17] Speaker C: Bookshop.Org this is live from Bacon.
[00:01:21] Speaker D: I am the guest host Brian CE Buhl, and I have with me Janet.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Hanker, and I write under JL Hanker.
[00:01:28] Speaker D: You have a book that is out or just coming out?
[00:01:31] Speaker A: I just published a novella actually, called Daughter of the Dispossessed, and it's a prequel for my full novel, which is coming out this fall.
[00:01:39] Speaker D: What's the name of the book coming out this fall?
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Oh, it's called Cave of Whispers.
[00:01:42] Speaker D: So you have the prequel and then you have the novel coming out. And so this is going to be a series.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: It is going to be a series. I'm not sure how many books yet. I've only got two planned, the novella and then two novels. But you know how writing goes. It could expand beyond that.
[00:01:56] Speaker D: Well, tell me a little bit about.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: The novella, just in a nutshell. It's about a young woman with unknown parentage because she was left abandoned in a forest and adopted.
As she grows up, people are realizing that she has incredible magical abilities. So there are some powerful men in her life circling her life that are trying to manipulate her to control her magic to further their ends, which basically is they want to control the dragons and she has the magic to do that.
[00:02:25] Speaker D: Did you write these chronologically or did you write the novel first and then go back and write the novella?
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I wrote the novel, which it didn't go the way I planned. The characters took me in all different directions.
[00:02:36] Speaker D: Was there any specific inspiration that led to writing the novel?
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sure that other people have the same story. I woke up from a dream and I had this image of a young woman in a cave who had been injured and she had a wolf and a bear sort of sleeping with her and protecting her in the cave. And I'm thinking, well, I wonder what that young woman's story is, why is she injured? Why are these animals protecting her? And out of that, I literally sat down at my computer and started typing and they started telling me their story.
[00:03:09] Speaker D: Other stories that you've worked on, is it typically from a dream or are there other areas that you go for inspiration?
[00:03:15] Speaker A: You know, it's really interesting because some of it's. There's been other dreams that I wake up from with an idea, but honestly, I'll just be walking down the street or hiking or being out in nature when I have time for my brain to quiet. And something will just literally pop into my head. So I'm not really. Usually it just comes to me. Either a dream or just an idea will pop into my head when I'm washing the dishes or walking or whatever. So I feel really lucky that things come to me and I don't have to really work too hard for it.
[00:03:46] Speaker D: I'd like to ask, do you have any favorite writing advice that you've received that you would want to share to somebody maybe trying to write what you're doing?
[00:03:53] Speaker A: I do. I do. And this came from a friend who was in my original writers group and she used to be a screenwriter in la. She's read my work and she said, if you get stuck, ask the characters what happens. And she also recommended that you sit down and do an interview. Like if you're having trouble filling out a character, sit down and have a conversation with them, like you're having over coffee and find out about their story. It was really helpful to interview, in my mind, some of these characters when I wasn't really clear about maybe their motives or how they did life. So that works for me to actually ask the characters.
[00:04:27] Speaker D: This has been really great. Is there anything else that you would like to say to anybody maybe that has had that dream and is maybe intimidated about getting to the page?
[00:04:36] Speaker A: There is, and it's especially for older writers, especially women, but everyone. And last year at Bacon, I did a panel on, you're never too old to be a writer. So I don't care if you're 50, 60, 70, whatever. If you have an idea, it's time, especially in these times, for the world to hear your words. And I didn't start really seriously on this road until I was 62. And I'm getting published now 10 years later. So I want people to know that you can do it. Get support, find your community. It's out there on Discord Online. Come to a con and your words are important. So get them out there.
[00:05:14] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Thank you. So much for having me. It's been great fun.
[00:05:17] Speaker E: This is Vanessa McLaren Ray, and we're live from Bacon 2025. And I'm here with two authors who work as a team. So this is going to be a different one. We have John and Susan Roof of Emerald Cove Press. And there's a little story about the press too, so we'll get to that. So tell us, you two write together as a team. You write in two genres, so tell me a little bit about each. Maybe one get to talk about one and one gets to talk about the other.
[00:05:46] Speaker F: Go ahead and talk about epic fantasy.
[00:05:47] Speaker G: Epic fantasy. Okay. So our first books were epic fantasy because that's kind of my background. I've got a standalone novel that we published and also a trilogy, epic fantasy trilogy. The trilogy is called the Doorway to Magic and there are three books. The first one is the Keyhole wizard and then the Door Ajar and then the Grand Door.
[00:06:02] Speaker F: The Cozy that we've written is so intended to be a series. We've got one book out right now called Recipes for the Copper Snake. There's a little prequel book that we wrote that you can get for free by signing up for our newsletter called Coins for the Counter. And we like writing in cozy because, let's face it, it's a little dark right now. And Cozy's a nice, uplifting, small scope stories. There are a lot of people that are just in the mood for right now because of reasons.
[00:06:27] Speaker E: Everybody who writes as a team does it differently. What's your technique to write together and stay together?
[00:06:33] Speaker G: Well, I actually do the writing and then John helps with plotting and characters and does critiques and tells me when my writing is stupid.
[00:06:40] Speaker E: So you're a pantser and a plotter.
[00:06:42] Speaker F: The way that the process works though is we'll start talking about the story and we'll just bounce it back and forth. And so it winds up being a discussion between the two of us that she then forms into words and then we do go through the editing process from there. But I do a lot of the plot direction and character development stuff that's a lot of me. And then she does a lot of it too. But all the actual words on paper is her.
[00:07:06] Speaker E: Started your own little press and you told me earlier kind of the story of how that got going and other people could follow that. So why don't you just tell us that story?
[00:07:13] Speaker G: Sure. So what happened is we had a group of, I think five of us that were getting together as authors, decided to put together an anthology, just short stories. So that we could kind of showcase our writing for ease of publication. And also because it was very inexpensive, we decided to do it as an ebook on Amazon. At that time, Amazon would not work with a group of authors because Amazon was not a publisher, they were just a distributor. So we had to essentially create a little publishing company in order to do it. And that's where Emerald Grove Press came up.
[00:07:42] Speaker F: Right. And the group originally formed as just a writers group, and then suddenly it turned into something that needed a name.
[00:07:48] Speaker E: And the group did not break up over.
[00:07:50] Speaker G: No, no, we did not. We did not.
Once a month.
[00:07:55] Speaker E: Those are good lessons for people. You can keep going and, and support your friends and get your books out.
[00:08:00] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:08:01] Speaker E: Thank you so much.
[00:08:03] Speaker D: This is your guest host, Brian C.E. buhl.
[00:08:05] Speaker C: And I have with me, this is Charlotte Cook.
Second time here at Bacon. First time really digging my heels into everything that's on offer here.
[00:08:16] Speaker D: So, Charlotte, tell me a little bit about your writing. And as I understand it, you like anthropomorphic fishing. And if you could tell me a little bit about what you look for in anthropomorphic fish fiction, that would be really helpful.
[00:08:27] Speaker C: I'm almost done with my very first novel length manuscript, the Wolfskull Standard. I like to pitch it as steampunk. Red Wall on the High Seas for Grown Ups. My introduction to the realm of anthropomorphic stuff, the furry fandom. My introduction to all of that was when I was a kid and I realized, why isn't there a beach episode to Red Wall? It is true that that the furry fandom for a lot of people heavily focuses on the sexual aspect of it, the yiffy side. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not for me. I just sort of wish there was a bit more, I don't know, high stakes. I want to see more deeper dives into more heady topics. I guess. Even though the wolf skull Standard is on the surface, it's about a bunch of anthropomorphic animal pirates, in reality, it's exploring issues of death, deeper themes, grief. Yeah, exactly. The themes are what I'm most interested in, and I feel like I can't find that readily out there. So I decided to write my own. And I'm not claiming to like break the sound barrier of anthropomorphic fiction or anything, but what I'm writing and how my characters are anthropomorphized is informed by my experience in the fandom. I hope my readers recognize that this is a product of the fandom of someone who has sort of appreciated the aesthetic for decades.
[00:09:55] Speaker D: We've got stories about robots and anthropomorphizing them. They may or may not even look human, but we'll give them agency, we'll give them perhaps emotion. We'll give them human qualities that normally otherwise wouldn't possess. And we're perfectly fine with philosophers following these stories. So it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to be able to have the vehicles of the story be anthropomorphized animals.
[00:10:16] Speaker C: You would think, but in my experience and in my research, people get weird about it. I could go into that. The problem that I've noticed that a lot of people have with walking talking animals is that they assume it's for children. I'm just annoyed with reading book reviews that dismiss animal protagonists.
I'm thinking of a few examples in my head right now. But in my experience, I've noticed that the casual reader has a harder time accepting non human world, a non human protagonist, because I guess some readers have a harder time identifying with that which doesn't make any sense to me because this is all fantasy we're talking about. Nothing that's happening is real.
So, long story short, in a nutshell, in my experience, a reader opening themselves up to the possibility that a warren of rabbits might have their own society and mythology, as in Watership down, is too much of an ask. They can't fathom that.
[00:11:15] Speaker D: What are some of the themes that you are really trying to explore with some of your stories?
[00:11:20] Speaker C: In the earliest days of the pandemic, when I had a lot of free time, I had a lot of free time to write. I wanted to get words out, out. But I already had the perfect setting in which to tell these stories. The realm of Oswyveria, which is a world that I've been building since forever. At the beginning of the pandemic, I decided to pretty aggressively write little. I called them vignettes from Oswavaria. No more than a thousand words. And then I kept this up for a few months. I posted them onto AO3 because I had nowhere else to post them at the time. And then I realized that. That I wanted to make a bigger impact. And in order to make that sort of impact, I need to outline. I've learned the hard way. I am not a pantser. I am a plotter. 100%. I need to know how the story ends before I even start. There's a lot of, I don't know, big ideas that I have in my head. And I don't see why I couldn't use anthropomorphic animals to explore these ideas. The Wolfskull Standard major theme actually is the nature of leadership. What makes a good leader leader? What makes a bad leader? Our main character, Phoenicia is a famous pirate and she inherits the helm, but she's not prepared to inherit the helm even though she is the most capable paw on deck.
[00:12:40] Speaker D: This has been really great and I wish you all the luck in the world going forward.
[00:12:44] Speaker C: I love hearing that. Thank you so much.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: Thanks again to our guest hosts, Brian C.E. bueller and Vanessa McLaurin Ray. Also thanks to our guests, we plan on publishing a new episode every month. 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 Lisa Jacob. Executive Producer is Stephen Radecki. Theme and ad music is provided by melodyloops. This month's episode was sponsored by Water Dragon Publishing, Paper Angel Press, Graveside Press, and Cupid's Arrow Publishing. You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and most of your favorite podcast services.
Thank you very much for listening and see you next month.
