[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to small publishing in a big universe. I am your host, Lisa Jacob. This is part three live from Worldcon 2025. This month from Water Dragon Publishing, the Eliminator by Alan Dyer Shapiro From Cupid's Arrow Publishing, Diamonds aren't a girl's best friend. Love Is by Felicia Caparelli, Cupid's Wanderlust by Kostatin Georgiev, the Sentience by Maurice Temple and from Paper Angel Press, Founding Daughter by Wallace Bain. Stay tuned for live from Worldcon 2025, part one of a three part episode.
Founding Daughter by Wallace Bain. What if the noble words of the Declaration of Independence were not written by Thomas Jefferson, but by an author of a much lower station still aspiring to be free? What if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was an idea of an especially precoc bookish half black teenaged servant girl with a boundless faith in the ideas of the Enlightenment?
Founding Daughter is available this month from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords and other online booksellers. Or support your local independent bookstores by ordering it through bookshop.org for more information, visit their website at paperangelpress.com.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: This is live from Worldcon 2025 and I am Brian Ce Buhl, the guest host, and I have with me Jacob John White. You focus on graphic novels.
[00:02:17] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:02:17] Speaker C: Tell me a little bit about what the process is for developing a graphic novel. I think that a lot of our listeners are probably something they're going to have some curiosity about. And so how if somebody has some art skill and some writing skill, how would they get started in graphic novels?
[00:02:32] Speaker D: Yeah. So wonderful question because Bellringer, which is my current work, this story about a little bell headed doll come to life.
When I first sketched the character, I actually had just finished my sixth novel. So querying going through that process over and over again. And I had worked on another project that was short fiction, but serialized short fiction, all about the same character, and we developed a relatively sized following online. Then I was starting to think, okay, I'm querying all these books. This is great, I enjoy this. I love writing and I want to be a writer, but there's this little bell guy that I don't think would work in a novel. And then I just went hardcore into this whole realm that I didn't know existed, which was comics. The process is honestly very similar for me. I start with sort of emotional beats and story beats. It's not a really clerical process. It's not very clinical either. I don't think in Plot beats. I try to go for story and character first. And then motivation comes from a place of, like, love and passion.
And it's very visual, which I write very visually as well. So I try to think of, where are we starting? Where are we going? Get that idea down and then move. It's not very dissimilar. Just instead of writing maybe index cards with outlines, it's storyboards.
[00:03:44] Speaker C: So you're a visual artist as well as a writer?
[00:03:46] Speaker D: Yeah, which I didn't really know until I started this.
[00:03:49] Speaker C: At what point did you realize, no, I've actually got the skill set in order to make this happen?
[00:03:54] Speaker D: That was a huge adjustment, by far the biggest adjustment, because again, I came off of writing big hundred to 200,000 word books that I was querying and starting to get some personalized rejections. Really excited about it. And I would draw pieces of those books. So I draw the characters, I would draw artifacts, I would draw locations, those kinds of things. And then playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends all of high school helps because I have books and books full of what I call the back of the homework style, which I didn't think would work in comics because here in America, comics are often associated with a genre of comic, which is superheroes, rather than the medium of comic, which can encompass anything. So when I drew the little Bell guy, I thought, this is unbelievable, because my style can't do this. I can't accomplish this. And then I started studying a little bit. I went to some local Pittsburgh comic shops, which I'm from Pittsburgh, lucky enough. Pittsburgh has an enormous breadth of really famous cartoonists of all shapes and sizes. Cartoonists, illustrators, what have you. It maybe took. I drew probably 20 pages that I thought, oh, I'll go to a big company and pitch this just like a book, right? And I drew 20 pages. I was whatever about it, didn't particularly like things, Waited a year and then went, okay, I can self publish this.
Drew another 20 pages. Kind of redrew that initial story. And then it hit me. I actually think this can work. I actually think that it looks like a story. And I finally have the art style down enough that I can pull it off.
But it took going to some local shops and I think recognizing that comics are a medium and not just superheroes, there are so many different art styles in sequential art that can work.
[00:05:26] Speaker C: Comics as a medium has a huge long history.
[00:05:30] Speaker D: It goes back so far.
[00:05:31] Speaker C: Sci fi, fantasy, adventure, those have been present.
[00:05:36] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: How are you finding your audience? How are you reaching people and spreading your work?
[00:05:42] Speaker D: So writing the novels ended up becoming a means of a question and then me trying to find that answer, which was what you just asked. How do you find an audience? So while I was working on my books, I decided, okay, I'm going to try to do something that's a little bit different. And I started writing short fiction and serializing it online.
It was called A Many Tale. It's actually still totally free. It follows a little mouse sling that kind of blips between worlds. So it's sort of, I call it sketchbook storytelling. Every 4,000 words is a completely different setting, but with the same character finding himself.
Long story short, I took that all over the place to Gen Con, to Confluence, Pittsburgh, to a bunch of comic cons all over the country trying to push it and meet people.
That was almost two years before I did Bellbringer. So I kind of learned how to build an email list, how to attract people to your social media.
How do you go out and just gain the confidence to shake hands and actually believe that maybe your work is okay enough? Which again, coming from a novelist background, I wasn't really comfortable pushing my art style until 40 pages into finally making work, which is a lot of drawing. All that experience built up over time and then a couple of trips to some bigger shows kind of solidified me with there's a lot of people making comics and there are a lot of people making zines. But because we make a fantasy comic about a little bell Knight, I felt really comfortable going to fantasy shows.
So essentially I just fought really hard to get into places where we'd be one of the only people.
[00:07:10] Speaker C: What's your pitch? Or how do you sell Bellringer? Yeah, what's the story about? What's that pitch? And then what's your pitch for? You said book two is coming out soon.
[00:07:18] Speaker D: Bellringer follows a bell headed doll who awakens whenever the world falls into dark, corruptive slumber with this provocation to ring a church bell, hoping that it will wake the world back up and save his child who's now asleep.
The catch is he's woken up very late and hundreds more of these bell headed dolls have woken of all shapes and sizes. And they built societies and some want to ring the bell. Most of them have the same provocation, but some of them don't want the
[00:07:44] Speaker C: bell to be rung because it means the end of their civilization.
[00:07:48] Speaker D: Yeah, I'm pretty easy to catch on to that.
And the first book sort of follows him.
While it's an epic story, it's at A small scale. So you're following a 4 inch doll moving through grass, having to fight a cat, having to move through through I think Red wall esque. But dark fantasy birds are a big problem.
[00:08:09] Speaker C: That's a great comp title there. So then book two. What's the thrust of that one?
[00:08:14] Speaker D: Yeah, so at the end of the first book, our character, it's not an explicit spoiler, but he falls down a well. And the second book picks up with he is no longer alone, so he finds another bell knight. And then his companion is quickly taken from him and he goes on a mission to desperately clinging for that friendship that he's lost almost immediately after getting it. And now our character is on a second journey to try and find this friend that he made that he's very close to, but in doing so uncovers many more belmites that have no interest in being friendly.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: This sounds like a lot of fun.
[00:08:46] Speaker D: Oh, thank you, thank you. I appreciate it.
[00:08:48] Speaker C: What is your favorite advice that you would.
[00:08:50] Speaker D: My favorite advice is grab on to what you're interested in at that moment, but also finish them.
Don't keep piling up new notebooks full of ideas without completing those ideas. The finishing is how you get a sense of pacing, it's how you get a sense of scale, it's how you get a sense of strengths and weaknesses in your writing.
And the ability to finish particular work is what also gives you the next idea, whether it comes to plot, pacing, et cetera. Finish the work. And when you.
For instance, we're in Seattle right now and every time that I travel, I was very lucky that my mom was a choreographer, is a choreographer. So I got to grow up and travel a lot.
I just get so crazy and heady. I get so excited about everything. I see something, I smell something, and I have to put it into something, even if it's not explicitly tangible. Just because I see a bell doesn't mean I write a story about bells. It's sometimes bigger than that, more amorphous.
But if you have an idea and you're walking through, say, a beautiful little pottery shop and you see a beautiful mug, and the mug makes you think about sitting out on the porch and drinking a cup of coffee and you want to write a story about that out of nowhere, maybe write it, or maybe put it on an index card and slip it in your notebook, or if you're going through a notebook store, pick up the notebook before you regret it. And you can't capitalize on it because I drew this little Bell Knight in the Middle of three other projects now. It is the thing that's kind of launched my career, which I did not expect, but I did have to finish it.
[00:10:20] Speaker C: So thank you so much.
[00:10:21] Speaker D: Thank you so much.
[00:10:22] Speaker C: This is live from Worldcon 2025, and I am Brian Ce Buhl, the guest host, and I have with me Liza Olmsted. I understand that you have a book coming out.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: I have a book out. It is called the Alien Encounters, and it is an anthology of short stories, poetry, poetry and art on the theme of neurodivergent people encountering aliens. Some of the aliens are also neurodivergent and they are very fun and uplifting, hopeful stories.
[00:10:51] Speaker C: So how did this book get its origins? How did it come about?
[00:10:55] Speaker A: So my co editor, Anthony Francis, came to me one day and said, all right, here's the word. The Neurodiversiverse. It's an anthology of neurodivergent people encountering aliens. And I'm like, I am in. I am. So we should 100% do that. And then from there, we really did. We just went off and running. But for me, being a neurodivergent person myself and just reading so many stories where we're the side characters or we're the problem even, to be solved or fixed, I really just wanted a collection that was all stories where we're the heroes and we're living our lives and our autism or our adhd, our depression, you know, whatever it may be, is just a fact. It's not the problem. It's not a hindrance. I mean, it could be, because sometimes it is, but that's not the point of the story. The story is we're just the people that we are living our lives while happening to encounter aliens and then hijinks happen or whatever it is.
I wanted a fun book. And so we made a fun book.
[00:11:56] Speaker C: Now that sounds fantastic. Is there anything that you learned in the process of putting this book together? And what was that process like?
[00:12:03] Speaker A: I learned that 40 authors is too many for a book. It was very much like herding cats. And next time I'm aiming for maybe half that many. But no, it was fun the whole way through. We slipped deadlines. I have adhd. My co editor discovered he has autism or is autistic in the process of doing this book. I'm also autistic. Deadlines are very aspirational, inspirational for me and for many of our participants in this book. We were aiming for own voices, and I think over 80% of the people involved in this book are some Flavor of Neurodivergent. Yeah. It was just so much fun reading people's stories, seeing people tell stories that feel like my own experience and even reading all the stories that are completely not my experience because there's people with forms of anxiety that I don't experience or PTSD that I don't experience. But reading how that feels and what that's like in an engaging story, just so delightful.
[00:12:59] Speaker C: Is there plans for another Neurodiverse book?
[00:13:04] Speaker A: There is, yes.
Yes. It was an exhausting book and so we decided that Self Care would be putting pushing it out. So it's going to release in 2027.
We are going to open the call for submissions early in 2026. It is going to be called the Bridging World Worlds. And again, on the theme of neurodivergent people, Bridging Worlds, whatever that means to you. We'd like it to be sci fi in context. It could be aliens, it could be whatever. We're trying to open the theme a little more broadly this time and just see what great things we get.
[00:13:38] Speaker C: That sounds fantastic.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Another couple of things we have in the pipeline are another writing book. This one is going to be about writing short memoirs and I'm very excited about this book to help people. So many people want to write memoir and think they have to write a book, but that's not the only way to write stories about oneself. There's also the personal essay, there's flash fiction, there's all these other lengths and media that you can use for any writing. So I'm very excited about that book. And then another one is a. We haven't formally announced it yet is a novella that is about a near future world with AI and very high tech. And also mythology.
It's all informed by ancient Greek mythology and in fact some of the characters fall into an ancient Greek myth. And it's this whole very crossing worlds, interdimensional, very cool story with neurodiversity in it, queerness in it, and also Latinx characters. I think it's such a cool mixing of all these different very neat concepts and I'm really excited about it.
[00:14:46] Speaker C: That sounds like a lot of fun. What is your advice that you might give to somebody that wanting to start their own publishing imprint?
[00:14:53] Speaker A: Maybe just do it.
[00:14:55] Speaker C: Just do it.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: There's so many pieces to it. It's a business and first and foremost you do need to think of it like a business, but find the parts of it you love the most and focus on those and then.
Oh, oh. Actually better advice than any of that. Get some really good friends or people that you collaborate with really well and make the business with them. Everything is easier when you have teammates.
[00:15:17] Speaker C: Got it.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: Everything.
[00:15:18] Speaker C: So no lone Rangers. Form a posse and go and do.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: That's what I'm saying for sure. For me, if it were up to me, we would have no books published. I need other people to bounce ideas off to keep me engaged and motivated and excited, to make sure I keep showing up every day and having other people who have different skills from me and aligned skills, and we have shared values, and that's how we make books.
[00:15:40] Speaker C: This is live from Worldcon 2025, and this is Brian Ce Buhl as your guest host. And I have with me Noah Page.
[00:15:48] Speaker E: I am an author and an artist.
[00:15:50] Speaker C: So tell me a little bit about your book.
[00:15:51] Speaker E: So that's probably been the biggest challenge of worldcon. I released the novel last month, and it's a novel that is basically, it surrounds my artwork, so there's multiple illustrations all throughout the work that were done by me with a single ballpoint. And it was only after I had built the world that I really actually started to write the novel in it. Quite plainly put, it's a story between the bonds of brothers.
[00:16:15] Speaker C: Let's narrow it down. Science fiction. Fantasy. Oh, yes. Yes.
[00:16:19] Speaker E: It's flintlock fantasy, set in a world of my own creation. So competing magic systems and how that would work in tandem with the innovation for the humans.
[00:16:29] Speaker C: What was that process like?
[00:16:30] Speaker E: For years, there was no pros, There was no exposition, There was nothing. It was storyboarding. It was just concept art of characters to start out with. And then I went through a phase where I got really into cityscaping and maps. So I started making cities. And then I would attach a name and maybe a little blurb, like history about the city. And then eventually it became easier for my characters to start giving them relationships, romantic relationships, bloodline relationships, friendships with each other. And that's kind of how the story came about, is I just started to fill in the blank space with words.
[00:17:07] Speaker C: What was the transition like going from full visual medium and your artistry that you've been doing way before that, switching to doing the prose, Was that a challenge?
[00:17:19] Speaker E: So I'm a big reader, always have been a big reader. I love to read, and I think that it's a pretty natural progression for every reader to start writing eventually in some capacity. Whether or not you actually go on to publish is a whole different thing. But I think everybody that does read as much as I think I have starts to Write. It was initially very challenging because I work in a very technical medium. Because of that I know how good or bad I am. It's very readily available, especially with the medium that I started with. You know, I did a lot of portraits. My portrait either looks like you or it doesn't. So like there's not a whole lot of gray space there as there is with maybe some other art forms, especially literature. It's a lot more subjective. Not that there's not objective elements to it, but I got really self conscious about my prosecution just because it was so difficult for me to gauge whether or not I was good at writing. That wasn't readily available to me. And quite frankly it's still not. I'm on my debut novel, but there's not really anyone to stop me, so I just kind of kept doing it.
[00:18:22] Speaker C: So before we started recording, you mentioned that you have a really interesting day job. And I want to ask if there's anything about that that you can talk about that also may have informed your writing or that it may have helped you with developing the plot, developing some of the realism that may be going into your story.
[00:18:38] Speaker E: I enlisted in the army right out of high school and I, immediately after enlisting went into special operations and I've been doing that since, which was also a little bit of a point of self consciousness. I have no higher education to this day. I still haven't gone to college. I had to make up a lot of space that objectively existed within my prosecution and quite frankly my art as well. But I think that it was worth it because that knowledge that I could gain from other sources. Whereas the lived experience of being in and going overseas with my boys and hanging out with them just on a nightly basis, and that lived experience is something that is so prevalent in so many stories. But it's kind of hard to really hit the nail on the head there unless you have experienced it. And I don't really want to gatekeep that style of story because I've seen plenty of authors do it very well without having those experiences. Arguably a lot better than me. But I definitely think it's helped me a lot.
[00:19:38] Speaker C: So you finished the novel? It's out.
What's the next thing? Are you working on another novel? Is this part of a series? And again, like as an artist, are you going back to it with storyboarding? Or is your approach changing now that you've finished the first novel?
[00:19:51] Speaker E: I kind of bit off all the time a little more than I could chew with these. My first novel has been done for years. I only just now decided to publish it, which means that my second novel has also been done for quite some time. So the manuscript for my second novel was done before my first novel was released and it's in the copy editing phase right now. And the big gate on releasing my second novel is the artwork within. I still need to make some decisions about which piece is specifically going to be in there. I would like to make it even more than we're in the first novel, but it's kind of an occupational hazard that a lot of my drawings get mud and rain and stuff on them and then I can't scan them and it becomes a problem. So that's the next thing that I'm doing right now is just kind of pulling together all of my resources and trying to get the art done for this next book. Hopefully to release it sometime next summer. So summer 2026.
[00:20:39] Speaker C: What would be your favorite advice that you would want to give in terms of how to be an artist and a writer and make that work for them together?
[00:20:47] Speaker E: Words cannot describe how not credible I am to be giving this advice. It is what it is. But I would say this getting to the finish line is an accomplishment that 95% of people, if not more than that, will never see. Whether or not my novel is received well by my reader based or society or whatever, I have produced it, which is a feat in and of itself and it's something that I will always, always be proud of. And I would say that that understanding is of tantamount important thing. I think that it's something that people should really strive to understand that especially in 2025, no one can tell you to stop. I'm a self published author. I did it on my own. And you can do it again. The merits of the work will speak for themselves whether or not it's actually good or not. But you can do it. You can do it all on your own and no one can tell you any different. And I think that that mindset is kind of really fun and a little bit liberating to have when you go into the process just because it means that if you want to finish, you will finish and no one has any say in it. Now again, querying, pursuing traditional publishers. Every external factor that you induce into this equation makes it more and more uncertain. But if you want to do it the way that I did it, it's almost a guaranteed success. You can do it absolutely possible.
[00:22:07] Speaker C: Finish what you start and then have the follow through. I think that's great advice. Noah. Thank you so much.
[00:22:13] Speaker E: Thanks, man. Yeah, thanks for pulling me out here.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: Cupid's Wanderlust by Kostadin Georgieff Poppy Lane thinks she has her life mapped out. The talented London art photographer lives with her aristocratic boyfriend Lawrence Atherton, and expects a marriage proposal. While traveling Europe in preparation for her first exhibition, she meets Damiano Monteiro, an enigmatic Portuguese archaeologist who recovers stolen artifacts. Although the attraction is instant, she doesn't expect to see him again.
Damiano has recently retrieved an ancient Cupid figurine rumored to bring luck and love. As Poppy seeks creative inspiration, she keeps encountering Damiano across Europe. Guided by mysterious clues and coincidences, he sweeps her off her feet and unleashes his romantic imagination on her. Poppy's carefully planned future begins to unravel.
Cupid's Wanderlust is available in hardcover, paperback and digital editions or go to Cupid's arrow publishing.com.
Thanks again to our guest hosts, Brian C.E. buell and Vanessa McLaurin Ray. 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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To find out more about the books and other products featured during this episode, please visit the Small Publishing in a Big Universe
[email protected] this podcast was edited by Lisa Jacob. Executive Producer is Stephen Radecki. Theme and ad music is provided by Melodyloot. This month's episode was sponsored by Paper Angel Press, Cupid's Arrow Publishing and Water Dragon 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.
