Welcome to Writing Walks. I’m your guide, Alex C. Telander. Today it is December 10th. It’s about 8:30 in the morning and I’m at the Armstrong Redwoods State Park.

Over the last few weeks we’ve had a number of days of heavy rainfall. So the ground is going to be all squishy, sounding a little different to the usual walking sounds I think today today. Today I’m going to be talking about writing about or writing through catastrophic events, hard events that affect your life, how you kind of work through it, how you process it and how you can use it in a way, as a writer. I live in Sonoma County and over the last three years we’ve had fires every October. Three years ago there was the Tubbs fire, which came through Santa Rosa, destroyed a good part of the surrounding town. I wasn’t personally affected cause I live further south, I was okay fortunately, but my father-in-law, they got real close to losing everything. It stopped like a block away from where they live. Then my coworker, part of the wall in the apartment complex where he lives got burned and they had to move out for a bit. And then we had to deal with the weeks after of smoke, the immense loss of property for all these people whose lives had changed. And it all happened overnight with these high winds. It was just so fast. We found out about it in the morning from my, sister-in-law. She lives on the East coast, asking if we were being evacuated or not. We didn’t even know what was going on. It was kinda like when 911 happened too, because it was all in the morning and I was still, we were still asleep at that point. Just finding out that the whole world has changed.

And two years ago it was the Camp Fire, near Paradise, California, that just wiped out the entire town. This was hours north of me. So again, I wasn’t affected specifically or personally. But again my wife’s uncle, he was literally about to move up there to his new house in a few weeks and moved a lot of stuff up there. And he lost everything that was up there. Again for the weeks after, because the wind’s blowing south, we had to deal with smoke. It was actually, uh, so bad. I found with my son, he was coughing a lot during that time and then getting really sick and not able to sleep through the night for going on for months, uh, not having a good night’s sleep and it was starting to affect his moods and everything. And after seeing a number of doctors, he eventually had his adenoids taken out and ear tubes put in and then was able to sleep a lot better through the night and not cough, but we’re pretty sure it was directly influenced by the smoke from the fires. And then this year, six weeks ago, just about, a little more than that. We had the Kincade fire a little north of us. Again, we were kind of ready for possible evacuation, but we were far out of the way, so it wasn’t that bad. We were pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen to us, but my father-in-law and his family again were evacuated. Just to be sure again, we had to deal with the smoke for the weeks afterwards.

I hadn’t realized, I think, how much it affected me, cause I hadn’t actually lost anything specific. I hadn’t lost my home or my place of work or things like that. Nothing had been burned down, but as soon as I could smell the smoke that first day, it was a definite trigger for me with all the emotions, feelings, and everything it was tied to. You tell yourself, Oh, you’re, you’re over it. You’re past it now, it’s okay. You’ve processed it. And you just hope it never happens again. And then all you need is that little bit of smoke to smell and it just brings it all back.

This particular fire I was actually even more affected because the town where I work and deliver mail, they got evacuated, the power got cut off. And so we had to work at a different facility for a few days. And then eventually when they got power back, we were delivering back in the town and it took a number of days to catch up. Also, thanks to a poorly thought out plan by PG&E we lost power. So I was actually without power for five days. And that’s one of those things that was really horrible at the time but at least now looking back on it, I can think about what I kind of learned from it. It was a harsh experience discovering that at night when the machines aren’t on, the lamps, fridge, all these things that you have on in your house all the time, how much heat they actually give. You don’t realize. So at night it got really cold and we didn’t have any other option other than adding more blankets. We couldn’t turn a heater on to make the room warmer. My kid missed a week of school again this year as he has the last couple of years, all because of these fires; it’s almost seeming like they should start just planning on losing a week in October due to fires from now on.

But what I take away from this as a writer are my feelings, are the experiences, what I see from everyone else. As well as what I felt, how we all processed it. Thinking of details. All my senses and how I was picking up on all these different things. I can remember the, actually the, one of the first few days with this year’s fire. And, uh, I was taking my kid to school. Because it was early in the morning it was dark. We could actually still see part of the fire on top of the hill and it was really far away, so it was no worry or anything like that. But because it was at night, it was like lit up like this bright torch, definitely started a lot of feelings in me of fear and things that I’d never really had before until we started getting these fires. So obviously when you have, when you experience a catastrophic event, a life-changing event, at the time you need to deal with it how you can, you need to get the help you need. You need to rest and recuperate and recover. And then once time’s gone by, as a writer, you can think how you can use the experience in your writing, by writing characters, stories that are possibly just the same story you experienced or they’re being experienced in different ways, more subtle ways because of what you went through.

There’s going to be a crossover episode in season five of Ostium with the show Starless, which was a short run show. It had a few episodes, but unfortunately with the creator, her life just took over and she was only able to spend so much time with it. But when I asked if she wanted to do a crossover episode she was happy to, but because it’s a world, kind of post-apocalyptic world where fires have ravaged everything and everything’s changed. She felt she couldn’t do it justice because she hadn’t really gone through all the experiences. But after suggesting the crossover episode, I felt it was an ideal crossover because I had experienced so much of this. And it definitely felt cathartic, poignant, and important to be able to put these feelings into Jake, these experiences, and have him talk about what he’d gone through in the crossover episode. And that’ll be happening. sometime later in the year after this episode is released, of Writing Walks.

Another moment in my life I wanted to talk about that was a strong one that I can never forget, was when I was about 12 or 13, I want to say, And we heard this dog that was crying out. We could tell it was in pain because you can always tell when animals are in pain. And when we went to check it, it was the neighbor’s dog. The dog had – just to let you know going to be a little bit graphic here – the dog had tried to jump over the gate and it was the kind of gate that had these spikes on top. And he basically caught himself on one of those spikes. Fortunately it hadn’t gone through anything too serious. It was through the back of his rear leg. But he was just stuck there hanging basically. But my dad and I, and some of the neighbors, all came together and helped. And we ended up lifting the dog up. Eventually a vet came too and was able to numb him up a bit and were able to lift him off of the, we actually knocked him out actually, as I recall, and then we were able to lift the dog off of the gate, get him all stitched up. And then a few weeks later he was back to normal. Apparently too the neighbor told us that he tried to do it again. But I think at that point they’d protected the gate better so it wasn’t going to happen.

But just going through that, I think especially as a teenager or younger person, I really remember it strongly. The feelings of the weight of the dog, feeling the fear in him, but also the understanding that he knew what we were doing, that we were helping him, but also the visceral nature of it: his hot flesh, the fur, the panting, the hot blood I had on my hands from him. It’s all stuff I took in at the time. And I thought I was going to write a quick story about it, that was just literally that same story, but I never really did anything with it. It didn’t come out the way I wanted it. And I think I was just being too literal about it, too close to what the actual event was. But it’s an experience that I’ve always kept with me. And so when I write other scenes that I want to be visceral, I’m able to pull from these experiences and use that in my writing.

This actually ties in nicely with the writing topic I wanted to talk about today. Wasn’t planned, just worked out well that way, which is the old adage of writing what you know. There’s a lot of pros and cons mixed up with this. Definitely think there are some pros. So the idea is that you can only write what you’ve actually experienced and gone through because otherwise you can’t do it properly. You can’t give it justice. So you shouldn’t try. But if that was true, and if all writers in the history of writing had done that, nothing good would have been written. A lot of us lead mundane lives. We don’t get to experience exciting, different things. And so if that’s all we’re writing about, stories wouldn’t be compelling and interesting, and there wouldn’t be any good literature in the world. So it’s not really true.

You should write what you don’t know. You should challenge yourself. You should push yourself. Write about a character you’ve never written before. Write about a character of the opposite sex, of a different gender, of a non-gender. Challenge yourself and push yourself. Because in that way, you’ll become better. Just like practicing anything else. The more you do it, the better you get at it. But if you’re just doing the same thing over and over and over, you won’t get better. You’ve got to do it in new ways, in different ways. That’s why they always recommend also reading as a writer and reading different things, because it opens your mind to different ways of writing and different approaches.

Now, the pros of it, as in the positives of writing what you know, comes from kind of what I talked about here today, where while I did not personally lose a house in the fire and go through all that, I got to experience a lot of things associated with it. Same thing with the dog story, where I was not the dog suffering, being stuck on that gate, obviously, but I got to experience it in different ways and go through the rescue. And it’s all part of experiences that we pull from and use in our writing, whether it is directly with the same experience, the same events happening, or through different ones. And that you can use the experiences of these past events to charge and embolden and strengthen this new experience that you haven’t done before, but you’re doing through your character. So if anyone ever tells you as a writer, that you should just write what you know, tell them to go to hell.

But it’s also a yes and no answer. You take what you know, but you also write new stuff and challenge yourself. And in that way, you’ll certainly become a better writer. You’ll become a better storyteller and a better person in learning from it. It also helps after doing that, if you have, or know some people, who have gone through either these exact experiences or similar ones, to let them read over it to see if it resonates on the right level. Not everyone has that opportunity, but if you do, it’s definitely recommended.

So now we’re going to talk about my recommendation for this week, and that is “Changeling” by Victor LaValle. I had it recommended to me, uh, kind of during the Halloween season. I was wanting some horror books from, uh, Jamieson Ridenhour of the Palimpsest Podcast. And it’s a story about a couple that gets together and gets married and then has a kid and reading it as a parent it was definitely very moving and emotional because the author had obviously gone through a similar thing with having kids. And I actually did contact the author afterwards just to see. And he had, he did have kids too, and was pulling a lot of from that, so it’s a lot of, uh, writing what you know, and writing from your experiences. And in that way, it hit me as a reader who was also a parent on a lot of levels. So the couple has a kid, but then weird things start to happen. It seems like someone’s either watching them while watching the kid and knows their every move and what’s going on. The couple grows distant as they’re getting less and less sleep. And it seems like something’s going wrong with the mother. Graphic warning here for the next events, if you want to skip ahead. Um, what ends up happening is the mother kills the child because she says it is not her baby. It is something else. And you think at this point that you’re on the father’s side, seeing it through his eyes, that she’s just gone mad and just killed the child. Your child. But then the story starts to open up. Becomes more complex and you find out there’s a whole history and mythology involved here that ties in really well with the town they’re in as well. And it becomes a much bigger encompassing book that you never thought it could have become when you started reading it at the beginning. Since then, I’ve actually read A number of Victor LaValle’s books. And I just enjoy everything he does. He reminds me of another favorite author of mine, Haruki Murakami, where the stories are always fascinating and you can never predict where it’s going to go. But what you do know is it’s going to be a crazy ride. And that’s definitely the case with Lavalle where this story, I thought it was going to go one way and it didn’t, and then went into a totally new place I didn’t expect to go. But because I had been grounded and started off with these familiar experiences and emotions, I was hooked on for the ride and was able to go to these places of the fantastical, because I’d been grounded already. And I’ve talked about this before in writing and storytelling of grounding readers in the familiar, and then taking them to the surreal and the seemingly impossible. Because if you just start out right away with confusing, unbelievable stuff, the reader easily becomes lost. And you, you just don’t get connected with the story.

So that’s my recommendation. It’s a dark horror fantasy book that is really worth the read, but it definitely has some very strong, moving scenes that you can see coming and then they actually do happen. And they’re just shocking, but there’s a reason behind everything. And by the end of the book, things work out and they work out well and correctly and satisfyingly, which is not always true for a lot of books. Definitely a lot horror books that kind of drop it on the ending but this one definitely delivers. So again, that’s “Changeling” by Victor LaValle. And if you enjoy that one, read all his other ones too. They’re great.

I think his other big book was, uh, it was like a novella, that did well called The Ballad of Black Tom. That was also a really fun read. All right. I think that about wraps it up for this episode. Thank you once again, for joining me here at Armstrong Redwoods, actually one thing I failed to mention earlier, I was going to, that, uh, when I’d thought about recording this episode, I was possibly going to try to go to one of the spots near where the Tubbs Fire from 2017 happened. Just as a place of resonance. Ooh, they’ve cut some branches down here. Wonder if this tree branch must’ve fallen, kind of blocking the way. Like around one of the houses or areas. Um, but that didn’t feel right. I was just going to be intruding and it doesn’t resonate right with the story I wanted to tell. So instead I came here to Armstrong Redwoods, which is a state park as opposed to a regional park. Hey, morning. And the reason I picked it is because it’s my favorite park I’ve ever been to. I’ve taken my kid here a number of times, I’ve been here with my family. And it’s just an awesome, amazing place where I get to walk around and stare at these giant trees. These majestic redwoods, just sitting here and growing and living for thousands of years while the rest of the world goes on around them. It’s my place of solitude and calm and inspiration. Whenever I want to take a break from everything, to just bask in the beauty of nature here, that’s why we’ve been doing it a lot with my kid too, get him to enjoy nature. And he certainly does.

Anyway, so thanks again for listening. Be sure to check out all the photos I’ll be posting along with this episode from Armstrong Redwoods. If you enjoyed the show and would like to support it, feel free to leave a review, tell your friends about it, tell your writing group, your writing buddies. And if you want to actually support us monetarily, I have a KoFi linked to my account or there is a Patreon which is developing and if it’s something that gets up and going pretty well, I’d be happy to do different writing things on there. And that’s again, tied into the, my account. So you can find it all on the description for this episode.

Thanks again for joining me and I’ll see you next month.

It is 8:16 October 14th today. I am at the North Sonoma Mountain Regional Park. This is Writing Walks. I’m your guide Alex C. Telander. Squirrels all around me, running through the trees and playing around. Beautiful early morning. I haven’t been to this park before, so make sure I don’t get lost. Stick to the trails. When I took my kid to school this morning there was fog everywhere. It was really thick and heavy, and just felt like it was covering the whole county. I watched Sleepy Hollow this last weekend, it reminded me a lot of that. So I thought when I was headed towards this regional park here, it was going to be all foggy and photos were going to be that great. And it was going to be really creepy and hard to see stuff. Deer I keep seeing everywhere too, on the drive up, let’s see a couple of deer now just walking around. But then once I got to a certain elevation, the fog just disappeared. It was like going through a fog doorway and it just ended. And there was the bright morning sun. Everything was beautifully clear. Got turkeys everywhere too. It’s like all of nature’s up and awake this morning, doing stuff. And now they’re running away. Man, it feels like I’m in a Lord of the Rings set here.

Today I’ve got two kind of topics to talk about as usual. I tend to make one more personal about me and the other one more general to writing and how I’ve kind of interpreted the advice and used it to improve my own writing, but I realized when I picked the two topics for today, they kind of work well for both. They’re both bits of writing advice and suggestions, but they also have a lot of personal stuff for me in it because of how I’ve used it over the years. Giant Redwoods all around me. So the two topics are why reading is important for writing and the other one’s going to be about writing spaces.

Why is reading important for writing? I’ve heard a couple of good anecdotes. Well, one’s a quote from Stephen King, from his book On Writing, really fantastic book with advice on writing. It’s actually a pretty short book. And half of the book is actually his kind of biography about growing up and becoming a writer and getting through all that. And then the second half is his writing advice. So it’s even shorter that really it’s like a hundred pages, but it’s really good stuff. One of the quotes that’s always taken from it and shared everywhere. It’s about how important reading is for writing. So the quote is: “If you don’t read, you don’t have the tools or the talent to write.” Another anecdote I’ve heard about how important reading is for writing, I got, unsurprisingly, off the Write Now Podcast from Sarah Rhea Werner. I’m pretty sure she probably got it from somewhere else. I seem to remember her mentioning from someone, but I just don’t remember who. Anyway the anecdote was for in relation to why reading is important to writing. And the anecdote is like saying, is that a chef doesn’t need to eat different kinds of foods and try different things and just stick with making the same thing over and over and over again. A chef needs to try different stuff, different kinds of foods, different cultures of foods, to know how to make different things, how to make new things, how to keep himself fresh in what he or she is making. And the same thing goes for reading, with writing. With reading you learn new words all the time. You learn new ways of crafting a sentence, of paragraph format, of how to structure a book, or if it’s a short story, how to do different viewpoints, how do you use flashback scenes, how to use dream sequences. Every writer’s trying to do something new every time they write, and when it gets published and you get to read that, it gives you the chance to discover that new way of doing something. A little spark, an idea, or a way of writing a story you want to write, or even possibly helping a project you’ve been working on or been stuck with. You can start something off that you never would’ve expected if you hadn’t read this particular story or book.

For me personally, with reading, I can pretty much remember when I started, it was around when I was 13, I’d been a C average student in school. I was doing okay basically, barely average, just squeaking by and I wasn’t reading at all. And then my teacher introduced me to an author named Willard Price. I think I might’ve mentioned him before. Yeah, in the second episode, I think, and starting those books just opened a whole new world for me of an interesting adventure. And that got me into reading. So once I was done with those books, I looked for more and I kept finding new authors and new genres and trying new things, actually down the road, I got into audiobooks and it opened up a whole new world for me and in, so doing it made my reading comprehension go through the roof, of course, but also it led me to start writing and becoming a writer. Here’s a fact: I’ve been reading constantly since I started reading when I was 13. I’m now 40 years old. I’ve never had a moment where I wasn’t reading something or about to start reading something. I’ve always been reading a book or multiple books instead. I think that’s pretty cool. And I also can’t imagine myself not reading. I enjoy it so much. I enjoy getting lost in a book and just forgetting where I am or the world I’m in for the moment and getting lost in the world of that story. And I know every time I’m reading, it’s making me a better writer. It’s making me a better reader. It’s making me comprehend the language more, learn new things about language and structure and how to write.

When I think back about what I was taught about writing in high school and even in college too, I know your basic, you know, subject, noun, verb structure and things like that, but a lot of the more complex sentences and jargon of that and how it’s phrased and wording and all that stuff, I really don’t know. I don’t know the technical term for everything that one would learn in basic English language classes. And that’s because I’ve learned it all through reading. I can tell you when a sentence is wrong and how it’s wrong. I can’t give you the specific term for what’s not being used correctly or how it’s being used and why it’s wrong, but I’ll know when a sentence is wrong or when a tense is wrong or how it needs to be fixed. They say that you have to know the rules to be able to break them. And that is true in writing, you can’t break a rule necessarily to have the wrong tense or the wrong phrasing, if it’s just wrong. But if you know the rule and how it works, you can bend it and mold it to fit whatever story you’re trying to tell, whatever sentence you’re trying to make.

Sometimes you can just break the rules too really. If you have a specific character or story structure that makes it so the reader understands what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. But again, you have to know all the rules and how it works to be able to bend and then possibly break them. And you can take bunches of English classes and learn all the technical stuff. Or you can just read; just read whatever you want. Stories, books, fiction, nonfiction, the more you read the better. And if you’re up for trying different genres that you’ve never consider yourself reading, that’s a good thing too, because you’ll learn something new out of it. Whether it might work for your story now or not, it doesn’t matter. You’ll learn from it. And it will be inside you. Part of your toolbox for writing. You’ll have it put away like a small little screwdriver that you think you’ll never need. And then one day you’ll be working on that story or project. And you’ll have this little thing, this little moment in the story, you’ll want to do something special with it, craft in some way, that’ll make it really stand out. And that’s when you’ll reach back in your mind and pull out that tiny screwdriver that you thought you’d never need and it’ll fit just right. And you’ll craft your sentence just right. You’ll make something unique and special that only you did.

And that’s why reading is important for writing. Plus, it’s a lot of fun. As I said, I love reading stories, going to places I never could have imagined.

So let’s move on to the other topic, which is writing spaces. I know there are websites out there and articles and books on writing spaces, on the spaces that many famous writers had over the centuries. They used to make me feel jealous, honestly, seeing Stephen King’s writing space or Joyce Carol Oates or William Faulkner, or, you know, any other author’s; this awesome middle cocoon they’d made themselves of books and a table and whatever writing implement they used, whether it was a pile of paper and a pen or old manual typewriter or a fancy computer setup. Because they’re famous writers and they get to do what they love to do and get paid full-time for it, which is awesome. But it’s not always something us writers who are trying to make it can do. We don’t necessarily live in a place, an apartment, a house, a room we share, where we can set up a huge writing space like that and make it ideal. It might just barely be a nook, a table, a dorm room table. That’s all you have to use. But I think here you can kind of borrow a little from the reading part I was talking about earlier and imagine your space as being this little cocoon. It can be very tiny if you need to be, but it’s your space that you make for your writing. It can be an elaborate office, but it can also be just the edge of a couch.

Writing spaces are good. They’re good to have. If you can. It’s good to have a place that you can say, this is where I write. And it’s time for me to write tonight or this morning or right now, so I’m going to take whatever I write with pen, paper, laptop, iPad, tablet, even your phone, and go sit in that writing space and write. Cause by making it a writing space that you use solely for that purpose, the more you do it, the more the routine you get into it, the more then you’ll be able to say, okay, it’s time to write now. And you go into that space and it’s a headspace to cause you’re mentally go in there. Just by sitting there it’ll like cause a change to happen and just set you into writing mode Again, the key is that there’s a routine about it, a habit, you do it over and over so that you get used to it.

I’ve had some really nice writing spaces in my time. When I was living with my mother-in-law many decades ago. Well, a couple of decades ago, not that long ago, um, in her house, I remember it was over the summer and it was this little breakfast nook off of the kitchen that wasn’t really being used. So that was great. I could set up my desktop computer there. I had it all set permanently for that summer and was able to just kind of go to it every day as needed and just write away there with windows looking out on the street below and being able to just enjoy my little space there with the research books I needed. I remember the book I was working on there. It was a historical fiction work called Wyrd, which is old English/Anglo-Saxon for fate. And that book is probably about a third done now, still sitting there waiting to get finished. It’s a kind of retelling of the Arthurian myth, but much more in historical context and less than a fantastical one. And I can remember where it left off with the Anglo-Saxons arriving and meeting with Arthur and the people around him. And it just ended with a big kind of celebration party that night in the mead hall they’d built there with Hengist and Horsa. And then it ended with Arthur leaving in the morning. Actually I call him Arturus in the book, because of his background and coming from, uh, the Near East kind of, Byzantium and that area. And he’d just taken, I can’t remember if it’s Hengist’s or Hosa’s daughter, Rowena. She’d gone willingly too. And I’m pretty sure that’s the last scene I wrote. And for 10, maybe 15 years now, it’s been waiting to get more scenes written. One day I hope to get back to it. Anyway, so that was that little writing nook and you can see there by that little space, how much I attached to it with this novel I was working on.

I can remember another nook I had in a apartment we had, which we moved out of an old place to a newer place. Cause it was a two bedroom bigger space for, I think a little less in price. Wasn’t as nice for the neighborhood though. But that’s actually where my cat ended up getting run over. So it’s not great association for that place, but that second bedroom, which we ended up actually renting out to a friend who had come on really hard times and had nowhere to live. So we let her live there for a year or whil,e six months. Um, anyway, before that it was a office, it was a library. We had all our bookcases in there and books everywhere. And I had a table that looked out the window out onto the pool below I think it was, but it was this awesome writing space, but I don’t have any associations with that one because I can barely remember writing in there. I can’t remember writing on anything specific there. I think I used it a bit, but not as much as I could because I think with work being stressful and hard, not being in such a nice area, going through a lot of stuff, I wasn’t as creative then and I didn’t use it as much. And yet here I had this perfect idyllic writing space like you’d see in any of these books on author writing spaces. So I think that kind of says a lot where I have two different spaces here, which are kind of great, but one was really well used and full of creativity and life. Whereas the other one, which definitely would have been considered better than the other one than the original one. Um, it was barely used. It was lacking and we ended up using that room for a roommate who needed it at the time. And I don’t think I felt that bad about it. She enjoyed also being surrounded by books and sleeping in there. But then I think about writing Ostium, which I’ve been doing now for the last three, four, five years, is it? Four years? Maybe five. And I think about, Oh, what’s my writing space for that. And I don’t really have one. It has been the end of the couch. It’s been the kitchen table. It’s been random Starbucks or coffee places. It’s been wherever I had my laptop and made myself write. And it’s definitely taught me a good lesson that it’s great to have a wonderful writing space, but you got to use it. If you don’t use it, it’s just another room you can use for something else, but also anywhere it can be your writing space, clearly your writing space is in your head. It’s your mental writing space.

I could have brought my laptop or my tablet with me today and just sat on this hill and made it my writing space and written for an hour, even though I’m not going to come here every day to do it because it was a long uphill walk, but I could have if I wanted, because I could have mentally gone there as my writing space and started writing. Now I’ve actually in my condo, made a bit of a writing space again. Um, it’s actually where I do my recordings. I have my mic stuff there when I can set it up. Um, and it’s a table in my bedroom and I didn’t always want to leave being close to my wife when I was writing because she’d be working on her stuff and we’d be, at least be nearby. But now she kind of has her writing space where she goes into the kitchen at her desk or kitchen table there and works there. It works really well for her. When she sits down there, it switches over and she starts writing, and I was writing on the couch in the living room, but now I’ve kind of made a space up in the bedroom there cause I have a desk there and it’s again a good place where if I step in there and sit down with a laptop, I know I’m either going to record or I’m going to write.

So I’m definitely happy now I’ve got myself a writing space again. I won’t say that I definitely needed it because I was able to write wherever, but I’m happy. I’ve got it. I’m happy I’ve got a place I can call a writing space, that I’ve put up bits and pieces, some artwork, a card I got from a fan who wrote some really nice words about Ostium and my writing. I have a little things there that I’m adding to make it a more lived in writing space. Flock of geese flying by.

So here’s what I think you can take from writing spaces. If you have the space to create a writing nook for yourself, go ahead and do it. But the key is you got to use it. If you’re designating it as a writing nook, that’s what you got to do there. And then you got to use it. Whether it’s every day, every night, every other night, once a week, whatever it’s going to be, I’m going to write on these days at this time, and then you’re going to go to your writing nook and use it and use it just for that. But if you don’t have the opportunity to create a writing space, anywhere in your place, where you live, that’s fine too. You can create a mental writing space, whether it’s at the kitchen table, on the edge of the couch, on the bottom of the stairs, in a café, wherever it works for you, just occupy that space mentally as a writing space, tell yourself, this is where I’m going to do writing today. And once I sit down wherever that is. I’m going to write. By doing that, when you have times where you don’t want to write, but it’s your writing time and you make yourself do it, you’ll get some writing done. It might not be good. You might hate it. You might just want to delete it the next time. That’s fine. But the key I think is the routine. You keep doing it. You keep making your mental writing space and your physical writing space. If you can. And by doing that, you’ll have less times where you won’t want to write or less times where you’ll get really stuck and just want to stop writing for awhile. It’s like exercise. Some people really love going to the gym. I kinda like it. I try to go twice a week. It doesn’t always happen. Sometimes I go once. Sometimes I don’t go at all, but I know I’ve got to do it. And by doing it over and over and doing it as a routine, it becomes automatic that I feel bad when I don’t do it and that I should be doing it. And it makes it easier to actually go and do it each time. Writing is a job. Writing is work. It’s not a fun, easy thing to do. And just like anything else, that’s hard. Whether it’s a sport, a particular kind of game, you play. Your job. The only way you get better at it is by doing it over and over. So that means doing the writing. And that also means reading. Do lots of reading, do lots of writing, and then you’ll get better at it. I was thinking of talking a bit about balancing your time with reading and writing, which Sarah Werner has done in one of her episodes. But I think I’ll save that for another episode, with my thoughts on that.

So to sum up: you want to be a good writer. If you want to write well, read a lot, read all the time, read when you can, read on a break, read when commuting, and hey, audio books count. That’s reading: listen to a book, listen to a podcast even, it all counts as reading because you’re listening to creative works that way. And if you can create a writing space, make one in your place where you live and use it. That’s the key. If you’re not going to use it, don’t waste time on it. But if you can’t make a writing space, make a mental writing space and then switch over to it when it’s writing time and do it over and over, get it to a routine and then you’ll be writing regularly.

Wow, it’s really beautiful here. And that lake of fog is still hanging there. I think that about does it for this episode. Thanks for listening in. If you’d like to support me at all, I have a Kofi or the Patreon I’m working on, I’ll start putting photos and stuff up there too. Maybe some little writing pieces, but, uh, you can support me there. And again, this is separate from the Ostium Patreon. That all goes to Ostium. This one is just for me. So any support I get there, we’ll go for me, which I would really appreciate. Again, you can support at any level a dollar, two dollars. Um, I’ll have to check. I think I’ll set some levels on there too, for what you might get out of it. And if you’re interested in getting something out of what I can give you, what advice or writing advice I can give you or help, um, at certain levels, suggest that to me and I’ll see if I can accommodate you, but any, uh, any support is really appreciated. Thanks for listening. And I’ll see you in the next episode on Writing Walks. And the good news is the way back is all downhill.

Welcome to episode two of Writing Walks. I’m your guide, Alex C. Telander It is 7:41 on October 3rd. And today we are at the Laguna de Santa Rosa Walking Trail, not too far from where I work. There’s a lot of traffic in the background cause it’s right off of the main kind of big road here for everyone going to work this morning. Today I’m going to start talking about what got me into writing and kind of how I started writing, where it all kind of began for me. Now I’m always kind of jealous of my wife because she seems to have a really good memory for remembering so much that happened to her as a kid in extreme detail it seems at times. A lot of memories of different things and different moments and things like that. And I can remember plenty, but not to the extent that she can. So I’m always kind of amazed by that. I’m not sure if it’s just something she’s really good at or it’s something I just don’t remember as well. Maybe when I’m older I’ll remember more. I hear that, that the older you get, the more you remember of your life, of those moments you’ve kind of forgotten about and they’ll come back to you later in life. Oh. And, uh, compared to my recording from last week, it’s a good 30 degrees cooler today. So that’s a big change.

I’m trying to think back to my earliest memories of how I got into writing and exposed to it. It really started when I got more and more into reading, think I was about 12 or 13 and got introduced to an author by a teacher called . . . .the author was called Willard price. And he wrote these series of kind of kids adventure novels, about two brothers traveling around the world, um, capturing animals for their kind of park they had. And then their dad would sell them to zoos and stuff. They came out in the fifties and sixties. So they’re pretty old books, but I really enjoyed them, reading them as a teenager, because I was almost the same age as the younger brother. And then as I kept reading them, as I got older, I was the same age as the older brother, so I could relate to a lot of it, but it got me really into reading and kind of opened the way for me to read a lot more stuff. Moving on to Stephen King, many other authors, uh, just getting really into reading. And along that way, I think it started me thinking about writing, about how you craft stories and put them together, how these people had done it before.

I can also remember a high school teacher, my English high school teacher exposing me to, uh, I can remember one where it was concepts of writing, things like using metaphors and similes, onomatopoeia, what purple prose is, this whole like kind of list of different tools and ways you can approach writing. And it kind of just opened it up for me, realizing how complex writing could be, how big of a world it is and how there was a lot of room in it to do pretty much whatever you wanted. The English language is vast. There are many, many words for the same thing often. And I think that kind of opened up my mind up to realizing the potential there of crafting and creating.

I really have fog coming off my breath today? It is a chilly morning, but really beautiful. Hot coffee with me too. That’ll help. And off in the distance there is a hot air balloon slowly rising into the sky.

I can remember another moment with my high school teacher, English teacher. With some little creative writing exercise we did. I don’t remember what it was about or if there was a prompt or if it was just make something up or whatever. But all I remember was there was something that I wrote in class and I got really positive feedback from her. And as I recall, it was more so than other students got. Again, I can’t remember what it was about, but just getting that attention. It was almost like it was an opening of a door saying you could do this. If you want, you could start to write and make up stories like this. So I think that was another important starting point for me, gave me the opportunity and the ability, the idea that I could do this if I wanted to do it. And that’s where that started.

I can remember writing on an old electric typewriter we had. Fluttering away at the keyboard. I remember it was pretty cool cause it had actually like an erase button where to put this well, you’d press the button, the erase button, to erase the last letter. And it basically put this little bit of white out on it and then you could retype over it, which I thought was really cool for an electric typewriter. I think I’d used . . . Yeah, I had, I took a, there was a typing class I did at school too, just to learn how to type on old mechanical, heavy typewriters, which was a great skill to learn, to touch type. So using the electric typewriter felt pretty cool. Think we had a computer at that point, but I wasn’t really thinking of it as using it as a writing implement. Yet.

I can remember my first “novel” that I attempted. It was a, what was, it like 40 pages, double-spaced, ended up being all typed out on that electric typewriter, and it was called Home by the Sea I think. And it was like about a haunted house, but I also remember that there was aliens coming and people were being abducted for some reason. And all I can remember was having my character being stuck inside a prison on the alien ship and then talking to someone else about unsolved mysteries. That’s all I can really remember about that, but very convoluted, complex story that I don’t really know what I was trying to do with it, but it was a starting point.

With writing you need to start, you can’t critique or question or think about what you’ve written until you’ve written, and you can say all these things later on, but until you actually start putting those words on the page, whether you write them with a pen, type them or whatever, you can’t really say anything about it.

It’s cold today. Next time I’ll have to bring gloves. Little birds in the trees and the bushes here.

So that’s kind of how I got into writing. From then on it was writing stories and stuff. Um, kind of have a little ideas for stories. And then I started a high school newspaper. The first time did only a couple of issues, but did it all myself, and copying everything out on the photocopier and stuff. And I can remember writing a short story for that called ‘The Lonesome Road” about a guy who picks up a hitchhiker. And then as it turns out the hitchhikers and who she seems to be and has a gun and pulls him over and then steals his car. And I don’t really know what I was trying to achieve with that. Oh, and one other thing I just remembered about, uh, learning for writing in class is another moment was when I got exposed to how you can approach setting a scene, writing a scene and how you always have to keep in mind what each of your five senses are sensing. Cause you got each of those that you can use to describe a scene. You generally don’t want to use all five because that will be purple prose. Overly written ,a little too much description there. I mean, you can always put them in to begin with and then cut them out later if you want. But that was another eye opening moment because I realized with these five different senses you could tell so much, you could paint a complete picture and then further on down the road, it was learning to paint that picture with lesser detail. Not doing too much. I still use that now when I’m writing, I remember I was stuck on a scene or trying to think of about how to approach it. How did you go through, well, when that character, what, what senses are they using to describe and learn the scene, see what it is or hear, what did it is, smell what it is or feel what it is. You’ll see a lot of that probably in Ostium or Jake. We have a lot to do with describing something like exact sight right away or specific sounds. So there were short stories after that and eventually that led to novels and me doing Nanowrimo a couple of times, we’ll talk about that in a different episode.

Another thing I wanted to talk about today was how we’re always writing. A lot of people say If you’re not literally sitting down and writing with a pen or typing, it’s not writing, and that’s not true, because a book isn’t just writing down that book. A book is research. A book is outlining, if you do that. A book is writing some beginning notes. The spark of an idea, A book is coming up with an idea and then taking a walk and thinking about it for an hour. Maybe even recording your thoughts on a voice recorder for a while. So I think that gets misunderstood a lot where people will say, oh, you’re not writing because you’re not literally sitting down doing it. I do it all the time I feel, whenever I have a free moment to think, I do it unavoidably at times when I’m working. So I’m sitting there delivering mail in my truck driving and delivering mail. And I’m also listening to a podcast or audio book at the same time. And still in the back of my mind, I’ll be plotting something or developing something, thinking about what’s going to happen next, thinking about what the character is going do or making up new characters, what stories I want to tell.

And then I’ll usually have to pull over and write some notes about it or something. So I think you shouldn’t beat yourself up if you feel that you’re not getting enough writing done and not literally sitting down and writing it enough. There are many ways to consider yourself writing. Sarah Warner has a great episode on the right now podcast. Uh, I think it’s called the writing season or something like that to do with writing seasons and how you may feel you’re in a season where you’re not in a writing mood. And so you’ll take a break from writing and doing other sorts of stuff, which could be writing notes or developing ideas. But you should check that episode out.

So don’t feel bad If you’re feeling stuck on something that you’re working on and you’re not sitting in that chair and writing it. There are many other ways you can be writing it, whether it be taking a walk and thinking about it, watching a TV show, and then in the back of your mind, you suddenly realize how to solve that plot conundrum you couldn’t figure out.

I don’t have a book recommendation, review type thing for today because I haven’t finished any books recently, mainly because I’ve been marathoning a podcast called We’re Alive. It’s a zombie podcast that came out in 2009. So there’s like four seasons of the first show. And then there’s like two kind of spinoff shows of it. And with the first show there’s chapters and then each chapter is broken up into three parts. And so there’s 48 chapters. I want to say for that whole, all those first four seasons. So it’s a lot I’ve been listening to, but I’m closing in on finishing that fourth season. Now. I know one reason I hadn’t started it is because it was a zombie show and I’ve kind of been burned out on zombie stories for a while now, after Walking Dead and reading tons of books on them and everything. I just needed a break. And I felt like each time I turned to a zombie story, I wasn’t really getting anything new out of it.

So I approached We’re Alive hesitantly. I wasn’t sure if I was gonna stick with it, gave it a few episodes. I tried it before too, and hadn’t gotten into it, but I wanted to give it another shot now. I often do that with podcasts where I’ll try something and if I’m really not in the right frame of mind, I’ll just take a break from it. And then sometimes I’ll try it again later until I get hooked on it. I’ve done that with books too. So with We’re Alive, I feel it gets me really hooked into it are the characters. They’re interesting. They’re diverse, not as diverse as they could be, but I feel that’s also a part of it being 10 years old. Um, as far as I know, as I’m finishing up now, I haven’t met any gay characters or trans characters or anyone like that on there. I’m not sure if that’s something they have planned for the future,, but it definitely feels like a older podcast in that sense that they haven’t been more inclusive, but the characters are really interesting and the way they work together to overcome their hardships is what’s interesting. It doesn’t go down the almost predictable routes that Walking Dead stories did and other zombie stories do. There’s plenty of people wanting to hurt each other to survive and take from each other, but it’s not to the extent that other shows like to do it. And I just liked to see how people overcome these situations when it seems like all hope should be lost. I’ve always been interested in that. I find that in a, when I’m reading history books too, in the past from long, long ago, medieval times or ancient times, kind of how people survived and got by and the same thing for post-apocalyptic stories and future stories of overcoming when it seems to all odds are against you, that we, as humanity, have been able to come so far with little and develop what we’ve got.

The show definitely does some, uh, annoying things for me. I find with, uh, they have a main, the main character is a military guy and there’s a few other military guys and it definitely falls into the stereotypical military guy, or it’s mostly guys talking about guy things and just doing guy stuff that is stereotypical at this point. Not so much reality at all. And I feel like when you’re trying to tell a story like this, sure, if you want to be as accurate as possible to how it is now or was before you want to get that exactly right, right? But the point of a story is to tell something different, to tell something new, to interest you, to not just tell it how it is, especially if it’s boring or predictable or stereotypical. That’s what always kind of bugged me about Game of Thrones – coming by the road here now so it’s getting a little noisier – that’s what was bugging me about Game of Thrones is that you’ve got dragons and a little bit of magic and all this crazy stuff, which is a fantasy element. But then when you asked him why it’s still a patriarchal society and women are still treated so bad, Martin’s claim is well, I’m being historically accurate to the medieval period. Yeah but they weren’t dragons there then were there? So yeah, that kind of annoys me when they kind of pick and choose what historical elements they want to include. But when they want to be actually current and faithful to characters, they won’t do the work. So that’s my main issues with We’re Alive Things like fat jokes about other male characters that are overweight or whatever it is just like, do something new. We don’t need to do that. But overall, I’ve really enjoyed the show, again, just for how it’s brought his characters to these different places. I’ve enjoyed seeing this group of characters that I’ve become pretty close to over the seasons cause it’s a lot of episodes together. And just seeing how they work together, especially the non-military people that have different skill sets and how they work together to develop this society from nothing. It’s an interesting idea that I’ve always been kind of fascinated with. I’ll write about it sometimes. You get a little bit of that with Ostium, I guess, with Jake and Monica being stuck in Ostium and kind of having to start from scratch and develop something with what they got.

So yeah, We’re Alive. It’s a long show. It’s a lot to get through, but once you get started, it really becomes addicting. The sound design is great. It’s pretty minimal too, which I like, like there’s music and sound. And then usually with the finales, it’s all really intense and big, but for the most part, it’s minor sounds that works great for audiodrama, as you’re letting your mind and imagination fill in the details of what these zombies look like, what the situation is, what’s actually going on. It almost makes it a little better, I think, than a visual zombie story like on TV or a movie because there you’re being told in extreme detail what you’re exactly seeing, whereas with a podcast, half of it is your mind creating the shapes and the look of everything. So if you want a nice long show to get started on, I recommend We’re Alive.

All right. I think that about does it for this episode, coming towards the end of, whatever it was, half mile mile walk here, probably about a mile. Thanks for listening. All right. Thanks again. And see you on the next episode.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Writing Walks. I’m your guide, Alex C. Telander and it is 8:13 on September 25th. And today we are at Crane Creek Park.

I discovered the secret town of Ostium . . . wait, no, that’s not how this goes. Let’s change that up. So why am I doing a writing podcast? Well, it kind of started out when I was listening to Sarah Rhea Werner’s Write Now Podcast. I marathoned through the 70, 80 episodes, however many there are, and just learning so much from her, advice, ideas, thoughts about writing and along the way, it started generating ideas in my own head about what I thought about writing, about my process, about how I liked to do things, about my craft and how I do it.

And it just started my brain going on about how I want to do writing, how I approach it. And I had my own ideas generating, of advice, thoughts, concepts, but I didn’t want to just do the same thing as Sarah had already done, because I didn’t just want to copy her. I wanted to come up with my own kind of style to it. Um, and also to link it more personally with me, with my own writing and how I developed as a writer, what approach I use, things like that. I feel like I’ve got some things to say about writing. That’s mainly what it is. I’ve been writing since I was 15. When I first started getting support and feedback and help from my English teacher on little creative projects I was doing. And that definitely blossomed as I was developing as a reader too. And reading lots of different authors, getting really into Stephen King.

Whenever I read Stephen King, it’s like, it turns something on in my body that makes me want to write and be creative. I don’t know if it’s something particularly with his style or the stories he tells, but they just inspire me to start writing. It’s kind of funny. There’s not that many authors that do that, but he’s definitely one of them, just when I’m reading him, it makes ideas start to generate in my head that have nothing to do with the ideas of the book that I’m reading at that time, but it just starts them off in my head. So I’ve been writing for about 25 years and of course it’s not necessarily an everyday writing or anything like that. It’s off and on periods of creativity, Slower periods. I’ve done NaNoWriMo a few times, and completed it twice, finished a few novels.

So I’ve got 25 years of writing at different levels. And over that time, I’ve obviously learned a lot about how to write and about what I do in my own writing. I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer, but also as a person. That’s actually the interesting thing I’ve learned over the years later on when I look back at my past writing and I’ll notice that I’m always writing about someone who doesn’t necessarily belong or feel that they fit in where they are. And they’re looking for a place that they do fit in, have them usually traveling somewhere or going somewhere. And it’s not necessarily something I do intentionally. It just tends to happen with my characters and my stories. So there’ll be events going on in the story that I’m writing. And then when I look back at it afterwards at the overall story, and I’ll see that theme in there. Another reason I wanted to do this podcast is because I wanted to make it more personal about me, things in my life too. So I think that way it’s going to help me learn more about myself and about how I write.

Going back to me writing stories about people who don’t feel they belong. I think it comes a little bit from me being born in Spain. My mom’s British, my dad’s Swedish. I went to a kind of British high school, even though I was in Spain and I did speak Spanish and learned it. And then I came over here to California for college and stayed here, met my wife here and now I live here permanently. So I think it’s part of my own life. When I write about that. Of not feeling that I belonged in Spain because I didn’t consider myself Spanish. I didn’t really consider myself British and didn’t consider myself Swedish either, even though I have a Swedish passport and that’s my designated nationality. I didn’t speak Swedish. My dad never taught me. So I think that’s why I write stories about people who are looking for somewhere they belong. I’m pretty sure I’ve found it here now in California, as I gaze on the beautiful view here, Crane Creek Park, this is a special place.

So I don’t know how regular these episodes are going to be. I like the idea of making this podcast, something more freeform and uncertain. I’m used to with Ostium and Circe and future projects, being very rigid and structured in how I make things specific lengths, specific release dates, specific number of episodes, a shape to everything. This is a little bit of the OCD in me. It’s just how I am. I’m an organized person like that. But with Writing Walks, I want it to be more freeform. So I don’t know if it will be a monthly episode thing or you might get a couple of episodes a month and then just one the following month. But yeah, that’s how it’s going to be. The other reason I wanted to make this show is because hearing Sarah Rhea Werner talk so well in her Write Now podcast, it was inspiring to me to make myself better as a podcaster, as a talker and a podcaster. I have . . . I always have trouble with just improvising and talking off the fly. Getting pretty warm today, already eight o’clock and we’re already like in the seventies, then it’s supposed to hit a hundred. I always feel like I need to work off a script. I work better when I write the words down and not when I just stand up and talk. So Sarah again has inspired me here to work on this myself. To work on getting better as a speaker in podcasting and getting out my ideas more coherently and trying to tell the listener, whether it be me or other people, things I want to say.

So the framework of this show in my mind is kind of half me talking about my life a little bit and the writing of my life. And the other part will be about a specific writing concept that I want to talk about, that I link to myself to make it a personal thing. And I feel in that way I’ll show how it works for me and how it helps me as a writer. So today I wanted to talk about inspiration, finding inspiration when you’re wanting to write. For me, I find going outside in nature, going on a walk, going on a run, definitely getting the heart rate up a little bit. It’s like something maybe with getting the blood circulating around the body a little faster, you know, creates activity in the brain perhaps. I can remember shortly after I had my kid or my wife gave birth to my kid and we were raising him as a newborn, which was really tough. I fortunately, wasn’t working at that point and I hadn’t really done anything creatively for awhile because lack of sleep and finding out how to raise a newborn kid was definitely taking its toll. And so I started going on runs once we started getting our schedule down. A couple of times a week, I’d just go out jogging for half an hour, an hour. Listening to audiobooks. I hadn’t got into podcasts quite yet. It was definitely on the horizon at that point. Little did I know the world that would open up for me once I started on this little show called Welcome to Night Vale, but I was listening to audiobooks a lot then as I was running, a lot of Stephen King, unsurprisingly, and that then started ideas forming and coalescing in my mind. I can remember listening to the entirety of Stephen King’s “It.” And that started a whole germ of an idea that grew and grew, and became a novel I’m currently working on.

But I find when I’m out in nature, walking or running; doing something that has me a little bit focused, but also allows my mind to just kind of relax, and start thinking about things. It’s getting really hot out here now. I find nature and the world inspiring. I find that it puts me in a state that lets my brain start developing things, coming up with ideas. So, that’s what I recommend when you’re feeling trapped, stuck on an idea, dare I say suffering from some writer’s block: going out for a walk or a run, or even just sitting in a park and paying attention to people, animals, and birds, and nature, and everything going on around you. It lets your mind kind of relax. You’re watching the things going on and you’re only semi focused. So in the back of your mind, you’re able to work on ideas, and generate new thoughts and concepts, and let your mind just be creative and flow.

I also find when I’m working my day job as a mail carrier, and I’ve been doing it for over five years now. So it’s all pretty automatic for me. And I’m listening to podcasts while I’m doing it, which is awesome. That I’ll be doing stuff, doing the job automatically, without barely even thinking; everything’s pretty much reflexive at this point. And even though I don’t necessarily intend to do it, I’ll have this same state. Like when I’m walking, looking at nature, of my mind, in the back . . . always feels like it’s in the back, but it probably isn’t when you look at the creative center of the brain, wherever that is, but it feels like it’s in the back of my mind that I’m being creative and building and generating ideas.

I can remember the novel I’m working on. I hadn’t actually worked on it for a couple of years because Ostium and everything had taken over, become my main focus. And I can remember when I plotted out and outlined that novel. It was while I was doing a specific route that had a good chunk of walking in a specific area and just doing those park and loops every day. I can remember building on my mind of that outline, developing each chapter, looking at what the characters were trying to get out of it, looking at where the story was going to go. And then as soon as I get back to my truck to grab the next part of the walking, I’d take out my phone, bring up the voice app, and then record my thoughts and ideas that I’d just developed and come up with. So I feel there’s different ways one can be inspired; different ways that work for different people. And for me, as I said, walking and looking around in nature, seeing the immense beauty and complexity of this world.

At the end I’ll do a little book recommendation. If I can, if it’s a book I recently read and enjoyed, again, I take a feather out of the cap of Sarah Rhea Werner on Write Now, because that’s what she started doing in the earlier part of the show. So there’s a book I’ve read recently that I find I enjoyed, I kind of talk about it a bit. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about Clive Barker’s Cold Heart Canyon. It’s an old book from the early 2000s. I’ve been going recently through all the Clive Barker books, definitely going through a phase where I’m into horror. I go through reading phases where I’ll be really into for sci-fi for a while. Pick up all the epic sci-fi I haven’t done. Then I’ll switch to fantasy and then switched to horror and switch back and forth depending on what I’m into at that point, what just kind of gets my brain going and makes me want to learn more about, of those particular genres. So right now I’m going through a big horror phase. I don’t know if it’s because I, I do have plans to write a horror podcast. We’ll see, maybe next year I can work on that. And I don’t know if that’s part of it. Could be because Halloween’s coming up. You know. Maybe. Definitely gonna read some Poe this month. Anyway, so I’ve been reading a lot of Clive Barker and Cold Heart Canyon is this big, long book, 700 pages or so. I remember reading it when I was at Long Beach State, right when it came out and living in LA, as it’s set in LA, it was a pretty fun experience. So it’s about this old house in the Hollywood Hills, I guess kind of, in an area that became known as Cold Heart Canyon. It was owned by a famous silent voice actress. And it was known as a place that had a lot of parties with all the elite of Hollywood over the decades. And it was there all manner of things happened. It was the parties that have all the worst stories you can imagine, but nothing ever got out. It was all kept secret. So the main character is an older actor who is a big heartthrob, and he’s kind of starting to drop off the map a bit because there are newer, younger actors coming in. And so he decides he wants to do, uh, some plastic surgery try and make him look younger, gets kind of a half promise from a big producer that if he does it and it looks great, he’ll be put in a new movie. So he goes ahead and does it, and it doesn’t go well. And so now he has to recover and heal up. So he stays at this place called Cold Heart Canyon and there he finds all these Hollywood elites are still there, basically as ghosts. And that all that sordid underbelly of Hollywood is still alive and well through these ghosts. It’s an interesting story because it goes places you don’t always predict, characters are interesting. It does a really good job of just capturing that classic Hollywood feel that I know the author Clive Barker was going for. The hardcover edition actually remember because of the first printing had him on the cover in a fancy suit, which worked out well. So yeah, it’s a long book. There’s definitely, uh, some heavy language, some, uh, sex scenes in there and things like that. So if you’re not into that you might want to avoid it, but for a good Clive Barker book, it’s definitely up there.

I think that about does it for this first episode. So I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I certainly have, it’s definitely, to use a bad pun that I can’t avoid, opened a door for me and open up some things that have started generating in my mind. And I’m just going to keep going with it and see where it goes. Thanks again for listening. I’m not sure when the next episode will be. It also depends on my schedule cause I do this on my day off when I have time after I drop off my kid at school in the morning. So stay tuned. Thanks for listening.