Our Wacky Book Lists — Intentionally Blank Ep. 280

0:03 Hi, Isaac.

0:04 Hey Brandon. How's it going?

0:06 Good. Dan's still on vacation. And I say still because I'm recording this the same day that I recorded one with Jancy.

0:12 Okay.

0:12 And we talked about him being on vacation.

0:14 Cool. I hope he's somewhere fun.

0:16 We don't know where he is, but Donald thinks that it's someplace fun.

0:19 Huh. Mm-hmm. Hope so. Hope you're having a good time, Dan.

0:23 This is Isaac. He's been on before. He is VP of Creative Development and, you know, my good buddy. We've been collaborating forever. Ever since I saw him drawing on a tablecloth at dinner.

0:35 Yeah.

0:35 It was appropriate tablecloth. It was one of those restaurants that has like, you know, they give you crayons. They give you crayons and they put sheets of paper as tablecloth.

0:42 Yeah, it was funny because I was drawing a face and you're like, you draw? And I'm like, oh, have we never had this conversation? What I do? Right? And but you're like, want to do maps? But I was drawing a face. And but you didn't know that I had done tons of maps growing up.

0:56 I may not have during that era understood the specialties that different artists had and just thought, artist, hey, map.

1:04 Yeah. But it was an appropriate because I had I'd done so many maps by at that point.

1:10 But Isaac is whatever the creative equivalent of a polymath is. Internet tell us, is there another word for like polymath where multidisciplinarianism? Yeah. Where Isaac has had a rock band and is a music composer. Yeah. Has written and published books.

1:29 Yeah.

1:29 And also is a fantastic illustrator.

1:32 Oh, thank you. And I built lasting category at my house. Sorry, what? Yeah. People need to know about lasting cat tegrity. So we moved into this house and they had a dumb waiter. And somebody had like retrofit it, like they'd upgraded it, right? Because it had fallen apart. The house is from the 70s.

1:51 But they they did a really great job engineering it, but it weighed more than anything it would ever carry. And it was used for canning or something. And so Kara was like, I don't know where to put the cats in the new house. And and she's like, you should put them in the dumbwaiter channel. And so I gutted it and I got old carpet from another place in the house that we were remodeling.

2:17 And I like screwed it into the walls. I made it really nice. I gave them some levels and I shoved a cat tree up inside it. At the bottom is their automatic litter box. At the top it's a very big dumbwaiter. Yeah, well, it's it's two. Yeah. I mean it's it's like 30 by 30. Okay. Um, and then it's got three, three or four levels, but the cat levels are different than human levels, so it's only two floors of the house.

2:42 And then so I just open the dumbwaiter at the top level, and there's their food and their water, and it's all plugged in next to all of the stuff for my internet box that I remove the doorbell and put an internet box up there. And then there's little cat doors, so we don't have to have the cat trees out where everybody can see them.

3:00 But when you have people over and then you hear like the cat like clawing at the carpet inside the walls, it's kind of fun. It's like, oh, those are our cats in the walls.

3:08 That's legit awesome. I haven't heard of this before.

3:11 I finished it a couple weeks ago. But yeah, anyway, lasting category.

3:16 Our cats would like one, so you know. Well, in your spare time.

3:20 Yeah, maybe we can uh I can give you plans or something.

3:25 We thought we'd talk today. You guys have had me pull out my idea, my list of ideas, and Dan and I did a podcast on this little file. Isaac is famous for his wacky ideas.

3:37 Yeah.

3:38 In fact, when I first met Isaac, he was taking my class. And this was back in the era where I was the same age as the people that were taking the class, and I got to know a lot of the people taking the class quite well. And Isaac was writing two stories that one was not super weird. It was called Skyfather, it was science fiction-y sort of thing with some epic fantasy sort of narrative beats.

4:03 And then the other one was do you want to tell us what it was?

4:05 That was Double O'Santa.

4:07 Yep. What?

4:08 Yeah, and it and it had epigraphs that were sometimes longer than the chapter that it epigraphed for. Yep. But it was yeah, it just kind of took all this Christmas lore and turned it on its head. And Santa was a super spy. Yeah, Santa was a super spy, and so he had like a very neatly trimmed goatee and nice hair and the glass eyeball.

4:32 In the glass eyeball that he used. Very great effectiveness in the story. Yeah. I think he was tied up in the death trap, like whatever the criminal mastermind had him in a James Bond style death trap. And I think he popped his glass eyeball out and used it to escape that.

4:50 He used his like eye muscles too. Yeah. And I remember in writing group, it was like, I'm not sure he could do that, right?

4:57 But it's a story called Double O Santa.

4:59 Yeah. His son that is left at home is named Jeffrey and is an accountant. And the bad guy was a wombat.

5:08 Oh so this is Isaac. And we're going to look at some of his ideas. And it's actually I hope will be useful for writers because Isaac has talked to me before about how learning to wrestle the weird ideas into ideas that work in stories and then balancing them with more characterization things. Like Double O Santic just kind of didn't work.

5:28 Yeah.

5:28 And yet the Lopend story that he wrote in the Stormlight Archive, which was part of Story Deck, and now we publish it on its own from a premise that I gave him is fantastic. And it has some of those wacky ideas. Yeah. And yet they all work. And every one of them I smile at. And that's just an excellent piece of writing.

5:47 And so we can trace Isaac's journey. And maybe that'll be useful to those who are listening in some way, or at least interesting.

5:53 Yeah. Let me think about this for a second because I think as you say that, right? It's like, why did Double O'Santa, you know, it was fun, but it it ultimately didn't work. Yeah. Why did that not work? But Lopen does. And I think it's because the humor comes out of the character. And it's not, it's the Douglas Adams versus the Terry Pratchett thing, not trying to put myself on either of their levels, but Double O'Santa had more that narrator who is, you know, poking fun at things and showing things that are funny.

6:23 And Lopen is it's about the character. And if it's appropriate for the character, then it works.

6:29 So that maybe that's one thing that That's one thing. I also think that oh so random doesn't work as well as people think it does. Yeah. It's really hard to write oh so random and make it actually work. Yeah. And it obviously can work because Hitchhiker's Guide works. And it is the king of look how random this is.

6:53 It is the juxtaposition. Like, I believe they go to a planet of sapient mattresses that communicate through flatulence in those books. And that shouldn't work. Right. It should just be like the sort of thing that you tell and then people smirk, but then if you have to read pages and pages of it, the joke dies real fast.

7:14 Yeah. And he's able to make it work. But I think that's part of the thing. The joke dies real fast.

7:18 It can, right. Yeah. You have to treat it like a little more seriously for it to work. Yeah. But that's yeah, that's such a hard one. So many people have tried to do like flatulence aliens. That how does that work? How does Douglas Adams pull it off? But I I will still maintain, I think, that Terry Pratchett's characterization is one of the things that makes that work a little better.

7:38 He was better at characterization than Douglas Adams.

7:41 Yeah, or let's let's give Douglas Adams. I think he wrote the stories he wanted to write. Yeah. But I think Terry Pratchett's style of having solid plots and solid characterization, particularly when he started doing that. The early Terry Pratchett's did not. Elevated them for me. I bet there's readers out there that prefer the Douglas Adams style.

8:01 I don't think Douglas Adams wrote him poorly. He wrote the style of story he did, but there's a preference that we can have, right?

8:07 Yeah, I should say I'm not trying to put him down. It's more when I was reading those books, like the first one really got me. I'm like 12 or 13 reading this book and I loved it. It was so funny. And by the time I got to like book five, I wasn't quite as attached. And as a kid, I didn't know why. But I look back and it's like I don't know if I cared about the characters as much while I still finished them and enjoyed the jokes.

8:30 And I wonder if Douglas Adams had stuck around, if he would have gone in a very similar direction as Pratchett in some ways, right?

8:37 Maybe I do feel the Dirk Gently books have more characterization and whatnot. So who knows? Yeah. But I have not heard what's in Isaac's idea thing. I want you to pull out your weirdest ones.

8:50 I'm gonna pull out some of these, and then we can go to another thing that I learned about weird ideas that's also related to graphic design. Right. So we'll go to that afterward, if that's okay. I'm just curious what you got in here. So I have so many things full of ideas. I have a thing called characters and quirks, for example.

9:11 I have a thing called plot archetypes, and then I have one called incoming ideas and story ideas. So if I just have an idea, I just write it down. And some of these are the worst. So they've already heard my bad one. So yeah, a lot of times it's a title, and then so I'll look for like, oh yeah, I have this character idea, I have a title idea, and I start kind of rolling those around in my head.

9:31 Never happy endings for a title. That's pretty good. I don't know. It's interesting.

9:36 There's that play.

9:37 Yeah, I think it was inspired by the play. Now I can't remember the name.

9:40 Almost happy ending.

9:42 It was looking it up. It's great, it's fantastic. It's on Broadway. I loved it.

9:46 Maybe happy endings.

9:47 Maybe happy endings, right? I'm like, the opposite would be, you know, never happy endings. And then neverything is awesome. Like, is neverything a word, right? I'm like, now it is. Metal mines. So a lot of Mistborn-related things because my head spaces is there a lot. Metal Mines soothe my zinc heart soul.

10:06 I'm like, I don't even know what that means. I wanted a band, maybe like in the 1960s era, Mistborn called the Soothers.

10:15 Okay. You know, like they're like the crooners or something. That was actually a pretty good idea.

10:20 Yeah, we should star that. That they might not be our Beatles, but Yeah.

10:23 Yeah. I I think you could totally have that.

10:27 This title, and I don't know if I can even say it, but I said it in a meeting at one point. I was talking about where the current revision of my book was, and this was before it was in the state it was in right now, which is in actually pretty decent state. The title is Weird Cess Pit of Wonder Crap.

10:43 Why would you not be worried? I don't know. I just don't know what your your dad might listen. Right. And he's like, Oh now. My my dad's uh he's come back to me and said, he's like, you know how I told you back when you were a kid, don't be an artist. He's like, I retract that. So idea for a country song, Don't Let Me Die in Tennessee.

11:08 I don't know why. I like Tennessee, but it just sounded like a country song.

11:12 See, if you're gonna make it a country song, it should be Don't Let Me Die in New York City.

11:16 There you go. Yeah, yeah.

11:18 That would actually be right, like take me back to Tennessee.

11:23 Yeah. I like that. See, I'm writing it down. Title again, Metaphors for Megafauna. There's just kind of like a nice mouthfeel. An idea for a sticker or something, and then Quizzicorn. Instead of the What's the Inquisicorn? Inquisicorn is that they have taken the unicorn horns and they have used them like hemallergic spikes.

11:48 And driven them through someone's eyes. And driven them through somebody's eyes. Or a horse where it's broken off in it's like really terrible, but inquisicorn. You can only do one. You have to put one horn through their forehead instead of the eyes. And they get the powers of another unicorn, which is like instead of also pooping rainbows, it can like belch rainbows too.

12:10 Okay. I don't know. I don't know. Okay. Yeah. Or it gets the powers of Nyonkat. Okay. Sequel to the Emperor's Soul. I've got your title. Uh-huh. The Emperor's Soulmate. Okay. I don't know where that goes. So something I'm not going to tell you that one. I'm going to use that one. Okay. Yeah.

12:30 Don't tell us the ones you're going to use. I didn't I didn't do that either. Tell me this. So one of your other wacky ideas that worked is monsters don't wear underpants.

12:39 Yeah, monsters don't wear underpants. Again, that oftentimes these come from title ideas. Uh-huh. And then I mash that up with a character idea. I've also I didn't exhaust it. That was just incoming. So I can listen to the thing.

12:52 I just threw this at him right before, so he didn't have time to look through and prep them.

12:56 It's all good. So monsters don't wear underpants was my daughter, you know, at night. Yeah. It's like you're trying to get him bathed, and she was like three, and she would do this weird monster voice. She did all these funny voices when she was a kid. At first, like she sounded like a southerner, like she had a southern drawl.

13:14 Okay.

13:14 We were like, where did she get that? She just would make all her vowels longer. And then she started talking like a monster and tried to get her in the bath. And she's like, No, uh, you need to get in the bath, you need to put on clean underpants, and then you need to go to bed. No, monsters don't wear underpants.

13:30 And I was like, I completely lost getting her to bed. Yeah. Right? It was like all these ideas for a kid's lift the flap book came to mind.

13:40 It's called Monsters Don't Wear Underpants, a Lift the Flap Book.

13:43 Yep. For those parents who are like, I should be scared. No, don't be scared. It's it's supposed to just make you go, What is that? It's a very cute story. It's actually available on our website on the store.

13:54 But it is about a monster who doesn't want to wear underpants.

13:57 Yeah, it's about a monster who doesn't want to wear underpants. And so he jumps out of the bathtub and runs into the night. And then he goes around asking all the monsters in the neighborhood if they wear underpants. And it as his mom chases him, because that's really kind of an awkward question to be asking your neighbors.

14:11 Yep.

14:12 So the first one he comes to is a vampire, right? And so he's like, hey, do vampires wear underpants? And the the vampire lady has this like really like awkward look on her face, like, whose kid is this? And then you lift the flap and it says, Not when you're a bat, right? So the first half of the book is all the ones that he gives as evidence as to why he shouldn't wear underpants.

14:31 And then the second half of the book is the monsters that do wear underpants. It's his mom's rebuttal to the whole thing. By the end, he has learned a lesson. We'll just say that. But I have heard from many parents that this book got their kids reading at an early age because it's very short. It's my intention on this book was yeah, it's wacky, but if they're going to be parents reading these books, like any any of you have been parents, and your kid comes to you with a book that's just like walls of text, you're just like, oh, this was one that I didn't want parents to be tired of reading.

15:03 Uh, but they would read it so often to their kids, their kids would memorize it, and then their kids would learn it and learn to read. And they would also learn to wear underpants. So you'd be surprised.

15:14 Those of you who are listening and don't have kids, Donald, Scar maybe can back us up on this. He has kids. It can be surprisingly difficult to get children to wear clothes. Really? At a certain age, they just do not want to wear clothes. And they have enough autonomy to just make that decision and yet not enough age to know why this is a bad decision.

15:42 And so my children said we're naked and would run around without their clothes on. And my wife convinced them somehow that the nakes needed to be protected by guards. And the guards had to wear armor. And so Nakey guards had to wear clothing, at least diapers. And so she'd be like, Oh no, the Nakes are getting attacked.

16:08 And then they go, throw on pants to be the Nike guards and protect the Nakes. So that was her solution.

16:16 I think that's pretty good. Like, that's some good use of like logic for kids that they can understand, right?

16:22 Yeah. And they'd be like, We're gonna be naked. She'd be like, Nope, Nakey guards. And it was a compromise.

16:29 I I'm gonna embarrass my brother slightly on this one. I only know that this is true because my brother, somehow in his infinite wisdom around that same age, tried to climb outside onto the roof naked. And I only remember my mother telling me this story, going, It was when I got a phone call about a child, you know, standing in the window naked, trying to get out, that I realized, ah, this is what parenting is like.

16:52 So I'm understanding a little bit of what you mean.

16:55 Yep. Yep. So you had a thing that you'd learned about graphic design you were gonna tell.

17:00 Yeah, yeah. Tying up the monsters don't wear underpants thing. One of the interesting things there is again, wacky idea, right? But I used principles of storytelling in it. If you look at like almost screenplay format, like what do you you have a twist in the middle? And I structured it like you would a screenplay.

17:21 Yeah. And so if you look at it, it's I feel like it's very well structured. And that's one of the reasons I think it works as a story, but it was interesting to get that in there when it's like, I don't know, 200 words long. So the wacky idea I made sure had what I think is pretty decent art and a good storytelling structure underneath.

17:41 That's one of the things that I think people underestimate how powerful good structure is. How writing is this interesting mix. I'm sure all the other creative fields have the same mixes, but of the structure plus the wild imagination, and the two of them kind of have to be in harmony in some way for stories to work.

18:05 I mean, this is part of the reason that a wacky story like Cloudy with a chance of meatballs works. Yeah. Right. Because it really has a lot of the same DNA in some ways as the double Osanta. Like all these wacky ideas, right? Yep. Chicken Brent. Yeah. But it worked because they'd you're talking about the film.

18:25 The film, not the picture book. Yes. The picture book is just a wacky idea. Yeah. But it's short, so it doesn't overstay. It's welcome. But the film by Lord Miller. Lord and Miller, yep. Just is way better than it has any right to be. Yeah, exactly. Like everyone I know who's watched the film is like, wow, that was really good.

18:41 Why is this why is this really good?

18:43 I mean, a guy's like wearing a raw turkey at the end. And it works. It's just strange, but I love it. Same with the Lego movie. There's, you know, it's wacky, but part of it's the structure that pulls it together. So with weird ideas and graphic design, it's actually something I started to learn from Jancy a long time ago because I was in a writing group with her for a long time.

19:04 And I would have all these wacky ideas. And in chatting with her, it was like Isaac, you get one big wacky idea in a book. Right. And then you can have some supporting wacky ideas, but the weirder you go, right? You have like you have a dollar of wacky ideas, and the rest of the book is like five dollars.

19:23 And so if you spend too much wacky ideas, you know what I mean. And this works with hierarchy in graphic design, where typically if everything is the same size on a page, you don't know where to look. So when you're doing graphic design, you have to be very intentional about where you want people looking.

19:44 And it's the same way, I mean, Mary Robinetts talked about this with puppets, being intentional about where they're looking, right? And you are the leading the reader through this. If you marry that with wacky ideas, you have to be intentional with the ideas in the book and say, here's my one big idea for the book, the wacky idea that I want you to look at.

20:03 And if there are other wacky ideas, it needs to really kind of work with that one.

20:08 My big and this one's less wacky than just a difficult-to-swallow premise. My favorite example of this working really well is Scythe by Neil Schusterman, which is an excellent book. And Scythe has perhaps the most difficult to swallow dystopian premise of all of them. Are you familiar with Scythe? The cover is fancy.

20:31 Unwind. Unwind is the one. Scythe has a premise that's very Isaac. You would just yeah. Okay. Scythe is like, yeah. But Unwind, the premise is that to solve the abortion debate in the future, abortions are banned. But when your child is like turning 16, you can choose to give them up and have them killed for parts.

20:55unknown Wow.

20:56 Spare parts really dark which can be given to people who need them. And so this is a premise that's just like no one's going to accept that this is a logical place the abortion debate would go. Right. Right. But Neil gets that one just like this is the premise. Just accept it and see what I do with it.

21:17 And it has that little like a lot of teenagers feel like their parents would give them up. Not maybe really, but you feel out of place. You feel like you don't. Do my parents even like me? Do my parents even like me? Would they have me unwound? And so, because of that, like again, you're hearing this premise, you're like, Brand, that's the stupidest premise.

21:37 It's not stupid. It's merely highly, highly implausible. And in this way, kind of this weird. He makes you just say, if you're willing to accept it, then he can do all kinds of cool things with the story that couldn't be done in a different story. Yeah. And like that's what this weirdness gives us is you can then tell.

22:00 Tell stories that you couldn't tell anywhere else or any way else, but you do need to get the audience to swallow sometimes a couple of big pills.

22:09 Yeah, it's kind of like magic systems in a way, right? It's all suspension of disbelief because when you have a magic system, you're basically telling people, hey, I know that this isn't like the real world, but here are the rules that make it work. And that's kind of the same thing is you get that one big thing, you know what I mean?

22:25 It's like you do too many other strange things going on in that, and the suspension of disbelief is just broken. Yeah. So if you had something in there again where it's like, and they're amassing nuclear warheads in kids' basements.

22:39 Yeah. Right. And the tone of the book probably like a lot of books have one dollar. There might be books with two or three dollars, maybe for these sorts of things.

22:48 You got to get more and more skilled though, like Douglas Adams in that way, if you you want to spend more money on the wacky ideas. But I think part of it too is that the stakes. So based on your unwind premise, I don't know. There, there's kind of a, I don't know, maybe there's a fugitive-esque thing going on there.

23:04 I haven't read it, but that's what it sounds like where it would go. And it's like, okay, well, that's a plot we've seen before. He's hanging like this, you know, weird, unplausible idea on a plot structure that he just knows is going to work. Yeah. And the other thing too is if the stakes are he's doing this to save the old folks' home, you know what I mean?

23:24 It's like, oh, that doesn't work. It has to be the stakes are his life.

23:27 Yeah.

23:28 Because that's not an unrealistic stake, really, in most stories.

23:32 Yeah. We started this off kind of talking about how you're a polymath for the arts, whatever that is.

23:40 Yeah.

23:40 I wanted to ask you, kind of as we get near the end here, like, how do you juggle that? You have so many masters. I know this is yeah, but I I know there's gonna be people listening who are the same way. They have so many things they want to do. You've done it for as long as I've known you. You took my class despite having an illustrious career as a video game artist, because you wanted to study writing also.

24:06 So for our very first meetings, this was Isaac. So, what advice can you give?

24:13 Yeah, not to mention that I had all those science classes too.

24:16 Yeah, because you've gone back to maybe become an optometrist.

24:19 Yep, and I'd had been on the dentistry track for a while too. And I really oh yeah. I mean, I should say this right here. The second time I took chemistry because I waited so long, I had to take it again, was one of the best classes for me for working in the Cosmere because of the way the teacher taught it and the way that it was like, here's the rules for chemistry.

24:40 And the way he taught it was now that I've given you all these tools, tell me why it rains. You know what I mean? From a molecular level. Right. And it's like, I loved that. And it it's been really helpful for like magic systems and things like that. But that's beside the point. We're talking about balancing.

24:56 Well, I'm still working on this. I'm getting a little better because I can also be somebody who it's like shiny new 3D printer, and I get a 3D printer and all the stuff for it, and then your basement floods, and I never get back to it. You know, so there's like some hobby type things going in there, and you have to learn your limitations and know what's realistic.

25:18 But I think it was Stephen R. Covey, and I could be wrong, but somebody asked him a similar question, and he's like, Well, you can do anything and everything that you want to, but you get two things. It was something like that, right? Yeah, and I've thought about that a lot, and it's like you really do have to choose.

25:35 Otherwise, you haven't done the music in a long time. I haven't. Yeah. I still write lyrics and things, but I haven't played my guitar in a long time. And that's something that I looked at and I said, I miss this. I want to make time to do this as just relaxing. But that means it has to be one of my things.

25:54 You know what I mean? It's like something else has to give. And so I think if I were to give people advice, wow, it's really hard because you kind of have to just do what's gonna work for you, but but don't ignore the important things in your life. I remember Dave Wolverton, Dave Farland.

26:12 I still remember this exact speech you're gonna talk about.

26:15 Yeah, you and I I I somehow just missed you. I took it twice, and I think the year I didn't take it, you guys took it, or I was right after you. But but he was very clear. He's like, I've seen so many people ruin their careers in the arts because they do the arts to the ignoring of the people who are important in their life.

26:36 And he basically gave us a lecture about get people on board in your family, but then give them back time. So I'm sorry this is all over the place.

26:48 It's all right. It's an all-over-place topic by its nature. So what you're saying is you do sometimes have to let some of those You have to let some of them go. You have to let some of them go. And maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but I've seen, watched you do this, I've known friends who have done this.

27:04 You can have a hundred hobbies because a hobby you can let go of at any time. You can't have a hundred career paths. Yeah. And deciding which of these things you are actually going to take and professionalize in and what you may just leave for yourself to have as a hobby, yeah, that you don't, and maybe should be clear with yourself, it's okay if you don't get to it because it is a hobby.

27:28 And it's okay if it gets replaced by another one in six months, if that's the sort of person you are. My college roommate, Tom, I was like this. New hobby, he'd get very into it. He would do it for a year, and then he would find another one. And as he's gotten older, they've lasted longer. But in college, he'd cycle through them like every couple months.

27:49 Like he'd get into Magic of the Gathering, have the best decks, and then he would sell all his magic cards and he'd suddenly be into music. Yeah. And we made fun of him for it, but it's okay.

27:58 There's nothing wrong with that. There isn't actually. And I mean, we grew up in the era when you did scouting, and it's very similar to like there's this rented emitted thing in scouting where you have to get your community merit badge, and then but I mean, I did a cinematography merit badge and learned I like to animate.

28:12 It's what are these skills that are going to be good in your life? But it's more like directed to your own interests, what Tom was doing. And there's nothing wrong with that because if you're interested in something for a while, you've gained some knowledge there that you could use somewhere else. I gave a lecture at LTUE a couple years ago.

28:29 It's a local science fiction convention. Yeah. And I talked about how the wandering was not bad.

28:36 Yeah. It led you to the path that you ended up on.

28:39 Yeah.

28:40 If you hadn't been willing to wander, you wouldn't have taken the how to write science fiction fantasy class.

28:44 Yep.

28:45 We would not have met. I would not have met Emily. Dragon Steel most likely wouldn't exist.

28:50 It'd be in a different form, at least. But also like I started learning how to lay out books. I just felt like, oh, this is something I want to do. I started doing it. I reached out to a friend of ours in New York and she hired me, and I started learning how to create books and lay out books. And I started doing these fake leatherbound books for you and doing books for like my brother, and just like for fun, right?

29:13 It was like gifts. You gave me stars end and first unpublished one.

29:18 It's not very good.

29:19 The reason I did that one was because it was short. Yeah. But it was also near the beginning of it was the first. It was the first.

29:25 Yeah. The first I finished.

29:26 Okay, right.

29:27 No, no, no, no, it's not. You're right. White sand is White Sand. It's the second. Yeah.

29:31 Yeah. Early white sand was kind of divided into two parts, but yeah, I see what you mean. But it was a good practice one. So that wandering gave me this skill that then we used to figure out between you know Peter and me, how do how do we make a leather-bound book? And that's led us down an interesting path.

29:49 But it's that wandering. And don't be afraid to wander in those ways because it's like a side quest. The side quests oftentimes they give you the things that you need for the main quest.

30:01 So well, I got through a lot of those copies of Mistborn. Nice. They go faster than the others do because those are eight pages. Uh maybe 16. Mistborn is 16. 16. Is this that's appropriate? Yeah. Mistborn is 16.

30:15 16 pages. So yeah. My favorite size of signature. Though we have been doing some eight ones as well because table of contents.

30:23 Yep. So they look like they just zip past compared to the other ones. Oh, yeah, right, because you get a stack that maybe it's like there's 3,000 in that. Yeah. But thanks for being here, Isaac. Hopefully uh we'll see Dan next time. Okay. But we're always happy to have you. Thanks. How's that, Ben?