[00:00:00.00] – John Knych
Hello everyone, thank you for being here today. We are with Ed Ashton to discuss After the Fall. Ed has been with us before. He talked with us about Mal Goes to War last year, and After the Fall is his 7th novel. And Ed, usually I begin with asking the author about the origin of their book, but I want to throw a curveball at you. So you mentioned last talk that you used to work for the CIA, correct?
[00:00:32.24] – Ed Ashton
I can neither confirm nor deny that.
[00:00:34.18] – John Knych
Yeah. Well, so you appreciate background check questions. So my question is, John, the protagonist of this book, his knowledge of putting wooden blocks under crossbars to fix the collapsed bed, then Six and John’s woodcutting scene, does this stem from the own work you’ve done on your own deck and your own construction?
[00:00:54.11] – Ed Ashton
I have done a surprising amount of construction work. I’ve, over the last 10 years, I’ve built 7 decks, which is more decks than most non-deck-building people probably build in a lifetime. So yeah, I, that I try, I try to get little bits and pieces of my life into my books because it’s, you know, it’s fun to talk about stuff that has been obsessing you recently. And so yeah, there probably was a little bit of that coming in.
[00:01:22.06] – John Knych
Thank you. Yeah, it felt, it felt real when they were building that bit. I thought, You’ve done it.
[00:01:24.06] Ed Ashton
Yeah, yeah, that is drawn from true life. Yes.
[00:01:30.12] – John Knych
Excellent. Thank you. Okay, on to Brandon.
[00:01:34.13] – Brandon
Yeah, Ed, thank you for being here.
[00:01:37.10] – Ed Ashton
So really, thank you.
[00:01:38.15] – Brandon
Really appreciate when authors come on and talk to us. So my question is, you kill off most of humanity in this book and turn them into pets. So what made you want to do that? And kind of what the origins of the book are for this?
[00:01:55.19] – Ed Ashton
I should start off by saying I do not actually want to kill off most of humanity. That is not— that’s not a personal goal of mine. In terms of the origins of the structure of the story, where it came from, this actually originated with something that happened to me, like most of my books. Something that happened to me or something that was obsessing me at the time. I had a dog named Max, and Max was my absolute best friend in the world for 17 years. He went everywhere that I went. When I sat down, he came and flopped himself on top of me. When I went out— when I live in a cabin in the middle of the woods— when I went out for a walk, he was right on my heels. He went everywhere that I went. I loved him. As much as anybody can love anybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you get me. Yeah. And we lost him 2 years ago and it was absolutely gutting. It was one of the hardest things that’s ever happened to me. And it got me thinking about the relationship that I had with him because I knew how it was from my end, but I didn’t know how it looked to him.
[00:03:07.21] – Ed Ashton
You know, every, because there’s such, in a relationship like that, there’s such an imbalance of power. Every choice that is made is my choice. Max didn’t actually get to choose. When we were, when we were going out for a walk, he didn’t get to pick where we went. He didn’t get to pick when we went. He might have preferred to go some other way and, and smell some other stuff, and he was stuck going along with me. And it made me question whether you really can truly have love and, or even friendship, when there is no equality at all, when there’s such a huge imbalance of power. And that’s the, that’s the main question that I, I really wanted to explore more with this book.
[00:03:47.15] – Brandon
Thank you.
[00:03:48.04] – John Knych
Fascinating. Thank you, Brandon. Thank you, Ed. Yeah, so Nick has never read this before. For dog lovers, I mean, you just captured that, Ed. I mean, I love my dog too, and there are tons of subtle moments that captured that. Thank you. Onto Noemi.
[00:04:06.21] – Noémie
Yes, thank you, John, and thank you, Edward, for being there with us today. As John mentioned, it is your 7th novel. How would you say your writing evolved since your first novel? Has anything changed for you in the way you write or in the way you process maybe characters, different events? Or is it exactly the same thing and you haven’t changed as an author, which I doubt, but maybe it is possible.
[00:04:29.03] – Ed Ashton
Oh, good Lord, I hope that’s not true. I think like, like anything else, You know, no matter what level of skill you think you have, you always can improve and you always get better. I always think my father was a professional musician. He was a jazz musician, and he used to tell me the story of the, of this elderly violin master in his, in his 90s, and he practices every day for 2 hours every day. And one of his students asked him at some point, you’re 97 years old. Why, why are you still practicing 2 hours every day? And he says, because I think I’m improving. Um, and I, I think that, that no, like I said, no matter where you are in your professional development or your personal development, if you’re not trying to improve and trying to get better at what you’re doing, you’re, you’re probably doing it wrong. And I definitely can see, uh, you know, looking back from my first novel, which, which came out in 2015, to this one, I can see steady improvement in my skills, in my ability to capture a character, in my ability to really structure a clean plot.
[00:05:39.06] – Ed Ashton
I can see improvements from each book to the next as they go. I mean, I just— the audio edition for my debut novel, Three Days in April, actually just released last year, 10 years after the print edition came out. Don’t ask me why that worked out that way. But I went back and listened to it. And like one thing I noticed in that book, readers are— the characters are constantly raising their eyebrows. Like nobody raises their eyebrows as much as my characters in that book raise their eyebrows. I’m just listening to that and kind of cringing inside as I hear that. And that might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. If you reread this book, you will find virtually no examples of eyebrow raising, and I consider that to be a big improvement in my style and in my work. And there’s lots of other little things, and they all seem small and subtle, but they add up to a much, much better book, in my opinion.
[00:06:38.14] – Noémie
Thank you so much. I will note on my own novel, no eyebrow raising. This is an improvement. I will get into that. Thank you so much.
[00:06:48.01] – John Knych
Thank you, Naomi. Thank you, Ed. On to Brian. Hey, Ed, good to talk to you again. Um, so I have not been able to actually get a copy of After the Fall in Taiwan yet. Um, I’m trying to avoid Amazon.
[00:07:03.20] – Ed Ashton
Um, yeah, I think, uh, it should be out there in June if I understand the schedule.
[00:07:10.04] – John Knych
Okay. Yeah, cool. Well, then I will keep an eye out. Um, But I do still have a question. Last time when we talked about Mal Goes to War, there was a lot of discussion of like AI and development of technology and kind of the ethics of its use. And you brought in some things about, you know, your other work and how you engage with new technological developments. I was wondering in this novel, is there an element like that where, you know, you’re engaging with something More, more from real life. Um, obviously you already talked about the relationship, uh, that people have with, you know, pets, with their dogs. Um, but is there, is there anything else in this one, um, that I should expect of like, uh, maybe different technology or different things in societal developments, uh, political issues, things like that?
[00:08:02.18] – Ed Ashton
Um, this is not, um, this is not a tech wizardry book. There’s not. In fact, one of the things that I did deliberately as a choice, considering that they’re sort of alien invaders, I made the Grays substantially low-tech. Their society is not a tech-based society. And I said that was a deliberate choice. This book is about the characters, and in particular, it’s about the relationship between between John and Martok, who are the two main characters. And that’s what I wanted to talk about. I did not want to get distracted with, you know, tech this and ray gun that. I like that stuff. I put that kind of stuff in other books, but that is not what I wanted to talk about in this book. So this is a distinctly low-tech version of science fiction, I think, is a way to think about it.
[00:08:56.15] – John Knych
Awesome.
[00:08:56.23] – Ed Ashton
Thank you.
[00:08:59.24] – John Knych
Thank you, Brian. On to Jen.
[00:09:03.21] – Jen
Hi, thanks for being here. Um, I think that kind of leads into my question, um, talking about just the intention of focusing on their relationship. Um, so you leave the nature of the fall itself pretty vague. Um, was that an intentional choice because you were just focused on the characters? Was there more at some point in there about what actually happened, or that you just wanted to you know, and we’re just going to set that aside and focus on John and Martok.
[00:09:33.09] – Ed Ashton
That was, that was also a deliberate choice, and that’s one that I thought about a lot. I know what happened. I had to build that, build that stuff up in my own head so that I could understand sort of what the effects would be and how, how I ought to build the world around it. But the thing that I deliberately wanted to leave out and leave vague was whose fault was it? Because one of the points that I was trying to explore is, is there any profit in trying to figure out something awful has happened and it happened hundreds of years ago, generations ago, not due to the fault of anyone living today? Is it really profitable to go back and try and figure out, well, you know, whose fault is it and who should we blame? I didn’t want that to be a focus. And so I— and I also wanted to talk a little bit about, um, propaganda and how all of our views are shaped by what we hear and what we’re taught, and which may not be the whole truth. So John, uh, has one view of what happened, and that’s what was drilled into him by the Grays in, in the Krysh.
[00:10:43.04] – Ed Ashton
And he believes it was 100% humans, they ruined the world, and the Grays came in and, and basically saved the survivors. From extinction. They’re heroes. They rescued us. Six, having been raised by feral humans, has a completely different view and a completely different story that the Grays came in and did this to us. They destroyed our thriving society to enslave us. And I wanted to leave that question unresolved because at the end of the day, you have to deal with the world as it is. And going back and saying it’s your fault or it’s my fault is not, uh, it’s not productive, it’s not useful, and it doesn’t help you deal with how we can move forward together. I mean, the humans and the Grays have to work together now. They’ve got this ruined planet that they need to deal with, and if any of them are going to survive, they have to work together. And that was kind of the point that I wanted to make there.
[00:11:32.06] – Jen
Yeah, thank you.
[00:11:35.09] – John Knych
Thank you, Jen. So I assume, Nick, you don’t have any questions since you haven’t read it. Uh, up to you now. Pass. Um, the Ed, I messaged you this, but the character of Martok is just brilliant. I’m going to try to not spoil anything too much for Brian or Nick, but Martok is the owner of John, and when I finished the book, what struck me was, as you mentioned before, there’s this power imbalance, but Martok is still— I loved him. I liked him and connected with him. So my question is, did he come out fairly naturally as a character in that you knew sort of his foibles and his— how he was, or did you really have to grind and sort of craft him to sort of fit that power imbalance but also the the empathy that the reader would care about Martok and want him to do well.
[00:12:41.23] – Ed Ashton
Yeah, I mean, I’ll say up front, Martok, I think, may be my favorite character of all the ones that I’ve crafted for my different books. I really like him too. I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to the audio edition, but John Peralla absolutely nails him. He voices him absolutely perfectly, like exactly the way He actually— I had a call with John after he did the audio, and he said that he expected he would get some hazard pay for this one because the voice that he did for Martok hurt his throat and he had to stop. He had to sort of stop narration every, you know, 20 minutes or 30 minutes and like drink some chamomile tea or something and go on. But I appreciate the effort he put to that because he just, he said, just absolutely perfect. And yeah, it was a very deliberate crafting of that character. The Grays in general are kind of menacing. They’re scary, they’re extremely powerful and can be really callous and brutal, particularly in how they relate to humans. And I needed to sand those rough edges off from Artok to make him to make him relatable.
[00:13:59.12] – Ed Ashton
And so I had to take this incredibly powerful, dangerous creature and also make him kind of a buffoon and like a good-natured buffoon who’s really sort of trying his best to do what’s right as he sees it. And that, you know, that did take a lot of work. That was, like I said, I probably put more effort into crafting this character than I have almost any of my other characters as well, because to take someone again, sort of dangerous and menacing and make them at the same time sort of lovable is— it was a challenge and I knew it would be a challenge going in, but I feel like I feel like I hit my mark on this one. I really do.
[00:14:39.06] – John Knych
Definitely. Thank you. On to Brendan. Back to Brendan. Pass. Back to Noemi.
[00:14:50.23] – Noémie
Yes, sorry. Was there one scene, maybe a character that really took you by surprise when you wrote it? Or maybe it was an intense part of the creation and writing process, maybe in this book or another one, whichever you prefer.
[00:15:10.04] – Ed Ashton
Yeah, that happens to me all the time. You know, when we talk about different types of writers, there’s this kind of ongoing debate between, you know, plotters and pantsers. And we don’t, I think we don’t like the term pantsers. We prefer to be called discovery writers, right? I definitely fall into the latter category. I’ve described my process for creating a book as more like walking down a dark country road in the fog and you think there’s a house at the end, But you don’t know, it might be a bear. You, you don’t really know what’s, what’s gonna wind up down there. And I usually don’t get a clear view of how everything’s gonna wrap up until I’m 50 or 60,000 words in. That’s, that’s just how I, that, that, that’s just how I work. I, I would love to have everything plotted out and know exactly how my book’s gonna wind up and exactly how my characters are gonna work at the beginning. That seems like a much nicer, funner way to, to, to write a book. But I just, like, I’ve tried, I can’t do it. When I, when I try to put together a, like a detailed synopsis of a book up front, everything just seems really dumb.
[00:16:18.03] – Ed Ashton
Everything I write down just seems really dumb and pointless. And, and so I, you know, I, I write and I trust my brain is gonna get me where, where, where it needs to go. And it, it usually does. And so there, there always are little bits and pieces that I’m going along and I’m like, wow, I, I would not have thought that I was gonna drop that in right here, but I guess I did. And Like, it works. It works. That just happened with the book that I’m drafting right now. I’m in the middle of drafting a book that’s due in December, and I’m about a quarter of the way in, and I just dropped in a new character who I had not considered was even going to exist when I started drafting this book. But I needed someone right at this point, and I needed a specific type of person, and It just sort of came to me and I dropped him in. And as soon as I did, it felt right. It’s like, oh yeah, no, something in the back of my brain was planning for this person to be here all the time.
[00:17:12.06] – Ed Ashton
It didn’t tell me about it, but it was clearly they were planning for it. Because as soon as I dropped it, you say, oh wait, I foreshadowed that 3 chapters ago. I didn’t consciously do it, but it was like when I go back and I look, I see, okay, I see the hints that this is going to come. So yeah, that work is getting done in like my cerebellum or something. And then it doesn’t get revealed to my conscious mind until it needs to come out. But it makes the writing process fun because I’m kind of reading along, discovering the book as I go.
[00:17:46.12] – Noémie
I guess the lesson must be to trust the process or something like that.
[00:17:51.01] – Ed Ashton
It can be scary to do that sometimes, particularly when you’ve signed a contract and you’ve already cashed the advance check and, you know, if you don’t deliver, they’re going to want their money back. Uh, it can be a little scary to trust that your brain’s gonna come through for you. But, um, and like I said, if I could have a detailed outline upfront and know exactly what I was gonna do, I’d be a lot more comfortable in the way that I work. But I just, that’s, that’s not how my process works. So yeah, at this point, and it works great. Yeah. This, I mean, this is my 9th novel that I’m working on now. Um, my brain’s come through for me on all the last 8. And so I, yeah, I just have to trust it’s not gonna let me down.
[00:18:28.20] – Noémie
It works so far.
[00:18:29.19] – Ed Ashton
So yeah, so far, so far so good.
[00:18:32.08] – Noémie
Thank you.
[00:18:34.18] – John Knych
Thank you, Noemi. I skipped Logan. Logan, if you have any questions, you can jump in or we’ll continue around the horn.
[00:18:44.15] – Ed Ashton
Yeah.
[00:18:45.03] – Logan
Hey, Ed, sorry I jumped on late. I’m putting out some fires at work this morning. So one thing I I did have a little trouble visioning throughout reading the book was, what do these characters look like? Um, you know, I, I went into it viewing them as kind of a dog-human hybrid based off of the COVID and the concept of the humans are the pets. I pictured a pet as the human, but, um, as I advanced through the book, I realized that my perception on that was probably wrong. What, what do you picture like Martok looking like physically, or what would that character look like in a movie or show, I guess?
[00:19:31.05] – Ed Ashton
You know what, I— we’re often taught to show, not tell, so I’m going to show you, not tell you, if you’ll excuse me for just a second.
[00:19:45.09] – John Knych
He’s living with a Martok. Or maybe he drew it. There you go.
[00:20:00.09] – Ed Ashton
That’s the Martok.
[00:20:02.24] – Logan
By the end, that’s closer to what I was expecting.
[00:20:08.09] – Ed Ashton
Usually when I’m doing sort of an alien creature, I start with some sort of terrestrial model I don’t, I try not to just sort of, you know, like take a tiger and make them walk on two feet and say, that’s my alien. That seems kind of lazy to me, but I have to start with some sort of model. And the model I started with for the Grays was the elephant. I modeled some of their behavior on elephant behavior, certainly some of their features and the way that they’re built. In particular, the, the concept of absenting I built around the concept of male elephants going to musth, if you’re familiar with that, with that process. Um, sort of this thing that happens around breeding season where rogue male elephants just absolutely go berserk and, and will murder anything that gets in their way. They’re famous for just like tracking down rhinoceroses and just murdering them for no reason. Just literally they will just go and murder a rhino for no reason. Uh, it’s a, it’s a hormonal issue. Um, you know, elephants are very sensitive, very intelligent creatures, but when they go into musth, they just turn into these sort of unstoppable killing machines.
[00:21:21.10] – Ed Ashton
And that’s, that’s kind of, uh, was, was my model for the, you know, for the phenomenon of absenting that I described with the grays. So yeah, I borrowed pretty heavily from the elephant for these guys. The COVID art is probably not helpful in terms of people’s expectations for what everything looks like in this book. I’m not really sure. There is a theme of wolf versus dog as applies to humans, and I think that’s what the COVID artist was going for there. But I think it led to an expectation that when the Grays come in, that they’re actually like dog people, and that was not what I was going for at all. So interesting.
[00:22:07.02] – Logan
That’s awesome.
[00:22:07.18] – John Knych
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, good, good question, Logan. Yeah, because I, I, I also pictured them differently in the, in the book than, than the COVID So that make— that makes sense. Uh, back to Brian. Back to Jen, or pass?
[00:22:33.09] – Jen
Um, that makes me wonder, how, um, how does that process work with choosing the COVID and the artist? And, um, do you have, um, like final say over that, or can you give ideas, or do they just come sort of present things to you and say, do you like this, do you like that?
[00:22:51.08] – Ed Ashton
So what typically happens for me, and I think this varies for different authors and different publishing houses and depending on how much particular pull you have. Like, I’m sure John Scalzi gets a lot more pull on what his covers are gonna look like than I do. But they will solicit some suggestions or ideas for me upfront. I just, they just asked me if I had any vague ideas for what my next book’s cover ought to look like. Which I just turned in about a month ago. But then they don’t necessarily take those suggestions into account. They tend to sort of go their own way. They’ve got their own department. You know, they have a graphic design department who does their cover work, and then they’ll come back with sometimes 2 or 3 different concepts and ask me to look at them and say, do I prefer one or the other? Would I, you know, are there any changes I would make? For this particular one, they just came up with the one concept. They sort of presented it to me and it was substantially different than the way that the COVID looks now. I did have some objections to the way that it was originally designed and they let me make some tweaks around the edges in terms of what the background looked like and the color scheme and things like that.
[00:24:12.05] – Ed Ashton
I have a I have a close friend who’s a professional artist who helps me review these sorts of things. She’s obviously a much more visual person than I am. And she had some really good suggestions and they took some of them and they ignored some of them. But at the end of the day, as the artist, you don’t actually have any control at all. They can do absolutely anything that they want. I don’t think they try to be mean about it, but, you know, if I come back with, no, I want you to do this entirely different concept, that’s not going to go well for me, that that’s not a fight that I can win. So I try to work with them to mold things where I can. But in general, you know, the COVID winds up looking pretty much like what the original concept was that they gave me.
[00:24:57.03] – Jen
Okay, that’s interesting. Thanks.
[00:25:01.06] – John Knych
Thank you, Jen. Ed, there’s a line in the book where Martok says, But great gains must always keep company with terrible risks. This is simply the way of the world. And that quote made me think of Mickey 7. So I think you all know Mickey 7 made into a movie, huge success. And Mickey 7 is on that journey because of a bad bet. And you have mentioned in a previous talk, correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve had in your life, like you’ve been climbing before and you’ve been hanging by like two fingers, um, like close to death. So my question is very philosophical, but what are your thoughts on, on risk? Because the opening of this book, Martok is taking a big risk. Mickey Seven, that whole story is from a bet. Uh, what’s, what’s your relationship with risk and, and how, how do you live with it? How do you think about it?
[00:26:00.01] – Ed Ashton
So yeah, first of all, I think it is fair to say that I was an extremely stupid young man. I would like to think that I’ve gotten smarter as I’ve gotten older, but my approach to life has been generally to, to be pretty conservative about a lot of things in terms of like my finances and how I you know, sort of how I’ve managed my career punctuated by enormous sudden risks where I saw opportunities. And I think, I think that’s, if you, if you’re continuously taking enormous risks, you’re going to wind up, you’re going to wind up dead. There’s a, I don’t know if you saw, if you saw the movie documentary Free Solo. Um, you familiar with that?
[00:26:55.15] – John Knych
I didn’t see it, but I saw the, uh, it’s, um, climbs El Capitan, is that right?
[00:26:59.18] – Ed Ashton
The— yeah, he free soloed up El Capitan. Um, that guy’s— he’s, he’s gonna die at some point. He’s gonna die in a really bad way. And he, like, he’s fully conscious of that because when you do free solo climbing, you, you only get one mistake. Once you make one mistake, that is the last mistake you ever make. And you wind up as— and there is in that documentary, there is a montage of his contemporaries and his friends doing what they call falling through the shot, which is, you know, they do these climbs with, you know, teams of cameramen and photographers from drones and from and hanging from ropes to document the whole thing. And if they mess up, they fall through the shot, they fall, and you just see their body shooting down through the shot. And then, you know, 1,000 feet down, They’re, they’re, they’re a wet spot on the rocks. And that is how free solo climbers end their lives. Like, uniformly, that is, if you take up that sport and you decide this is what you’re going to do, you are accepting that your life is going to end in a fall to, to, at, at some point, whether it’s, whether it’s now or tomorrow or 10 years from now, that’s what’s going to happen.
[00:28:11.21] – Ed Ashton
Uh, and, and he’s accepted that. And I am not that. I am not accepting that, but I have, you know, for instance, my, in my, in my professional career, I started out after I completed my doctorate, I worked for the government for 5 years and that’s a very safe career. You can, you know, you can, you can do that. And I mean, maybe not right now so much, but at the time you could do that. You could sort of lock in and guarantee you’d have a nice pension at the end of the day and you’d be solidly upper middle class for the rest of your life. And 5 years into that, I quit my job and I founded my own company. I jumped out with literally $75,000 of funding that I had gotten, that our team had gotten, which was enough to fund us for about 3 months on a very shoestring budget. And I quit my job and I sold my house and I moved 500 miles away to do this. And that could have ended really, really badly for me, but it was also a huge opportunity and it actually worked out great.
[00:29:18.13] – Ed Ashton
We actually wound up succeeding and I’m still, I’m still working with the same group that I put together 26 years ago. So you can afford to do that sort of thing once or twice. And if you win, it’s great. And if you lose, hopefully you’ve done it when you’re young enough and you have time to recover. So that kind of punctuated conservatism, I think for me is a good approach to life. It’s a good way to maximize opportunities while at the same time make it reasonably possible that you’re not going to end by falling through the shot, which is, which again, is not how I want to end my life.
[00:30:00.24] – John Knych
Fascinating.
[00:30:01.15] – Ed Ashton
That may have been more than you were asking.
[00:30:02.23] – John Knych
No, no, that’s great. That’s great. No, that’s— it’s when— so I’ve read all of your books, and when you— an author, I think, reaches beyond 5 books, you start to have your sense of who the author is. So that’s just always been a curious thought, and you answered some of my curiosities. Thank you. Back to Brandon, if you have a question.
[00:30:29.04] – Brandon
Yeah. So what you said about, uh, the elephants and the grays, that’s really interesting. And, and now that you’ve said that, I think, uh, it really fits. The elephants and the grays really fits with the story, I think. So you did a good job with that. Um, and I like elephants myself, so I’m just curious, why did you choose, uh, elephant to base the grays on? Do you have a fondness for elephants, or what, what motivated you there?
[00:30:56.14] – Ed Ashton
Well, I thought they fit what I needed in terms of both sort of physical presence and behavior. I want, you know, an elephant is a creature that fully dominates its environment. Nothing challenges an adult elephant. There’s, you know, other than a human with a rifle, nothing challenges an adult elephant. They fear absolutely nothing. They, as I said, sort of in terms of their behavior, they are mostly very sort of peaceable and gentle. But if provoked, or again, if when they’re in this state of must, they are absolutely terrifying, absolutely terrifying monsters. And that’s what I wanted from the Grays. That’s what I wanted from the Grays in this. I wanted them to be something, you know, sort of the sort of creatures that could, could be nursemaids in a crash and could take care of little baby humans and raise them safely. And, but then every once in a while, just absolutely be completely terrifying. Uh, and you know, if you start with a model of something more like a predator, they’re terrifying all the time. And if you start with a model of something more like, uh, you know, like a capybara, they’re always adorable.
[00:32:15.24] – Ed Ashton
How can they be scary? Elephants. Elephants for me really fit that model of can be adorable but can also tear you into tiny shreds.
[00:32:24.12] – Brandon
So is there a, is there a difference in creating like alien aliens? Kind of like I think the alien from Mickey 7 were more alien aliens.
[00:32:34.10] – Ed Ashton
Yes.
[00:32:34.22] – Brandon
And is there, is that more of a challenge than kind of basing them on, on a preexisting animal?
[00:32:42.01] – Ed Ashton
It is if you want to have them be sort of interactive characters. In Mickey 7, the Creepers are more of sort of an abstract force that has to be dealt with. Moving forward in Antimatter Blues and in the third Mickey 7 book, which I just turned in, there’s a little more character interaction with the Creepers. But certainly in the first book, they’re really more of an abstract force. For that, you can be much more alien. I think of, um, have you ever read The Ophiuchi Hotline, John Varley? That’s a classic. If you haven’t, it’s old school, but if you ever get a chance, it’s a short read and it’s really, really fascinating. But he has aliens in there, um, who literally live outside the space-time continuum. Like, they can move through all four dimensions. They can move through time in the way that we move through space. And they are so alien from us that they really can’t even be understood as the way that we understand life forms. And they similarly don’t understand us as life forms. They’re just thoroughly, completely alien. But as a result, you can’t actually have a character that’s one of those things.
[00:33:58.09] – Ed Ashton
I needed something for this book where I could have an identifiable character that the reader could relate to. And for that, I needed something that was a little more like us in something that really was recognizably sort of part of our terrestrial family.
[00:34:15.01] – Brandon
Awesome. Thank you.
[00:34:19.01] – John Knych
Back to Noemi, if you have a question.
[00:34:22.08] – Noémie
Yes, it’s a bit adjacent, but have you read a book lately, and as you were reading it, you were like, oh my God, I wished I did that. I wish that Who wrote that book? Did you have one like this recently?
[00:34:36.20] – Ed Ashton
That, that, that happens to me all the time. I’m a, I’m a voracious reader. I, I go through, I go through books like water and it is very, very common for me to read something and say, not that I wish I had written that, cuz most, most of the time I recognize immediately that I couldn’t write that. But I do sometimes wish that I had the, the capability to write in that way. So I, I just finished Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky, for instance. Absolutely brilliant. All 4 books in that series are really must-reads in my opinion. I’ve met Adrian. He’s an absolutely brilliant person. He has a really unique mind, and that’s what allows him to craft the books the way he does. As much as I admire them, I could never write a book the way that he does. I just, maybe I’m just a more simple fellow than he is. Just the intricacy that he, with the way that he crafts his plots is sort of awe-inspiring to me. And like I said, I wouldn’t try to imitate him. I would not try to write the way that he does. But I can hugely admire the work that he does.
[00:35:51.11] – Ed Ashton
The closest I’ve come to, I wish I had written that, probably would be Red Shirts by John Scalzi. Scalzi and I do actually write in very similar ways. I was on a panel with him at Tucson a few weeks ago, and he started talking, you know, you were talking before about how you didn’t have a clear idea of who the, what the characters looked like as you’re going through the book. And John started talking about how he gets grief about that, about how he doesn’t describe the physicality of his characters very much. And I just leaned into the microphone and said, John, I have never felt as seen as I do right now. We sort of fist bumped across the podium because that’s, you know, we both, I think we both fall into that kind of category of really kind of plot and character driven and not so much like into visual description and like long paragraphs of exactly what the room looks like. But Red Shirts is a book that the way that it’s written, His style is not dissimilar to mine. The way that it’s plotted is not dissimilar to the way I plot a book.
[00:36:54.14] – Ed Ashton
If I thought of it, I could have written that book, I think, and I would have been really happy because then I’d have a whole bunch of Hugo Awards instead of him. But that’s probably the closest I’ve come to saying, man, I wish I had thought to write that.
[00:37:09.04] – Noémie
Jan Szajkowski is an easy answer for us, right? We actually had a talk with him yesterday. About the Tradition of Strife. So yeah, absolutely. It was my last— well, fuck, that was amazing book as well.
[00:37:22.02] – Ed Ashton
Absolutely a brilliant person. I had dinner with him about a year ago and my wife was there and she afterwards, she was like, that was fascinating because like the conversation bounced back and forth. We’re talking about like Bronze Age Greek history to the biomechanics of how mantis shrimp work to the astrophysics of interstellar propulsion and just ping-ponging around these things. She’s like, “I’ve never seen anyone who really kept up with you on that sort of thing before. That was really, really fun.” She didn’t say a word the entire dinner, I don’t think. She’s like, “That was really fun to watch.” That’s great.
[00:38:06.24] – John Knych
I want to jump in there for the circuit because You mentioned before, Ed, that you’ve read all the Children of Time series. Were they partly inspiration for the spiders in After the Fall? Because it’s another mysterious element, right? There’s— we don’t know why the fall happened, and then there’s these antagonistic mysterious spiders that are extremely powerful. Were you pulling from Children of Time, or no, was that just a No, no.
[00:38:37.10] – Ed Ashton
Um, if you’ve, you know, you’ve read all my other books, you may have picked up on the fact I’m really scared of spiders. Spiders, spiders creep me out really, really badly. I was actually, I was bit by a black widow when I was 9 years old, and I spent 4 days in the hospital, and that left a, that left a mark on me. Um, I think, and, uh, you know, whenever I want to reach for something, just absolutely viscerally horrifying. Um, for me, it just always winds up looking like a spider. That’s, that’s just, um, that’s, that’s just my own neurosis playing out in my books, I think. Because if you look back at my other books, there’s some kind of spider-like thing that shows up over and over and over again. Going back to Antimatter Blues, um, although all the way back to Two or Three Days in April, there’s, there’s always something.
[00:39:28.07] – John Knych
Got it. Yes, no, the way the characters describe, like, yeah, when the spiders come, it’s— there’s fear. There’s definitely fear.
[00:39:36.17] – Ed Ashton
Yeah. Yep. That is sincerely felt. That’s coming right from my gut.
[00:39:42.08] – John Knych
Excellent. Back to Brian, if you have a question. No, I’ll pass. Thank you. Back to Jen.
[00:39:55.14] – Jen
Um, I was wondering if the book were ever adapted into a movie or a TV show, is there something that you would be especially excited to see on the screen?
[00:40:08.00] – Ed Ashton
I mean, I would be excited to see everything on the screen. Um, I’d love to see what they did with the, with the Grays. I would love to see how that sort of got— I’ve actually talked to my agent about this. My film rights agent was pretty excited about this book. He thought he might be able to get some people interested in. I don’t know how that’s going. I hope it’s going well. But he was thinking it would probably work best as an animated feature, which would make the sort of character development pretty easy in terms of putting the Grays in place, but I could see it being done live action as well. But yeah, that’s, you know, like, Um, when I, when I read, um, when I read Project Hail Mary and found out that was going to be a movie, that was one of the first things I thought was, how are they going to animate Rocky? What’s that going to look like? Um, and it was really interesting what they did. You know, those were puppets. Um, there was no green screen that was done. That was all, uh, practical effects. And, and Rocky, Rocky and the other Aridans were puppets.
[00:41:10.10] – Ed Ashton
And I wonder if they would do the Grays as like people in suits Or as green screen animation or something like that, CGI. I really don’t know. I’d be really curious to see how that came out.
[00:41:25.22] – Noémie
Yeah, me too.
[00:41:26.11] – John Knych
Yeah, fingers crossed. I’d love to see a movie from this.
[00:41:31.02] – Ed Ashton
Oh, it’d be fantastic. I think it would be pretty easy to shoot too. There’s only a small number of settings. You just get an abandoned cabin in the woods that you can use for your main set. Yeah, I think it’d be pretty straightforward. A lot easier to shoot than Mickey 7 was, for sure.
[00:41:48.22] – John Knych
Easier to shoot, but I had the same thought, Ed, with Project Hail Mary. How are they going to do Rocky? For your book, it would be how would they capture the subtle pet-type relationship that you do in the book? All the little verbs and adjectives like padding, the humans padding across the room, the humans John huddling up against Martok’s bulk. Those little moments would be hard, I think, on film.
[00:42:15.06] – Ed Ashton
Yeah, but I think it’s doable. I think it’s doable. You got to take the verbal signaling and turn it into visual signaling, which is— that’s what moviemakers do. That’s their business. So I think it could be done. Excellent.
[00:42:30.17] – John Knych
I’m going to jump into the roundtable again. You mentioned in a previous conversation, not this one, I think the one with— you did with Brockport on Mickey 7, that when Mickey 7 was made into a movie, you were able to talk with Bong Joon-ho, and he asked you what’s the one moment you really want to keep from your book. And if I remember correctly, it was chapter 9 of 19. What would be the moment or scene in After the Fall that you would not want a director or screenwriter to mess with?
[00:43:06.10] – Ed Ashton
The one moment— well, actually, there’s two. I mean, the climactic scene, I think, really is what wraps everything up there. So I mean, that would— but nobody would touch that if you’re going to do the book. That’s what that would be in there. But there’s a scene I describe in there where it’s kind of like the dark night of the soul for John and Martok. Where Martok is actually contemplating, like, ending it all. He’s contemplating, like, walking into the lake with John and just being done. And John basically brings him back. And to me, much like Chapter 19 in Mickey 7 cemented the relationship between Mickey and Asha, I think that scene is what really shows you where the bond really is between Martok and John. And I think that would have to be in there.
[00:43:54.11] – John Knych
Thank you. I jumped in front of Logan. Logan, do you have another question?
[00:44:00.20] – Logan
Yeah, so I audibly clapped here in my office whenever you said that there’s another Mickey 7 book that’s been delivered. It wasn’t something I was expecting. I, you know, as active as I am on BookTok, I don’t follow too much the news behind things on that, so I’m not sure if that was public before you said it here. Um, I— you’ve written a handful of standalones, you now have this soon-to-be trilogy. Do you, do you prefer these expansive worlds and series, or do you like kind of taking this— you know, After the Fall isn’t an outrageously long book, but the world is so well built out and able to see visually through the book. Which do you prefer, kind of these shorter standoff, you know, you write a book, it’s done, the story’s over, or do you like more the series where you can continue with these characters and see years and years of development through the different books?
[00:45:07.16] – Ed Ashton
Well, I mean, they each have their charms. The, the advantage of a standalone is that you get to meet new people, you get to meet new characters. Every one is a fresh challenge. You can, you know, you have a blank canvas in front of you, you can do whatever you want with it. And there’s a lot of freedom to that. And it can be an exciting process. It can be a frightening process. Because again, you don’t necessarily know you’re going to get to a good place at the end, or at least I don’t. With, with a series, The sequels are, I would say, easier to write. The writing comes more easily because you already know the characters, you’re already familiar with them. Like, I know exactly when I was writing this, this most recent book, the third Mickey 7 book, I already know Nasha, I know Mickey, I know Birdo, I know how they sound. I didn’t have to worry about working on their characters or their voices and figuring out exactly how they ought to handle diction and intonation and things like that. I already knew all that stuff. And so I can just, you know, I can just go.
[00:46:11.10] – Ed Ashton
I also don’t have to worry in a series so much about worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the hardest part of writing a science fiction novel, trying to get the details of sort of where you are, when you are, how do things work here, what’s the new tech, what’s the new social mores that the reader’s not familiar with. Getting all that out there without it being like an embarrassing data dump is really, really hard to do. And in a series, you do all that in your first book, and then hopefully you’re not doing any more of it in your sequels. If you’re inventing new lore in book 3, you’ve done something really wrong. That’s, yeah, I don’t know if you follow like The Fourth Wing, but that was one of the big criticisms of the sequels of The Fourth Wing is that You know, Rebecca Yarros is, um, still inventing lore in book 3 and book 4. And that’s, uh, you know, that, that can be kind of— now she’s, she sold a million books for every one of mine. So I’m not criticizing Rebecca Yarros in any way, but, uh, you know, if, if you’ve done things right, from my perspective, you get all the worldbuilding done in book 1 and then book 2, book 3, um, really you can just get to sort of the characters and the adventure and, and that’s, To me, that’s a lot more fun to write.
[00:47:25.01] – Ed Ashton
Like I said, world building, I love what wound up on the page in Mickey 7, but it was hard. It was, that was really, really hard work. And you have to do that all over again every time you put it, put out a standalone. So there, you know, that’s a challenge. And I also have to factor in what my publisher wants because I don’t just get to write whatever I want, right? I’m, Signing contracts with Macmillan and my editor gets a big input into what I’m gonna be delivering to them. And there’s a basic assumption in publishing that each book in a series will sell a fraction of the previous books in that series because, and you know, this makes perfect sense, nobody who didn’t read the first book is gonna read book 2. And some of the people who read the first book hated it and will not read book 2. So you’ll always sell fewer book 2 than you did book 1, fewer book 3 than you did book 2. And so you have to have, before they’ll greenlight a second, a third, a fourth book in a series, you have to have a certain sales level of the first book.
[00:48:31.21] – Ed Ashton
And so that’s, you know, obviously with the movie and Mickey 7 being translated into 24 languages and so on and so forth, that’s not a problem. I can, I think I can probably write as many Mickey 7 books as I want at this point. But with the other books, it’s a negotiation with your editor as to whether, well, let’s look at what the sales numbers were for book 1. Do we think that’ll support a sequel? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s, to me as an author, it’s a little bit easier to avoid that negotiation and just write another standalone if that’s what the publisher wants. So that was a long answer to a short question. I don’t know if that got to what you were looking for.
[00:49:06.01] – Logan
It did. And I actually do have a follow-up on it. Which of your standalones would you like to revisit in the future?
[00:49:14.09] – Ed Ashton
I would love to write a sequel to The Fourth Consort. I deliberately put a little seed for a sequel. You know, it’s a standalone book. It’s a complete story in and of itself. But I did build a little seed in there at the end for a sequel. I already have plotted out a sequel to that book. I’ve provided that pitch to my editor. He has not bitten on it yet. But I still have hopes that he will at some point. I think that could be a lot of fun. I really, really loved, you know, I told you Martok’s probably my favorite character. I think Dalton Greaves is my second favorite. I really loved working with Dalton. He was a really fun character to write, and I would love to get to revisit him and revisit that world.
[00:50:01.16] – John Knych
Thank you, Logan. Thank you, Ed. In a previous talk, Ed, we had a talk with Peter Hamilton and One of the readers, Chris, asked a great question which I said I want to ask Ed this. It’s another left-field question. If you could have— sit down and have a beer with any of your characters, who would it be? Would it be Dalton or would it be Martok? Just for an hour to talk, who would it be and why?
[00:50:31.17] – Ed Ashton
I don’t think it would be Dalton because Dalton’s enough like me that it would be boring. Dalton is the closest I’ve probably ever come to a self-insert into a book. I mean, if you look at Dalton’s biography and look at my biography, there are some alarming similarities there. So yeah, that would probably be a dull conversation, honestly. I think it might be, you know, if I were to stretch back Gary from Three Days in April is a really, is a really interesting guy. I wouldn’t mind. I think I could probably have a good time hanging out with him. I might end up dead at the end of it, but I think, I think it’d be an interesting conversation in the, in the interim.
[00:51:18.23] – John Knych
Excellent. Back around to Brandon, if you have a question.
[00:51:24.09] – Brandon
Yeah, I have kind of a comment followed by a follow-up question. So this is like one of the coolest books I own, and this is a broken binding edition. I love it. Thanks for signing it, by the way.
[00:51:38.02] – Ed Ashton
Yep. You know what, what’s annoying though? I never got a copy of that one. That is— I think that is the only edition of Mickey 7 that I do not own a copy of.
[00:51:47.06] – Noémie
Huh.
[00:51:47.24] – Ed Ashton
So I don’t know what happened. They were supposed to send me some and they just never did.
[00:51:52.11] – Brandon
Huh.
[00:51:52.19] – Ed Ashton
Wow.
[00:51:53.20] – Brandon
Yeah, my question was going to be like, how much How much involvement do you have in, in this? This is— so it’s the Broken Binding Edition. Did you have any involvement with this?
[00:52:03.20] – Ed Ashton
Um, the same that I do with all the editions. Um, there was an approval process on the COVID I absolutely love the COVID on this one. I had no notes on this one. I was like, no, that is— that’s absolutely perfect. Um, and they gave me, they gave me approval on the, um, the artwork on the interior of the book as well. Which I also thought, like I said, absolutely spectacular. I thought they really— I’ve seen a number of depictions of the Creepers in various ways. I think the artist here really got it as close as anyone has to how I imagined it and how I described it. I was really pleased with that. Yeah, there you go. That’s basically what I was thinking. He really nailed it. It was impressive. So I, you know, I thought that was fun. I did have to sign a zillion copies. I think they were— I think they printed 6,000 of those, if I recall correctly. That’s a lot of signing. I don’t know if you ever signed your name 6,000 times in a row, but, you know, if you want the experience, try to just like say the word Chesapeake 6,000 times in a row and see what it sounds like after about 2,000 or 3,000 times through.
[00:53:15.02] – Ed Ashton
I actually had to stop every 20 or 25 minutes and remind myself how to sign, what my signature is supposed to look like before I could get back into it. It was, that was, I know like Brandon Sanderson once supposedly signed like 24,000 copies of one of his books in one night. I don’t know how you manage to do that without winding up in a hospital afterwards. That was, that, that was just doing these. It took me, it took me a week to get through all 6,000 and, and it was, uh, it was a challenge.
[00:53:48.00] – Brandon
So does a Broken Binding reach out to you or is that just something between them and the publisher to, to get those published?
[00:53:54.08] – Ed Ashton
They, they work, they work through the publisher. Um, and then the, the publisher works through my agent to get back to me. So I, I never had any direct contact with the, the folks at Broken Binding except basically like approving the artwork and so forth.
[00:54:07.16] – John Knych
Thank you. Yeah, I’ve stumbled on videos of Brandon Sanderson, like doing a, doing like a talk and signing at the same time.
[00:54:16.14] – Ed Ashton
It’s a, he’s an interesting guy. Yeah, he is. He’s a super interesting guy. Yeah. I, I, I, uh, I mean, you, you can tell that just by the volume of work that he produces. I mean, how many hundreds of thousands of words a year does that man crank out? It’s, it’s, it’s absolutely astonishing. So I can— that’s another person that I can admire while at the same time knowing I could never do what he does. Never. The way that he writes, the volume of work that he produces, even if I didn’t have a day job, I could never do that. Absolutely impossible.
[00:54:52.03] – John Knych
Yeah, he’s prolific. All right, let’s do a last question. We’ll go around the horn. Noemi, do you have any last questions?
[00:54:59.11] – Noémie
Yes. Apart from not raising the eyebrows of your characters, if you could go back in time to the first draft of your first book and give young Edward Ashton an advice, what would it be?
[00:55:12.09] – Ed Ashton
You’re not as clever as you think you are. That’s, that’s the big thing that I would have said to him. There’s a lot of stuff in there that I thought I was being really funny and clever, and looking back on it, I I am very conscious of John Scalzi’s admonition that the failure mode of clever is asshole. And you need to really, when you think you’re being funny and you think you’re being clever, you need to really interrogate yourself to make sure that you’re not just being a jerk. And I don’t think I was a jerk necessarily. But there are certainly, there are some things in, particularly in that first book that I would have that I would have toned down.
[00:55:54.06] – John Knych
I think it’s a really funny book. It’s, I laughed out loud. It does.
[00:55:58.11] – Ed Ashton
I think it does hold up and I like it. But like I said, you can tell there are tells in there that I was still a baby writer when I, when I did that one. It’s looking back, like I said, there are things I would have done different. And any artist 10 years on who looks back at what they did 10 years ago and says, no, that was perfect. I wouldn’t touch it. You’re not growing then. You’re not growing as an artist, and that’s not where you want to be.
[00:56:24.15] – Noémie
That’s interesting. Thank you. Growth, I think, is the main thing, the main theme today.
[00:56:30.13] – John Knych
Thank you, Naomi. Back to Brian, if you have a question, or Jen. Brian’s good. Jen. Nick, you’re good. Brandon, you’re good. You have one last question?
[00:56:45.17] – Brandon
Uh, nope, just thanks for, thanks for joining us.
[00:56:48.06] – John Knych
Yeah, or Logan, one more, one more question. I didn’t want to skip you.
[00:56:52.16] – Logan
Yeah, it’s all good on my end. Thank you a lot.
[00:56:55.15] – John Knych
Um, I have one last one, Ed, before we, uh, say thank you and goodbye. The— I mentioned this idea before that I thought the, the human as pet trope just could have been so easily bungled. Like, it’s— going into it, I was very curious to see how you would, how you would do it.
[00:57:11.00] – Ed Ashton
I knew I was walking a tightrope with this one. Yeah.
[00:57:13.19] – John Knych
So my question is, with that tightrope, was it a similar process to you creating Mark Talk in that you really had to revise, you know, try things, the editor says no? Like, were there some moments that the editor said that’s too much, or were you able to create it in a fairly efficient way? Because to me, it never felt like too much. But I can see in the writing process you might have had like a scene or an idea that might have crossed the line, or did that never happen?
[00:57:47.09] – Ed Ashton
Not with my editor. My editor, who I love dearly, he’s a fantastic person, but he has a pretty light touch. And I think part of that is because I’m so hard on myself. And I have a group of critique partners who are very hard on me, as I asked them to be. My middle daughter in particular is absolutely brutal. She is a very keen reader. She picks up on things that I would never in a million years pick up on, and she has no hesitation to say, like, you sound like an idiot here, or this really is not what you want to do, or this particular thing that you put in there is going to really piss off this particular segment of, you know, whatever audience you’re trying to reach, and you need to take that out. In this particular one, she was, in fact, there are a couple of scenes in there where she was like, you’re gonna get animal rights people really upset with you if you write this scene the way that you wrote it. And I completely rewrote a couple of scenes in order to to allay those concerns. Reading back through it, she was like, she was 100% right, 100% correct.
[00:59:10.16] – John Knych
Violence against the Grays against the humans or the humans against the Grays?
[00:59:17.16] – Ed Ashton
Just in the way that the relationship between Martok and John, some turns that it took in the initial drafts. She was just like, “No, the PETA people are going to absolutely eviscerate you on this.” So I don’t want to get anybody mad. I don’t want to get yelled at on the internet any more than anybody else does. I mean, as a writer, you’re gonna get yelled at on the internet sometimes by random people. Particularly after the movie came out for Mickey 7, I got a lot of hate mail. I got a lot of really, really aggressive, nasty hate mail after that movie came out.
[00:59:55.21] – John Knych
About what?
[00:59:57.13] – Ed Ashton
About the fact that Mark Ruffalo was doing an impression of Donald Trump. And if you’re a fan of Donald Trump, you’re really mad and you can’t get Bong Joon-ho’s contact, but you can get mine. And so they just absolutely let me have it. And like, I’ll accept that. I’m not gonna get mad about that.
[01:00:17.16] – John Knych
Angry that you wrote a book and that someone else hired someone else who did a bad impression.
[01:00:24.04] – Ed Ashton
Well, these people never read the book. They probably never even saw the movie. They just probably read something about the movie that it was making fun of Donald Trump, and they’re like, who can I yell at about this? And like I said, if you go looking, you will never find Bong Joon-ho’s contact information. But if you’re a little bit diligent about it, you can go to my website and you can get through to me. And so they did. And so they did. But I’ll accept that kind of heat, but I don’t want to inadvertently or unnecessarily, um, torque off any particular segment of the population because number one, I don’t actually like getting yelled at. Um, and number two, I don’t want to alienate groups of readers. I mean, that’s not helpful to me.
[01:01:09.16] – John Knych
That’s, uh, well, and I don’t think you’re— I think any— I posted this before, anyone who’s a dog lover will just just love this book. Like, I think, um, I didn’t feel any, any violence or hate.
[01:01:23.00] – Ed Ashton
I think that’s, that’s the way it came out in the end.
[01:01:24.22] – John Knych
Yeah.
[01:01:26.17] – Ed Ashton
After I, after I had gone through many, many rounds of revision, I’m really happy with where it came out. But like I said, there were a couple of rough spots in that, in that first draft that my, that my daughter really honed in on in a really effective way. She’s a smart kid. I mean, she’s, she’s 27 years old. She’s not a kid. But she’s very— she’s a very smart woman.
[01:01:47.05] – John Knych
Excellent. Well, I don’t want to take up too much more of your time. I really enjoyed this talk. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. And hopefully they make a movie from this. Looking forward to reading the third installment of the Mickey 7 series.
[01:02:04.24] – Ed Ashton
Should be out in February next year.
[01:02:07.06] – John Knych
Awesome. And are we the first to know? Is that—
[01:02:10.17] – Ed Ashton
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that to anybody yet. So yeah, I think you probably are. I mean, my editor and his team are all well aware. But yeah, I think you may be the first people in the general public to be aware.
[01:02:22.17] – John Knych
Great. If you give me the email addresses of the Trump people, I can email them back with the news.
[01:02:29.08] – Ed Ashton
I will be sure to do that. Yes, I’m sure they’ll be very excited.
[01:02:32.17] – John Knych
Yeah, just forward it.
[01:02:33.08] – Ed Ashton
I’m sure they read Antimatter Blues and are just queued up for this new one.
[01:02:36.16] – John Knych
Yeah, yeah. I’ll send them a link to the chat and say that you—
[01:02:40.14] – Ed Ashton
Appreciate it. Thank you.
[01:02:41.17] – John Knych
Yeah. All right, everyone, have a great day. Thank you, Ed, and happy reading, happy writing.
[01:02:48.13] – Ed Ashton
Yep. Thank you.
[01:02:49.06] – John Knych
Bye-bye.
[01:02:50.10] – Noémie
Thank you so much.