Edward Hall and Daniel Horowitz Garcia

[00:06] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: My name is Daniel Horowitz Garcia. I am 50 years old. Today is March 26, 2021. I am in Atlanta. My partner today is Ed hall, and he is my friend, co conspirator, colleague, and comrade in weirdness.

[00:26] EDWARD HALL: My name is Ed hall, also known as Edward Austin hall on my fictional work. I am 59 years old. Today is March 26, 2021. I'm in Atlanta and speaking remotely with my friend and colleague Daniel Horowitz Garcia.

[00:49] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So, Ed, I want to talk about writing today. So how long have you been writing?

[00:55] EDWARD HALL: The first thing I can remember writing was more or less a dessert menu, but I thought it was a story. And the title of it was like a list of. And I know it. I'm almost certainly included the word brownies and ice cream, but I don't remember much beyond that. You know, this was my idea of a story, and I think it's a Disney animated film, All Dogs Go to Heaven, which I never saw. But the, the ads for it were in heavy rotation. And the one thing that stuck with me from those ads was the Chihuahua character gets to say, I like a story with food in it. So apparently from the get go, I always like the story with food in it. And so to this day, I always try to get some kind of food reference into my work. Oh, yeah, so, yeah, that's, that's like grade school or even kindergarten when I was doing that. And that's a, that's a bad habit I continued today. So, you know, more than 50 years.

[02:00] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Later, I, I disagree. It's a bad habit. But what do you remember? What? Why you wanted to write that story.

[02:10] EDWARD HALL: Because I like sweets. And I still like sweets. And I'm not sure. I couldn't tell you why I felt it necessary to put that down on paper. I have a vivid memory of doing it. And again, what its content was. And I don't remember that it had an actual story. And some people would argue I still haven't figured that out. But I leave that to posterity and readers.

[02:44] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: You know, it feels to me like an exercise in the difference between premise versus plot. Your young mind had a good premise, but you couldn't figure out a plot.

[02:53] EDWARD HALL: And, and again, some people will say, and you still haven't figured out.

[03:02] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I don't think. I don't think it's a bad habit to have food in the story. That's the only thing I agree with George R.R. martin about, like, everything he, everything he writes has food in it. So like all of his Game of Thrones The Game of Thrones Thrones series has a lot of very detailed accounts of them eating. And what are they eating? You know, like, so the mushrooms dripping in butter and garlic and how it tastes and what it smells like and everything. And I think it's fantastic. I think that's great.

[03:32] EDWARD HALL: I'm kidding. There's even one of the things that I. My favorite thing that I ever. Second favorite thing I ever wrote for White Wolf, in fact, has Christina Vergano's recipe for pasta alla aglia Iolio. I mean, you literally could read that story, my little Mafia story from World of Darkness, Mafia, and figure out how to prepare yourself a decent plate of pasta in garlic and oil with fresh tomatoes.

[03:58] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: That sounds fantastic. I mean, who wouldn't want to do that?

[04:03] EDWARD HALL: Bingo.

[04:04] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Right?

[04:04] EDWARD HALL: It's got proportions.

[04:07] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And the thing is, like the rest of Jor the only. I read his first book of Game of Thrones and I hated it, except for the stuff about the food.

[04:16] EDWARD HALL: I. You know, I tried to read that book. Sorry, sorry, Mr. Martin. I loved that work, his early science fiction stuff. A lot of people think that he came out of nowhere. He came out of television. He had an enormous career as an SF writer beginning in the 70s.

[04:36] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[04:37] EDWARD HALL: You know, one Hugo Awards, a Song for Liar. I have a signed copy of his first or second book from that era. And then he went into tv. I know he worked on Beauty and the Beast. And a lot of people think he just sprung fully formed out of television work and that, you know, that. That the Game of Thrones actually stems from that. Which it does. Right. Like, he wanted to do something that was in no way constrained by budgets. And then, of course, it became a TV show, which is a great irony of those things. And that, you know, that's. That's the great thing about both prose writing and comics writing is. Yeah, okay. You know, there's the time element with the illustration of a comic, but apart from that. Right. Your canvas can be as large as the page or as large as the given artist can make the page encompass. And then when you're writing a loan, again, the budget becomes con. And if you're like in that Lester Dent school, writers, you know, it's, well, they're paying me, and, you know, they're paying me 2 cents or 3 cents a word. So the faster I get this done, the more, technically speaking, the more money I'm making. So, you know, hats off to those guys. Lester Dent, Cornell, Wilrick, that whole crew.

[06:09] SPEAKER C: Isn't that how L. Ron Hubbard got his start?

[06:12] EDWARD HALL: L. Ron Hubbard did start as a writer of pulp sf. And you know, the famous story goes that a bunch of the golden age science fiction writers were in some hotel room or bar grousing about word rates and somebody. It differs depending on who's telling the story. Asimov, Isaac as an all over Fritz Liber. One of them says, yeah, but the real money is an organized religion. And they said you could see the light bulb go off above Hubbard's head. And after that, like literally whatever was in inventory from him at the pulp magazines, that was the last fiction you saw of Hubbard's until he was a multimillionaire, right? And then everything after that's Dianetics and all the stuff building up Scientology that, you know, arguably he had the best selling idea of any science fiction writer in the history of the world.

[07:08] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, I also heard the story on that is the other science fiction writers were ripping his stuff apart because it's just like they would look at and be like, this is. This premise is stupid. Like no one's gonna believe this. So like his bad science fiction made bad but much more sellable religion.

[07:29] EDWARD HALL: I, I literally, I've never seen that angle on it. It wouldn't surprise me. I opened, you know, he's got that quote, unquote 10 volume or decalogue novel.

[07:41] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I read that. I read that. It was awful.

[07:43] EDWARD HALL: Oh yeah? How much of it?

[07:46] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: No, I read that when I was a kid, all 10 volumes. When I was a kid and a teenager. Read it Ed. All of it. I read the technology. I read Battlefield Earth. I read Battlefield.

[08:02] EDWARD HALL: This explains some shit. I knew you were suffering some ptsd. I didn't realize it could be late.

[08:08] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: At Hubbard street back in the day when I just. Like for me, science fiction and fantasy was absolutely. It was my escape. It was my happy place, right? And I read it all. So all the Forgotten Realms books, I read all Dragonlance books and all of it. And, but. And I only could get what I could find, right? Like there was nobody telling me what to read. There were no online forums because it was no online yet. So my exposure just came in, whatever I could stumble on. And I was in, you know, Long island or South Florida, so it wasn't like I could go to a great secondhand bookshop and find all these obscure things. What I found was the mainstream stuff, mainstream science fiction, fantasy at the times, right? So Harry Harrison and the Stanley still rat that entire series. All of it. All of it.

[09:04] EDWARD HALL: Never read any.

[09:06] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: The Isaac. Isaac Asimov. I read so much Isaac Asimov. The man's Not a good writer. I read all of his stuff. Yeah, I read.

[09:14] EDWARD HALL: I read enough.

[09:15] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Orson Scott Card, all of it, like, all of this stuff. But it was all like the names that, you know, that the promoted stuff. Right. So it was. I was in my almost. I mean, I think I was like 25 before I found Woman on the Edge of Time and was like, what the hell is this? Wait a minute.

[09:32] EDWARD HALL: What?

[09:34] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Right. So. And then I think it was in my late 20s, early 30s, when I realized, like, the Forgotten Realms books like Ra Salvatore. He's awful. This is bad writing.

[09:46] EDWARD HALL: And, you know, I. I think it's Stephen King, who, among others, gets kind of the last word on bad writing. You write. I'm sure you can think of so many people, whether Octavia Butler, perhaps at one end of the spectrum, if you want to look at it this way, or Stephen King at not. Not a polar opposite, but at another, you know, in another realm, who were inspired by looking at the work of their predecessors and saying, I could do that and I could do it better. Yes, right.

[10:22] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yes.

[10:24] EDWARD HALL: Of the people you listed, you ticked off there. The. The one that I am both acquainted with personally and literarily would be Scott Card. And indeed, A Planet Called Treason is simply one of the most atrocious pieces of fiction I ever read in its entirety. At the other end of the spectrum is Heart's Hope, either in its novella form, which I came to years after the fact, or the full length novel which Thomas Dish reviewed in Twilight Zone magazine in a roundup with other stuff and just Praise to the Moon. And I sought out that book and read it. And indeed, I think it's an absolutely. It's a couple of things. It is a sparkling. It is a sparkling tonic to American high fantasy that at that point was so slavish to the work of Tolkien.

[11:23] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yes, yes.

[11:24] EDWARD HALL: Right.

[11:25] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And.

[11:25] EDWARD HALL: And yes, go on.

[11:27] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I. I think this connects to earlier, what you were saying, right? Why high fantasy is the IPA of the genre, right? Like ipa, like, you can't go to a craft bar and find like, you just like, please tell me you have a stout. And they just look at you and be like, we have. We have a fruit beer. And you're like, oh, Jesus.

[11:46] EDWARD HALL: You know, we got. We got a heavy set guy over there.

[11:48] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Oh, yeah, right. And it goes back to what you're saying because you can sit at a table and write about galactic wars or, you know, this king against that king, and on this, houses fighting for dominance and everything, and you're only restricted by your own imagination and time. With the page. That and that. And because that have soul. Tolkien coming in and just basically dominating the genre. What it means is. And now reinforced by the whole Harry Potter. I don't think Rowling at all invented the idea of the nothing kid who in reality is, you know, the chosen one of some. Right, right. That's a huge thing.

[12:34] EDWARD HALL: Yep.

[12:36] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah. But all of that. I mean, even the Conan epics are all like, here's this one guy, but he's becoming king. Right? So it's all epic. It's all epic. So now every single fantasy book is, she was an orphan, but she didn't know she was really the child of sorcerers or he is the king. So it's open. Always about thrones. It's always about the royalty. Right? Where it's really.

[13:02] EDWARD HALL: Oh, wait.

[13:04] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And it's really hard. It's really hard to find something like a Fritz Lieber who's just like, ah, thank you. Fritz Leiber who's like. He's these two guys getting into a shitload of trouble, you know, like, that's fun.

[13:21] EDWARD HALL: Fofford Gray Mouser.

[13:22] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[13:25] EDWARD HALL: Why that's not been developed into a television series yet is a complete mystery to me, you know, for. For decades, I think, until I'm pretty sure that sort of sorcery. The first. The first issue predates who Remembers Scorpio? The Historian who Remembers Scorpio, to my mind, is the first original masterpiece of. Of comics. Right? It's David Anthony Kraft on Keith Giffen pencil's Defender story. It is the. It has the first not explicitly gay, but absolutely gay antagonist character, even in mainstream comics. Jake Fury. Right. Nick Fury's younger brother, also known as Scorpio. There is there too. There is such a TV series to be developed from that I already mapped it out with a friend of mine and said how I would do it, and I totally want to do that. I would call it House of Fury and just go from there. But Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, you know that stuff. That's. Is it O'Neill? Is it Denny O'Neill and Howard Chaykin with Neil Adams inking. First of all, it's gorgeous. You know, those two characters first came into DC as supporting characters in a Wonder Woman story when Wonder Woman had no powers. When she's like Diana Prince, you know, agent of whatever. And. And Catwoman, It's. It's Fafhrd Gray Mouser, Wonder Woman, no powers. Catwoman. Right. And they wind up in Mayan. Oh, wait, you know who it. And. And of course, the first Person to write Fafhrd in the gray mouser. It occurs to me, for D.C. chip Delaney.

[15:36] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Oh, really?

[15:37] EDWARD HALL: He wrote that Wonder Woman story.

[15:39] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Huh?

[15:39] EDWARD HALL: He wrote that damn Wonder Woman story and in fact, named the wizard in it. It's. And I'm fumbling for the. The Polish name. This is so funny. I can remember. It's the Polish name for rook. Gavron. Jean Mark Gavron. Right. The wizard is named Gavron. G, A W R O N. Right. Which I always said Gowron. Right. He's. He's. Chip named him for a writer buddy of his, science fiction novelist Jean Marc Gavron.

[16:12] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Okay.

[16:12] EDWARD HALL: So, yeah, I want to.

[16:16] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Can I redirect just for a bit here back to. I want to talk more about process. I mean, we do. And maybe this kind of ties into a bit because high fantasy is big on plot, you know, otherwise. But it's very boring. I mean, I just don't know how much you can write about, you know, trying to assume power. Like, my thing is, I don't want to read about Game of Thrones. Tell me about Game of Peasants. How do the peasants survive all this? Like, it's. It's. It's the same. Like this lord or this lord. Their life. Like, how is their life different? What are they doing to survive in this? That's all, you know, so. But that's. That's a pro, I think, like a process question. And also a little bit. So you've written and you've published now your first novel, but you've also published a bunch of stories and poems. Yes.

[17:02] EDWARD HALL: Yes to both of those. And so what's your. Is there a specific process question? You want to balance the two different processes?

[17:10] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I do, eventually. But right now, let's talk about the specific process question. You. How. How do you begin? Like, do you begin with a premise? Do you begin with a scene, something.

[17:20] EDWARD HALL: I usually begin with the title. Honestly, I keep a running list of story titles, chapter titles. Fritz Leiber, for example, was a. That's. That's one of his grace notes that I always take to heart. And that is a chapter of a novel should have a damn title. Why? Right. Because it's. It's also a way of. It's a way of shading the events of a chapter of a book. So in Dread Isle, for example, there's a chapter, no one back talks the colonel. And you get the reference there. Right. No one writes to the Colonel Garcia Marquez.

[17:59] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[18:00] EDWARD HALL: So, you know, and the same thing is true with a poetry collection versus an individual poem. Right. One of the ways That I know to buy or not to pay actual money for a poetry collection is to read down the table of contents. If the table of contents itself reads like a poem, I know I'm in good hands. I know that this person is operating on my wavelength. Right? Because if those titles read poetically, they read right. They read resonantly. The titles themselves. The language sparkles. I know this is poetry I want to read.

[18:50] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So that sounds like regardless of genre, that's kind of your base, right?

[18:53] EDWARD HALL: Like you need to know the language. And I also have. I have two. Also two rules that almost. I almost never deviate from with fiction. And that is one. No, I will read no work of fiction with the. With the recent exception of Nancy Springer's first novel, beginning with the words it was absolutely not. When I open it up, the first two words are it was. I close it. I put it back on the shelf.

[19:28] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So the opening line. Can't say it was opening.

[19:30] EDWARD HALL: No, cannot. And I even started a book of my own that really is now as long as it needs to be. I think it's called like Untitled Novel Number six or something that the first words of which are a quote. It was right. In right quotes in internal quotes. It was question mark. That's right, it was. Seriously, you will not read a word that begins with it was absolutely not. Not even Dickens. Well, obviously not Dickens. Right. You know, you know, he plowed that field, but anybody else plowing that field now is plowing already plowed ground. That's more or less how it goes. Wait, wait.

[20:08] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: What is it about the. For the words it was that like, does it.

[20:11] EDWARD HALL: Lazy.

[20:12] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Lazy.

[20:13] EDWARD HALL: Okay, lazy. Receive it's received wisdom. The other one comes from Michael Gartner, the, the. The. The old newspaper man who insisted no lengthy work of any kind, pro right. Fiction or non fiction, should begin with the. It's yawning at the reader. It's is what he wrote. And I tend to agree. You'll never see me start. I might have a chapter title beginning with the. But I would never begin a work of fiction or a poem with the. And I probably have. If somebody's going to go back, let's see if that's true. There's an exception to every rule. But I will completely bend over backward. And so now that tells you. Right? And I'm a big fan of periodic sentence structure. Right. The opening line of Dread Isle at the top of the ladder. At the top of the ladder. The boy, a teenager by mere days closed his right hand around the last rung. Periodic Sentence structure, right. Beginning with a dependent clause. I tend to do that a lot. A lot of people will insist to. You start with a noun and have it followed immediately by a verb. I almost never do that. I always wonder, right. And like, one of the things I. My. My second Ian Campbell, who gave me really, my second serious edit on the novel on Dread Isle, said was, you can stop playing games with who these two young protagonists are. Just name them. He could see what I was doing, Right. I was holding back that information. And that was one of the serious problems with Dread Isle, is I was holding back way too much information. When Michael Bishop read it and gave up on it, about the same place that most men tended to give up on it, 60, 50 or 60 pages in, I realized I had withheld too much information for him to be able to care about the characters. So I moved the apparent death of the parents of the two young protagonists into the initial conversation in the book. After that, I found the reception was much different.

[22:48] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Do you. Do you find that you're, like, was this specific to this novel? Or do you, like. Do you find that you're more of an underwriter? That, like, you won your first draft, you leave out too much? Or like, Stephen King famously is an overwriter. Right. So, like, he's. He's also famous, like, one of the most famous pantsers. He sits down, he thinks about a character. He thinks about a monster, usually sits down and just writes to six pages a day for like, three months. And then he cuts out about 20% of his words.

[23:18] EDWARD HALL: Yeah.

[23:19] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Which I would say is not enough. What now you need to cut out. There's a lot. I still. I'm sorry. The sex scene in it is stupid, and I will say that over and over and over again. It's offensive and stupid.

[23:33] EDWARD HALL: You know, for years, I. When I could still read Stephen King novels, and some of them I treasure perhaps over much. In the case of something like Salem's Lot, my friend Miriam points out how the last. I don't know, maybe the last third of it, last quarter of it, you can see how it's rushed and not written as well as the earlier portions. The stand. The original version, I hasten to point out, was, I think, just right. The first time I tried to read that revision of it and was just like, it just the. The updates to it were like. I don't know, were like chrome turds, right? They stood out and were so offensive to me that I gave up just a few pages in. I started out thinking, yeah, this guy can do Long form fiction, but can't do short stories at all. And now I think my opinion has sort of flipped on that.

[24:35] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I'm with you on this.

[24:37] EDWARD HALL: Right there. Something like. What is it? The Woman in the Room from Night Shift, from his original short story collection. You know, that's maybe the best piece of. That's one of the best things he ever wrote. And there's not a supernatural. As he points out, there's not a supernatural note in it.

[24:55] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah.

[24:55] EDWARD HALL: So really, go ahead.

[24:57] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I mean, there's some stuff that I remember. I. I read him a lot again when I was much younger, like preteen, up until I was about 15. The last thing I tried to read of him was Dark Tower. And I got halfway through the first book and I was like, I can't read Stephen King anymore. I just can't.

[25:15] EDWARD HALL: You. You got even further along than I did. I read the. The Gunslinger from its first publication in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and it just felt like a really hollow exercise. I think he hadn't. It wasn't fully formed at that point.

[25:33] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: It's. Yeah, it ain't there. So. But, but. Right. So my original point though is like, Stephen King is a famous panther. Like, he's. His thing is like, don't plot, don't. You know, he also makes pronouncements like. Honestly, it sounds to me like he's saying, this is the way I write, therefore this is the way to write.

[25:51] EDWARD HALL: He does have a book on writing this actually got some good, really good advice in it.

[25:55] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, I mean, good advice. It's a good advice. And it works for him, obviously. Right. But I don't think it works for his kid, for instance. You know, his kid's a different type of writer.

[26:06] EDWARD HALL: Well, which one are you talking about?

[26:08] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Joe Hill.

[26:09] EDWARD HALL: Yeah. I haven't read Owen. I haven't read Owen King. I think Joe Hill can write rings around his old man.

[26:14] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, right, so. So there's some stuff that works. I mean, it works for him. So it's hard to argue. His process works for him. But his, you know, there already is a Stephen King. There's no need to be more than one. Right. But the idea, him and Margaret Atwood both, right, they sit, they get interesting characters and then they just go. And they let the characters do what they're going to do on the page, Right. On the other side, you get people like Kevin J. Anderson, right? So like, Kevin Anderson is known for like everything. Everything is. And you can see this on something like, there's a guy, I forget his Name, but he has a thing called the story Grid. He was an editor for a while. He does a lot of genre work.

[26:50] EDWARD HALL: Okay.

[26:51] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So the idea of the story grid is, you know, you. And honestly, the advice helped me, but this guy is also coming from the Stephen King thing as this is the way to write a story that works, right? And when he says that works, he's like, these are the different scenes your first act has. Your act two has half the scenes. Act one has a quarter of the scenes, act three has another quarter. You have your inciting incident, you go to your middle build, you have the mid turn, and then you have the climax and the denouement and the whole thing. Then you're on the scenes. If this scene ends on a positive, the next scene has to begin on a negative and you have to switch. So when you. He actually like plots out an entire novel.

[27:32] EDWARD HALL: Wow.

[27:33] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: And it looks like like a physicist trying to charge a laser. Like.

[27:41] EDWARD HALL: Yeah.

[27:41] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I don't understand how I looked at it. I'm like. Well, I think the stuff on scenes really helped me, but your other stuff, like I'm throwing. And the thing is, I tried to read one of the books he edited using this, and it's bad.

[27:56] EDWARD HALL: This is not Anderson, to be clear. No, no, no.

[27:58] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Kevin J. Anderson can be boring, but some of his books can be really good too, right? But this guy's book, the Story Grid, there was a book I just bought and it's like a steampunky book. It's set the naught of history where it's basically like pro colonialism. Like there's the people who are obviously the English, the characters don't really develop. And then like about 70 through them. I, I trudged my way through it because there was some stuff that was kind of interesting, but it was very much on like, you know, who's going to be the first to colonize this land and take their resources, Right? And so you're supposed to be rooting for these various colonial powers.

[28:37] EDWARD HALL: Oh, oh, wait a minute. It's not. Oh, God. Oh. It's not Scott Westerfield, is it?

[28:43] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: No, I don't think it is. It's a self published thing on Amazon.

[28:46] EDWARD HALL: Oh, say no more.

[28:48] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Some of that's really good. Some, I do have to say some of that is really good. But this was this.

[28:54] EDWARD HALL: No, obviously I'm not criticizing it in that way.

[28:58] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Well, the thing is, right, there's this like at 73, there's like the rape scene of the, the, the, the white one, you know.

[29:07] EDWARD HALL: Oh, wait, say no more.

[29:09] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah. So you're like, you're in the Arab lands where, like, the. The Arab. Unnamed Arab soldiers who are not really Arab, but they're Arab or Afghan. You know, the local. The brown natives raped the white colonized. The rape the white imperialist woman. Right. And that's supposed to show, like. And that's like this big. And it's.

[29:29] EDWARD HALL: Oh, that. Oh, that's the justifying. That's the justifying moment. Right.

[29:32] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I don't know. I couldn't get. I didn't even get through the scene.

[29:35] EDWARD HALL: No, of course.

[29:36] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So, like, I don't know. I don't know what he. What he was trying to do other than show, like, brown people bad or something. Like. But it was awesome.

[29:42] EDWARD HALL: Yeah. So.

[29:43] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So, so, like, neither one of these. Like, you could have a. A pantser who, like, it's just not going anywhere. There's no plot. I don't see why this is here. Right. And you could have a plotter who's like, yeah, you have your. Your plot already sketched out, but it's. It's just bad. Like, your characters suck. And I'm. I don't care about this. And you're right.

[30:05] EDWARD HALL: So.

[30:07] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: So part of it, I guess, to kind of back up and kind of. This is like, where do you fall in that spectrum? Like, once you have the idea of your language.

[30:16] EDWARD HALL: Right, Right. What do you go from there? Well, it's important to know that Dread Isle was not always Dread Isle. Originally it was Originally. Originally it was Tim Speed. Originally. Originally and the Megalodon Hunt. Oh. Then it became Once. No Megalodons or even reference to Megalodons have shown up like a chapter in. I was like, maybe I'm not writing that book. Then it was like, oh, this must be Tim Speed on Chimera Island. Then it just became Chimera Island. Then somebody published a book called Chimera Island. An old girlfriend pointed this out to me, and nobody could pronounce it anyway, and so I was like, oh, you did me a favor, pal. So.

[31:06] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Plotter, or submit, like, how once you have your language, where do you go?

[31:10] EDWARD HALL: Right. Once I wrote myself in the corners repeatedly, which was an old. That's like part of the old, you know, pulp writer marching orders. Right. Never, never extricate your characters from a situation before you put them in a new situation. And that's not the worst advice in terms of plot. But again, as a plotter, I'm a plotter. I'm not that interested in event for its own sake, but rather how it illuminates character or how it illuminates mindset. And so, yeah, I guess I would say that this book was written by the seat of my pants, but with. Right. I had a destination in mind all along that ended up changing by the time I got there. Right. I think I. I think I decided that the, The. The. The ending I had was a. Was there was a superficial plotting element and there was a much harsher outcome for one of the characters or with one of the. With one of the characters who's still there. Once I relented on that because I think I came to like the character too much to have them do what I had originally envisioned. And the, you know, kind of the surrounding architecture of the book had changed enough that that didn't make sense. I would say I have a framework. I always go in with a framework. I like to be surprised on the page because I don't see how you can surprise a reader if you can't surprise yourself. And, you know, there was a literal year where I wrote not a word on the book of the. You know, I think I said before that it took 10 years. I think it actually took closer to 12, and maybe in excess of 12 years when I really start looking at it. And.

[33:50] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Why do you.

[33:51] EDWARD HALL: And that. That. That year off was, again, I'd written myself into a corner. Didn't know. Had these. Had these little rules, right. Like, I can't. I can't introduce new elements to extricate them from this. And a friend of mine, Priscilla Smith, said, you're the author, you can do whatever you want. Like, oh, right, so I can. So, you know, it ended up being, well, so they're on this fake oil rig. What would be on a fake oil rig. So I knew that I could include those elements that would be there, right. Like the stuff you would need to launch a weather balloon. And that's what they actually used to get themselves out of that particular corner was the things. Weather balloons and the things that you would need to put them in the air. Right. That was the simple solution because once I thought about it, it's like, yeah, of course, you'd have to have this out in the middle of the ocean, right, where you. Particularly where people might be jamming your communications so you might not get weather reports. Although in retrospect, I don't think that that particular set of information could be jammed for them. They have a very particular sort of point of view, if you will, on that. I don't want to spoil anything here.

[35:03] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: It all seemed to make sense. But it sounds like five minutes. So it sounds like you are more there. There was another editor. You and I talked about this before and she had a. She has a bunch of YouTube videos on and it just kind of popped up on my feed about. Instead of just plotter versus Pantser, she adds another axis. I think it's methodical versus intuitive. So it's possible to be like, what I, I listened to her and I was like, oh, that's me. I'm an intuitive plot. Like, I need to have a sketch, right? So I'm working on my. I'm working on my first novel now. It's real different than a short story. And that's what I've learned so far. I thought a novella was like, holy crap, this is big. I'm like, oh yeah, not so much. But. But I need to plot, right? I need to know they're going to be here at this time. I need to get them here and then I need to get them there. But I'm also very intuitive, right? So like what I'll sketch is they'll meet at the stables and that's it, you know, Like, I know they got to get to the stables and I know they needs to play a fight there. But actually how they. Or like, you know, they'll be big. The captain reveals something. I don't know how she's going to reveal it. I don't know what's going to happen until I kind of write through that, you know. So the way this, this editor is talking about is you can plot, but you can also be very intuitive about how you get through the road, right? Or you can plot and be extremely methodal. Methodology. Method. Methodological, right. Where you, you just have everything sketched out and you are, you're just, you're filling it in. But you can also be like a very, you know, so there's, there's a lot of variety and. Sounds like I'm a bit more of a plotter than you, but you and I are both pretty intuitive. You know, if I, if I can't think of the, if the character, if I cannot see the character, if I cannot hear the character. And this is true. If I'm writing non fiction, like if I'm doing a history historical article or something, if I cannot hear the character talk to me, if I cannot see the character talk to me, the person, I can't write it.

[37:21] EDWARD HALL: Yeah. For me, I also need to be a. I need, I need a lot of visual prompts and a lot of historical background. So I use the macmillan Visual Dictionary anytime I needed to see what an oil rig looked like. And so the oil rig in Dread Isle is very much the line drawing, the color, colored in line drawing of an oil rig. The schematic of an oil rig in the entry for that thing in the macmillan Visual Dictionary. And so any. I could just look at that and know, well, here they are in relation to the derrick. Here they are, right? And then. And you can actually see, like, what the different parts of an oil derrick are in that picture. So when I'm talking about the crown block level, right, that's based on what's shown in and pointed out with a little. Right. You know, there's a little bit of text with a line pointing that part of the structure. So I know, well, they're higher than that. They're up above the crown block level. Even though, again, as I said, not a spoiler, I say in the first few pages, the thing that looks like an oil rig in Red Isle is not an oil rig, was never meant to be an oil rig, was never used as an oil rig. However, it is you. It was used in relation to the petroleum industry. I never tell you what it's used for. It actually has multiple uses. Only one of them is tangential to petroleum. There's another one having to do with where it is in the world. And again, right. Like, part of the, part of what's going on in the book is you have to know enough about science to be able to fill in the blanks. I leave a lot of blanks. And that, to me, right, that's, that's my grace note is I hate, hate, hate, as you know, Bob, dialogue.

[39:23] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Yeah, yeah, right.

[39:24] EDWARD HALL: And so scientists are not going to explain everything that they know. The other scientists they're talking to knows. So you have to know enough to fill in the blanks.

[39:35] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I, I call it like a impressionistic writing, you know, like the, when the impressionist painting is, you know, you don't draw a detailed woman. You draw as if, like you see a woman walking in the corner of your eye. So you have the impression of a woman walking, right. And, and the, the guy, I can't believe this. I didn't do this on purpose, trust me. But the guy who comes in my head as kind of a model on some of this is Hemingway, not Old man in the Sea. But if you've ever read A Movable.

[40:03] EDWARD HALL: Feast, I love A Movable Feast.

[40:05] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Like when people's like, oh, I've read Hemingway. I've read, you know, for whom the bell tones. I'm like, no, you haven't read. You've read Hemingway when he's like, I got bills to pay. I need to publish something. You haven't read Hemingway when he's like, I got this in my head. I have to write it. Right? Read A Movable Feast. That is brilliant writing. But Hemingway is. Is an impressionist. He's like, I'm not going to give you a detailed count. Count of this. This person walked into a bar, and this is what they were wearing, and this is how the sun glinted off their eyes and everything. It's like a band walked in a bar. And, you know, like, he'll describe enough. And you're like, okay, this guy's shabby. And that's it. That's all you're gonna get. Yeah, yeah.

[40:40] EDWARD HALL: You know, and then. And I know we need to wrap up, but you know who I think promulgated kind of a postmodern approach like that is Gregory McDonald, who created Fletch, Right. Later embodied on screen by chevy Chase. Gregory McDonald's thinking on that was, we have television, right? I don't need to tell you what, you know, this thing looks like or how this works, right? You know, all that. You've seen it on tv. And so he then had this shorthand where he was able to create this, honestly glittering and hilarious dialogue amid all this stuff that, as indeed he felt, and rightly so, needed no description because you know what it is. And if you don't know what it is, okay, then you might be lost.

[41:33] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: But you'll be all right.

[41:36] EDWARD HALL: Most of his readership is, in fact, exposed to the. The technology, the baseline technology of the 20th century, you know, which lets him do these lines like, you know, who is it? CIA. Mr. Fletcher, could you spell that? Right. I love that bit.

[41:58] SPEAKER C: It's funny talking about things that don't need description. I'm a sports guy. Pat Summerall, he was a football player and then a broadcaster for cbs. I think he was a broadcaster on a lot of Super Bowls for them. Made the transition to golf for a while. And he was just told by the head of CBS Sports, you know, obviously, you don't have to describe everything that's happening on the screen that the viewers can see what's happening. He said he was told if you ever say the words, he made the putt, you're fired.

[42:37] EDWARD HALL: Yes. Perfect. Exactly.

[42:38] SPEAKER C: Yeah, yeah, we can see it. We can see it. I just.

[42:42] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: I had.

[42:43] SPEAKER C: I had one specific question back at the beginning. You talked about a book where you had a recipe in there for a pasta dish. I missed the title of the book that you were talking about there.

[42:54] EDWARD HALL: I called it out. It is the. It's. It's the framing fiction. There's, like, two short stories, one at the beginning, one at the end. That book end, a white wolf book called World of Darkness Mafia. And the stories are soliloquy. And then the. The back half of it is obsequies.

[43:18] SPEAKER C: Okay. Okay, cool. Yeah, Yeah, I. I can sit here. And I think this interview should be, like, three hours because I also have, like, a lot of general questions. What's that?

[43:31] DANIEL HOROWITZ GARCIA: Still recording?

[43:32] SPEAKER C: Yeah, we're still recording. I'm sorry.

[43:34] EDWARD HALL: I'm happy to do it.

[43:35] SPEAKER C: I'm being a little bit casual. Okay, cool. I'll be quiet now. And thanks, guys.

[43:44] EDWARD HALL: No, thank.