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So Say We All: Mark A. Altman on the Oral History of Battlestar Galactica

This article was written by Swapna Krishna and originally appeared on Unbound Worlds. Oral histories have become increasingly popular ways to tell the story of important moments in pop culture. They take away the barrier between writer and storyteller; it makes you feel closer to the narrative because all you’re seeing are people’s own words, arranged in a way that tells a coherent story. However, despite the fact that an oral history may seem like an easy endeavor, it’s anything but. That aforementioned arrangement is key to being able to follow the narrative and understand opposing points of view. Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross have become experts at the enormous work that goes into these books; they edited a two-part oral history of “Star Trek,” The Fifty-Year Mission, an oral history of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” with Slayers and Vampires, and now they’ve moved onto the sci-fi classic “Battlestar Galactica” with So Say We All, out August 21st from Tor Books. Unbound Worlds spoke with Mark Altman on how exactly they put these enormous books together and where they might head from here. Unbound Worlds: What first made you interested in conducting and compiling oral histories? Mark A. Altman: It all began with the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek.” We felt we in a unique position to tell the history of “Star Trek” in a way that no one else could. Even then, it took some convincing from Ed to bring me around. It wasn’t till after reading the wonderful oral histories of “Saturday Night Live” and MTV that I realized this was a great format to chronicle the history of Trek that had never been done and also be true to the Rashomon-like history of the franchise. To Ed’s credit, I’m delighted I did do the book with him and I keep trying to get out, but he keeps pulling me back in. UW: What’s the research and interview process like? What about the process of putting it all together into one coherent story? MAA: Years of intensive research and hundreds of hours of interviews are where we start. But you’re absolutely right, perhaps the biggest challenge is taking literally hundreds of thousands of pages of transcripts and turning them into a coherent narrative. We always say it’s like attending the greatest dinner party in the world with 200–300 people and then getting them to tell these amazing stories they’ve never shared before and prodding them to tell you more, even the things they don’t want to or might have forgotten about. UW: Is it ever hard to decide what makes it in versus what to cut? MAA: Yes, because these books could be thousands of pages instead of hundreds if we used all the great stories we had. Thankfully, Macmillan indulged us on the Trek book and let us bifurcate it into two volumes to do justice to the entire 50 years, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the reception we received. Otherwise, that would have been hard to distill down and we would have lost some amazing stories and anecdotes. Buffy and Galactica have been easier to keep at less than 1000 pages, but it’s still a challenge given the bountiful material we’ve had access to in terms of the candor and passion of the people we’ve spoken to. UW: You work with a co-author, Edward Gross. How is the work divided between the two of you? How do you collaborate? MAA: It depends on the subject. In the case of the first Trek volume, we really built on each others’ work and interviews. For the second volume, we divided up the series but then flipped everything. There was no way I was doing “Voyager,” I was very insistent on that fact. For Buffy & Angel, Ed primarily took “Angel” and I did “Buffy” but there was definitely a cross-over in interviews and we revise each others sections. BSG was definitely the most clearly defined. I did 1978 and 1980 primarily and he did Ron Moore’s series, which isn’t to say we didn’t both contribute to each section, but he did the heavy lifting on his section and vice versa. And when I was finished I was really unhappy with the 1980 section. I didn’t feel I had really added anything new to the story and I knew no one was ever likely to write about the subject of this dreadful series again, so I started from scratch intending to really do a deep dive, did a ton more interviews, and it’s one of my favorite chapters in any of the books now. UW: You’ve done oral histories for “Star Trek,” “Buffy”/”Angel,” and now “Battlestar Galactica.” Was there one that was your favorite? Not because of the property, but because of process or uncovered secrets? MAA: I agreed to do all these books, first and foremost because I’m a fan of all these shows. These books are primarily a hobby for me, my day job is as a writer/producer for film and television series which is quite time consuming so if I’m going to give up my hiatus, weekends, and nights for a book, it has to be something I’m passionate about. “Star Trek” was no-brainer, but “Buffy” was super fun because it not only gave me a chance to write about a show I loved as well as my family, but also talk to several people I worked with in my other capacity like Felicia Day and Sean Astin, who were guest stars on an episode of “The Librarians” I wrote and, of course, Christian Kane. But then “Galactica” was also a big deal for me because I grew up on the 1978 series and always felt it was the Rodney Dangerfield of sci-fi series. Despite its many flaws, it was a really significant and impressive series that had a lot to do with influencing the future of television, even if people don’t recognize that. And, of course, Ron Moore’s series is just a major milestone in genre storytelling and one of the greatest TV series ever produced so to have the kind of access we had thanks to Ron and tell the real story behind this show was really remarkable and we were honored to do so. UW: “Battlestar Galactica” had a long-lasting impact on science fiction as a genre. What does it mean to you personally, and how do you interpret its legacy? MAA: It was the sci-fi “Sopranos.” Ron and David Eick created a series that will stand the test of time and really was part of the dawn of peak and binge-able television. It’s very significant and a really remarkable accomplishment. The original series deserves more respect but is often derided because it was perceived as a “Star Wars” rip-off. But it actually, if sometimes clumsily, dealt with some very heady themes and had some of the most remarkable production design and visual effects in any genre film or TV series ever. It was also a show about a literal family unlike “Trek,” which was a figurative one, which made it unique as well and there are some remarkable episodes and an ingenious premise that made “BSG“ 2004 possible. It was one of the few sci-fi series to deal with theology and spirituality as well. What we also chronicle is the unique place Universal Television was at the end of the ‘70s in the waning days of the studio system when talent was under contract and half the show creators were either drunk or on drugs, and work was done by a small coterie of largely white men who all knew each other and would all get hired on each others shows. I found that period absolutely fascinating and it’s amazing to see how dramatically TV has changed. UW: You’ve traced quite a bit of Ron D. Moore’s career through “The Next Generation,” “Deep Space Nine,” “Voyager,” and now “Battlestar Galactica.” What was it like to work with him, and what do you think these books say about his career? MAA: Ron is a remarkable talent. That’s no secret. But what people might not know is what a great guy he is. A total mensch. I first met Ron back in the heyday of “TNG” when I used to interview him for the late, great Cinefantastique magazine. He has remained steadfast and loyal even when I was less than effusive with my praise for his films like “Generations” (which I savaged) and yet he remained very supportive of my own career. I think he’s incredibly savvy and smart and has a passion that is unparalleled among genre creators. He has been incredibly supportive of Ed and I. With the “Trek” books, he spent literally tens of hours on the phone with Ed speaking to him with complete candor and thoughtfulness. When it came time to do So Say We All, he literally reached out to the entire cast and crew on our behalf and told them to speak to us honestly about the show and it really opened the floodgates so that we were able to talk to everyone involved in the new series from Eddie on down to the grips — okay maybe not the grips, but mostly everyone. UW: This is the last book in your oral history trilogy. Why is that, and if you could open the door to exploring more shows and properties, what might they be? MAA: Well, that’s not quite true. When I wrote [the introduction to So Say We All], I thought it would be. That I said everything I had to say. And while it’s likely to be our last oral history of a genre TV show—although never say never again—we’re already committed to another oral history of a major film series for Tor that we’re writing now and have a few other projects that we’re discussing so like I say; I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. A big part of this is how much I enjoy my working relationship with Ed Gross as well as my fantastic editorial team at Tor, but also how much I love these TV series and films we’re writing about. There’s a great line in the mediocre Michael Crichton film “Looker,” when Albert Finney is asked to do plastic surgery on a really beautiful girl and he wants to turn down the assignment and he’s advised by a colleague, “You better do it or someone less competent will.” That’s kind of how I feel about these oral histories too.
Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash
Blog, Random Notes

Staff Picks: Jenny

Who better to give book recommendations than the bookish experts? Penguin Random House employees are sharing their favorite reads every month. Browse below! Jenny, Production Manager, Crown Publishing Jenny, a production manager at Crown, is convinced she was born with a book in her hand. She lives in her houseplant forest/apartment and spends all her free time drinking tea and rearranging books.
Blog, Uncategorized, Writing Tips

If You Want to be a Writer, You Need to be Fearless: Here’s Why

This article was written by Christina Dalcher and originally appeared on Signature Reads.

A quick Google search for ‘writing advice’ tells me there can’t be much left that hasn’t already been said. Nobel Prize winners offer tips. Forty experts tell beginners what to do. Bestselling authors give us insight into their creative processes. And so on, ad infinitum. Then there’s that perfect book, half craft, half writer’s memoir: Stephen King’s On Writing. If I could only have one how-to manual on my shelf, it would be that one.

Where does this leave us, then? What guidance can I, a debut novelist and writer of flash fiction, possibly offer the world, or the emerging writer? I’ve thought about it over and over, and finally came up with two words: Be fearless. We know writing takes work, and skill, and talent, and perseverance. There’s the old ‘Butt-in-the-chair, honey!’ mandate (with its cute acronym) — a writer’s corollary to the athlete’s ‘Just Do It’ mantra. You want to run? Run. You want to write? Write. There’s something so plainly tautological about it all. And there can be beauty in tautologies.
But I think fearlessness is the single quality we as writers need to cultivate, and I mean this in multiple ways.
We need the bravery to pour our emotions out, spilling ink onto paper with a little of our own blood mixed in. That’s no small trick. We need the courage to send our words into the world, knowing that once we do, a part of us is gone, floating in the public sphere, no longer under our control. If one accepts Roland Barthes’ notion that the author is dead, we authors must embrace the concept that we’re killing some portion of ourselves the minute our work leaves us. And, of course, we need the self-esteem and thick, carapace-like skin to hang on and persist when the inevitable rejections hit our inboxes. Believe me, they will hit — hard. A bland form rejection from an agent or editor can carry all the pain of bludgeon to the face, a direct smack to our very soul. Everyone who writes, or who wants to write, requires a ring fighter’s determination, a Rocky-esque willingness to go the distance, and to keep going. Being fearless also takes us in new directions, allowing us to experiment with previously unknown forms, new characters, and diverse points of view. One of my favorite things about writing flash fiction — tightly condensed stories often under 500 words — is exactly this: Within the space of a day, I can be a cranky old man on a front porch in Mississippi, a young housewife, or a sneaky feline. Fearlessness is a gift, a license to try something different and liberate ourselves from any habitual ruts. And it need not be limited to our writing lives. We can extend it to our whole lives: to our relationships with ourselves and others, to our careers (and the changing thereof), and to how we interact with the world. Finally, we need to forge some armor of another sort — the kind that protects us from dissatisfied readers. It’s useful to remember that old John Lydgate saying about not being able to please everyone all of the time. Every once in a while, our words may not even reach the point of unpleasing, instead inspiring far less positive reactions. Still, they’re our words and our thoughts, and we have to steel ourselves against ugly feedback. (Hint: read your reviews, or not. Then go back to doing what you do.) When I teach writing classes, the very first thing I tell my students is to prepare for rejection and failure. Both are going to happen, sometimes much more frequently than we’d wish. The rejection and failure aren’t the focus, though; it’s what we do afterwards that counts. And what we, as creators, should do afterwards is simple: get up and do it all over again. Would I call myself fearless? Would I use that label? I don’t know; I haven’t walked through the world with a superhero cape on my back. I do know that others have said this about me, starting with my first professor in graduate school twenty years ago. That man is gone now, and I can’t pick up the phone and say, “Hey, guess what? I believe you.” So instead, I write, a little or a lot every day, and try to live up to the descriptor. I try to fear nothing, even when that seems impossible. Maybe you were expecting a writer’s user manual. A list of do’s and don’ts full of perennial tips like ‘show, don’t tell’ and ‘avoid adverbs.’ Something along those lines. But the best advice I can give, and — in my mind — the only advice worth its salt, is encapsulated in two words. Be fearless. Then sit back and watch what happens. I have a feeling what happens will be good. Be Fearless/Photo by Evan Kirby on Unsplash
Blog, Writing Tips

There’s a Limit to Writing What You Know, and Here’s Why

This article was written by Elyssa Friedland and originally appeared on Signature Reads.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the difficult balance an author needs to strike between writing what we are familiar with, and therefore helping to unsure an authentic voice, and creating characters totally apart from ourselves in settings we may never have visited.

The former might seem easier and the safer route to go. “Write what you know;” it’s a familiar refrain and popular advice given to aspiring writers. But even that can be fraught with difficulty. In writing characters, places, and events from our own lives, we can all too easily fall into the trap of sharing too much detail. When setting a novel in New York City, where I live, it’s critical that I don’t mention every restaurant and boutique name that I frequent. When I find myself writing more of a guidebook to New York City than a novel, I ask myself: Is that extra detail propelling the story forward? If not, it should be cut. I certainly don’t want to limit the audience for my books to readers who live within a ten-mile radius of me looking for a great hat store. On the other hand, there is value in sharing the nooks and crannies of a setting we know intimately well. It is the ultimate way to invite the reader to join us in the pages. Reading fiction is nothing if not an escape, and the more specificity provided, the more easily a reader can Photoshop themselves into the novel and feel the humid air, taste the freshly picked tomato, and smell the lavender — whatever atmosphere the writer is trying to suck the reader into comes alive the more detail we give. A quick anecdote. In my latest novel, The Intermission, a critical scene takes place at a Chinese restaurant on First Avenue called Wa Jeal. This would be a case of providing too much in the minutia department. It didn’t matter that it was on First Avenue and it certainly didn’t matter what the restaurant was called. The only upshot of providing that detail were the numerous texts I got from local friends: Is Wa Jeal really good? What do you order there? Do they deliver? Yeah
 you get the idea. Setting is not the only trap where writing what you know can lead to extraneous detail. Too often we as writers like to share experiences from our former professions — probably because we are scarred by them. There are a lot of lawyers-turned-writers and much as we may want to tell our readers about the gloom and doom of law firm life, from the tedious document review at three A.M. to the hours spent waiting in the printing office for four-hundred page contracts to be bound, we need to remember: there’s a reason we switched gears. Being a lawyer was boring! And so is writing about it. In The Intermission, I attempted to strike a nice balance between writing what I knew and writing what I wanted to know about. I refused to make either of my husband and wife pair attorneys. Instead, I made Jonathan a hedge funder — a world that is somewhat elusive to me but is prevalent in my hometown of New York City. For Cass, I decided to put her in the world of Broadway marketing. I love theater but knew very little about the behind-the-scenes making of a show. So I was able to bring my passion for the stage to the novel but also explain the mechanics of marketing a show in outsider-not-insider terms. Likewise with the plot. Half the novel is set in New York, but half the story is in Los Angeles. I’ve visited LA many times but don’t know it nearly as well as my hometown. Having a split-setting kept my overflow details in check. I needed to make sure LA came alive just as much as New York did in the book. Not overwriting what I know continues to be a struggle I face as a writer, but I’m certainly aware of the pitfalls. And I welcome reader feedback on the subject, as that is truly the test of whether I’m striking the proper balance. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Random Notes

Staff Picks and Q&A about Read Ahead: Megan

Who better to give book recommendations than the bookish experts? Penguin Random House employees are sharing their favorite reads every month. Browse below! Megan, Assistant Editor, Audio Megan is the friend who’s reading a book when you show up to dinner and recommends no less than six others over the course of your meal. If you can’t find her in a book or at a restaurant, she’s likely listening to a podcast on her commute or up in the air en route to her next trip. Megan is also a member of Read Ahead’s Junior Board and has been a volunteer for four years. Read Ahead is a charitable organization that matches mentors with children to foster a love for reading and promotes literacy. Read below for Megan’s interview about her volunteer work! RA: What is the most rewarding part of volunteering with Read Ahead? MM: The most rewarding part of my experiences volunteering have been with my student, Yetzibeth. She brings so much excitement and enthusiasm to every kind of book that we read together. We’ve read books that range from Barbie princesses to non-fiction books about bees. It’s incredible to see her excitement grow with each session – she is just so imaginative. When we start to get into a book she really likes, she can’t wait to turn the page and see what’s next. I learn as much, if not more, from her than she does from me. RA: How has your relationship with her grown? MM: We understand each other more as we continue to get to know each other. We aren’t just reading together the whole time. When we first started she would come in and we would sit down and read together, but as we’ve gotten to know each other we’ve become a lot more comfortable, spending more time talking and learning about each other. RA: Is there a book you’ve read together that has been particularly successful? MM: She has such a range of interests – we’re always reading about something new. One book that she really loved was “The Day The Crayons Quit” by Drew Daywalt – it really is a great story and she was so excited by it.
Blog

Robert Jackson Bennett on Magic as a Form of Programming

This article was written by Robert Jackson Bennett and originally appeared on Unbound Worlds. One of the problems I had with magic as a young reader was that it was never clear how it worked. Despite whatever exposition or worldbuilding the author put me through, at the critical moment magic usually boiled down to a word, a gesture, the right ingredients, and the proper stance. Why this combination of disparate if not random elements satisfied the rules of the world to force reality to change was always a mystery to me. “Why did they have to prick themselves with a needle?” I would ask myself. “Why did they use an onion? Why a candle made of black tallow? Why were the ladies always either naked or wearing gauzy robes when they did magic, but men wore giant black cloaks?” I understood that the reason why magic worked is that
 well, it’s magic. But often at some plot-critical point in the story, the magic would wind up not working, and this often flew in the face of what had been established before. Loopholes and exceptions abounded, seemingly invented on the fly. Magic wasn’t a system, it was just the fuel the author used whenever they needed to make the plot go. It was while I was staying at a rather drab and dreary hotel that I had the idea
 what is magic, I thought, but a command? A direction? An order? If magic were real, I thought, it wouldn’t be some hidden mystery – it would be a series of instructions given to the world to make it be different, to distort reality into something it wasn’t. I complicated it further – what if it wasn’t instructions, but rather an argument? Reality, like any natural phenomena, wouldn’t want to change: it’d have gravity, momentum. It would have to be convinced, and magic would be the language you’d use to convince it to change. “So reality is stupid,” I thought. “You’d have to give it a very specific, detailed argument as to why it needed to be totally different. If you want to tell a ball to roll forward very fast like it was flying down a hill, you’d have to define what a ball was, what a hill was, and then what ‘fast’ meant.” And then I thought to myself, “Magic is just a way of programming reality like one might write code for an application.” And that blew the whole thing wide open in my mind. In the world of Foundryside, there are naturally occurring elemental sigils in the world, sigils for anything and everything: for water, heat, motion, gravity, for “stone” and “night” and “wind” and “flesh.” When you inscribe these sigils on an object, you change its reality, but only very slightly – if you write, say, the sigil for “clay” upon a stone, it becomes slightly, slightly softer
 but not that much. Yet if you combine the sigils
 if you put them together to make what is essentially a script that can be executed on command
 then you can change much, much more. You’d just store the pre-written scripts in a bank of some kind – like a database, or lexicon – and whenever you needed to alter reality, you just called up the right script, and
. Abracadabra. Foundryside is a world very different from our own, but also very much alike: it is a world in which some very, very smart people have found a way to write code to change reality, thus making themselves and their culture massively powerful almost overnight, creating an industrialized city of corporate espionage, reality-altering magic code, obscenely wealthy tycoons, and ancient secrets. It is a world in which someone figured out how magic works. And such a world, it turns out, can be very nasty indeed.
Blog, Random Notes

Staff Picks: Casey Blue

Who better to give book recommendations than the bookish experts? Penguin Random House employees are sharing their favorite reads every month. Browse below!   Casey Blue, Senior Manager, Business Development Casey Blue is a proud nerd who loves doling out book recommendations as much as she loves reading. When she’s not doing one of those things, she’s either running, cooking, on the beach, or in a museum.
Blog, News, Uncategorized

Congratulations to Our 2018 Man Booker Prize Longlisters

The Man Booker Prize is one of the most influential annual international literary fiction honors, open to writers of any nationality, writing in English. Congratulations to these six books published by Penguin Random House for making the longlist! The longlist includes 13 total titles published in the UK and Ireland between October 1, 2017 and September 30, 2018.   Learn more about our six books in the running:  
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My Brothers, My D&D Campaign, My Graphic Novel, and Me

This article was written by Jaime Green and originally appeared on Unbound Worlds. Almost four years ago, Justin McElroy was about to become a father. He knew he’d need at least a few weeks of paternity leave from the comedy/advice podcast he makes with his brothers, My Brother, My Brother, and Me, but the McElroys didn’t want to leave their listeners in the lurch. So, as a lark, they recorded a couple of hours of themselves playing Dungeons and Dragons with their dad. Griffin, the youngest brother, DMed [editor’s note for the uninitiated: a DM is a Dungeon Master, the game organizer for a Dungeons and Dragons ongoing game, or campaign]. But they didn’t just play for a few hours—what began as a paternity leave place-holder soon became its own podcast, The Adventure Zone, and eventually evolved into something bigger and more powerful than any of the McElroys imagined. Justin has previously described the experience as thinking you’re driving a car and then discovering the car has wings. The Adventure Zone never lost its initial goofiness, but as Griffin quickly moved away from a pre-made Dungeons and Dragons quest and into crafting his own adventures, the world developed a rich mythology—and a compelling overarching story for the three adventurers to discover, play out, and shape. That first massive storyline, called Balance, wrapped up last August, and the show is now about a dozen episodes into its second story, Amnesty, set in present-day West Virginia (the McElroys’ home state), where a small town is shaped by its proximity to a gateway to a mystical world. Now, the winged car is metamorphosing again, into a graphic novel co-authored by the McElroys and illustrator Carey Pietsch. It covers the first chapter of the Balance arc, called Here There Be Gerblins, maintaining the D&D set-up by making Griffin, as game-master, a meta-character in the story as well. I spoke to Justin, Griffin, and Carey about adapting a podcast into a graphic novel, their relationship with fans, and the story behind the podcast’s most shocking moment. Jaime: What were the logistics of this adaptation? There are five of you and you all have very busy lives, many jobs, and podcasts, and that’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen. How did you go from this audio record of a D&D game to a graphic novel? Griffin: Dad has a background in comics, so he spearheaded the script drafting process. After he would finish, we would go over some changes. Then the rest of the creative team would go over some changes. Then we’d have a new draft of the graphic novel. Then it would go through another. Each time that we knocked out some things that we felt didn’t make for a very good graphic novel, we would read through another draft and then find more of them. There’s a lot of table talk, or out-of-character humor, or jokes that only work if you can hear them. There aren’t drastic story changes, but we did change some things, especially since this first arc in the podcast is fairly light in terms of overarching themes and world development and the plot of what the story turned into. Jaime: When you were making those changes, from the podcast to the graphic novel, did you have an eye on making it accessible or inviting for readers who haven’t listened to the podcast? Justin: Yeah—it’s an easier ask. [The podcast] is a long commitment just to see if you like something or not. We’re talking six or seven hours just in the first arc. I really like that now you can get into the story in just however long it takes to read the graphic novel. Jaime: Carey, how did you get involved with The Adventure Zone? Carey: I started out, back in 2015, drawing fan art when I was listening to the show as a way to keep myself happy and engaged while working on a whole bunch of other freelance projects. I was so struck by the charm and joy evident in it. It made me want to try to figure out how it could look in a visual setting. I got to know a bunch of the fan community and chat with the McElroys a little bit when I co-ran The Adventure Zine [a collection of fan art of the show, the proceeds of which went to charity] with Megan Raley a year or so after that. Jaime: What was it like shifting from a fan to a collaborator? Carey: I’ve had to take a step back from being as active in fan communities, mostly because I’ve gone from “Oh, this is a fun thing that I can spend some free time on” to “All of my time is working on this book.” I’ve also tried to be mindful the fact that the McElroys have talked a lot about how important all the various visual interpretations of the podcast characters are. So the graphic novel canon can be the graphic novel canon, which is something we all developed together through collaboratively talking about what we want these characters in this world to look like, in this particular graphic novel interpretation. Jaime: Do you all see this as a separate canon from the podcast story? Griffin: Yeah. We feel very strongly the canon of the podcast is only within the podcast. So this is one visual representation of what the world looks like. One thing that was important to us for the podcast is that there is such a huge array of interpretations of the world and the characters, and we didn’t want to shut that down by saying, “No. This is actually what it is. This is actually what it looks like.” Jaime: As the Balance arc went on and as you moved from working out of a D&D campaign into crafting this whole epic story yourself, you had a different kind of authorial hand in this from the players as the DM. Did working on the graphic novel feel like a shift in authorship? Griffin: I was not hesitant to sort of give up the reins. I hadn’t solely had the reins of the podcast, because things would change based on the decisions that Justin and Travis and Dad made and how the dice played out. The bigger change had to do with understanding what makes something good for a graphic novel, what things work visually. That was entirely Carey’s work and it was one of the best things for us, getting new drafts of the art and seeing visual gags of things that happened on the podcast. Jaime: Carey, what was it like coming into this collaborative group? Not only are you working with a family, but you’re working with people who’ve been making podcasts and videos together for a really long time. Carey: It feels really lucky that this was a real collaboration. Despite the fact that the McElroys have so much else that they’re juggling, they really were dedicated to bringing their full knowledge of this story and care for these characters to the table and really sitting down not just at the start of the script, but checking back in at thumbnails, at pencils, at inks and colors, to really make sure that the book was shaping up to be something that the entire team could be proud of. The whole team was really generous about letting me contribute to things about pacing on the page and timing and adding some room for things to breathe. Justin: I think that we’re also at an advantage over other creators who might be adapting something, where if we’d [originally] written this entire thing down word for word, then we would have chosen everything very carefully. We would have been very deliberate. But I think about what we put in the podcast, and we were just creating in the moment. So [when it came to adapting it for the graphic novel], we were precious about some character-related stuff, but in large we were probably more willing than a lot of creators would be to go like, “If it doesn’t work, cut it. I came up with that in ten seconds.” Jaime: On the podcast, you’ve moved into the next big story of The Adventure Zone. But Balance is still a big part of your lives, in live shows and the graphic novel. People are still making fan art and cosplaying. What does that feel like, for that first story to still be so big? Justin: I vacillate. The overriding thing I feel is gratitude. The idea that we created something that means something to a lot of people will always be very precious to me. But there is a side of me that does feel like, “I hope we didn’t make just one thing that people really like, and they still like other stuff that we make as well.” But that’s my crappy human vanity. You hate to think that you peaked with the very first swing at something. But even if we never approach the level of passion that we have gotten from Balance, I will still consider the entire venture a success just because the it’s been so lovely that so many people brought that story into their hearts. You can’t really ask for more. Griffin: When we decided to wrap up Balance and move on to a completely new story, we were straight-up terrified of leaving the world behind. We all knew that it was time to do it—it was important to all of us to have a conclusion for that story and not just let it go on and on—but we were, I think understandably, afraid that we would not be able to ever capture that again. I do feel like Amnesty, the story that we’re telling now, is growing. I’ve seen some cosplay of Amnesty characters at cons and at live shows, which is very exciting. This campaign is still finding its footing a little bit, but the investment is there from all of us in this world. We’re excited to see where it goes, because we saw the same transformation happen when we did Balance. Jaime: My last question is for Justin. [Apologies to anyone reading this who hasn’t listened to Balance. And: podcast spoilers ahead.] How far in advance did you plan the buying of the Flaming Poisoning Raging Sword Of Doom? Justin: About 30 seconds. Jaime: You are fucking kidding me. Seriously? Justin: If you go back and listen to the audio, Griffin told us that The Slicer of T’pire Weir Isles existed in that episode. So it was— Jaime: But didn’t Griffin used to send you guys a list of the Fantasy Costco items so you could plan your purchases? You really decided while you were recording? Justin: Yeah, Griffin sent us a lot of things. And I’m a very busy man. I have a lot of kids and a lot of email and I don’t always have the time. So yeah, it was formulated in the moment. And I wish more people knew just how impressive I am in ways like that. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about it, because you’d be shocked how rarely the interviews pivot into like the craftiness and innovation, the wit, the emotion. I want history to make sure that they’ve noted my genius, I guess.
All images © Macmillan
Random Notes

Staff Picks and Volunteer Spotlight: Ron

Who better to give book recommendations than the bookish experts? Penguin Random House employees are sharing their favorite reads every month. Browse below! Today, we spotlight Ron, who works as Retail Chain Manager for Adult Mass Merchandising. He also volunteers for Camp Kowakan and has kindly shared some of his experience. Learn more about Ron’s service time by reading his story below: Just over 1 million acres – – 1,090,000 to be specific.  So many lakes it’s almost as if they had help from Dr. Seuss in naming them – – there really is a Lake One, Lake Two, Lake Three and Lake Four.  That’s the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. (BWCA) There’s no other place like it on earth and its located in Northern Minnesota.  Since about 2004 I’ve been on the leadership team for a wilderness canoe base called Camp Kowakan. To keep it a wilderness experience, the U.S. Forest Service limits groups to nine including a guide and chaperone. We ask them to leave behind smart phones and take off watches – – they won’t be needed.  We teach them to live with the natural rhythm of life: eat when you’re hungry; sleep when you are tired; get up when it feels right, or when the canoe guide rousts you.  Group members learn teamwork and leadership skills, along with the rigors of life on the trail while, hopefully, seeing the beauty surrounding them. The resulting experience isn’t for everyone, but you’d be surprised at how many kids take to it. My next trip is in August.  All of the kids have gone on trips with me before and for two of them this will be their fourth time.  I always tell the kids that my job is to keep them safe and theirs is to make sure we have fun.  They are good at that.  I try.