Under what sort of circumstances would Plasma Bolts ring like a bell?
Alright man, I only used ring like a bell because I used it as a tag for Yerin's major ability, I didn't, I've used it other times in Traveller's Gate and other series; but, (Sam says 'A lot!' from off screen), I know, I know dang it, I use it a lot. I used it,I rely on it, I only over use it because of Cradle. Dang it. (Takes sip.)
What is the next type of series you are planning to work on?
Alright, so I've teased this, and I've talked about it. I'll tell you now, the next thing I'm planning on working on is space fantasy. So, it's not exactly scifi, it's a very soft sci-fi it's kind of a wizards in space with dragons. So you've got star ships, you've got wands, you've got dragons hatching from stars. Fun stuff.
Other than regular flavor, what is you favorite type of Oreo?
Birthday Cake. It's funny because I try all these different kinds of Oreos, and I really enjoy that and it's really fun; but you always come back to the double stuf is the best. Then I think of the fancy ones, Birthday Cake man. It's great.
Is the MFA program at the UCF worth enrolling in?
It was worth it for me, but I can't say it would be worth it for everybody. As I've said before, it was worth it for me because it was worth reading, being forced to write, read other people's writing. Learn how to give and receive feedback. All that kind of thing. Become familiar with myself as a writer; but everything you learn from an MFA program you can learn from, on your own, or from a writers group. From getting mentors. You can do that online for free, if you're going to, but I wouldn't have, I dont have the discipline for that. I wouldn't have done it. The MFA made me do it, so it was worth it for me.
What's your favorite game in the Legend of Zelda franchise?
Breath of the Wild, no question. I think Breath of the Wild is just amazing, what an awesome step forward for the franchise and for open world games in general. I like a lot of the other, I mean Link's Awakening is really good, a Link to the Past. I know Ocarina of Time was everybody's big, and it's a great game, but it was one of those things where I played it as a kid and it didn't make that much of an impact on me. So... It's, it's a good game, but it wasn't anything that informed me. (Takes sip.)
How do you start with conceptualizing a new series or world, and how do you transition that into a story or series?
Alright so I start with some kind of, some kind of concept, that is just the seed for whatever I think is interesting about that idea. Then I build out from there, and then I have to link it to a plotline and characters and all that kind of stuff. Whatever my initial thought process is, so for Cradle I was going look I want to do a cultivation series, that is more designed for western audiences; because a lot of the cultivation series that are written in China and Japan and Korea, they assume a level of cultural familiarity that a lot of people here don't have, and they're translated. So I was trying to go, okay let's use English words, let's use western tropes, and let's try to write it for a western audience. So I take those things and I go, what do I want to see?; and then I go out from there. That's generally how I start; but it goes back and forth. Everything I figure out about the world informs the characters, everything I figure out about the characters informs the plot, everything I figure out about the plot informs the world. So on and so forth.
How do you name your characters?
Uh, I've said this before, kind of any way. All the ways. There's only really a couple of rules I go with, one is if you want people to, who are named by a certain culture to have something in common with other people named by that culture, and then other ways are, you don't want main characters with rhyming names or names that start with the same letter; because that becomes confusing. So, you kind of, your main character names have to be distinct. Dresden Files is my big example of that, we have Murphy, Michael, Mouse, all these people who begin with M, and it's like, it looks confusing on the page. So it's not terrible, it's just one of those things where, avoid those things if you can.
Yeah, Elden Ring names.
Character names shouldn't start with the same letter? Someone tell Elden Ring.
Oh yeah, Elden Ring, that's another good, Elden Ring yeah. All the Elden Ring, Godfried, Godrick, Godwhatever, it's okay sure. Godwin, Godbolt.
How fast does Plasma Bolts?
How fast does Plasma Bolt?(presumably?) Quickly, anytime anything happens, he's just ready to bolt. Plasma is just out of there.
When does Lindon show up in Plasma Bolts?
Um, 6.
Does your upcoming series Plasma Bolts have plasma swords?
Yes.
People always ask who is Will Wight, but we want to know how is Will Wight? :D How are you doing?
Aw, 'how are you doing?' I'm doing alright, not too bad. One of the things that we're continually trying to figure out is how I take time off better. So I give myself time off, but it's hard to kind of turn my brain off. So I've been trying to figure out how do I channel that into projects that make me restore...
Turn Will off and on again. That might reset him.
(...) Yeah, yeah that's actually what I'm talking about, how do I turn myself off and on again and rest. I know you were joking about the lag.
Why and how did you decide to try doing such an ambitious work of two parallel trilogies? Hats off to you, structurally it must have been difficult, how did you figure it out?
Brute force, I figured it out by brute force. Doing two parallel trilogies, I always really liked that idea. Oh actually wait I'm going to back up. (...) Structurally it's difficult for Elder Empire, yes it was very difficult. I figured it out kind of one step at a time. It was hard to, hard to do. Something that was just, I had to do it, I had a great time doing it, I don't recommend it. (...dialogue lost to lag...) The flashback storylines were major storylines. (...more lost...) I then had to get the flashback storylines to work complimentary with the main storylines.
Bro, Cathel is cool.
I do not understand that, and I'm going to move on.
If they weren't stuck with the class 1 fiends would the readers and other people with powers of Elder Empire be able to ascend? Has anyone ascended from the world of Elder Empire?
(...class 1 fiends...?) Yes. (...has anyone ascended...?) No, after they were locked there, it was locked down. No one has ascended from that iteration.
I love Shera, as a woman I resonated with her, what is the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?
It's fan response, it's reviewer response. People have certain ideas about what it means to be writing in a characters head based on their gender. So in general, speaking very candidly, when you are a man writing in the head of a woman, really even if you're a woman writing a woman character, it is, people have these assumptions that what you're doing is a statement on women in general. Where as when you do a male character, it's not taken that way. So, when you, so I can write a male character doing anything, and it isn't taken as a judgement or a statement on who men are, but whatever I have a woman do it is taken as, it can be taken as a statement on what women are like or what I think about women. So that is really the hardest thing, it's not really writing the characters, so there's a lot of good reasons for that, I'm really not attacking that, it's just what it is. So because of that I have to keep in mind what people are going to expect or how they're going to read this. I don't really have to do that for male characters, so that's the hardest part. That's the, I have to go, however the way I prefer to write characters is, and the way that I usually do is I write them just as the people that they are in the scenario, and then I kind of assign gender later. So I sort of have them in their role and their personality and their backstory, and then I figure out who they are as a human. So because of that, gender kind of comes along later in the process. So I write them the same, I write them the exact same ways, the same process. It doesnt change. Except that then, I have to determine, afterwards, okay is this, what can I? Am I allowed to do this? Are people going to take this, is this going to offend any body? Is this something that is going to, is there a problem here? You know, I've got to check, right? A lot of my beta readers are women, so I get to have that checked for me, they get to tell me what they think about it. That is primarily how I write characters, the same. That is how I would prefer to do it the entire time, I would prefer to write them exactly the same way. You have to keep reader expectations in mind, I certainly don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. That's the hardest thing, in terms of how you'd write people, look, you write people as authentically as you can. theres this idea that there's a gendered voice in a pov, and I have not found that to be true. It all comes down to how authentically you are writing the character, and if you're writing the character authentically then I think it comes across as an authentic voice and if you are not then I think it doesn't. There you go.
I'm glad Yerin is female.
Okay so Yerin is one of those characters that I had as a woman from the beginning, and the reason by that is, she is the character who is the protagonist, who would be protagonist if Lindon wasn't around. She's got the sword powers, she's got the blood powers, main characters in these cultivation stories always have either sword, darkness, blood or fire powers or often all of them. Therefore Lindon got the fire and darkness and magic powers, and she got the sword and blood powers. So, I had her just be the, she's kind of the protagonist, and that's why she's the one who wants to fight all the time. Thats the typical cultivation protagonist. So her being gender flipped was intentional on my part, because she's the other side of the coin. Of a normal cultivation protagonist. Thats the backstory of Yerin's design there.
What rank is Bass.exe?
Probably no rank because he's a program, so there would be nothing for him to interact with now.
Does Elder Empire take place before, or after Cradle?
We get that question a lot; and I'm still not going to answer it.
You said it on some podcast that it was twice as many books from more than double the amount of work. If you could do the series over again, would you approach it differently?
Yeah, so one thing I would do is, we think the main deal with Elder Empire is, the concept is not super clear. So, I would clarify that. I think one thing that hurts that is, the titles, which I think are super fun, but they don't communicate the concept really that well; and they're hard to remember. So, it's, there's a lot of presentation things that we would change, I probably would, the thing is I probably wouldn't do, I would probably do a different concept; but it's hard to say that because I'm glad I did it, once, it was cool, it was a good experience. I grew as a writer, I learned a lot. Now I would do that, but I would only do that now with the benefit of hind sight, so if I really went back in time I would probably do the same thing. So... It's really the dual book structure thats not clear.
What's not clear about pirates vs ninjas...?
It's the dual novel structure that's not clear, why is it two novels? What is the structure, what are the flash backs? It's not clear. So I would clarify that more; but I did say before it is twice as many books for more than double the amount of work, yeah it, it look. Writing two books would be easier than writing two books in parallel; because two books in parallel you have to be extremely clear and exacting on where everything is at each time. Plus, they both have to be structured in relation to one another and also independently. So they have to work on a structural level, as themselves, and in relation to the other story. As you can imagine, that's hard; because you have to have characters, both characters pushing their story line forward in a way that interacts with the other, but in a way that's also satisfying on its own. It's very very difficult to do. So, that was a challenge that I took on. Some people have in the past been like, 'ah, yeah, you did that so you could get two pieces of income, for essentially the same book.' Uh, no. That, that's kind of the opposite of what happened; and it is really, I would have made way more money had I just written six books 1 2 3 4 5 6, instead of two at a time. So yeah. It would have been way easier.
What would happen if a person who had two Territories pulled on both hard enough to incarnate at the exact same time, would they die a gruesome death, or would the territories be linked? Also how does someone ascend from this world?
Would they die a gruesome death? Probably. Would the two Territories be linked? No, they would not get linked, they would, they might become an incarnation of both, that would be a weirdo hybrid thing, that could happen; but most likely they would just die. How does one ascend from this world? It's in between Territories, so Territory, obviously spacial travel, there's a lot of weird spacial stuff happening in Amalgam, which is the Traveller's Gate world. So there are a lot of ways where you could go from a Territory and be like a back way out, where you would get lost between worlds. That's the kind of thing where you would do, it's less ascending like it is in Cradle in terms of you have transcended this plane of existence, more or getting lost and stumbling out. In terms of if you were to ascend from Amalgam, in terms of becoming that great, you would basically just have to become the greatest Traveller of all time.
Are the Travellers comparable to the Sages of Cradle? They both can bend reality to their Will, open gates, portals and pocket worlds, both can become stronger by exercising their Will power.
Jamie D. Woods, which I'm going to assume is James Woods the actor, (...), Sage is more equivalent to like, the Founder of a Territory. So, Simon of course being the honorary Founder of Valinhall, but not the real one, Valin being the real Founder of Valinhall, but not like someone who is fully in control of their powers. If Valin had been able to create Valinhall and control it completely, he would have been like a Sage. That would have been like where he's at; but because he can't, because he was sort of using material that was already there, and was kind of a, they had similar abilities but not as well controlled.
