An Interview with Erratic Errata, Part One
The first hour of our hard hitting two hour interview with the foremost expert on the Guide, Erratic Errata! Thanks for taking the time to talk with us!
Transcript
Podcast Guys takes a long view and a long price. Spoilers will be commonplace. Listen at your own risk.
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:Good morning, Faithful Reader.
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:Welcome, Fortunate Seeker, and welcome to a very special episode of Podcast Guys Talking ErraticErrata
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:called Podcast Guys Talking ErraticErrata colon Podcast Guys to Talking ErraticErrata
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:because today we happen to have a very special guest.
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:Hello, I go by ErraticErrata on the internet, so you might have heard of me or read a thing or two that I wrote.
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:I imagine that everybody listening might have, yeah, and that's awesome.
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:Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate your time, and we're really looking forward to this.
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:It's my pleasure to be here. I mean, without getting too narcissistic, I always enjoy talking about Practical Guide to Evil.
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:I mean, it's a great thing to talk about. We do too, so...
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:And speaking of Practical Guide to Evil, it's been, oh my, it's been a year or two since it finished?
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:I've lost track.
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:I think a little over a year by now.
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:Time flies.
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:To be honest, I'm not great with keeping track of months, either in real life or in books.
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:So it gets kind of nebulous, especially since I gave myself quite a bit of time off after finishing the series.
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:Well deserved if you ask us.
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:For sure.
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:But even though Practical Guide has finished up, the Guide is also newly again in its infancy, or perhaps just passing out of it.
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:The first book has wrapped up in its re-release, and now that book, the only one we've fully covered on the podcast or even covered in any great part,
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:has two versions, two very similar, very different iterations people can check out.
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:And this isn't something that traditional publishing and most of the writing world has had to deal with for the past century or so.
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:Things were weird before the war, really.
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:Probably even a little more recent than that.
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:Web novels are a relatively recent phenomenon, even if there were obviously written forebears, let's call it that way, by people who use their writing newspaper and that sort of thing.
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:Absolutely. Serialized fiction.
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:Yeah, but this kind of stuff only became possible on the internet when you had platforms like WordPress popping up where you could legitimately host a book instead of a web page in eye-searing colors.
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:Which is one of our greater critiques of the website, practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com for those who have forgotten.
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:But despite that one, I would say glaring failing, but it's the opposite of glaring, that one readable and pleasant failing, it still means you have two versions of the story on two platforms,
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:one more recent and therefore at the very least perceived as perhaps more authoritative, one more easily accessed.
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:I can say it's read out. The yonder version is not what I would consider the final version, because to get it paper published, I'm going to have to revise the text anyways,
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:because what yonder does is I basically take my old chapter and they have character limit and how many words they can put in a page, more or less, if you go too big.
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:Anyways, I've had to ask permissions for chapters that were too large, so then my chapters, which are sometimes ridiculously large, have to be chopped into smaller ones.
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:But in a final published paper version of the text, obviously I wouldn't keep those same separations, but I might, but most likely I would be reuniting the chapters and massaging the text a bit.
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:Which sounds like a whole lot of work actually, of course a whole lot of work, all writing is a whole lot of work, but particularly considering the transition,
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:we've marveled many times in the past 40 weeks or so, the past 36 chapters we've covered, at how well adapted to the serialized web format your online chapters are.
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:They always end, or perhaps not always end on a cliffhanger, but they often end on a cliffhanger, consistently end on an upward stroke of thematic motion.
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:They leave you wanting more, and that doesn't have to be the goal in a print novel. People will just read more, it's the next page, maybe the same page if you have it badly formatted.
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:I'd say going for the cliffhanger tends to be a web novel disease, so to speak, but it's even in, I'd say the text is not necessarily lesser for it, it's just a writing habit, as you will have suspense books,
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:as thrillers who will essentially do the same thing, only allowing themselves a little more room, but I'd say the big problem with this serial is,
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:here you want to keep the cliffhanger, but you don't want to put too many of them in the row, because the loser is going to lose focus,
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:especially if it's several weeks in a row where you're just dropping cliffhanger after cliffhanger, and there's always the general problem of chapter creep,
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:I've yet to see a web novel not fall prey to to some extent.
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:This chapter creep being the steady expansion of the chapters?
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:Yeah, I mean, I try not to think too much about how long the older books ended up being, the later books rather, but yeah, it's easy to get into the mindset with web novels that you think
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:week per week instead of as a bigger whole, and I benefited in that I'd laid the big bones of the story years ahead before I ever started writing the Guide,
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:but there are sections of the books that I look back at now, and we're really glad that the yonder version is a thing because I can go back and hack and slash through a lot of stuff that I feel might have been
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:ended up being unnecessary.
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:With that, so if you've got parts that you think maybe were unnecessary that you want to approach, are there things outside of just for purely formatting or pacing reasons that you maybe would like to
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:get rid of just to keep a mystery around certain things? You give us a lot of perspectives on different characters and the interludes, there are a lot of things that are sort of revealed piecemeal throughout this incredibly long work.
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:Are there things that showed up as you were writing because of this serialized format that you later wished you had kept quiet or kept quiet longer within the story?
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:Basically, all the big strokes that you would consider a major plot twist in the series were nearly all universally decided in advance, so those I pretty much released when I felt they should be released.
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:So in that sense there's not a lot I can regret.
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:Are there small details that I would have kept quiet?
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:Not really. I'd say in the more final version the big issue is that extra chapters aren't necessarily going to fit very well in something closer to a book version, so I'm going to have to find a way to
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:integrate that in the text without just let's stop this book and for three chapters you're going to hear about the Grey Pilgrim's past.
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:It worked for Victor Hugo, though even Tolkien did have to, I was going to say publish another book on that, but no, Tolkien had to have a collection of papers and then die with them and have them published if I understand the origin of the Silmarillion correctly.
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:Roughly speaking.
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:But that might not be the way to approach this.
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:Probably not.
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:I mean, sometimes the information in the extra chapters isn't necessarily really necessary to understand the text, but there's a couple of things that if you know them, they really color the understanding of the story from that point forward and those I'm definitely going to have to slide in one way or another.
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:I remember the order I was able to encounter things.
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:I recall, of course, on this podcast, we do take the long view and the long price, and so spoilers are as commonplace as can be.
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:So I feel no shame in noting that in the penultimate, antepenultimate chapter, when the Dead King is finally vanquished, there was a moment with a little songbird that seemed colorful and cool.
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:It felt good, but then later I got to read the Dead King's chapter because I was at that time fully unemployed and not a patron.
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:And it made it so much richer, even though I read it afterwards, I can't wait to see how you choose to include all the little pieces.
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:I mean, for a certain aspect, it's really a question of bringing in the world-building earlier.
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:Like, there's a lot of stuff that I ended up doing for Praes in the book 7 that should have been done much earlier in the series, considering how important the part of the setting it is, and I did end up doing a lot of that work.
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:I call them Volume 1 and Volume 2 now because it was getting a headache with talking about my editor in which book 1 are we talking about, which book 2 are we talking about.
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:So nowadays I use a book for the original version and a volume for the yonder version.
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:Oh, okay. Make sense.
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:That's fantastic.
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:So Volume 1 and Volume 2 did a lot of the heavy lifting.
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:Basically what happened with the yonder version is what used to be the first book I cut into and expanded both parts.
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:And the second part is set in Praes, and there I got to do a lot of the world-building that I ended up having to do much later in the series.
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:And since I'm allowing myself, Volume 3 basically is going to be entirely a new text.
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:It's going to be a smaller, tighter book that's set in between what was originally book 1 and book 2.
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:And that once again lets me do world-building and lets me connect greater concepts of the setting that I didn't necessarily, when I started out writing the series, understand thematically how important they might be.
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:I mean, that's always the advantage of going back to your work years after, especially when you have a finished version, however rough it might be.
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:You get to see, like, yeah, this should be mentioned much earlier, considering how important it ended up being.
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:And you get to go through and revise that.
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:You're in a very cool position of being able to take a story deeply beloved by many, many people's favorite work of literature, and continue to iterate on and improve it.
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:But it is all out there, or at least so many pieces of it are out there.
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:We have the original web serial.
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:We have the yonder version.
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:You want the traditional paper book, and that's great.
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:And I feel we benefit greatly from it, but that's so much.
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:Would you want to, I guess you're writing Pale Lights online right now, but would you recommend this sort of public drafting process?
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:So drafting feels like something of an ungenerous word considering the word press version is still a very complete series, even if it's getting complete or or tighter or better different.
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:So many comparative adjectives.
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:The thing about that question, like, in an absolute sense to where I recommend making your first draft public and then trying and putting it out on the internet where, you know, people can grab at it and everything.
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:No, on the other hand, I look back at where I was.
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:The first book of the Guide was my first serious work as a writer.
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:I had written short stories before, small stuff, fanfic, that kind of thing.
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:But nothing that I would that sought to be professional writing.
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:By the time I had the first book of the Guide finished, if I had sat down in front of a publishing house, they wouldn't have touched that.
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:It wasn't a finished product.
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:It wasn't refined enough, so to speak.
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:The first book of the guide is probably my roughest as a writer because I was kind of finding my footing there.
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:So is it the best idea to make a public drafting process?
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:No, but on the other hand, doing it that way, doing it through a web serial, not only first allowed me to realize that, yeah, okay, like, my stuff is actually popular.
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:Like, it's one thing for teachers, even a writing program to tell you that, yeah, you could maybe make it as a professional.
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:It's another to, you know, make that jump and see that people are actually interested in reading your stuff.
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:And then later on, continuing on in the series, I realized, yeah, I can legitimately make a living out of this.
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:And at that point, I guess I made a transition to being a professional writer in a different sense than I was before.
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:Like, I'd done writing contracts before I started living full time off the guide, writing contracts, editing stuff mostly.
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:Almost nothing that was actual creative work.
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:But I feel that the question, should you make a public draft?
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:Doesn't really address the reality that it was either a public draft or no draft, or maybe I could have worked on that book for another couple of years.
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:And then maybe it might have been pick up by publishing a house, but that's always rolling the dice, especially if it's a first book.
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:Thank you.
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:I think this sort of like behind the scenes look at how the Guide was written in your mindset on some of this is awesome stuff.
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:But if you don't mind, maybe we could, if we might transition here to talking about the content of the guide a bit more.
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:This is the stuff that is at least more visible to us, the fans here.
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:So you mentioned the Grey Pilgrim's perspective a little bit ago, and the Grey Pilgrim is a character that we on this podcast absolutely love to hate.
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:Oh, I heard, yeah.
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:Perfect.
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:We've received a bit of pushback here and there for some of our maybe vitriolic statements about the Grey Pilgrim.
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:We were both sort of in the-
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:We were forced to make them considering how frequently he's come up in the first book of the Guide which we've read.
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:Coming up all the time, so we had to talk about him.
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:Like we said, we love to talk about him.
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:And so we're both pretty firmly in that we would see him hang camp and we are thrilled to death.
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:We love that there's this complex and unintended Grey character in the story that we can look at from different perspectives and everybody sort of has a different view on.
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:You know, he's not the only character like that in the Guide, obviously.
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:But he is a complex, not villain, obviously.
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:It's a pretty loaded term, but antagonist to Cat for a while.
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:And prior to him, the first real opponent, not counting the war college situation, that we see for Cat is William, is the Lone Swordsman who's a pretty rough guy.
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:He's racist, ethno-nationalist, he leans a bit sexist compared to a lot of the characters in the Guide especially.
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:So does the transition in the Guide from William to greyer foes to more complex nuanced antagonists form a deliberate arc?
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:Was it intentional or important for you for things to get muddier in where the lines are for our protagonist as the story goes on?
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:I'd say when I wrote William, I considered him something of a training wheels antagonist, narratively, but also for me because early in the book, from Cat's perspective, she makes a decent argument as to why we should work within the Empire instead of going for a straight on rebellion.
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:So William is the counterargument for that, is the traditional Callow and rebel route.
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:He is, however, a product of an occupation that lasted for decades, so he can't be too traditional.
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:More than that, he can't be too right either. He has to be right enough that you question, is Catherine doing the correct thing?
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:But he can't be too shiny, otherwise the reader might legitimately, at that point in the game, start rooting against Cat.
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:And it's a little early in the series for me to direct the reader at the seer question, is Catherine doing more good than a harm with the things she's pursuing?
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:So I guess lore-wise it fit for William to be racist against orcs specifically, because Callow is very much a kingdom, while Praes is an empire in a sense.
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:Praes is multiple ethnicities, there's a lot of compromise in the way it's ruled.
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:Callow was a fairly centralized kingdom, with mostly people of the same ethnicity and the most major ethnicity.
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:That's not traditional Callowan is a Deoraithe, and they're basically an independent kingdom inside the kingdom.
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:And they don't even get out all that much.
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:So as a vice, that was one of the things that I thought fit best for William.
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:But from the outset, that was the direction I wanted to do with the character, there's a reason.
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:I called him the Lone Swordsman, in part because he was the lone wolf archetype at the beginning of his story, certainly always dealing out a little bit of the gritty justice.
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:But I also chose Lone specifically because I wanted to evoke Lone Shooter on the Hill, which is why it fed directly to him in Summerholm later, taking some pretty grisly measures against the occupation.
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:So in that sense, yeah, I wanted William to be less complicated than antagonist.
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:By the time we get to the Grey Pilgrim, we start to question what we know about heroes and villains as presented by Catherine and Black.
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:And the Grey Pilgrim is, I guess, a whetstone for that kind of thinking for the rest of the series, because he's someone who typically tries to improve, do the most good for the most people.
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:But, you know, that can result in pretty bad consequences for a minority.
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:Yeah, that's great stuff. The comparison drawn between Callow and Praes there is fantastic.
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:We spent a lot of time talking about specifically that in the sort of interlude chapter where you pretty much directly juxtapose William and Heiress and the situation, how they're viewing people who aren't exactly like them.
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:And so, yeah, that's really cool to see that drawn out in full throughout the early books here, you know, and then zoomed in on that chapter there that we just covered a few weeks ago.
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:But, well, we have this transition from a relatively clear training wheels protagonist to the Grey Pilgrim, the Grilgrim, as we say here.
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:We end the story with what is, well, nuanced and informed from so many positions, a very clear good versus evil life versus death kind of battle.
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:The ravening hordes of the undead led by one guy with big ideas and a really nice hell.
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:Yeah, well, that's the thing about that part of the series. By that point, the moral conflict in the sixth and seventh book isn't really about Catherine or good versus the Dead King, because that's not really a contest.
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:By that point, he is literally in it for the annihilation of our life on Calernia. The moral conflict is, weirdly enough, the character that I ended up using, the voice that is the Mirror Knight, is when you're raising a coalition against literally the end times.
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:Things start to slip. At some point, at which point are the moral compromises that you're making stop being justifiable? You get heroes more and more saying that, yeah, we're going much too far with those compromises.
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:Well, you have Cat in the most, more traditionally villainous mindset, which is if you're in the face of annihilation, there is literally no moral compromise that is unacceptable.
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:So I'd say in the last book, the moral conflict isn't outside, it's within the Grand Alliance trying to balance the morality of what they're doing and the realities of juggling an alliance with villains inside that let's call them evil nations, which have some customs that are questionable at best.
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:What's a little ritual sacrifice between friends?
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:But, you know, now that you pointed out, there were a few tensions in the Grand Alliance looking back on it.
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:Yeah, I say book six is the one who's handling the one I feel like I handle the worst. First off, it should definitely have been two books instead of one, because the themes don't carry very well from the first half to the second half.
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:And I'll say the themes I wanted to carry for the Arsenal arc did not land as thoroughly as I wanted to, because a lot of the arc ended up being swallowed up by not only the action, but also the military planning, which was starting the second part of the book early, more or less, which is something I should have been more careful about avoiding, in my opinion.
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:When you say the sixth book, and I apologize if this comes off in any rude way, but when you say book six should have been two books, that's the current book six should have been because, as I understand, book seven was also intended to be book six originally?
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:Yeah.
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:No, no, no. Basically, I had the bones of book six and book seven as one very large book. And we got maybe into the Arsenal arc by the time I realized that it would be absolutely ridiculous to keep it together.
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:So I chopped it half and half and I decided this is the good place to end, which the end of book six, how it landed, that I'm happy with. I think it ended on the right note for the end of a book.
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:However, as a finished product, basically all my favorite pieces of what used to be the big common book that became book six and seven, all my favorite parts were in what ended up being book seven.
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:So I feel the book six suffered a little from that and also from being cut off from the whole. So it was harder to make it a clear narrative with solid themes throughout. On the other hand, just practically speaking, welding book six and seven together, given their current size, would have been insane.
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:A long book. Just out of curiosity, I know that you were pretty public about the fact that you were going into a book seven when that wasn't initially the plan. When you laid out your bones at the very start, were you anticipating six books? Did it expand from a smaller number of books or shrink at any point from the very beginning?
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:I mean, when I was 16, I thought it'd be a trilogy. By the time I got seriously to writing it, I was like, I can probably knock this out in five books. By the time I got at the fourth book, I was like, yeah, that's probably six books.
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:And what do you know? By the time I got to the sixth book, it ended up being seven, but it's a number I can live with.
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:Now you've got seven books, one of which is published twice.
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:I mean, that's great. And I'm glad that you were able to recognize the size of your task ahead of you and expand the number of books as you were going. If this had been a trilogy, these would be some heavy books.
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:I mean, in all fairness, by the time when I thought it was going to be a trilogy, my experience as a writer was minor. Let's put it that way.
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:But yeah, no, it's, I mean, it's the expectation when you write fantasy, isn't it? You're going to go for a trilogy because that's what everybody does.
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:Fair enough, yeah. Trilogy is a classic for a reason, I guess.
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:But even traditionally published trilogies so often fall apart. Not to compare the Guide and perhaps the most important fantasy novel of the past 100, 150 years.
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:But I know the Inheritance Trilogy by Christopher Paolini, Eragon, was four books.
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:And the intersection between sci-fi fantasy, Locked Tomb series is on the verge of gain, or Locked Tomb trilogy is on the verge of its fourth and final book.
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:Trilogies are very much the goal to start with, but you don't need to end there. You're fine.
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:Alright, I'm amused to hear you say that about the Inheritance Trilogy because I have opinions that I don't think are compatible.
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:Oh, no, I assure you they are compatible.
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:I enjoyed the first two books, but it started slipping later on, I think.
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:I think there, it sounds like maybe three people in this call right now who finished the Cycle out of a sense of obligation, maybe?
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:I didn't even finish the entire thing.
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:Oh, okay, fair enough.
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:I stopped on a third book and I read stuff about what was happening inside because I couldn't bring myself to go on the fourth.
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:Very fair, very fair.
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:If you ever feel the urge to see what you're missing, we'd be happy to do a podcast.
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:Podcast Guys who Talk Erratic Errata and Erratic Errata, talking Christopher Paolini.
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:It'd be quite a title, but we could go through the books.
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:No title.
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:It'd be a quick one compared to this endeavor we have undertaken for sure.
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:Yeah, I guess you guys really did not pick the shortest series out there, did you?
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:No, but don't worry.
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:This is our first podcast, so we know what we're doing, of course.
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:It's your first big published work, so we'll do our first podcast, and that way we can just cut our teeth against each other.
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:That checks out, checks out.
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:In the Guide, you have this massive setting.
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:You've got this world with nations and peoples and troubles and magic and everything going on.
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:There's a lot that the readers are learning about bit by bit throughout the entire thing.
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:You're learning new things about the setting in the final chapters, it feels like, and that's awesome.
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:Obviously, even in seven books, as it ended up being, there's not space to address every detail in every piece of the world,
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:nor should you necessarily want to.
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:It's a focused story, but everybody's got their curiosity about certain things.
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:I know my co-host and I are very interested in The Chain of Hunger because, well, one of us is very interested in Cordelia.
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:I think I noticed that from the Discord nickname.
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:Yeah, exactly.
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:I don't know what you're talking about.
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:The episode with Cordelia's perspective, that interlude, was an interesting one to say the least.
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:Is there anything that you wish you had been able to more deeply dive into,
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:or that you plan to provide more detail on, or first details on something,
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:a new aspect of the setting you didn't get into here in the seven books that are published?
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:Is there anything you're looking to get into as you start publishing the volumes on Yonder?
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:There are two wolves inside of me.
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:There is a wolf that says, oh, you could have gotten so much deeper in how Procer actually works.
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:Some parts of it people barely know about.
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:And there's the other wolf that says, no, you should have put less Procer in there.
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:People already know significantly way too much about how that political system works.
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:To an extent, that's maybe not necessary to properly understanding the text either.
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:So it's a back and forth in there.
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:Obviously, I like the setting, I like the character, so my instinct is always to put more in it.
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:But I guess the thing I learned going on in the books, and maybe from writing the series spirit,
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:is at some point you have to ask yourself, putting this, like this is a cool chapter, it's cool information.
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:I like sharing it in the world building, but does it help the text?
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:Does it advance the text? Does it contribute?
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:Or is it just something I wanted to put in there?
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:So, yeah, obviously I'm going to reform some parts of Procer, how it works in the Yonder version.
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:But a big part of that is that overall there might be more names,
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:but the important names, basically I picked a Procer cast of like a limited number of people
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:that their reader is going to know those names, recognize those names,
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:are going to be the players that they're going to pay attention to.
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:Like take Song of Ice and Fire, for example.
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:Like there are thousands of names in Martin's books,
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:but the important ones we remember, that's more the kind of thing I'm aiming to achieve.
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:I thank you and deeply respect your answer because I recognize it's a wise and rational answer.
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:But I also want to know everything there is to know about this world.
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:We all do. Everyone listening wants to know everything about the world,
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:or they wouldn't be listening to a podcast about a book they read once.
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:What I can tell you about a Chain of Hunger is that basically early on when I was modeling all the nations
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:the typical goblin that you see in fantasy is basically canon fodder for the PCs in your adventure.
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:In the way that when I took on Praes as world building my question was
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:how do you make Mordor work as a political system? Why does it exist like that?
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:The Chain of Hunger was something like the goblins that you see in RPGs
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:that are almost considered more creatures than folk.
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:When they are obviously capable of doing things like mining and making armor,
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:how do you create a race like that and make it not deeply genocidal and racist for people to be fighting against them?
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:And my answer to that was a Chain of Hunger where there are sentient ratlings.
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:There's a fundamental hunger in them that makes it impossible to negotiate in a meaningful way with them.
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:So it's eternal war for you.
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:And from what we've seen of them, because thank you that's fantastic,
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:but there's a huge danger I think we can appreciate in any fundamentally destructive,
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:fundamentally, if I may, verminous race or species or people.
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:Because those claims have been made so many times in so many places, so many terrible ways in the real world.
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:And the Chain of Hunger, maybe certainly due to being carefully approached
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:and also maybe due to being off-screen a lot too, but there's never any vibe of,
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:oh look, we've got fantasy, if I may say the awful word, Untermenschen
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:no, they're ratlings and they fascinate, but don't horrify.
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:I will say it's definitely not an accident that I made them non-human
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:because there's no way to execute that well when it's patterned on actual people.
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:There's a reason also that there is no visible inspiration for any real-world culture equivalent
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:as I pattern most nations in the setting.
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:Which is, if I may express here what I have on the podcast before,
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:really admirable overall in that in a world where there is good and evil
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:and good nations and good peoples and bad, er, evil, pardon, that's the point of making,
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:evil nations and evil peoples, you don't have, oh, these are the bad people who are just bad
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:and these are good people who are, you know, by birth superior.
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:The world even from Catherine's original perspective is much more nuanced.
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:We see an orc in the first chapter in the pit scene not being a monster
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:but being a person at the pit because it's just, these are people,
274
:even if they're scary people and orcs are scary.
275
:Shoot too many rows of, sorry, two rows of teeth.
276
:Yeah, no, I didn't want to put leather pants on the orcs either.
277
:I wanted to show that they're legitimately a culture in people
278
:but on the other hand, they also eat people.
279
:I'm not going to pretend that's not a part of what they do.
280
:They are very much a warrior culture to an extent that can easily be exploited by unscrupulous leaders
281
:and has been often the detriment of their neighbors.
282
:You know, the very ethnicity, well, not necessarily ethnicity
283
:but the very culture Catherine comes from.
284
:The detriment of their neighbors and themselves, they're hollowed out.
285
:There's no warlord, there hasn't been.
286
:I mean, I'm not sure if I actually ever put that explicitly in the text
287
:but that's very much not an accident as in the Empire has very carefully
288
:across basically all the Tyrants intervened to keep the orcs from unifying.
289
:There are internal pressures that would have made that very difficult in the first place
290
:but nobody who has the tower wants united orcs to the north.
291
:You say that and that's amazing and great
292
:but I'm shocked that there wasn't a Dread Emperor Accidental who let things slip through
293
:because the cast of dread tyrants is, we only see one in the entire text in present time
294
:and yet the, well...
295
:I was about to say, hold on now, one who currently has the name.
296
:But the cast of tyrants is fantastic
297
:and since I said the word tyrant, I just need to note also I love the Tyrant.
298
:Yeah, I also glean that from the nickname.
299
:Again, don't know what you're talking about.
300
:The thing about, like you make a fair point that some of the Emperors have been highly incompetent over the years
301
:but the thing about Praes is that it's a highly sophisticated crab bucket
302
:so it doesn't really matter who's in charge as competent
303
:because sure, the Empire erupts into civil war.
304
:One of their first steps is, alright, are the two, three high seats close to the border with the orcs in a good position?
305
:First thing you do is you pay the orcs to f*** them up.
306
:And they're gonna wanna go raiding, they go raiding anyways.
307
:So in a sense, the natural answer to that from the high seats that are close to the orcs
308
:is you pay other orcs to fight those orcs.
309
:So even in times of civil war, the clans are more ruled than player
310
:and they don't really have the industrial base to ever get out of that trap
311
:because their best weapons come from trade with Praes.
312
:So if they fight for the high lords, they get better weapons, they maybe get winning
313
:but they also get dependent and they don't really have an easy economic way
314
:either resource-wise or population-wise or land-wise to get out of that resource trap.
315
:Wait, I never ask, am I actually allowed to curse on this?
316
:Sure, we may edit out.
317
:Don't feel like you need to censor yourself.
318
:We're not concerned about it but we've so far avoided an explicit rating for podcasts
319
:so we may try to hold it back.
320
:But that's the national slash racial species dynamic
321
:that has been well done, that avoids in our eyes at least the dangers of
322
:oh, I'm going to make different groups of people and different kinds of people
323
:with different characteristics.
324
:It's a valuable thing in writing and I really think valuable for whatever the purpose of art is
325
:which is difficult but for the ways art teaches and helps us grapple with ideas.
326
:Valuable good stuff and it just goes badly in fantasy a lot and hasn't here.
327
:But that's race.
328
:One thing I really noted, especially as a gay man, is that you're one of the fantasy writers
329
:who chose to make a fantasy world with most places, at least that are relevant to us,
330
:having gender norms, norms of sexuality, love relationships that very widely mirror
331
:the most progressive places in the real world today.
332
:We see Catherine's bisexuality really only addressed when people are concerned about who exactly she's looking at
333
:which turns out to be everyone with a pulse.
334
:There are trans characters, some of whom many, there are trans characters whom many of the readers
335
:kind of didn't even notice or noted to be trans because there's a subtle acknowledgement
336
:but nobody fixates on that.
337
:Women do and have held authority in very many places.
338
:Actually, I was going to make the Everdark the exception there but no, actually gender's gone for everyone
339
:except I'm pretty sure the goddesses, based on that word...
340
:Their mindsets haven't really changed since ascension so they kept a gender.
341
:It's very cool that gender and sexuality are comfortable and this has to be a deliberate choice.
342
:You don't come from a world that sees any sort of universal view that women are people, that queer people are allowed
343
:and you didn't have to make that choice. You put a lot of nasty things in your world.
344
:Why have this be a whole lot nicer than at the very least my United States of America?
345
:One of the derives for how I ended up doing the guide was a discussion I had with two friends on the internet
346
:maybe a year or two before, both are women.
347
:I'm not sure I should speak about their sexuality without their permission but they're not traditionally in that sense.
348
:Both of them were discussing fantasy books that I'd almost never heard of.
349
:I was curious why they went off the beaten path so much and what they told me is the traditional young guy male character
350
:was someone they had a difficulty identifying with.
351
:The golden standard was what you found everywhere.
352
:One of the things I got from that discussion was when I wrote my own book.
353
:I wanted to avoid doing that and it fit with also the very earliest draft of the guide was called Black and White
354
:and Black was very much more the main character
355
:but the person through which he gave the exposition that helped understand the setting was basically a new recruit
356
:for the side of the evil called Priestess which was I guess proto-Catherine at the very barest bones
357
:and I realized it made for a much more interesting story for Catherine to actually be the main character entirely
358
:and discover herself how the Empire worked and how she wanted to change it.
359
:As for sexuality stuff like obviously my personal values are a factor in there
360
:and about the trans stuff being subtle I tend to be of the school of thought that if you make a big point out of it
361
:then the presence of that LGBTQ character tends to it becomes about the point of them being of that orientation
362
:of that sexuality or whatever the details of it so if you simply treat it as something entirely normal
363
:and established which in my opinion it is regardless of whether it's a fantasy setting or real life
364
:it works better in a sense I don't think it's necessarily better representation or anything
365
:but I think it helps establish that this is how it is in the setting there's nothing unusual about this
366
:just keep walking it's there.
367
:And better representation quote unquote as you say there are it's good to include representation of things
368
:but I suspect I would find it much less palatable if somebody from outside of minority community
369
:tried to produce THE representation for the community.
370
:Oh yeah practical guide yeah it's about being a bisexual teenage girl.
371
:You don't think I'm qualified to write that story which is why one of the reasons I much prefer like it's being part of the story.
372
:It's a very well done part.
373
:So you have my thanks.
374
:Well my pleasure it's always I guess it's gratifying to hear that it landed more or less as I wanted it to land
375
:because it's I guess it's always tricky navigating this kind of thing.
376
:Speaking of things that are tricky to navigate and speaking of bisexual teenage girls.
377
:Catherine is a character who among many other qualities.
378
:She is very many things but she is often defined by perhaps recognized as and remembered in the community for being
379
:what the hip Gen Zers out there call if I may horny on main.
380
:You're writing a story about a young woman a teenage child initially and you are not a teenage young woman.
381
:I will confirm.
382
:She has a lot of she has a lot of relationships a lot of there's a lot it's a long book or a long series.
383
:And it feels to me like it could be very dangerous it could come off as some type of male fantasy male gaze.
384
:But it seems like a pitfall that could have been easy to fall into.
385
:And at no point did I or anyone I've spoken to about the story find it to be like that.
386
:Did you have to deliberately or did you maybe not have to but did you deliberately work to.
387
:I don't know.
388
:Not fetishize Catherine's experiences or totemize or tokenize or any other fun graduate school word.
389
:I'll say for it off first off that I know it's the meme inside the fandom that Catherine is such an enormous wandering eye.
390
:I think it's been exaggerated like it's kind of a self feeding loop as it often is in fandoms.
391
:I think later on in the books whenever Catherine gave a description of anyone who which wasn't just a basic description.
392
:People took it as her being into the individual which I don't think is a really fair description.
393
:It's also that she gets more gets better at noticing details as the series goes on.
394
:But as for the characterization attempts I guess I feel comfortable enough saying that as a teenager some of my closest friends were bisexual women.
395
:So sexuality wise I kind of based it on what I had personally encountered which made it easier not to get cartoonish in one way or another I suppose.
396
:As steps I took to avoid it I mean it was a conscious decision to never write smut inside the Guide when I'm capable of writing smut.
397
:And I guess that that's in part to avoid getting too fetishistic.
398
:But I also had from the beginning in my mind very clear ideas about what Catherine did and did not find attractive.
399
:So that made it easier to just you know never do a stupid hook up plot just for it.
400
:Especially when from the books to the end of the series she's a pretty driven person who doesn't necessarily have a lot of personal free time.
401
:Sorry I'm just scanning through what is it however what point what million words of story to think about her relationships.
402
:And the only hook up plot that comes to mind is not a stupid one but rather the Kingfisher Prince which is the correct choice in all situations.
403
:Yeah that ended up being significantly more popular with the fandom than I thought it would be.
404
:Everybody in the fandom was just envious of Cat I think.
405
:You wrote the seven most famous words in the guide.
406
:When someone has the thing they do with their hips the fandom will take over.
407
:I'm sorry it's no longer your work.
408
:However you say you have a very strong idea had a very strong idea.
409
:Tense is weird because I it happened before but it's still true now of what Catherine finds attractive and it turns out to be normal stuff like raining fiery death on your opponents from the sky.
410
:Which in all honesty truly is a very attractive thing.
411
:And that's the turning point at least in the first published web serial version.
412
:That's the turning point for her relationship with Killian which may be the first time I've said the name properly on the podcast.
413
:Some characters are defined by being really attractive from the start.
414
:The Empress, Heiress, being attractive is part of their importance in the story and in the story which is great and good.
415
:But the first meeting with Catherine's first major love interest she's glossed over entirely.
416
:It's only after the fiery doom that she becomes much of a person in Catherine's eyes.
417
:Here's the thing you go early Rat Company Catherine is going to notice several times that Ratface is attractive because Ratface is a really good looking guy.
418
:That's that's one of the things but Ratface is from then on never seriously considered as a potential of interest because Catherine thinks Ratface is attractive.
419
:But in that moment with the fiery doom she is attracted to Killian which is a small difference.
420
:But she thinks Ratface is good looking she was attracted physically and romantically to Killian in that moment which is why Killian ends up being someone she dates later on.
421
:And that's a really cool and humanly honest juxtaposition because you say you elected not to write smut you did not write smut.
422
:But you had the setup for possibly the biggest possible setup in the Guide for a smut you seen when in early Rat Company between games Catherine encounters Ratface in the early hours of the morning.
423
:He's got rivulets of water running down his blah blah blah blah.
424
:Oh I had fun with that I wanted it to be straight up romance novel and you know show how Catherine would react in a situation like that which is mostly staring.
425
:And you pivoted away from anything coming from that perfectly it which goes to show maybe the fandom does take things a little far.
426
:Maybe a little bit, a lotta bit, somewhere in there.
427
:I mean when you talk a lot about something you make details stand out in a way they wouldn't necessarily if it was your first reading of the text.
428
:Oh so you are a longtime fan of the podcast then.
429
:Of course.
430
:But I guess it's the same in any fandom and I'm as guilty as that sin as anybody.
431
:Well there is only one sin.
432
:No one has ever quoted my own work so much as me I kind of dig it.
433
:Oh boy yeah that's kind of what we're all about so that's great.
434
:So you know we need talking about the direction cats romance could have gone you know there's the handset rat face before pivoting completely away from that goofball.
435
:But so more than in a lot of other series there's different directions that the Guide seems it could have gone early on especially that it doesn't necessarily follow through on and not to its detriment
436
:but because it you know takes a different path it has a different focus.
437
:Early on we see Cat practicing a little bit of auto necromancy.
438
:She sort of uses herself together with dark magic and that is cool and a great scene and a lot of thought is devoted to that on Cat's end.
439
:But it's not somewhere that it's not something that necessarily ties directly into where she ends up you know as as the Warden it's she's not a necromancer in her prime you know that's not her main thing.
440
:We get some hints at Triumphant here and there that I think some people perhaps many people myself included felt that that was hinting at the final boss the main antagonist being a Triumphant return
441
:and that doesn't go anywhere obviously.
442
:You've got the gnomes there's what's going is something going to come from them is are there is there going to be an apocalyptic number of demon eggs happening all at once.
443
:None of these become the big thing.
444
:Were these threads if they were intentionally laid to be misleading and misleading is a really harsh word but you know if not misleading then at least to provide some possible avenues to not make where the actual story ends up going just obvious from the get go.
445
:Were they threads that were difficult to cut were they things that you were maybe going to pursue more and then ended up didn't were they something that you hoped would and then couldn't find a way or didn't want to find a way.
446
:Or were they just there and you're happy with where they were all along and they were intentionally left at the level they were the threat level they were the hint that they might become something more.
447
:Going up from the top Catherine with auto necromancy that's a that's a good way to put it.
448
:I considered all the power sets that Catherine has had through the books which is quite a few.
449
:I never really considered them as Catherine needing to settle for a final form as in Catherine early on is the Squire because her mindset is still very much that of a brawler.
450
:She is capable of things like auto necromancing herself because already she has this mindset that she's willing to sacrifice parts of herself to get an objective at every point in the story by I'd say more or less.
451
:What the powers that Catherine has represent where she is at an overall journey.
452
:Later on in the fey was Catherine was technically at the peak of the power she was able to throw but she was also very much stuck in a rut mindset.
453
:As in early on in the books Catherine is defined by not only the way she's capable of hurting herself to get a victory but also by.
454
:The specialized isn't finding a third away finding an alternative making the deal.
455
:When he reaches that height of power which is happened simultaneously with her getting the full power of the Fae or winter court rather Catherine kind of stops looking for for that angle.
456
:Yeah tries gambit yeah she does different things but she stuck in a rut as in she's had the power she's wanted for so long she's now effectively Queen of Callow.
457
:But she's not sure how to use it in the same way that she's not quite sure how to use the power of the winter court which I tried to display very clearly during the battle of the camps while Akua is given the exact same skill set she wipes the floor with the opposition.
458
:But she does also fall prey to traditional villainy downfall which is winning too much against the wrong people.
459
:So I wouldn't say it's threats the power sets that Catherine has it's a reflection of where she is at in her story.
460
:Essentially Catherine at the moment where she stops trying to clean up her leg wound is at a point where she recognizes where she's at what she's had to pay to get there.
461
:And you'll notice she becomes significantly better at dealing with people even if she still has quite a bit of power to throw around.
462
:Alright the Triumphant thing which is not the first time I'm hearing.
463
:I legitimately did not anticipate that people would take that as a call in for Triumphant maybe showing up in the future.
464
:I thought more as a way to introduce that Preasi mythology is woven with old tyrants because it's the closest thing they have to gods.
465
:As in people have direct relationship with the Gods Below you don't really have the equivalent of wreaths and angels as much as you would with the heavens.
466
:So that something I ended up maybe making clearer in the yonder version which you know allowed me as I mentioned earlier to redo some of the Praesi world building and do it earlier.
467
:The gnomes were what I thought at the time was a clever way to point out well this is one of the reasons the technology of the setting doesn't really advance.
468
:And I never really saw them as a potential antagonist if anything they were brought up by Black early in the series as a way to hammer home the point that ultimately Calernia feels like this enormous field full of things but it's backwater in the greater scheme of things.
469
:And the gnomes being this big thing that's not in any way touchable were meant to you know something that reinforces that impression.
470
:The demon eggs I guess I never saw so much as an antagonist as in part of the setting as in you know there's been a war so long between Praes and Callow that obviously there's going to be consequences for the land and that is sometimes you dig a little too deep and you let out a demon that eats your entire family and is a hero to be put down.
471
:It's a I guess I didn't really go into deep for that but it was a by meant as a way to show that there there's a reason that people like heroes and heroes are around there are legitimate threats for these people to deal with.
472
:And I guess it's also a reminder that you know Black cleaned up his his side of the chessboard a bit but they are the people throwing around like damage to reality for low born military victories low brow rather.
473
:I'd say the the big element that never bore is you might remember that early in the books Nauk has a one off line about his grandmother having eaten elf during that.
474
:Absolutely. Yeah. All right. That's that's a remainder of the very very first draft which had instead of the fey invasion diplomatic incidents with the elves and an invasion of the Golden Bloom instead which is one of the people I discuss a series with and help me realize that it was necessarily where I wanted to go with the.
475
:The series because originally it was going to be the elves were also quite different to what they ended up being like most of the same themes were the same but they were not almost unkillable forces of nature the way they have been in the series.
476
:And basically the invasion of the Golden Bloom was going to prove to be the inciting acid incident for the crusade that followed later obviously there were there were several differences and I liked better where for the themes and the character work going with.
477
:Akua's fortress of doom and what it meant for the factoring of the partnership between Black and the Emperess.
478
:That's very interesting that.
479
:Yeah.
480
:The elves they were they're a part of the world that I really like how they show up in the Guide is you know where they show up now and again and it's always a big deal that they're there and I would never have guessed that there was a chance that we could have had.
481
:And the elf invasion that sounds.
482
:That sounds pretty rough.
483
:Yeah, it was there.
484
:I guess in the first book, the first angle I took with the series was I was going very heavy on deconstruction before I guess I grew into the story a bit and decided to go a little deeper than that, which is why there are some.
485
:Elements in the first book that are a little simple because I was basically working off the Evil Overlord List in reverse, as in making a competent evil overlord, which was one of the things I wanted to do with Black in the first place.
486
:So I guess one of the reasons the elves were an invasion target was I wanted to basically dismantle the concept of what an elven society that lives in the woods and never makes weapons out of anything that's that's steel maintains the same level of technology is culturally stagnant
487
:and what that would actually be when faced with an evil empire.
488
:Basically, I wanted to do the ents coming to Isengard with competent military force defending Isengard.
489
:So yeah, obviously that's not what I ended up going with.
490
:And I think it was an interesting deconstruction, but the character work tends to be what carries the Guide and the character work worked much better with the final version I ended up going for.
491
:It really is such a wild thing to hear about the version said would have been could have been originally were intended to have been because while everyone listening should of course continue to support the Guide and access it in all possible forms, etc, etc.
492
:The Guide as originally written, the Guide as currently being published is a fantastic and complete work.
493
:This may surprise some of the listeners, but I'm actually quite fond of it.
494
:I might do a podcast on it, but that other things could have been and written by you.
495
:So with all the same style and grace and blah, blah, blah, blah, that would have been now I want to read that.
496
:I don't want to give up what I have.
497
:And I'm sure it's for the best where we are, but more.
498
:I want more, which is what Yonder's for, I realize.
499
:Yeah, I guess to some extent.
500
:Yeah, I mean, it's going to be it's not going to be proto version of the Guide, but proto version of the Guide had weaknesses of its own.
501
:So I endorse the revisions for sure.
502
:I should hope so.
503
:Otherwise, can we help you?
504
:And unfortunately, that is all the time we have for this week.
505
:Join us next week for the second part of the interview where we discuss questions such as
506
:That question you really, really want to know the answer to
507
:One terrifying secret
508
:And BBC's Sherlock
509
:Wade in their blood
510
:Podcast Guys talking ErraticErrata
511
:Colin Podcast Guys Ralking to Erratic Errata is a fan made podcast discussing ErraticErrata's a Practical Guide to Evil.
512
:Check out the full serial at practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com
513
:Intro music for this episode was Royal Guard by NickyPe.
514
:Outro music, which even now is elevating my voice to the realms of the divine is Phantom by lemonmusicstudio.
515
:The music is provided by the generous license of pixabay.com/music.
516
:Go and support all the artists who make this work possible by providing their stories and sounds free of charge.
517
:If you'd like to support this podcast, follow us on Twitter at thelongprice.
518
:Do you have questions, comments, contributions? Are you overwhelmed by the urge to correct our errors?
519
:Maybe not this time because we had the author here.
520
:But email us at thelongprice@gmail.com
521
:If you'd like to materially support our work, find our patreon at patreon.com/pgtee.
522
:Join the ranks of our patrons and be called by Name, receive personalized stories and art, and access all of our patron exclusive tangents.
523
:We implore you, don't consider joining unless you're already supporting the artists who make this all possible.
524
:Special thanks to our patron and villainous hero, Grey.
525
:Our patron and liege, Always the Claimant, Never the Named
526
:Our patron and guardian, the Fae Knight.
527
:Our patron and mentor, the Traveling Teacher.
528
:Our patron and dear friend, Aerin.
529
:Our patron and inspiration, the Hopeful Romantic, as well as the hordes of cattle below.
530
:Next week, more interview?
531
:Thank you for watching!
