Break All the Rules! Insights from Acclaimed Author Erika Lewis

Erika Lewis has written novels, comics and graphic novels. She has deep experience collaborating with other creators.  What we talked about:

• how her childhood riding dirt bikes and roller skates shape the adventurous world of Kelcie Murphy
• how her books  like "Game of Shadows" and "The Color of Dragons"  compare to the Kelcie Murphy series
• the nuts and bolts of collaboration with outer authors and how she makes sure it works!
• the challenges of working across multiple mediums and what keeps her hooked
• how to break the rules for success!

About Erika
Erika Lewis grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, where she spent most of her childhood speeding through the neighborhood on her dirt bike, roller skates or anything they could build with wheels. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, she went on to earn a master’s degree from Georgia State University and an advanced certificate in creative writing from Stony Brook University. In addition to the Kelcie Murphy series she is the author of Game of Shadows, The Color of Dragons, Firebrand, and more. Her latest release, Kelcie Murphy and the Hunt for the Heart of Danu came out in July, and the final book in the series will be released in 2024.

Find Erika
website: https://www.erikalewis.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erikaelylewis/
tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@erikalewisauthor?lang=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheErikaLewis

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Hi, friends, today we are thrilled to welcome author Erica Lewis to the podcast. Erica grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, where she spent most of her childhoods speeding through the neighborhood on her dirt bike, roller skates or anything they could build with wheels. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, she went on to earn a master's degree from Georgia State University and an advanced certificate in creative writing from Stony Brook University. In addition to the Kelsey Murphy series, she is the author of Game of Shadows, the Color of Dragons, Firebrand and more. Her latest release, Kelsey Murphy and the Hunt for the Heart of Danube, came out in July, and the final book in that series will be released in 2024. So, Erica, thank you so much for joining us today. We are so happy to have you.

Speaker 2: 1:17

Oh, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:18

This is very exciting. So right before I turned on the recording we were talking about kids going to college and you mentioned that you had a son who was looking at St Andrews. Does he want to go overseas? And I'm asking because I have a kid overseas and I'm just really curious about it. Feels like almost a new thing that suddenly kids are really interested in going overseas to school.

Speaker 2: 1:44

Well, it's funny because we for a long time wanted to be living in Ireland. I spent part of my college years in London and so as a family we travel a lot to the UK and to the Republic of Ireland and I don't know if it's a new thing for them hearing it, because I've been sort of like stressing this to them, like, hey, the cost is pretty similar, if not cheaper, for some of the universities and they have a different approach to how you know what you're studying and how it works. And I think that the pandemic especially for my daughter, because she's a university now but she's in California I think it was daunting for the idea of going overseas without us, and so with my son yes, I don't know if it's a new thing so much. I do know a lot of people who are going abroad. I think it's really good for perspective. I think there's something incredible about having that experience of having to go and sort of being immersed in another culture. Like that you learn so much on top of what you're already learning at university.

Speaker 1: 2:48

So, yeah, where does your so my son just he's a freshman at Northeastern London, so that's the London campus of Northeastern University that's based in Boston. Northeastern started this new program.

Speaker 2: 3:02

It puts you three years in London and one year in Boston, and they get the best both worlds in that program, because Boston is also one of my favorite cities. Yeah, it's funny because the Kelsey Murphy series Kelsey was originally in Boston at the beginning of the middle grade book series and I used to spend all my summers growing up as a kid with my grandparents up in Massachusetts. They were in Weston and then we'd go to Boston and we had relatives all over the place. We'd get farmed out eventually.

Speaker 2: 3:33

I'm like one of the islands, not Cape Cod, but the other one, Martha's Vineyard. So, we would get sort of farmed around Boston and it was a great excuse to talk about excuses for me to set a novel there, Because I was like I need to do some research. I'm going to go for a week.

Speaker 1: 3:46

I am telling you it's the big, hidden but not really hidden secret of authors that you pick your setting based on where you want to go. We are telling everybody now, be a writer, go on cool vacations. That's how it works.

Speaker 2: 4:01

Yeah, I mean I think every one of my books other than Kelsey, which is pretty much other than Boston, it's completely fantasy based. It gets out of Boston very fast and it hardly goes back. But almost all of the other ones are set in the UK or there's somewhere else, and I had to, of course, visit them all Definitely.

Speaker 3: 4:24

Well, let's talk it, let's send, let's just jump right into the questions Cause. Speaking about locations, how did your childhood in Alexandria, virginia, with dirt bikes and roller skates, and it sounds like you had a very adventurous childhood. How did that shape the world of Kelsey Murphy, you know?

Speaker 2: 4:43

it's funny because the thing that Kelsey has shaped most about from my childhood is the strong willed, very athletic nature of those kinds of things and also the freedom of it all. I think the one thing that our generation I'm Gen X we had a lot of freedom, because our parents were never there. I mean, I would just, they would just come home when the lights come out, as they like to say, and so because of that, you had a lot of ability, like I would just get on my bike and ride everywhere, and so when you're creating characters, especially like Kelsey, in general, you know I actually made her a foster kid who was abandoned, which is a big part of the story anyway, but because kids today are so, so, like oh no, you can't do that. Where are you going? What are you doing? Do you have your phone? Can I track? You know everything is different. So it's that freedom. I think to me that that was so great that they don't have. And then I combined that with the things that I fell in love with as a kid.

Speaker 2: 5:41

I think I saw Star Wars eight times at the movie theater. So you know, you had to get in line. It wasn't the days where you could go online and book a ticket and get your seat and it'd be all like set up for you, right? You had to go and wait in line for every showing and they didn't even let everyone in. So if you missed and you couldn't get into that showing you know, I don't remember this you had to get you know, wait in line for another two hours and so you could get into the next showing, and so a lot of those things that I loved from my childhood that we're kind of almost saturated with now.

Speaker 2: 6:11

It's sort of interesting. They were so sparse when I was growing up. We had the Lion Lutz and the Wardrobe and we had A Wrinkle in Time and some of these fantasy books, ray Bairie, stuff that you eventually fell in love with as you get a little bit older. But for me, when I had Star Wars and the original Battlestar Galactica and stuff like that that just you know, and then the launch of video games, it was the beginning of the fantasy that I loved so much so that I would say that those were our and still our big influences, because for middle grade, for me I liked those strong-willed kids who are learning as they go, found family themes, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 6:49

I love what you said about the Gen X kids, just sort of you know, wandering around. Nobody knew where we were, nobody cared particularly where we were. I watched Stranger Things with my kids when it first came out and they were like no, this can't be the way it was. And I was like oh yeah, this was actually.

Speaker 1: 7:12

You know, in that show there are a lot of stay-at-home parents, but most of the people that I knew, and myself included, had both of my parents working. You just come home and there were no phones, there was no tracking, you were just kind of wilding around in the world and yeah, it's a totally different sensibility. And I think when you see it in a book in a more modern setting, but that sensibility from like the 80s, 70s, 80s, it's different, it's interesting.

Speaker 2: 7:43

And I think some of it too goes to why I mean it's hard, because when you start I mean you could do. It's fun to write spy things when you're talking about all the technology that we have today and all the things, because I literally can't get away from my luggage. Half the time my husband's sticking an air tag in it and then it pops up on my phone every five seconds. I'm like I don't really care where my luggage is right now, right. And I'm trying to turn it off and I'm like what is?

Speaker 1: 8:09

this. Why do I?

Speaker 2: 8:10

care. I was like there's a tracker on the dog, there's one inside, one on her collar, there's kids all have phones. I'm like it's a weird experience because we didn't grow up that way, but then we've been so inundated with bad news all the time that all we do is want to know where our kids are and that they're safe. So there's like this weird balancing act that you're doing, and I think when you're writing middle grade, something I had to really focus on was giving the kids authority, giving them the ability to make decisions, because as a kid, it's more fun when you're not always being told what to do, when to do it, how to do it. You gotta have to figure these things out on your own.

Speaker 3: 8:48

Well, and I think the key to middle grade is always finding the way to remove the parents, in a way, from the situation you know it's true.

Speaker 2: 8:56

Well, they do Editors it's funny because a lot of the editors I work with, but one of the things that they've said to me a lot is why can't the parents just be dead, or why do they have to have parents, you know? And then I do think there's gonna be a swing back for those people who are writing middle grade. I do think there's a swing a little bit the other direction. I was reading an article I think it was on Was it publishers weekly. There was an article I was reading that was written by somebody who was actually a psychiatrist in the UK and he was talking about the fact that it's kind of telling about our society that all of our biggest children's books are about orphans or people with bad parents.

Speaker 3: 9:31

It's not good thing. Well, you just want them out of the way so that you don't have to deal with them being that authority figure, and so I mine, are always, like you know have a single mom who's busy working or something, and so it's like OK, off she goes, and now you can get into your shenanigans, whatever you're doing. That's, I think. As middle grade writers, that's one of our first thoughts is like let's just get them out of the way right up front. It's just one less thing we have to worry about.

Speaker 2: 9:58

It's interesting because, like with Kelsey specifically her she doesn't know who her parents are. So it's a big thing for her to want to find out who they are and to have them back in her life. Fortunately, she finds out that he's, you know, one of her parents, is literally the one of the most the big villain of the story. So there's a lot of not so great things that can happen and come from that as well. But at the same time I feel like it's it's hard to have them on your back the whole way through the story. Right, I mean, you can, and sometimes they add a little bit of a stake. Oh, I got to get home, you know, speaking about stranger things is a good example of that. It's like you know where are you. You know, having that parent, that's worrying. Percy Jackson did that as a being but. But it is so much easier just to get rid of them, just to have them dead.

Speaker 1: 10:44

It sounds so harsh, but Well, I think those, the middle grade books that really resonate, give the kids agency. No kid wants to read a book that is exactly like their own life, where the mom and dad are constantly saying do this, do that be here, do that? I'm watching you, you can't do that. We're so structured, so I think you know removing the parents in whatever way is necessary. It sounds very like Mafioso, doesn't it?

Speaker 1: 11:10

There you go, oh, but yeah, it seems it gives them that agency and that just makes it more fun for the reader. All right, next question for you. So your books Game of Shadows, Color of Dragons, they seem very different from the Kelsey Murphy series that we were just talking about, so I would love for you to be able to give us a kind of a quick snapshot of those as compared to Kelsey.

Speaker 2: 11:37

Oh sure, the common theme on those three books is that all of them stem out of various kinds of touchstones in Celtic mythologies. I write a lot in Celtic mythologies I write a lot in. I should say that I expand on those mythologies. I don't want to give anyone the impression that they're going to walk into a story of mine and find a perfectly telling. The way a lot of the like the Percy Jackson books are Like I tend to do a more avatar, the last airbender approach, where I'll have a hint of something that's from something, but then I'm expanding on it in a very fantastical way. There is definitely mythology to be learned from it and the nice thing is in all the books well, actually I guess it was just toward us there's a lot in Game of Shadows and Kelsey Murphy, because that was my imprint for both. They have glossaries in the back which help out a lot.

Speaker 2: 12:31

Color of Dragons was something different. All of them are about magic. The way that they vary differently is that the Game of Shadows book is a book that was written for, like Ender's Game same editor as that. Written for everyone. Everybody can read it kind of thing. It's very PG but at the same time still dangerous enough. It is about a 14-year-old kid and it is also set in a lot of Celtic and specifically Irish mythology which I have a huge passion for.

Speaker 2: 13:01

And then with the Color of Dragons, that story was actually something else entirely. It is a very loose idea, completely made up idea about the birth of magic in Wales, so, where King Arthur and the Penn Dragons are the end of magic, right, and Merlin he was the last king and then after that Christianity came in right. So I kind of always wondered, well, where was the birth of all these stories? What's the beginning? It's very loosely crafted around the idea of their ancestors without using the name Penn Dragon or using Merlin's name. And that was quite an experience in writing because I was co-authoring that book and that was one of the. I have co-authored many things, but novel.

Speaker 2: 13:45

That was my first novel co-author experience which was amazing, as it was with Ari Salvatore and he's brilliant. But it was written from two different perspectives and we were going back and forth and the Young Woman's Perspective, Magni, because it's a YA novel, and the other one from Griffin's perspective. And so at the bottom I was sitting down to write this, I was like I think we should write this in person. And he's like I think we should write this in third person. And so, as we were like getting into the nitty-gritty of it all, and I was like, well, I think the agent was like, well, why don't you write it in two, both? You know, Maggie can be first person and Griffin can be close third person. So it still feels really. So he said I was like okay, and he was like okay, so that's what we ultimately ended up doing. So that was almost like a writing, I don't know, like learning experience.

Speaker 1: 14:33

I've seen that a lot lately, where you have two points of view, one is first person, one is third. And I feel like that's fairly new and I've been seeing it in adult thrillers. I'm sure it's happening elsewhere, but there was a long time where that just didn't happen. You didn't see that.

Speaker 2: 14:52

Well, it's taboo, you know there's rules or people always love to give you rules and the one I don't know if you guys, we don't like rules. When I first I wrote my first middle grade novel and I sent it off for like a an editor, like freelance, to review, and I was really sad because I was paying for this review and I got like a nine pages back edit letter which I mean you're paying for. So that was hey, okay, great. But the first, I think five pages of it were literally going on and on about why middle grade novels shouldn't ever be written in first person and I was like, have you not read Percy Jackson? I was like it was just one of these moments like wait a minute, what? And so I was like, well, that was useless, it's the money Cause. You know, I don't want rules. I don't want rules.

Speaker 2: 16:17

And it was nice that the editor because we were already had sold the novel to our HarperCollins at that point. It was nice that they were like whatever you want to do, so that was helpful too. I mean not that they give you I mean I don't know about you guys, not that they give it so many orders, but they, they. There are little things, and so when we brought that to them, they were like okay, it's also a matter of your own comfort, right?

Speaker 1: 16:40

I mean, we've talked a lot on this show about voice and how important voice is, and I am with you. I write in the first person present, if I can get away with it, because that's where I feel most authentic, as you know, presenting my character. But I think that there are a lot of people who will tell you you can't write middle grade in first person, which I've done seven, so you can you can do it.

Speaker 1: 17:06

But you know, I mean, I think that it's just publishers like to put you in a box cause that's easier for them. Does it necessarily lend itself to your creative output being the best that it can be? So I'm with you. We're going to call this episode break all the rules.

Speaker 2: 17:22

There you go, that's the name.

Speaker 1: 17:24

I'm going to write it on my little note sheet. Break all the rules, just do it.

Speaker 3: 17:29

So we did touch on the collaborations and it looks like you have quite a few collaborations with other authors, like how did that first come about? And I have to imagine with each person it's a very different situation and how that works. And you just talked about one and I'm sure the next collaboration was very different.

Speaker 2: 17:48

So they expand different spaces. So some of my collaborations are on the comic, space and things, and I used to work in television for many years and while I was there I worked at a television network called G4, which is a gamer network, and they we did a lot of like attack of the show and X-Play and shows that were geared towards technology and interviews on nerd stuff, I guess it's the way to phrase. We were always covering the next Marvel or DC or whatever was coming up for Star Wars and so which was, of course, great for me- I absolutely had the greatest job ever.

Speaker 2: 18:28

And so I was running this. I eventually moved to where I was running the in-house studio of it all, and so we would shoot a Comic-Con live and at E3 with the games, and so a lot of the folks that I worked with were extremely some of the most creative bunch I've ever worked with in my life Just incredible brilliance. Many of them have gone on to write on so many other incredible things, and while I was there, there were a couple of folks that I worked with that I we just started talking about collaborating on things, so a lot of the collaborations started there, and as soon as we left G4 and I had sold Game of Shadows, we started working on some of these other things. So, like Firebrand, which is a graphic novel series that I wrote with Jessica Chobot, who is the host of Bizarre Stage. She was on Nerdist for a long time and it's now on Expedition X, so there's the expedition shows that they do with Josh, and on Discovery Channel she does Expedition X, which is it's really creepy and haunted stuff, and they go to explore all over the world these places that are incredibly scary, which is so perfect for us.

Speaker 2: 19:35

So we decided to join together and write Firebrand, which is the story about these witches in Seattle. You know this whole idea. I don't know if you know about Seattle or you've spent a lot of time there, but you know there's a city under the city. So the city was originally built I want to say it was late 1700s, early 1800s and there was a big logging community there and in gold?

Speaker 2: 19:59

I think too as well. But the city itself was basically founded on the idea of brothels and you know, hotels and places for people to come and stay. Well, it flooded. Because whatever they, however the plumbing they had, it completely flooded and it wasn't time to rebuild it. So they didn't destroy the city underneath, they just built a new city on top of it and so you can actually go on tours of the city underneath. So, of course, we had to have it all infested with all kinds of creepy things, some kind of vampire things, whatever it was. And this young woman whose mother was a witch, who passed away right after she was you know, from, basically from her birth, who's being raised by her dad, and then the aunt comes in and sweeps her way and she ends up coming back and they turn out to be the protectors of Of the city.

Speaker 2: 20:45

We collaborated on that. What normally happens with I'm the writer she's more idea and talent in that way and we work with Claudia Aguierre, who's an amazing artist, on that project. We worked with a legendary the entertainment company. They published it and so on it, and so I I typically do a lot of the, the early drafts and those kinds of relationships.

Speaker 2: 21:08

Jessica would do the editing. She'd come in and be like I think this should happen, I think this should happen. It was collaborative in that I but but I was doing most of the actual typing, I guess it's a way to phrase it. And then I worked on another project called a cursey. In it was another graphic novel series for legendary, with an actor named John Bairman and his sister, carol. And Carol and John have author, have books. They've written, like Hollow Earth and other books, and so when we were working on that project together which also came about from working with John at g4 Carol and I did the lion's share of the work, but but she and I would work on it and then John would come in with his really, really crazy ideas, which was always so fun.

Speaker 3: 21:47

So wait, I have to interject now. Is that John from Dr who? Yeah, I'm a huge Dr who fan, so the minute you said that, I'm like, oh, you just got really cool.

Speaker 2: 22:02

Yeah, he was on Torchwood, was the series that was spinoff. That's been a spinoff right. He was Captain Jack. Yes, he's wonderful, I mean I. He worked with us at g4. He was our host for our Comicon stuff. As the network was winding down NBC universal. You know, mergers happen and and they were, they were basically dismantling our lovely network. And John came in because he was freelancing and he was on aero as well, and so that's when we started working together on that project and and yeah, so we wrote a cursey and that was sort of a one-off book and yeah, he's, he's fun, he's, he's, he's great.

Speaker 3: 22:40

Tell me. I said hey.

Speaker 2: 22:44

Unless you're promoting or you're with those people like we used to promote stuff all the time together, and then you know, now it's like it just sort of slows down. You know you collaborate them and then then you're kind of done right.

Speaker 1: 22:54

That is an interesting point about collaboration too, because you're in the thick of it with somebody in a very intense Way and if it's only a single book or maybe a couple part series, then obviously everybody goes on to their next thing when it's over and it probably feels like you know, a little bit of like grief at the separation because you're you're so intense with yeah Relationship and then it's gone, even if you remain in contact or your friends anyway, or whatever. It's not going to be the same as that day-to-day Working.

Speaker 3: 23:28

No, that's interesting.

Speaker 1: 23:29

I never thought about really the psychological side of of collaborating with somebody on you know intense project like a novel.

Speaker 2: 23:36

It's kind of like a little bit like the film and TV business, because you're you, I'm kind of used to that in some ways, because Things just get canceled right and then you shut them down we spoke with a couple other authors in one of our last interviews.

Speaker 3: 23:49

That was all about collaboration and I think it's just because I think everyone's interested in like how do people collaborate, and I'm starting to get the feeling that every project looks very different and how you Approach it, and I think it's more about how you and the other author want to set up your systems and how you you know how that exchange is going to happen. Like you just said. You know I did most the drafting and then she came in on the back end and that's. You know, that's a really different approach. I never would have thought about it.

Speaker 2: 24:19

It's because not everybody that I Collaborate with is a full-time writer or a writer in that way. You know Jessica and Jessica would be like I'm not Eric is the writer, she does the writing. I'm gonna come in and you know to be a the other part of it In in the in the film and TV business You're kind of used to this week called story by credit or created by credit. It's somebody comes in and this, it's got this. It happens all the time actually, where someone will have an idea and then you go and you write it. It's just it happens to be up with somebody's idea.

Speaker 2: 24:51

Work for hire, I guess they call it in the publishing business, but with writing with other authors, it's it's a little bit more daunting, I think, because when you're writing with another author like I was with Bob you have to really respect everybody's process and Some people are really great collaborators and some people you just know right away that that they're gonna they're gonna be need to be very precious about what it is that they're working on and they're not gonna want you touching with it or messing it, or you know what I mean, because there there is that part of it as well. We all have our own writer's voice and it takes time to develop it. And I think if two people are working together from the beginning, you can probably develop that voice together and become fairly similar in and then it works out probably 100% really well, especially we're doing like a whole series of a bunch of books. But if you're just doing, you know, a project together and somebody has a different voice there has to you have to sort of. I personally like to establish those rules from the very beginning and I'm very blunt about it, like can I stick my fingers? I literally use a wrench. Can I stick my fingers in this keys? You want me to give me a note? You know what I mean. Like everybody's a different process.

Speaker 2: 26:00

So like, if you're trading chapters, like a lot of writers I know will be like I write this chapter, they write the next chapter and we go back and forth until we'll finish the book, which can be great, except for you know, a lot of times when you go back to reread that chapter they've written and then you're flushing out the next one, something might have changed a little bit in the character development or in the plot, right? Do you go back and you make sure that you're following through on the flow of it all, but then at the same time, you're like what would that character really say that and are you? Is that person going to be comfortable with you going in and being like I think maybe we should change it this way? Do you have those conversations or do they prefer to make those changes themselves? Because everybody has a different answer to those questions you know what I mean, and so.

Speaker 2: 26:42

I think the best thing for collaborators is to just because I've collaborated a lot is to just establish those rules up front and respect them, and if you can't do that, then you shouldn't collaborate.

Speaker 3: 26:53

That is great advice right there. That's the nugget we're looking for. You may leave now.

Speaker 1: 27:02

No, I think, because by nature I think writers are pretty sensitive when you're talking about their, their baby words that they're putting out there into the world. I think that's really an interesting thing for people to keep in mind who might want to collaborate. I love the idea of just hammering out those rules up front and saying we've agreed to this, almost like a contract. This is how we're going to proceed, so you can't get upset later when I'm following the rules. I think that definitely gives you a little bit of protection in that relationship. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:33

And also if it's an early relationship, if it's not something that's been already picked up and you guys are like with Bob and I were sort of put together on this project that was moving forward, but with I mean, we wanted to do it together, Don't get me wrong, because we've known each other for several years, but I a lot of times. If it's a new relationship and it's a new kind of project, don't be afraid to also realize that it may not be the best fit, because that's the thing that I feel. Like early on I was collaborating with someone and the truth of the matter was that it just the collaboration wasn't going to work out. It's kind of got into a bad place for no real reason. You know what I mean. And it's okay to be like okay, well, maybe I should just be doing this myself and they should be doing that, you know, on their own and divide, Because it's not every time we'll work out and it shouldn't be like a failure.

Speaker 1: 28:21

Yeah, and that's also, I think, really an important thing for people to keep in mind that you know, despite your best efforts, it might not turn into something that's been a visual for either or both of you. I mean honestly, when you were talking about how you're trying to keep the details and the character and everything consistent chapter to chapter, even though people different people are writing those chapters, I mean, I struggled to keep consistency with myself chapter to chapter, Me too.

Speaker 1: 28:47

So the fact that there would be another person in there. Like my heart started racing a little bit when you were saying that, because I was like, oh, that's terrifying, but it's really it's interesting to think about on that granular level, right, like you've got to keep it has to read to the person on the other side as if it's one writer. Right, it has to be a coherent story. It's a, it's a challenge and it's true we get lots of questions about it on the show. People are really interested in that idea, I think, because writing is so lonely, as you mentioned, people like the idea of having a companion on the journey.

Speaker 2: 29:21

Well, and it can be disheartening. I mean I think I had I don't know how many rejections until somebody five years of it, you know, of rejections until you finally get. You're like, oh okay, you know somebody actually said something I did was okay.

Speaker 2: 29:39

I mean, it's like we are an insecure bunch, just like actors are. You know, people love to see these actors like they're celebrities. And same with the authors, like the Libertugos of the world and the. I mean like we're all. We're in this, we're in what we do because we, we like the quiet, the, we like our alone time and in our, in our own world and and a lot of us are shy. Those rejections are hard, they are.

Speaker 1: 30:05

And you remember the rejection so much more clearly than you remember anything positive For sure On a side note, which is about rejections.

Speaker 3: 30:14

I don't know if anybody's still on Twitter I quit but they have. Oh my God, this is the funniest thing. So listeners, if you're, if you're hearing this, go check it out, because it's so amusing. Writers are taking their rejections and creating blackout poetry, so they're like blacking out everything and then creating a rejection. That is hysterical. So it's just saying like, despite your writing, it's horrible, like you know whatever. They just take out these words and then make it like even worse and it's hysterical. So it's the. I think the hashtag is blackout poetry on Twitter, and I just go on there and crack up that these people like sit there and figure out these hilarious rejections. It's well worth going into the cloud of oblivion as we refer to Twitter here.

Speaker 2: 31:07

Yeah, I, finally I had to quit. I. I, it wasn't so much the anxiety of Twitter or so much or X or whatever they're calling it these days, it was more just the too many platforms and the distraction. The news is hard enough for me and I do feel like I, I do have to like literally shove the hide the Tik Tok app while I'm working because, like, I'm on deadline right now and I, if I go in there, it's like a scrolling for 10,000 years. There's the cooking videos alone. I'm like, oh, I want to cook that you know.

Speaker 1: 31:40

It's like, oh, we all have our poison, like cooking kittens, puppies, you know weird sports moments.

Speaker 3: 31:47

I'll save every cooking reel I want to do, and yet I make my family the same thing every week.

Speaker 1: 31:54

And they're just like, oh my gosh, okay, we could spend. We could spend like another hour talking about these things, but we do not want you to feel like a hostage to writers with wrinkles, so we're going to continue here. So we've touched on this a little bit. You have written novels and comics and graphic novels and it seems you have been creative across the spectrum here. So can you sum up the challenges of those different paths and how you came to pursue these different mediums for your stories?

Speaker 2: 32:26

I had a really difficult time learning to read as a kid, so for me, comics played a really important role, and one of the things I do, one of the reasons I like writing for middle grade, and particularly these days, is working with organizations like J3, which I don't know if you know the J3 Foundation and helping these kids to read more, and part of the graphic novel comic experience was really getting kids to read, because I would read the Justice League comics as a kid, or the Spider-Man comics or the Archie comics, whatever my mom would have. I would go through the boxes of whatever we had in the house because I was having a really hard time learning to read. I had a version of dyslexia that was undiagnosed, and so for me, reading comics came first, and then I started reading a lot of prose novels as I got into my high school world and beyond, and so when I first started turning to writing, I was working in scripted programming at places like Sony as a creative executive, and so I was reading scripts all day, and so whether they were mostly television scripts, because they were a series like Party of Five and Dawson's Creek and just to go way back, just to date myself even more, and these are some of the shows on the air. And so when I'd be reading these scripts, that's kind of the way a comic is written. So this is how I first started writing in comics is as I started reading scripts and my job was to give notes and I I I was pretty good at it. I kept moving up the ladder and they would give me more and more responsibility in terms of giving feedback on the creative stuff and I Learned from some of the the best in the business. They were amazing and sort of taught me how to work with writers and give notes to writers, which is it's a learned thing. It's not something you can really learn in school, it's kind of like on the job training, sort of stuff. So, anyway, I was working at G4 and I was working with a lot of comic book companies again promoting their stuff and that kind of thing, and we'd go to Comic Con every year and I I just started with an idea of one that I wanted to write, and so the first thing I wrote was something called the 49th key, which to this day is still one that I get so many notes about, which you know. It's nice that my first one was so love. It was a project I wrote. It's kind of a Indiana Jones kind of thing about a lost kid and he's trying to bring them home, and it was just really fun and so I that was the first thing I wrote. And then and then, as G4 started wanting down and I started writing my own prose novels.

Speaker 2: 34:56

Prose novels are are harder. Just to be perfectly blunt, they're longer. The reason is is because in the comic world and the graphic novel novel Do you have an artist who does a lot of that setting work for you. So, yeah, you got to write some paragraphs about what that setting is and and how it relates to the character, especially if it's like a person's apartment and you know their things are in there and and how they relate to those things or they press them about them. Are they pigs? You know what is it about this apartment? How does it fit in with their world? But the artist is going to do all the heavy lifting and drawing those things or creating that that visual.

Speaker 2: 35:33

As a prose author, you're writing those paragraphs.

Speaker 2: 35:36

You know you're doing the work of having to really set the scene depending upon their adult verses, you know children's. How much of that you're doing is varied, but it still takes a lot more time, I guess it's the way to phrase it. So with with graphic novels and even some of the pilot scripts I wrote and had options. They are things that are very character driven, and that was the thing that I loved about About exercising that muscle. First is that everything was about character, so that when I got into the prose part of it, I felt like I knew these characters really well and what I had to learn was is how to make that setting a character of its own and bring it in to either a new experience for the character or a Part of the reason why the character was who they were it's interesting to hear how they were kind of closely related and built on each other for you that maybe in your journey, starting with the comics inevitably led to the prose writing, and how those were Influencing each other.

Speaker 1: 36:34

You know and we say on this show all the time that you need to really immerse yourself in whatever it is that you want to do, and just hearing your story about how you started with reading scripts and that comic books are written in the same way and you kind of went up and until you had the the knowledge and experience to launch yourself into that comic writing, I think that's a super important point, like put yourself into that world so that you have the best chance of success when it comes to your own Creative output.

Speaker 2: 37:01

I don't know too many writers who would say this anymore, but I remember when I first Even started working in the television business, we talked to people about, you know, a show that would be on the air or a book that came out or something like that, and they'd be like, oh, I don't have time to read. And there was a part of me that's like how can you not have time? I mean, I, I don't know. I Learned so much from reading other people's writing. You know, not so much that you're. You're looking at it because you're emulating it. You know what I mean. It's because you're like, oh, that was an interesting approach to something.

Speaker 2: 37:33

I mean, one of the things I love the most is reading Neil Gaiman's books, because Neil Gaiman has this way of everything feeling different, but kind of Still brilliantly the same. But but you know, like the graveyard book. It literally starts out the book from the perspective of the knife and it's like, wow, okay, I, you know, as a young, when I was first starting out, I was like can you do that? How do you? How do you do that? You know, for me, reading as much as you can and and whatever world you want to tackle, it's so important.

Speaker 1: 38:04

That's our show. Gospel Lisa says this all the time constantly. Yeah go read the books, bring your highlighter, bring your pen, deconstruct them, learn from what others did before you. That's the education that you need if you're gonna be a writer. That is a great place to wrap up our time, so that we don't keep you here all day. I mean you'd like to, but we're not going to because that seems cruel.

Speaker 1: 38:27

So thank you so much for being here and sharing all this wisdom. There's so much in this episode that I think our listeners can learn from and grow from, so we are grateful to you for that. Well, thank you for having me. This has been a blast, and listeners, remember you can find out more about Erica in our podcast notes and I'll put links to all her socials and her website there too, so you can easily get in touch. And, as always, thank you for tuning in. Please visit our writers with wrinkles link tree or the podcast notes and find out how to support the show by subscribing, following and recommending. And we will see you again next week, november 20th, for a new marketing Monday episode. We love these new episodes and we hope that you will join us for that. So, until then, happy reading, writing and listening.