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Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory.
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I'm your host, Pookie Spitz, and I'm flying solo again today.
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Talking about what everyone's talking about.
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Dungeon Crawler Carl Sensation.
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The novels.
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The graphic novels.
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The role player game.
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The upcoming NBC Universal Miniseries.
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The Phenomenon.
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From Matt Dinneman.
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I have trouble pronouncing the dude's name.
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Matt Dinneman.
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Dinneman, say Dinneman three times.
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He started out on Royal Road back in 2019.
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Chapter by chapter.
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He had an idea for a doomsday kind of story.
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Fan of Dungeons and Dragons, obviously a fan of Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide.
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And he landed on an idea that a transcendent alien race uses humanity for entertainment as it mines our resources.
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Think of Game of Thrones meets Hunger Games, meets hitchhikers.
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What I love most about the series is what I've been ranting about on this podcast and others, which is not staying in your lane.
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It's great to master the craft.
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Sure, it's science fiction, fantasy.
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But giving it some horror zip, some political and social commentary, some satire about our social media age, our entertainment, consumer-driven culture, if you can call it that.
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Politics, humanity, ethics, philosophy, all rung through with a very wry, cynical sense of humor.
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Great, great stuff.
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I've read the first book, I got the second book, so I'm no expert in the series, but I wanted to rant about it for a few reasons.
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For starters, I find it as the next generation of indie author sensational success after Andy Weir's The Martian.
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I'll go into that in a second.
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As an adjunct to that, I find Dinneman's series here to be a reflection of our culture in the 2020s, just like Weir's was in the 2010s.
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I also want to talk about what it's like being an indie author and the tools of the trade and the best practices displayed by both of these gentlemen to get them from total obscurity to multi-zillionaire status, super best seller status, and all starting from pretty much nothing.
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And lastly, I want to focus on the joy of just the raw creative process, balls to the wall, or any other part you want to throw up there against it, and doing what you do without listening to other people's opinions, while paradoxically, ironically enough, listening to other people's opinions, namely your audience, every step of the way.
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So let me dissect this one step at a time, and I'll start with Andy Weir.
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His story is also well known, and I'm just going for the bonus brownie points here of the overall narrative to illustrate my points.
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So, in essence, back in 2010, 2011 was when Weir first cracked it.
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He had set up his own little blog or website, and he started posting a serialized version of what became the Martian, chapter by chapter.
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He had created his own mailing list so you could register for Andy Weir's little mailing list, and then you had access to his content, and you could participate in the editing and even writing of the book in the sense of making corrections, giving him recommendations.
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He created a community slowly, organically.
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I think in one interview he mentions that it literally took him like a decade to get to only a few thousand people.
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But that was the seed, that was the kernel.
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That was the little little rift in the the little impurity in the crystal that sent the whole thing ablaze to mix metaphors.
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And starting from that seed, he kept cranking and he built his following.
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Word of mouth, word of blog posts, and he built it, and he built it, and he built it to the point where when he launched on Kindle the earlier days of KDP, 99 cents, he started making some real coin.
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And the thing snowballed, and then he got published by an air quote real or traditional publishing house.
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And then it really took off.
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And one thing led to another, and then Ridley Scott optioned the movie, and then Matt Damon played Mark Watney, I believe the protagonist's name, and it became the super sensation that we all know it to be.
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He had another novel, and then recently Hail Mary, which was also a great book that turned into a Ryan Reynolds-starred movie.
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And there you have it.
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End of story, right?
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No! This is all fascinating because you have an indie writer who didn't just throw some books up on Amazon and maybe attend a few cons and hope for the best.
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Andy was a guy who built it up organically, and here's the thing took in the feedback of his readers and made the book better as he grew his audience to the tipping point of getting published in traditional channels and then busting out.
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Boom! There you go.
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Now, fast forward almost exactly 10 years to 2019, and he got Matt Dinnerman.
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Let me say it, Dinamin.
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Matt Dinneman.
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Seattle guy.
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Apparently, he made his career uh painting portraits of exhibition kitty cats.
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So the Persian cat, Princess Donut, who makes it into the starring role of Dungeon Crawler, uh, is near and dear to his heart.
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He apparently had exposure to many kitties, and the Persian one really must have left a mark.
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Anyway, he starts writing, and apparently he was set up for the big con coming up in March of 2020, and then boom, the pandemic hit, shut it down, he was broke, kids needing to go to college, all that kind of stuff.
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And he set up a Patreon account.
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He already had built up a bit of a following on Royal Road.
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So Royal Road really wasn't happening for Andy Weir.
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Remember, Andy built his following from his own little website and his own email list.
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Dinneman jumped on an established platform for writers that already catered to the lit RPG crowd, literary role-playing game originating in South Asia, going back ten years prior, maybe even more, and it's essentially similar to Twitch.
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You know how Twitch is video gamers who watch other video gamers play video games?
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Well, LitRPG is you, the reader, tracking characters who are ostensibly in a video game, and the narrator of the book is helped along, or sometimes is the system, which is namely the OS running the game, who provides information to the characters in a way a video game interface would.
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Stats, intelligence at level 15, charisma at level 22, armor at level 45.
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You're giving metrics for character attributes that then evolve throughout the game.
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So you get dinged for making a mistake and you get rewarded for accomplishing things.
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And the game dynamics are essentially problem solution reward, problem solution reward.
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It's usually a self-contained world, it's usually dire and dank, but a lit RPG now isn't science fiction, military science fiction, dungeons and dragons style stuff, just about anything encompassing the science fiction and fantasy genres you can find in lit RPG.
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And then you go from usually level to level.
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So every level has a boss or a number of bosses, just like video games.
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And this is all in the prose.
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And reading lit RPG is a trip because even laid out on the page, it's paragraph, paragraph, dialogue, dialogue, paragraph.
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And then the system comes in, usually bolded and bulleted, and it tells you what you need to know as a character.
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And the system is its own character.
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So the more successful and more creative of these lit RPG books, you have the system with its own personality.
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And usually the personality is cynical, it's helpful, hurtful.
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These tropes have been long established prior to Matt.
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But like any great writer, you don't invent the genre that you then call your own.
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You just do a better job than anyone who came before you to infuse it with next level humor, next level creativity.
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So you still dealing with the levels, you go from level one to level two to level three, and you're still battling monsters and killing bosses, and you're still accruing rewards, and you're still getting dinged.
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You're making your way through it, you're problem solving, you're kicking ass.
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But as I mentioned earlier, Matt combines other genres and he does it really, really well.
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So the essential premise, no spoilers here, is that the aliens destroy every building on the surface of the earth, and anyone left outside survives the initial purge, and then these portals open up 150,000 portals across the entire surface of the planet, not evenly distributed, and these portals lead down into the dungeon, and the dungeon has levels one through 18.
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And there's something like 20 million human survivors out of 8 billion people who make it down into the dungeons, and these people get whittled away with time and with every accruing level.
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And then the goal here is for Carl, you never even know his last name, every man Carl and his pet kitty cat, his not his pet kitty cat, his ex-girlfriend's pet Persian pampered kitty cat, Princess Donut, who becomes sentient, by the way, quickly in the book, and this is no spoiler, after eating a special magical pet treat.
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Together they build up their strength, accrue weapons and armor and magic and character attributes, and fight their way through level after level of increasingly arduous problems.
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Now that's classic lit RPG, but then Matt infuses it with the hunger game style entertainment value.
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So all the shenanigans and horrors of all of the crawlers in the dungeon is being broadcast live to literally trillions of sentient beings throughout the galaxy across multiple races, and the evil alien syndicate who wreaked havoc and caused this destruction and created these dungeons, use it to supplement their resource mining activities.
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So they're stealing all of the Earth's resources, killed most of its population, and uses this small percentage of survivors to entertain the galaxy and make more money that way.
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So Rife within Matt's world is these other genres of political commentary, satire about our obsession with media, social media, hero worship, our entertainment complex, influencers, the whole shipbang.
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And as I was mentioning, it's very, very funny.
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So the system here is an exaggerated version of the narrator of Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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You don't have the lit RPG stats, but you have that same cynical sense of humor, very dry.
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In Adams' case, of course, it's English.
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In Matt Dinner's case, it's Seattle Post Grunge.
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And here's where I get to my next point: alarmism, skepticism of institutions.
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The bad guy in Dungeon Crawler Carl is the syndicate.
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They're the organization who made the dungeons, perpetuated, and grind the holy hell into all the characters on a moment-by-moment basis.
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Pure sadism.
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Sadism in hell, where the humor is a safety valve for the characters, and it's yet another way for the system and its elements to grind it in.
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Salt in the wound.
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Now, this is in stark contrast to the world of Andy Weir.
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Andy Weir was post-pandemic.
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Andy Weir was dovetailing off the Obama years of change and hope.
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Andy Weir's institutions are mostly benign.
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They could be bureaucratic and inefficient and frustrating, but NASA is cool.
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The Chinese Space Agency comes in to help.
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He's just an everyday dude who has some amazing abilities, a jack of all trades, a problem solver who is going to science his way through the existential trials and tribulations of the narrative.
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Watney or Watley of the Martian gets stranded on the surface of Mars, and then he needs to survive by himself, the only human being on the planet with limited resources.
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He applies his skills in botany, engineering, astronomy, chemistry.
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And he makes it.
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And NASA helps, and even the Chinese come to help.
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And Hail Mary is basically a cloned version of all of these anti-weir tropes.
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And you got the new guy who does pretty much the same thing.
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He's not an astronaut, he's a teacher.
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But his Swiss Army knife is equally vast, equally efficient, equally proficient, to the point of busting credulity, frankly.
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If anything negative could be said about Weir's characters, it's not only that they're Pollyanna nice guys, but that they seem to know everything and are able to do everything.
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But that's the definition of a hero.
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And it's not really a fair criticism because Dinneman's Carl and even Princess Donut, for that matter, come across as vulnerable, yet, at least in the first book or two, invincible.
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They keep kicking ass.
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Carl is just a retired National Guard or Navy guy, and Coast Guard guy, I think.
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And pretty quick, he's learning how to build exotic weapons.
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He's learning how to fight like a MMA guy on steroids, and he's not afraid of cockroaches the size of horses and monsters who are basically a black haze with skulls and horns sticking out of their head.
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I mean, it's really a nightmarish, horrible kind of situation.
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I felt like I needed to take a shower after I read a few pages of Dungeon Crawler Carl.
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But it's effective that way.
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It's a great mood.
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But the point I'm getting to here is Andy Weir had respect for institutions, and so do his characters.
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Andy Weir has hope in humanity.
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So uh Watney's astronauts fly right back to go pick them up, risking their own lives.
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Everyone's a good guy in Andy Weir's books, including the institutions who support them, and the only bad guy is the second law of thermodynamics and the harshness of nature in this Darwinian sense.
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It's like just Pollyanna to the core.
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There's humor, there's cynicism, there's irony, but everybody's a good guy in an Andy Weir book, including the alien in Hail Mary.
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What a nice rock Rocky is.
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I loved the first movie and I hated the second one.
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And I know you're gonna hate on me for hating the second one, but I I think it sucked, and you can kiss my ass.
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Never once for a second did I have a feeling that the fate of humanity was at stake in that movie.
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I felt Ryan Reynolds was over the top.
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I didn't give a shit about Rocky, and I can go complaining about that film.
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But the reason I'm ranting about it that way is I think it backs.
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Fired to the extent that the Martian worked when the Martian was written, and even when the movie, the Ridley Scott movie, came out, we were still hanging on to this belief that institutions were cool and everyone was fine.
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Fine.
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I had an ex girlfriend, she used to say, fine.
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Everyone was fine.
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Matt Dinnerman's nightmare hellhole of a dungeon is the exact opposite of that.
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The institutions have designed this hellish nightmare hellhole to kill you.
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You can't trust the crawlers.
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Even the humans in the story, you can't trust, many of whom are deadlier than the monsters you'll meet.
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The characters are inherently flawed.
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And the hero, alongside Carl, is a talking Persian cat who's truly a cat.
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Now I love cats.
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I love cats for the same reason a lot of people hate cats, which is they're just awful creatures.
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Talk about narcissistic.
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They'll come up and rub your leg and purr.
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And you think, oh, I'm bonding with my kitty, and my kitty is bonding with me.
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And then a second later, they'll do the exact same thing: rubbing and purring to the leg of a chair or a table.
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They'll curl up in your lap and sigh and sleep.
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And they'll do exactly the same thing in a box of rocks.
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Cats are mean bitches.
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And like I said, I love cats.
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Cats are cool.
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But Princess Donut, she's a mean bitch.
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So while she's all prissy and obsessed with her stats and can't wait to be on TV again, even if she's the laughing stock or the victim or the crawler.
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And just as she's all prissy about her tiara and licking herself constantly to make sure that she's looking good in the dungeon, she's also a vicious killer.
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And that fits perfectly.
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That's a cat, folks.
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And Carl is a similar bundle of contradiction.
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But Dinnerman does a great job with Carl in that he's pledged to survive.
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He has this recurring mantra that he's not gonna let them get to him.
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He's fighting the system, he's fighting the syndicate, he's out there to survive.
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It's a fuck you to their fuck you.
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And he means it and he's gonna do it.
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He's not gonna let them get to him.
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But he's also got a huge heart, and he's conflicted constantly between the need to help his fellow humans, the other crawlers, and the reality that helping them is often a zero-sum game, mutually exclusive to his survival and that of Princess Donut.
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So, what I'm getting at here is the illustration that both Andy Weir and Matt Dinnerman embody the times that they've emerged from.
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Rick Rubin talks about art being this emergent phenomena from the culture, the history, the moment that engenders them.
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Every generation has its own creative talent.
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Every generation produces amazing people.
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Lauren Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live, was asked how he went about recruiting for the TV show.
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And if it's hard to find talent, he said he's got the opposite problem.
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He would travel across the country and see stand-up comics and comedy troops and improv shows.
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And he was always blown away by the sheer volume of gifted people.
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He saw amazing people all the time across every ethnic, gender, socioeconomic class, all types of Americans made him laugh his ass off, and he thought that they were brilliant.
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But his challenge was pulling it all together.
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He had to get that person into a group, and the group had to go live on TV every Saturday night live.
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And that mix, that magic mix, is what was so tough.
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And the additional dimension that I don't believe he explicitly mentioned was that the times around comedy changes around the comedy.
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And the comedy that flares in the moment is a kind of comedy where the audience intuitively connects with it on a gut level that's reflective of the trials, tribulations attitude that they deal with in their everyday lives.
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So one generation's comic will not work in another generation.
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And when we retroactively look back at the history of comedy, the history of art for that matter, then we see that the artists and the art of other eras emerged organically from their surroundings and become atrophied, if you will, no longer resonate like they did.
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Now, don't get me wrong, there's classic comedy.
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If you look back at a Richard Pryor skit from forty, fifty years ago, you laugh your ass off.
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But Eddie Murphy is not Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle is not Eddie Murphy.
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And if you look at their rise and their success through this lens of the society that, in a sense, created them, then I think this thesis, which isn't rocket science or too much of a surprise, holds true.
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What I'm pointing out here, though, that it's not limited to comedy, it's expansive across art and specifically back into indie creative writing and science fiction and fantasy in particular.
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Now, what all this means, at least to me, as a sci-fi podcaster, ranter, bloviator, essay writer, and novelist, is the reality that my success and the success of all those around me on my podcasts, those I see on Substack, in chat rooms, wherever, is contingent not only on their innate ability, not only on their own willingness to think outside the box and do something innovative, to jump genres, to shake it up.
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That's almost a prerequisite.
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That's the knock-knock at the door of making it.
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And I've ranted about this before.
00:29:57.279 --> 00:30:12.960
Sure, you can get a developmental editor, you could go through 20 iterations and spend 10 years to write your novel, or conversely, you can crank them out in an afternoon at this point with AI.
00:30:15.200 --> 00:30:18.559
But you need to think out of the box.
00:30:18.799 --> 00:30:29.680
Simply doing what's been done and doing it a little bit better or getting it right is not gonna differentiate you.
00:30:30.319 --> 00:30:44.079
You need to mix it up genre to genre, infuse it with currents and themes and perspectives and challenges of our time.
00:30:45.440 --> 00:30:57.839
Make it real, make it resonant, and the rest is really up to the gods, as they used to say.
00:30:58.720 --> 00:31:16.880
You're either on the pulse of your generation or you're not, and you could argue that a great artist or a talented creator would naturally be on the pulse.
00:31:17.200 --> 00:31:25.519
But here's the thing: you could be behind it, and you can even be ahead of it.
00:31:27.039 --> 00:31:36.240
You could be a Van Gogh where you're leagues beyond, and people don't even get you until you drop dead.
00:31:36.720 --> 00:31:40.079
Herman Melville actually falls into this category.
00:31:40.319 --> 00:31:59.519
Moby Dick! It's a joke, it's a punchline, it's a Led Zeppelin song, it's arguably the great American novel, but when Melville died, pretty much at the turn of the 20th century, he was forgotten.
00:31:59.839 --> 00:32:02.079
Moby Dick was a dud.
00:32:02.960 --> 00:32:13.599
And Melville had to live his later years as a customs official, I think, on the dock, just to pay the rent.
00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:25.920
It wasn't until, I believe, just before World War I, or maybe even a little after, that some academic found Moby Dick.
00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:36.400
And Melville was not only resurrected, but tossed into the pantheon of American greatness.
00:32:37.279 --> 00:32:39.920
So you could be ahead of the curve, folks.
00:32:40.160 --> 00:32:46.559
You could be behind it, and in that sense, you really got no choice.
00:32:47.440 --> 00:33:13.039
But the one thing you gotta do is to stay true to yourself, stay creative, think out of the box, and borrow, steal everything you can to make your content and your storytelling resonate.
00:33:14.720 --> 00:33:28.720
And the biggest learning experience from this Andy Weir, Matt Dinneman kind of parallel story is their best practice of integrating the audience into their work.
00:33:28.799 --> 00:33:35.680
Now, this begs the question of people giving a shit, but if people don't give a shit, then what's really the point?
00:33:37.759 --> 00:33:41.839
And all of this suggests that you gotta throw it out there.
00:33:42.400 --> 00:33:48.160
All of this suggests that you share, that you listen.
00:33:49.519 --> 00:33:58.640
Rather than, or in addition to hiring a developmental editor, see what people think of your stuff.
00:33:58.960 --> 00:34:01.359
Take in their feedback.
00:34:01.759 --> 00:34:20.239
You don't have to listen to everybody, and if you're smart, you'll listen to next to nobody, but every once in a while there's a good idea, especially if they are paying you big bucks on Patreon, which happened to Matt.
00:34:20.400 --> 00:34:33.760
Apparently, there's a shift in the narrative to Cuba or the facsimile of a Cuban environment, and I think that's a direct consequence of one of Matt's benefactors being Cuban.
00:34:34.480 --> 00:34:48.800
Then there's a host of opportunities for different loot boxes containing certain prizes and gifts that are reflective of what some of his patrons asked him to put in there with a little payola.
00:34:49.199 --> 00:34:52.400
And I think all of this is spectacular.
00:34:52.639 --> 00:35:04.960
And what I love most about this whole model is that it's self-reflective, it's meta, it's recursive back into the themes of the Dungeon Crawler books themselves.
00:35:05.519 --> 00:35:18.000
Carl and Princess Donut are on TV, and the feedback of their viewers resonates into the action that's taking place.
00:35:18.559 --> 00:35:39.679
Just as Matt wrote these books with the feedback of his audience, and I have to mention Jeff Hayes, who did the audiobook version, which is yet another level of multi-channel engagement and expression, going supermodal for the series.
00:35:39.920 --> 00:35:45.039
Apparently, Matt and Jeff knew each other even before the series was written.
00:35:45.519 --> 00:35:52.400
And Matt and Jeff are tight to the point where Jeff gets it, likes it.
00:35:52.719 --> 00:35:56.000
And Jeff does all the characters in the book.
00:35:56.320 --> 00:36:03.280
And I haven't listened to the full audiobook, but I've heard snippets, especially on YouTube, and I laugh my ass off.
00:36:03.440 --> 00:36:12.000
And apparently, Jeff is gonna be the voice of Princess Donut in the upcoming NBC Universal miniseries.
00:36:12.079 --> 00:36:16.159
I'm not quite sure if it's gonna be animated or live action with CGI.
00:36:16.719 --> 00:36:25.760
I'm afraid to see it because if I had to take a bath after reading a few pages of the book, I can't imagine what's gonna be on screen.
00:36:26.000 --> 00:36:31.119
But again, it's reflective of our times, folks, which is chaotic, disruptive.
00:36:31.280 --> 00:36:33.920
We feel like we're in hell a lot of the time.
00:36:34.639 --> 00:36:40.639
And horror, fantasy, science fiction at their best act as a catharsis.
00:36:41.599 --> 00:36:44.159
Why do people like scary movies?
00:36:44.400 --> 00:36:55.440
Because it's happening to everyone on the screen and not you, and you could project your fear back onto the screen as kind of a release.
00:36:56.079 --> 00:37:31.039
And when you leave the theater with the lights coming up, well, my life might be difficult and challenging, and I'm scared of this and I'm scared of that, but it's it's not anywhere near as bad as the shit that I just experienced in the theater in the book, and I think that's a role of art, and that's why Dinneman's book is so popular, in addition to all these other reasons, is that it's channeling the anxiety of our time, analogously to how we're channeling the hopefulness of that time.
00:37:31.599 --> 00:37:33.920
I love this kind of stuff.
00:37:34.239 --> 00:37:48.480
It's a lesson and best practice to creators now, and it's also a wonderful expression of the role of art and the artist's role within it.
00:37:49.519 --> 00:37:56.000
So I had to bloviate about what everyone is bloviating about, give it my own take.
00:37:56.239 --> 00:37:58.960
Am I gonna finish all eight books?
00:38:00.079 --> 00:38:01.039
I don't know.
00:38:01.199 --> 00:38:06.320
I'm not sure if Lit RPG is my cup of tea, to be honest.
00:38:07.039 --> 00:38:13.440
On the negative side of my effervescent critique of Mr.
00:38:13.599 --> 00:38:20.480
Dinnerman, and this is no points against him, but I do find it repetitive.
00:38:20.719 --> 00:38:29.360
As I mentioned, I I need to shower or take a bath after reading a few pages, and I'm intrigued.
00:38:29.440 --> 00:38:43.519
I want to know what happens next, but I'm also offset by being off put by the repetition, by the gore, and frankly, by the sadism of it.
00:38:44.320 --> 00:38:56.880
Maybe it's a little much, maybe it's a little bit too world-buildy contained for my taste, but I do acknowledge its brilliance for all the reasons that I'm highlighting here.
00:38:57.840 --> 00:39:03.039
And there's also this rising tide raising all boats.
00:39:03.199 --> 00:39:13.920
When you have a hit in any in any modality, in any medium, it gets attention on the on the whole sport.
00:39:14.159 --> 00:39:18.320
It's like when World Cup soccer swung through the States.
00:39:18.480 --> 00:39:34.079
I I had to laugh my ass off at all these people getting into the sports outfits and rage cheering for their team when for most of the year most Americans don't know shit, don't give a shit about soccer.
00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:42.719
It's such a a lemmings over the cliff kind of phenomenon.
00:39:42.800 --> 00:39:47.920
And I just naturally am repulsed by that.
00:39:48.239 --> 00:40:22.719
But at the same time, it was wonderful to see, which is a sport like soccer, which is ubiquitous everywhere except the states, getting its due, and then people getting together and being excited, spending billions of dollars revitalizing local and national economies, and basically taking all of our angst and anxiety away from our political arguments and polarized shit show into a shared event where politics, race, none of that matters.
00:40:22.880 --> 00:40:26.480
Your pocketbook matters because the tickets were like what 10 grand.
00:40:28.079 --> 00:40:37.840
But the whole point was for everyone to enjoy themselves, have a good time, and for the sport and all sports to be infused with more enthusiasm.
00:40:38.559 --> 00:40:47.119
And the same goes for Dungeon Crawler, Carl, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror.
00:40:47.679 --> 00:40:53.039
More people are reading that book than they've read books for who knows how long.
00:40:57.760 --> 00:41:03.920
And I had another lit RPG guest, Matthew Kent, who actually turned me on to the genre.
00:41:04.639 --> 00:41:22.960
And Mallory has a great premise, and he's writing in the young adult target audience, too, which is young people, especially young boys, don't really read because they're not given material that would excite them.
00:41:23.360 --> 00:41:35.119
That we can use the excuse of attention deficit disorder and video games and digital technology to cite as reasons that boys don't read.
00:41:35.199 --> 00:41:42.159
And because they don't read, they're not really getting educated, because reading is really, frankly, the foundation of any kind of education.
00:41:42.239 --> 00:41:46.079
So if they don't read, they're not getting educated full stop.
00:41:46.719 --> 00:41:58.559
And Mallory's point was it behooves us as writers and publishers to create content for young people, especially young boys, to get excited about reading again.
00:41:58.639 --> 00:42:02.880
And that's what he does, and he does it really successfully, and it's a noble mission.
00:42:03.760 --> 00:42:11.360
Him and Recontour Press have a dedicated division for this very purpose.
00:42:11.920 --> 00:42:20.480
I don't know if they got the mission statement on a plaque, but they're going for it, and I think that that's awesome.
00:42:20.719 --> 00:42:31.519
And in that spirit, Dinneman's books, say what you will about them, have triggered and re triggered excitement in reading.
00:42:31.920 --> 00:42:37.840
And that triggers and engenders success in learning.
00:42:38.960 --> 00:42:43.280
The two are connected together, the two are the same damn thing.
00:42:43.360 --> 00:43:06.800
So whether you're reading about world history or quantum mechanics, or you're reading about Carl and Princess Donut vanquishing goblins and trolls and gigantic insects and all sorts of shockingly despicable monsters in the dungeon created by the syndicate.
00:43:07.039 --> 00:43:11.920
You're reading, you're learning, and they're problem-solving elements.
00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:16.480
You need to pay attention reading the book because you're rewarded.
00:43:17.280 --> 00:43:32.400
And it's fun to anticipate how puzzles are solved as a reward for your own attention, let alone that of the characters who take advantage and are able to survive and even flourish.
00:43:33.280 --> 00:43:38.800
So, for all these reasons, what a terrific sensation.
00:43:39.519 --> 00:43:59.760
Educating indie authors about being social and sharing content and embracing different genres, thinking and creating out of the box, appeasing themselves, but also learning how to appease audiences, listening to audiences, integrating feedback from audiences.
00:44:00.639 --> 00:44:25.199
Building content organically, reflecting the sign of our times, so that we become heralds, even harbingers, of what's happening now and what could and should happen, channeling the thoughts and feelings of the Zeitgeist so that we all feel better because we are creating shared experiences.
00:44:25.440 --> 00:44:37.360
And science fiction, fantasy, horror are particularly well designed to be projections of all these things for humans because they leave it wide open.
00:44:37.519 --> 00:44:55.519
You're not limited by physics, you're not limited by any facts, and the only limitation is one's own imagination and courage and willingness and eager to share.
00:44:56.239 --> 00:44:59.360
And that's why I hit record on the mic.
00:44:59.599 --> 00:45:09.599
That's what thrills me about this series, and I hope it's the beginning and not the end of yet another generation of writers.
00:45:09.760 --> 00:45:38.480
And I think that my hope will be proven to become manifest because going back to the Rick Rubin observation that art is really an eruption and an emergent phenomena of the times, we'll have our next Andy Weir or Matt Dinneman when the time is right and the audience is ripe.
00:45:38.880 --> 00:45:46.159
Thanks for listening to this solo rant on the science fiction and fantasy factory podcast.
00:45:46.880 --> 00:45:56.800
I've got more guests lined up, and I always, in the spirit of this rant, welcome your feedback.
00:45:57.039 --> 00:45:59.199
Like, comment, share.
00:45:59.440 --> 00:46:03.360
I am the Mookie Multiverse on Substack.
00:46:03.920 --> 00:46:06.559
I am Mookie Spitz on Patreon.
00:46:06.719 --> 00:46:08.480
Nudge Nudge Wink Wink.
00:46:08.639 --> 00:46:11.440
You don't need to give me any money, you could just sign up.
00:46:11.519 --> 00:46:13.679
That goes a long way, too.
00:46:14.159 --> 00:46:16.800
I've got some fun stuff in the pipeline.
00:46:16.960 --> 00:46:23.920
I've got my own science fiction spin-off prequel, Vinx the Mercenary Minx.
00:46:24.079 --> 00:46:27.840
I read a couple chapters here on the pod recently.
00:46:28.239 --> 00:46:35.280
I've got the sequel to my novel, Johnny Fizzuli and the Transfinite Reality Engine, which I'm excited about.
00:46:36.239 --> 00:46:43.760
I think I'm about halfway through, but everything else just gets in the way, including this podcast, but it's so much fun.
00:46:43.920 --> 00:46:45.119
How could I not?
00:46:45.599 --> 00:46:50.719
And I'm working on a tech implementation of AI.
00:46:50.880 --> 00:47:00.559
It's not AI creating the damn creative, but I'm using AI to create an interactive storytelling experience.
00:47:00.800 --> 00:47:02.159
So more on that.
00:47:03.440 --> 00:47:11.519
And I'm actually adapting the creative process of that storytelling experience to write a short story on that experience.
00:47:12.800 --> 00:47:19.840
It's called the bouncy yo-yo playtest catastrophe.
00:47:21.599 --> 00:47:23.920
I am having so much fun.
00:47:24.639 --> 00:47:31.440
And I hope when you listen, when you read, when you watch, you are too.
00:47:32.880 --> 00:47:34.239
Back at you soon.
00:47:34.400 --> 00:47:35.599
And thank you.
00:47:36.239 --> 00:47:38.800
Like Bartles, Bartles and James.
00:47:39.039 --> 00:47:45.760
I don't know if you're old enough to remember this, but they were a wine cooler company.
00:47:46.400 --> 00:47:54.400
Back in the 90s, we had those fruity drinks that became popular and then they blew up, then they went away.
00:47:54.719 --> 00:47:58.480
And we had wine coolers that were popular for a while.
00:47:58.639 --> 00:48:02.159
They blew up, then they went away, like Krispy Kreme donuts.
00:48:02.480 --> 00:48:05.519
Those used to be hot stock picks, believe it or not.
00:48:05.760 --> 00:48:12.079
You had Bartles and James, these two old guys, one tall and thin, the other short and fat, of course.
00:48:12.800 --> 00:48:22.079
And they would uh be in certain situations talking about their Bartles and James one coolers, and then they would say at the end, thank you for your support.
00:00:02.560 --> 00:00:06.799
Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory.
00:00:06.879 --> 00:00:11.599
I'm your host, Pookie Spitz, and I'm flying solo again today.
00:00:12.880 --> 00:00:15.599
Talking about what everyone's talking about.
00:00:16.480 --> 00:00:20.320
Dungeon Crawler Carl Sensation.
00:00:22.800 --> 00:00:24.079
The novels.
00:00:24.800 --> 00:00:26.480
The graphic novels.
00:00:26.960 --> 00:00:29.120
The role player game.
00:00:29.679 --> 00:00:35.520
The upcoming NBC Universal Miniseries.
00:00:36.399 --> 00:00:38.240
The Phenomenon.
00:00:39.679 --> 00:00:41.679
From Matt Dinneman.
00:00:41.840 --> 00:00:43.759
I have trouble pronouncing the dude's name.
00:00:43.920 --> 00:00:45.200
Matt Dinneman.
00:00:45.359 --> 00:00:48.399
Dinneman, say Dinneman three times.
00:00:49.600 --> 00:00:55.520
He started out on Royal Road back in 2019.
00:00:56.960 --> 00:00:58.479
Chapter by chapter.
00:00:58.640 --> 00:01:02.079
He had an idea for a doomsday kind of story.
00:01:02.799 --> 00:01:08.640
Fan of Dungeons and Dragons, obviously a fan of Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide.
00:01:10.159 --> 00:01:23.120
And he landed on an idea that a transcendent alien race uses humanity for entertainment as it mines our resources.
00:01:24.640 --> 00:01:33.519
Think of Game of Thrones meets Hunger Games, meets hitchhikers.
00:01:34.480 --> 00:01:45.359
What I love most about the series is what I've been ranting about on this podcast and others, which is not staying in your lane.
00:01:45.599 --> 00:01:49.280
It's great to master the craft.
00:01:49.680 --> 00:01:52.640
Sure, it's science fiction, fantasy.
00:01:53.439 --> 00:02:10.080
But giving it some horror zip, some political and social commentary, some satire about our social media age, our entertainment, consumer-driven culture, if you can call it that.
00:02:10.560 --> 00:02:22.000
Politics, humanity, ethics, philosophy, all rung through with a very wry, cynical sense of humor.
00:02:22.240 --> 00:02:24.159
Great, great stuff.
00:02:24.479 --> 00:02:34.960
I've read the first book, I got the second book, so I'm no expert in the series, but I wanted to rant about it for a few reasons.
00:02:35.680 --> 00:02:51.680
For starters, I find it as the next generation of indie author sensational success after Andy Weir's The Martian.
00:02:52.879 --> 00:02:54.800
I'll go into that in a second.
00:02:56.240 --> 00:03:12.080
As an adjunct to that, I find Dinneman's series here to be a reflection of our culture in the 2020s, just like Weir's was in the 2010s.
00:03:13.439 --> 00:03:41.439
I also want to talk about what it's like being an indie author and the tools of the trade and the best practices displayed by both of these gentlemen to get them from total obscurity to multi-zillionaire status, super best seller status, and all starting from pretty much nothing.
00:03:43.120 --> 00:04:16.720
And lastly, I want to focus on the joy of just the raw creative process, balls to the wall, or any other part you want to throw up there against it, and doing what you do without listening to other people's opinions, while paradoxically, ironically enough, listening to other people's opinions, namely your audience, every step of the way.
00:04:16.879 --> 00:04:24.160
So let me dissect this one step at a time, and I'll start with Andy Weir.
00:04:25.519 --> 00:04:36.720
His story is also well known, and I'm just going for the bonus brownie points here of the overall narrative to illustrate my points.
00:04:36.959 --> 00:04:45.600
So, in essence, back in 2010, 2011 was when Weir first cracked it.
00:04:46.079 --> 00:04:58.079
He had set up his own little blog or website, and he started posting a serialized version of what became the Martian, chapter by chapter.
00:04:58.560 --> 00:05:22.160
He had created his own mailing list so you could register for Andy Weir's little mailing list, and then you had access to his content, and you could participate in the editing and even writing of the book in the sense of making corrections, giving him recommendations.
00:05:22.480 --> 00:05:26.959
He created a community slowly, organically.
00:05:27.120 --> 00:05:34.639
I think in one interview he mentions that it literally took him like a decade to get to only a few thousand people.
00:05:35.759 --> 00:05:39.040
But that was the seed, that was the kernel.
00:05:40.560 --> 00:05:50.399
That was the little little rift in the the little impurity in the crystal that sent the whole thing ablaze to mix metaphors.
00:05:51.199 --> 00:05:59.680
And starting from that seed, he kept cranking and he built his following.
00:06:00.560 --> 00:06:23.360
Word of mouth, word of blog posts, and he built it, and he built it, and he built it to the point where when he launched on Kindle the earlier days of KDP, 99 cents, he started making some real coin.
00:06:24.720 --> 00:06:32.959
And the thing snowballed, and then he got published by an air quote real or traditional publishing house.
00:06:33.759 --> 00:06:35.279
And then it really took off.
00:06:35.439 --> 00:06:49.600
And one thing led to another, and then Ridley Scott optioned the movie, and then Matt Damon played Mark Watney, I believe the protagonist's name, and it became the super sensation that we all know it to be.
00:06:50.160 --> 00:07:02.800
He had another novel, and then recently Hail Mary, which was also a great book that turned into a Ryan Reynolds-starred movie.
00:07:05.759 --> 00:07:07.360
And there you have it.
00:07:08.639 --> 00:07:10.000
End of story, right?
00:07:10.240 --> 00:07:24.639
No! This is all fascinating because you have an indie writer who didn't just throw some books up on Amazon and maybe attend a few cons and hope for the best.
00:07:25.439 --> 00:07:44.879
Andy was a guy who built it up organically, and here's the thing took in the feedback of his readers and made the book better as he grew his audience to the tipping point of getting published in traditional channels and then busting out.
00:07:45.199 --> 00:07:47.120
Boom! There you go.
00:07:48.160 --> 00:07:57.839
Now, fast forward almost exactly 10 years to 2019, and he got Matt Dinnerman.
00:07:58.319 --> 00:08:00.000
Let me say it, Dinamin.
00:08:00.160 --> 00:08:01.439
Matt Dinneman.
00:08:02.720 --> 00:08:03.839
Seattle guy.
00:08:04.240 --> 00:08:11.360
Apparently, he made his career uh painting portraits of exhibition kitty cats.
00:08:12.240 --> 00:08:23.040
So the Persian cat, Princess Donut, who makes it into the starring role of Dungeon Crawler, uh, is near and dear to his heart.
00:08:23.199 --> 00:08:29.920
He apparently had exposure to many kitties, and the Persian one really must have left a mark.
00:08:30.160 --> 00:08:49.279
Anyway, he starts writing, and apparently he was set up for the big con coming up in March of 2020, and then boom, the pandemic hit, shut it down, he was broke, kids needing to go to college, all that kind of stuff.
00:08:49.600 --> 00:08:51.919
And he set up a Patreon account.
00:08:52.080 --> 00:08:56.559
He already had built up a bit of a following on Royal Road.
00:08:56.720 --> 00:09:00.879
So Royal Road really wasn't happening for Andy Weir.
00:09:01.840 --> 00:09:09.039
Remember, Andy built his following from his own little website and his own email list.
00:09:10.879 --> 00:09:34.080
Dinneman jumped on an established platform for writers that already catered to the lit RPG crowd, literary role-playing game originating in South Asia, going back ten years prior, maybe even more, and it's essentially similar to Twitch.
00:09:34.240 --> 00:09:39.600
You know how Twitch is video gamers who watch other video gamers play video games?
00:09:39.759 --> 00:10:06.960
Well, LitRPG is you, the reader, tracking characters who are ostensibly in a video game, and the narrator of the book is helped along, or sometimes is the system, which is namely the OS running the game, who provides information to the characters in a way a video game interface would.
00:10:07.679 --> 00:10:17.279
Stats, intelligence at level 15, charisma at level 22, armor at level 45.
00:10:17.759 --> 00:10:25.120
You're giving metrics for character attributes that then evolve throughout the game.
00:10:25.360 --> 00:10:31.600
So you get dinged for making a mistake and you get rewarded for accomplishing things.
00:10:31.840 --> 00:10:38.159
And the game dynamics are essentially problem solution reward, problem solution reward.
00:10:39.039 --> 00:11:00.960
It's usually a self-contained world, it's usually dire and dank, but a lit RPG now isn't science fiction, military science fiction, dungeons and dragons style stuff, just about anything encompassing the science fiction and fantasy genres you can find in lit RPG.
00:11:02.720 --> 00:11:06.080
And then you go from usually level to level.
00:11:06.159 --> 00:11:11.120
So every level has a boss or a number of bosses, just like video games.
00:11:11.279 --> 00:11:13.679
And this is all in the prose.
00:11:14.240 --> 00:11:22.799
And reading lit RPG is a trip because even laid out on the page, it's paragraph, paragraph, dialogue, dialogue, paragraph.
00:11:22.960 --> 00:11:31.440
And then the system comes in, usually bolded and bulleted, and it tells you what you need to know as a character.
00:11:31.600 --> 00:11:33.840
And the system is its own character.
00:11:34.000 --> 00:11:41.519
So the more successful and more creative of these lit RPG books, you have the system with its own personality.
00:11:42.080 --> 00:11:47.200
And usually the personality is cynical, it's helpful, hurtful.
00:11:47.600 --> 00:11:51.360
These tropes have been long established prior to Matt.
00:11:51.840 --> 00:11:57.919
But like any great writer, you don't invent the genre that you then call your own.
00:11:58.080 --> 00:12:14.799
You just do a better job than anyone who came before you to infuse it with next level humor, next level creativity.
00:12:15.200 --> 00:12:30.559
So you still dealing with the levels, you go from level one to level two to level three, and you're still battling monsters and killing bosses, and you're still accruing rewards, and you're still getting dinged.
00:12:31.840 --> 00:12:36.559
You're making your way through it, you're problem solving, you're kicking ass.
00:12:37.679 --> 00:12:46.159
But as I mentioned earlier, Matt combines other genres and he does it really, really well.
00:12:47.279 --> 00:13:20.320
So the essential premise, no spoilers here, is that the aliens destroy every building on the surface of the earth, and anyone left outside survives the initial purge, and then these portals open up 150,000 portals across the entire surface of the planet, not evenly distributed, and these portals lead down into the dungeon, and the dungeon has levels one through 18.
00:13:21.600 --> 00:13:36.320
And there's something like 20 million human survivors out of 8 billion people who make it down into the dungeons, and these people get whittled away with time and with every accruing level.
00:13:37.600 --> 00:14:05.600
And then the goal here is for Carl, you never even know his last name, every man Carl and his pet kitty cat, his not his pet kitty cat, his ex-girlfriend's pet Persian pampered kitty cat, Princess Donut, who becomes sentient, by the way, quickly in the book, and this is no spoiler, after eating a special magical pet treat.
00:14:06.480 --> 00:14:23.120
Together they build up their strength, accrue weapons and armor and magic and character attributes, and fight their way through level after level of increasingly arduous problems.
00:14:24.240 --> 00:14:32.960
Now that's classic lit RPG, but then Matt infuses it with the hunger game style entertainment value.
00:14:33.200 --> 00:15:04.000
So all the shenanigans and horrors of all of the crawlers in the dungeon is being broadcast live to literally trillions of sentient beings throughout the galaxy across multiple races, and the evil alien syndicate who wreaked havoc and caused this destruction and created these dungeons, use it to supplement their resource mining activities.
00:15:04.320 --> 00:15:16.639
So they're stealing all of the Earth's resources, killed most of its population, and uses this small percentage of survivors to entertain the galaxy and make more money that way.
00:15:17.440 --> 00:15:42.159
So Rife within Matt's world is these other genres of political commentary, satire about our obsession with media, social media, hero worship, our entertainment complex, influencers, the whole shipbang.
00:15:43.120 --> 00:15:45.759
And as I was mentioning, it's very, very funny.
00:15:45.919 --> 00:15:55.919
So the system here is an exaggerated version of the narrator of Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
00:15:56.000 --> 00:16:03.279
You don't have the lit RPG stats, but you have that same cynical sense of humor, very dry.
00:16:03.759 --> 00:16:06.879
In Adams' case, of course, it's English.
00:16:07.120 --> 00:16:11.919
In Matt Dinner's case, it's Seattle Post Grunge.
00:16:12.480 --> 00:16:22.399
And here's where I get to my next point: alarmism, skepticism of institutions.
00:16:22.799 --> 00:16:29.279
The bad guy in Dungeon Crawler Carl is the syndicate.
00:16:29.519 --> 00:16:41.440
They're the organization who made the dungeons, perpetuated, and grind the holy hell into all the characters on a moment-by-moment basis.
00:16:41.759 --> 00:16:43.039
Pure sadism.
00:16:43.279 --> 00:16:55.600
Sadism in hell, where the humor is a safety valve for the characters, and it's yet another way for the system and its elements to grind it in.
00:16:55.840 --> 00:16:57.519
Salt in the wound.
00:16:58.399 --> 00:17:03.200
Now, this is in stark contrast to the world of Andy Weir.
00:17:03.360 --> 00:17:05.759
Andy Weir was post-pandemic.
00:17:06.079 --> 00:17:12.240
Andy Weir was dovetailing off the Obama years of change and hope.
00:17:12.559 --> 00:17:16.480
Andy Weir's institutions are mostly benign.
00:17:16.559 --> 00:17:22.240
They could be bureaucratic and inefficient and frustrating, but NASA is cool.
00:17:22.559 --> 00:17:26.319
The Chinese Space Agency comes in to help.
00:17:30.960 --> 00:17:50.799
He's just an everyday dude who has some amazing abilities, a jack of all trades, a problem solver who is going to science his way through the existential trials and tribulations of the narrative.
00:17:51.680 --> 00:18:09.839
Watney or Watley of the Martian gets stranded on the surface of Mars, and then he needs to survive by himself, the only human being on the planet with limited resources.
00:18:11.839 --> 00:18:21.119
He applies his skills in botany, engineering, astronomy, chemistry.
00:18:22.160 --> 00:18:23.279
And he makes it.
00:18:23.519 --> 00:18:27.839
And NASA helps, and even the Chinese come to help.
00:18:28.400 --> 00:18:36.480
And Hail Mary is basically a cloned version of all of these anti-weir tropes.
00:18:37.519 --> 00:18:44.160
And you got the new guy who does pretty much the same thing.
00:18:44.319 --> 00:18:47.200
He's not an astronaut, he's a teacher.
00:18:48.240 --> 00:19:01.920
But his Swiss Army knife is equally vast, equally efficient, equally proficient, to the point of busting credulity, frankly.
00:19:03.359 --> 00:19:15.680
If anything negative could be said about Weir's characters, it's not only that they're Pollyanna nice guys, but that they seem to know everything and are able to do everything.
00:19:15.839 --> 00:19:18.079
But that's the definition of a hero.
00:19:18.240 --> 00:19:33.440
And it's not really a fair criticism because Dinneman's Carl and even Princess Donut, for that matter, come across as vulnerable, yet, at least in the first book or two, invincible.
00:19:33.599 --> 00:19:35.359
They keep kicking ass.
00:19:36.160 --> 00:19:46.000
Carl is just a retired National Guard or Navy guy, and Coast Guard guy, I think.
00:19:46.640 --> 00:19:51.519
And pretty quick, he's learning how to build exotic weapons.
00:19:52.000 --> 00:20:11.839
He's learning how to fight like a MMA guy on steroids, and he's not afraid of cockroaches the size of horses and monsters who are basically a black haze with skulls and horns sticking out of their head.
00:20:11.920 --> 00:20:16.799
I mean, it's really a nightmarish, horrible kind of situation.
00:20:17.119 --> 00:20:23.440
I felt like I needed to take a shower after I read a few pages of Dungeon Crawler Carl.
00:20:24.000 --> 00:20:25.440
But it's effective that way.
00:20:25.519 --> 00:20:26.319
It's a great mood.
00:20:26.400 --> 00:20:34.319
But the point I'm getting to here is Andy Weir had respect for institutions, and so do his characters.
00:20:34.480 --> 00:20:37.200
Andy Weir has hope in humanity.
00:20:38.000 --> 00:20:48.720
So uh Watney's astronauts fly right back to go pick them up, risking their own lives.
00:20:49.119 --> 00:21:06.240
Everyone's a good guy in Andy Weir's books, including the institutions who support them, and the only bad guy is the second law of thermodynamics and the harshness of nature in this Darwinian sense.
00:21:08.319 --> 00:21:11.839
It's like just Pollyanna to the core.
00:21:12.799 --> 00:21:23.200
There's humor, there's cynicism, there's irony, but everybody's a good guy in an Andy Weir book, including the alien in Hail Mary.
00:21:24.240 --> 00:21:27.200
What a nice rock Rocky is.
00:21:27.759 --> 00:21:31.440
I loved the first movie and I hated the second one.
00:21:31.920 --> 00:21:39.119
And I know you're gonna hate on me for hating the second one, but I I think it sucked, and you can kiss my ass.
00:21:39.599 --> 00:21:46.559
Never once for a second did I have a feeling that the fate of humanity was at stake in that movie.
00:21:47.440 --> 00:21:50.880
I felt Ryan Reynolds was over the top.
00:21:51.119 --> 00:21:55.759
I didn't give a shit about Rocky, and I can go complaining about that film.
00:21:56.160 --> 00:21:59.599
But the reason I'm ranting about it that way is I think it backs.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:14.799
Fired to the extent that the Martian worked when the Martian was written, and even when the movie, the Ridley Scott movie, came out, we were still hanging on to this belief that institutions were cool and everyone was fine.
00:22:15.119 --> 00:22:15.759
Fine.
00:22:16.640 --> 00:22:20.240
I had an ex girlfriend, she used to say, fine.
00:22:23.200 --> 00:22:25.039
Everyone was fine.
00:22:26.000 --> 00:22:32.079
Matt Dinnerman's nightmare hellhole of a dungeon is the exact opposite of that.
00:22:32.240 --> 00:22:38.720
The institutions have designed this hellish nightmare hellhole to kill you.
00:22:39.519 --> 00:22:41.599
You can't trust the crawlers.
00:22:41.680 --> 00:22:51.200
Even the humans in the story, you can't trust, many of whom are deadlier than the monsters you'll meet.
00:22:51.920 --> 00:22:54.960
The characters are inherently flawed.
00:22:55.359 --> 00:23:03.920
And the hero, alongside Carl, is a talking Persian cat who's truly a cat.
00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:05.519
Now I love cats.
00:23:05.680 --> 00:23:12.799
I love cats for the same reason a lot of people hate cats, which is they're just awful creatures.
00:23:13.119 --> 00:23:14.880
Talk about narcissistic.
00:23:14.960 --> 00:23:17.279
They'll come up and rub your leg and purr.
00:23:17.680 --> 00:23:21.599
And you think, oh, I'm bonding with my kitty, and my kitty is bonding with me.
00:23:21.680 --> 00:23:32.000
And then a second later, they'll do the exact same thing: rubbing and purring to the leg of a chair or a table.
00:23:32.240 --> 00:23:37.440
They'll curl up in your lap and sigh and sleep.
00:23:37.920 --> 00:23:42.880
And they'll do exactly the same thing in a box of rocks.
00:23:43.200 --> 00:23:45.200
Cats are mean bitches.
00:23:46.000 --> 00:23:47.680
And like I said, I love cats.
00:23:47.839 --> 00:23:49.279
Cats are cool.
00:23:50.240 --> 00:23:54.319
But Princess Donut, she's a mean bitch.
00:23:54.480 --> 00:24:08.319
So while she's all prissy and obsessed with her stats and can't wait to be on TV again, even if she's the laughing stock or the victim or the crawler.
00:24:09.359 --> 00:24:23.119
And just as she's all prissy about her tiara and licking herself constantly to make sure that she's looking good in the dungeon, she's also a vicious killer.
00:24:24.079 --> 00:24:25.920
And that fits perfectly.
00:24:26.240 --> 00:24:28.160
That's a cat, folks.
00:24:28.480 --> 00:24:32.240
And Carl is a similar bundle of contradiction.
00:24:32.400 --> 00:24:39.359
But Dinnerman does a great job with Carl in that he's pledged to survive.
00:24:39.519 --> 00:24:43.839
He has this recurring mantra that he's not gonna let them get to him.
00:24:44.079 --> 00:24:50.720
He's fighting the system, he's fighting the syndicate, he's out there to survive.
00:24:51.039 --> 00:24:53.279
It's a fuck you to their fuck you.
00:24:53.359 --> 00:24:55.119
And he means it and he's gonna do it.
00:24:55.200 --> 00:24:57.839
He's not gonna let them get to him.
00:24:58.640 --> 00:25:20.720
But he's also got a huge heart, and he's conflicted constantly between the need to help his fellow humans, the other crawlers, and the reality that helping them is often a zero-sum game, mutually exclusive to his survival and that of Princess Donut.
00:25:21.599 --> 00:25:37.039
So, what I'm getting at here is the illustration that both Andy Weir and Matt Dinnerman embody the times that they've emerged from.
00:25:38.160 --> 00:25:50.480
Rick Rubin talks about art being this emergent phenomena from the culture, the history, the moment that engenders them.
00:25:51.279 --> 00:25:55.839
Every generation has its own creative talent.
00:25:56.000 --> 00:26:00.079
Every generation produces amazing people.
00:26:00.559 --> 00:26:07.759
Lauren Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live, was asked how he went about recruiting for the TV show.
00:26:07.839 --> 00:26:12.960
And if it's hard to find talent, he said he's got the opposite problem.
00:26:13.119 --> 00:26:20.319
He would travel across the country and see stand-up comics and comedy troops and improv shows.
00:26:21.119 --> 00:26:26.640
And he was always blown away by the sheer volume of gifted people.
00:26:27.200 --> 00:26:44.240
He saw amazing people all the time across every ethnic, gender, socioeconomic class, all types of Americans made him laugh his ass off, and he thought that they were brilliant.
00:26:44.640 --> 00:26:47.759
But his challenge was pulling it all together.
00:26:47.920 --> 00:26:55.279
He had to get that person into a group, and the group had to go live on TV every Saturday night live.
00:26:56.799 --> 00:27:01.599
And that mix, that magic mix, is what was so tough.
00:27:01.920 --> 00:27:11.359
And the additional dimension that I don't believe he explicitly mentioned was that the times around comedy changes around the comedy.
00:27:11.440 --> 00:27:30.559
And the comedy that flares in the moment is a kind of comedy where the audience intuitively connects with it on a gut level that's reflective of the trials, tribulations attitude that they deal with in their everyday lives.
00:27:31.680 --> 00:27:37.920
So one generation's comic will not work in another generation.
00:27:38.079 --> 00:28:04.079
And when we retroactively look back at the history of comedy, the history of art for that matter, then we see that the artists and the art of other eras emerged organically from their surroundings and become atrophied, if you will, no longer resonate like they did.
00:28:04.160 --> 00:28:07.039
Now, don't get me wrong, there's classic comedy.
00:28:07.119 --> 00:28:14.960
If you look back at a Richard Pryor skit from forty, fifty years ago, you laugh your ass off.
00:28:17.599 --> 00:28:26.160
But Eddie Murphy is not Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle is not Eddie Murphy.
00:28:26.880 --> 00:28:43.680
And if you look at their rise and their success through this lens of the society that, in a sense, created them, then I think this thesis, which isn't rocket science or too much of a surprise, holds true.
00:28:44.960 --> 00:28:59.839
What I'm pointing out here, though, that it's not limited to comedy, it's expansive across art and specifically back into indie creative writing and science fiction and fantasy in particular.
00:29:01.839 --> 00:29:48.960
Now, what all this means, at least to me, as a sci-fi podcaster, ranter, bloviator, essay writer, and novelist, is the reality that my success and the success of all those around me on my podcasts, those I see on Substack, in chat rooms, wherever, is contingent not only on their innate ability, not only on their own willingness to think outside the box and do something innovative, to jump genres, to shake it up.
00:29:49.759 --> 00:29:51.759
That's almost a prerequisite.
00:29:51.839 --> 00:29:55.039
That's the knock-knock at the door of making it.
00:29:55.119 --> 00:29:57.119
And I've ranted about this before.
00:29:57.279 --> 00:30:12.960
Sure, you can get a developmental editor, you could go through 20 iterations and spend 10 years to write your novel, or conversely, you can crank them out in an afternoon at this point with AI.
00:30:15.200 --> 00:30:18.559
But you need to think out of the box.
00:30:18.799 --> 00:30:29.680
Simply doing what's been done and doing it a little bit better or getting it right is not gonna differentiate you.
00:30:30.319 --> 00:30:44.079
You need to mix it up genre to genre, infuse it with currents and themes and perspectives and challenges of our time.
00:30:45.440 --> 00:30:57.839
Make it real, make it resonant, and the rest is really up to the gods, as they used to say.
00:30:58.720 --> 00:31:16.880
You're either on the pulse of your generation or you're not, and you could argue that a great artist or a talented creator would naturally be on the pulse.
00:31:17.200 --> 00:31:25.519
But here's the thing: you could be behind it, and you can even be ahead of it.
00:31:27.039 --> 00:31:36.240
You could be a Van Gogh where you're leagues beyond, and people don't even get you until you drop dead.
00:31:36.720 --> 00:31:40.079
Herman Melville actually falls into this category.
00:31:40.319 --> 00:31:59.519
Moby Dick! It's a joke, it's a punchline, it's a Led Zeppelin song, it's arguably the great American novel, but when Melville died, pretty much at the turn of the 20th century, he was forgotten.
00:31:59.839 --> 00:32:02.079
Moby Dick was a dud.
00:32:02.960 --> 00:32:13.599
And Melville had to live his later years as a customs official, I think, on the dock, just to pay the rent.
00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:25.920
It wasn't until, I believe, just before World War I, or maybe even a little after, that some academic found Moby Dick.
00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:36.400
And Melville was not only resurrected, but tossed into the pantheon of American greatness.
00:32:37.279 --> 00:32:39.920
So you could be ahead of the curve, folks.
00:32:40.160 --> 00:32:46.559
You could be behind it, and in that sense, you really got no choice.
00:32:47.440 --> 00:33:13.039
But the one thing you gotta do is to stay true to yourself, stay creative, think out of the box, and borrow, steal everything you can to make your content and your storytelling resonate.
00:33:14.720 --> 00:33:28.720
And the biggest learning experience from this Andy Weir, Matt Dinneman kind of parallel story is their best practice of integrating the audience into their work.
00:33:28.799 --> 00:33:35.680
Now, this begs the question of people giving a shit, but if people don't give a shit, then what's really the point?
00:33:37.759 --> 00:33:41.839
And all of this suggests that you gotta throw it out there.
00:33:42.400 --> 00:33:48.160
All of this suggests that you share, that you listen.
00:33:49.519 --> 00:33:58.640
Rather than, or in addition to hiring a developmental editor, see what people think of your stuff.
00:33:58.960 --> 00:34:01.359
Take in their feedback.
00:34:01.759 --> 00:34:20.239
You don't have to listen to everybody, and if you're smart, you'll listen to next to nobody, but every once in a while there's a good idea, especially if they are paying you big bucks on Patreon, which happened to Matt.
00:34:20.400 --> 00:34:33.760
Apparently, there's a shift in the narrative to Cuba or the facsimile of a Cuban environment, and I think that's a direct consequence of one of Matt's benefactors being Cuban.
00:34:34.480 --> 00:34:48.800
Then there's a host of opportunities for different loot boxes containing certain prizes and gifts that are reflective of what some of his patrons asked him to put in there with a little payola.
00:34:49.199 --> 00:34:52.400
And I think all of this is spectacular.
00:34:52.639 --> 00:35:04.960
And what I love most about this whole model is that it's self-reflective, it's meta, it's recursive back into the themes of the Dungeon Crawler books themselves.
00:35:05.519 --> 00:35:18.000
Carl and Princess Donut are on TV, and the feedback of their viewers resonates into the action that's taking place.
00:35:18.559 --> 00:35:39.679
Just as Matt wrote these books with the feedback of his audience, and I have to mention Jeff Hayes, who did the audiobook version, which is yet another level of multi-channel engagement and expression, going supermodal for the series.
00:35:39.920 --> 00:35:45.039
Apparently, Matt and Jeff knew each other even before the series was written.
00:35:45.519 --> 00:35:52.400
And Matt and Jeff are tight to the point where Jeff gets it, likes it.
00:35:52.719 --> 00:35:56.000
And Jeff does all the characters in the book.
00:35:56.320 --> 00:36:03.280
And I haven't listened to the full audiobook, but I've heard snippets, especially on YouTube, and I laugh my ass off.
00:36:03.440 --> 00:36:12.000
And apparently, Jeff is gonna be the voice of Princess Donut in the upcoming NBC Universal miniseries.
00:36:12.079 --> 00:36:16.159
I'm not quite sure if it's gonna be animated or live action with CGI.
00:36:16.719 --> 00:36:25.760
I'm afraid to see it because if I had to take a bath after reading a few pages of the book, I can't imagine what's gonna be on screen.
00:36:26.000 --> 00:36:31.119
But again, it's reflective of our times, folks, which is chaotic, disruptive.
00:36:31.280 --> 00:36:33.920
We feel like we're in hell a lot of the time.
00:36:34.639 --> 00:36:40.639
And horror, fantasy, science fiction at their best act as a catharsis.
00:36:41.599 --> 00:36:44.159
Why do people like scary movies?
00:36:44.400 --> 00:36:55.440
Because it's happening to everyone on the screen and not you, and you could project your fear back onto the screen as kind of a release.
00:36:56.079 --> 00:37:31.039
And when you leave the theater with the lights coming up, well, my life might be difficult and challenging, and I'm scared of this and I'm scared of that, but it's it's not anywhere near as bad as the shit that I just experienced in the theater in the book, and I think that's a role of art, and that's why Dinneman's book is so popular, in addition to all these other reasons, is that it's channeling the anxiety of our time, analogously to how we're channeling the hopefulness of that time.
00:37:31.599 --> 00:37:33.920
I love this kind of stuff.
00:37:34.239 --> 00:37:48.480
It's a lesson and best practice to creators now, and it's also a wonderful expression of the role of art and the artist's role within it.
00:37:49.519 --> 00:37:56.000
So I had to bloviate about what everyone is bloviating about, give it my own take.
00:37:56.239 --> 00:37:58.960
Am I gonna finish all eight books?
00:38:00.079 --> 00:38:01.039
I don't know.
00:38:01.199 --> 00:38:06.320
I'm not sure if Lit RPG is my cup of tea, to be honest.
00:38:07.039 --> 00:38:13.440
On the negative side of my effervescent critique of Mr.
00:38:13.599 --> 00:38:20.480
Dinnerman, and this is no points against him, but I do find it repetitive.
00:38:20.719 --> 00:38:29.360
As I mentioned, I I need to shower or take a bath after reading a few pages, and I'm intrigued.
00:38:29.440 --> 00:38:43.519
I want to know what happens next, but I'm also offset by being off put by the repetition, by the gore, and frankly, by the sadism of it.
00:38:44.320 --> 00:38:56.880
Maybe it's a little much, maybe it's a little bit too world-buildy contained for my taste, but I do acknowledge its brilliance for all the reasons that I'm highlighting here.
00:38:57.840 --> 00:39:03.039
And there's also this rising tide raising all boats.
00:39:03.199 --> 00:39:13.920
When you have a hit in any in any modality, in any medium, it gets attention on the on the whole sport.
00:39:14.159 --> 00:39:18.320
It's like when World Cup soccer swung through the States.
00:39:18.480 --> 00:39:34.079
I I had to laugh my ass off at all these people getting into the sports outfits and rage cheering for their team when for most of the year most Americans don't know shit, don't give a shit about soccer.
00:39:34.400 --> 00:39:42.719
It's such a a lemmings over the cliff kind of phenomenon.
00:39:42.800 --> 00:39:47.920
And I just naturally am repulsed by that.
00:39:48.239 --> 00:40:22.719
But at the same time, it was wonderful to see, which is a sport like soccer, which is ubiquitous everywhere except the states, getting its due, and then people getting together and being excited, spending billions of dollars revitalizing local and national economies, and basically taking all of our angst and anxiety away from our political arguments and polarized shit show into a shared event where politics, race, none of that matters.
00:40:22.880 --> 00:40:26.480
Your pocketbook matters because the tickets were like what 10 grand.
00:40:28.079 --> 00:40:37.840
But the whole point was for everyone to enjoy themselves, have a good time, and for the sport and all sports to be infused with more enthusiasm.
00:40:38.559 --> 00:40:47.119
And the same goes for Dungeon Crawler, Carl, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror.
00:40:47.679 --> 00:40:53.039
More people are reading that book than they've read books for who knows how long.
00:40:57.760 --> 00:41:03.920
And I had another lit RPG guest, Matthew Kent, who actually turned me on to the genre.
00:41:04.639 --> 00:41:22.960
And Mallory has a great premise, and he's writing in the young adult target audience, too, which is young people, especially young boys, don't really read because they're not given material that would excite them.
00:41:23.360 --> 00:41:35.119
That we can use the excuse of attention deficit disorder and video games and digital technology to cite as reasons that boys don't read.
00:41:35.199 --> 00:41:42.159
And because they don't read, they're not really getting educated, because reading is really, frankly, the foundation of any kind of education.
00:41:42.239 --> 00:41:46.079
So if they don't read, they're not getting educated full stop.
00:41:46.719 --> 00:41:58.559
And Mallory's point was it behooves us as writers and publishers to create content for young people, especially young boys, to get excited about reading again.
00:41:58.639 --> 00:42:02.880
And that's what he does, and he does it really successfully, and it's a noble mission.
00:42:03.760 --> 00:42:11.360
Him and Recontour Press have a dedicated division for this very purpose.
00:42:11.920 --> 00:42:20.480
I don't know if they got the mission statement on a plaque, but they're going for it, and I think that that's awesome.
00:42:20.719 --> 00:42:31.519
And in that spirit, Dinneman's books, say what you will about them, have triggered and re triggered excitement in reading.
00:42:31.920 --> 00:42:37.840
And that triggers and engenders success in learning.
00:42:38.960 --> 00:42:43.280
The two are connected together, the two are the same damn thing.
00:42:43.360 --> 00:43:06.800
So whether you're reading about world history or quantum mechanics, or you're reading about Carl and Princess Donut vanquishing goblins and trolls and gigantic insects and all sorts of shockingly despicable monsters in the dungeon created by the syndicate.
00:43:07.039 --> 00:43:11.920
You're reading, you're learning, and they're problem-solving elements.
00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:16.480
You need to pay attention reading the book because you're rewarded.
00:43:17.280 --> 00:43:32.400
And it's fun to anticipate how puzzles are solved as a reward for your own attention, let alone that of the characters who take advantage and are able to survive and even flourish.
00:43:33.280 --> 00:43:38.800
So, for all these reasons, what a terrific sensation.
00:43:39.519 --> 00:43:59.760
Educating indie authors about being social and sharing content and embracing different genres, thinking and creating out of the box, appeasing themselves, but also learning how to appease audiences, listening to audiences, integrating feedback from audiences.
00:44:00.639 --> 00:44:25.199
Building content organically, reflecting the sign of our times, so that we become heralds, even harbingers, of what's happening now and what could and should happen, channeling the thoughts and feelings of the Zeitgeist so that we all feel better because we are creating shared experiences.
00:44:25.440 --> 00:44:37.360
And science fiction, fantasy, horror are particularly well designed to be projections of all these things for humans because they leave it wide open.
00:44:37.519 --> 00:44:55.519
You're not limited by physics, you're not limited by any facts, and the only limitation is one's own imagination and courage and willingness and eager to share.
00:44:56.239 --> 00:44:59.360
And that's why I hit record on the mic.
00:44:59.599 --> 00:45:09.599
That's what thrills me about this series, and I hope it's the beginning and not the end of yet another generation of writers.
00:45:09.760 --> 00:45:38.480
And I think that my hope will be proven to become manifest because going back to the Rick Rubin observation that art is really an eruption and an emergent phenomena of the times, we'll have our next Andy Weir or Matt Dinneman when the time is right and the audience is ripe.
00:45:38.880 --> 00:45:46.159
Thanks for listening to this solo rant on the science fiction and fantasy factory podcast.
00:45:46.880 --> 00:45:56.800
I've got more guests lined up, and I always, in the spirit of this rant, welcome your feedback.
00:45:57.039 --> 00:45:59.199
Like, comment, share.
00:45:59.440 --> 00:46:03.360
I am the Mookie Multiverse on Substack.
00:46:03.920 --> 00:46:06.559
I am Mookie Spitz on Patreon.
00:46:06.719 --> 00:46:08.480
Nudge Nudge Wink Wink.
00:46:08.639 --> 00:46:11.440
You don't need to give me any money, you could just sign up.
00:46:11.519 --> 00:46:13.679
That goes a long way, too.
00:46:14.159 --> 00:46:16.800
I've got some fun stuff in the pipeline.
00:46:16.960 --> 00:46:23.920
I've got my own science fiction spin-off prequel, Vinx the Mercenary Minx.
00:46:24.079 --> 00:46:27.840
I read a couple chapters here on the pod recently.
00:46:28.239 --> 00:46:35.280
I've got the sequel to my novel, Johnny Fizzuli and the Transfinite Reality Engine, which I'm excited about.
00:46:36.239 --> 00:46:43.760
I think I'm about halfway through, but everything else just gets in the way, including this podcast, but it's so much fun.
00:46:43.920 --> 00:46:45.119
How could I not?
00:46:45.599 --> 00:46:50.719
And I'm working on a tech implementation of AI.
00:46:50.880 --> 00:47:00.559
It's not AI creating the damn creative, but I'm using AI to create an interactive storytelling experience.
00:47:00.800 --> 00:47:02.159
So more on that.
00:47:03.440 --> 00:47:11.519
And I'm actually adapting the creative process of that storytelling experience to write a short story on that experience.
00:47:12.800 --> 00:47:19.840
It's called the bouncy yo-yo playtest catastrophe.
00:47:21.599 --> 00:47:23.920
I am having so much fun.
00:47:24.639 --> 00:47:31.440
And I hope when you listen, when you read, when you watch, you are too.
00:47:32.880 --> 00:47:34.239
Back at you soon.
00:47:34.400 --> 00:47:35.599
And thank you.
00:47:36.239 --> 00:47:38.800
Like Bartles, Bartles and James.
00:47:39.039 --> 00:47:45.760
I don't know if you're old enough to remember this, but they were a wine cooler company.
00:47:46.400 --> 00:47:54.400
Back in the 90s, we had those fruity drinks that became popular and then they blew up, then they went away.
00:47:54.719 --> 00:47:58.480
And we had wine coolers that were popular for a while.
00:47:58.639 --> 00:48:02.159
They blew up, then they went away, like Krispy Kreme donuts.
00:48:02.480 --> 00:48:05.519
Those used to be hot stock picks, believe it or not.
00:48:05.760 --> 00:48:12.079
You had Bartles and James, these two old guys, one tall and thin, the other short and fat, of course.
00:48:12.800 --> 00:48:22.079
And they would uh be in certain situations talking about their Bartles and James one coolers, and then they would say at the end, thank you for your support.
