← Book Riot - The Podcast
Book Riot - The Podcast
New York Report, New Harper Lee Collection Announced, Golden Ticket Strategies, and more
01:13:10
Jeff fills Rebecca on his recent trip to New York for publishing meetings before they talk about the newly announced Harper Lee collection and other items of note.
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- [00:03]
Jeff O'Neill
You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Ba da ba ba ba.
- [00:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
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- [00:46]
Jeff O'Neill
This is the Book Riot podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill.
- [00:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.
- [00:50]
Jeff O'Neill
And we are both a little out of sorts today. I was in New York. Rebecca was. I think you were skinning reindeer for a couple of weeks.
- [00:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
I would never skin a reindeer.
- [01:00]
Jeff O'Neill
You were driving them, breeding them proximal to reindeer.
- [01:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
I was proximal to reindeer. Sadly, they did not let me like ride a reindeer. I didn't even get to hug a reindeer. But I did get close. I got to feed a reindeer a bunch of lichen out of a giant bag of like lichen and moss. And I just about left.
- [01:18]
Jeff O'Neill
I was going to say you're. You. Did you bring a whole bunch of moss home?
- [01:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
I did not bring a bunch of moss home. The people of northern Finland not super into like tourist defying all of that.
- [01:30]
Jeff O'Neill
Okay.
- [01:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
There was, there was not a moss related gift shop.
- [01:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
- [01:34]
Rebecca Schinsky
I, I come bearing no pelts or souls for your children next week.
- [01:38]
Jeff O'Neill
No. At least I didn't promise them anything. And I was just back from New York. We're recording on a Friday, which is a little bit different. We also have a big week next week. So we're. We're getting a little loosey goosey. I know. Actually, people kind of, kind of like it when we're.
- [01:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And let's remind the people why we have a busy week next week. It's because we are doing a live event at Powell's in Portland about the 20 most recommendable books of the 21st century. So if you're in or near Portland, you should come hang out with us on Thursday night, the 13th at 7pm There is a ticket link in the show notes here. Your $15 ticket also doubles as a credit towards purchases of Powell's. And let's be real, people, we know you're going to make some Purchases because we're going to sell the hell out of these books.
- [02:21]
Jeff O'Neill
That's right. And we're looking forward to it. Friends, family, come say hi to us. We got some nice notes from people that are going to show up there. You know, we don't really know what the turnout is going to be, but our goal is to be a great time. So if you know someone that lives in the area, even if they don't listen to the show, you know, tell them it's going to be fun, we're going to have a good time.
- [02:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, you won't need to know us or know the show to enjoy it. And that's kind of the idea is for us to be able to bring in book riot people, but also hopefully meet a bunch of reg like Powell's regulars and expand both of our communities that way.
- [02:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Frankly, the first hour of Knowing Me might be the most enjoyable part. It's all downhill after that. Sort of asymptotically degrades into mere tolerance.
- [03:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
I disagree because I, I, I'm not fishing, I'm.
- [03:05]
Jeff O'Neill
Let me be self deprecating here for a second.
- [03:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Several hundred hours in and then you get the really good Jeff stories.
- [03:11]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I think that's what Stockholm syndrome is. Maybe what we are describing here, like.
- [03:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
Is there a better example of Stockholm Syndrome than two people who have podcasted together for 12 years?
- [03:21]
Jeff O'Neill
You're either gonna be like blindingly loyal or want to murder each other. And luckily, you know, we got the, we got the heads on that coin.
- [03:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, we did. We got the good end of that bargain.
- [03:30]
Jeff O'Neill
Speaking of, if you want to hear more from us, we had the great pleasure of being guests on books of on the podcast, Books with Betsy. Betsy listens to the show and invite us to come on. And we went and the episode title is Insatiable Curiosity, which I think is terrific. And she asked about our reading lives. I think if you listen to the show there may it's going to sound like us, but maybe some stuff you haven't heard before. But go check out Betsy's show. I'll put a link in the show. It's over there. But Books with Betsy.
- [03:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
We had a great time B E.
- [03:57]
Jeff O'Neill
T S Y for googling it or searching for it in your podcast player of choice. Thanks.
- [04:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
We continue to be grateful and excited that folks listening to the show who host their own podcasts or have their own literary events took us seriously when we said we want to come talk to you so we'd love to and.
- [04:14]
Jeff O'Neill
I'd like to say that we are very low maintenance guests. We've been doing these for a long time. Don't be nervous. We'll make your we'll make your 45 minutes of podcasting that week as easy as you get there. Let's see, what are we going to do today? So TBR I want to mention again myTBR co, our in house recommendation service. I was in New York doing some business meetings this week and I want to talk more about some trends and stuff I heard here on the show in a minute, but I was telling people about TBR and and you know, it's something that people are really interested on the business side because it is human recommendations. Responding to reader needs Matchmaking between books and finding right authors is like the single task of traditional publishing, to be honest with you. We do this in a non scalable way really to sort of BRH levels, but we do do it in a a smaller way and have a really good chance with it. Go check out mytbr.co for that. Actually I'm gonna use my front list foyer to plug some first edition stuff, so I'm gonna hold off on there. From there we're gonna go to a first sponsor break.
- [05:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
This episode is sponsored by Advent by Seth Ring. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt of the audiobook provided by our sponsors at Blackstone Publishing. Wanting to follow in his heroic family's footsteps, Mark Fields is eager to join the military and defend the massive fortress city he calls home. Then his older brother returns from deployment a burned out wreck. As Mark quickly rises to the top of his unit and loves his new life, he doesn't notice the dangerous friends his brother is making until it's too late. From best selling lit RPG author Seth Ring, creator of the Titan and battlemage Farmer series, Advent is the first in an epic new series of alien Contact. Fast paced military action and thrilling adventure that will leave readers hungry for more. Again, stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from Advent by Seth Ring provided by Blackstone Publishing.
- [06:11]
Jeff O'Neill
Today at T Mobile I'm joined by a special co anchor. What up everybody? It's your boy Big Snookdeal Double G Snoop where can people go to find great deals? Head to T mobile.com and get four iPhone 16s with Apple Intelligence on us plus four lines for 25 bucks.
- [06:26]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's quite a deal Snoop. And when you switch to T Mobile.
- [06:29]
Jeff O'Neill
You can save versus the other big guys. Comparable plans plus streaming. Spang we up out of here.
- [06:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
See how you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys@t mobile.com switch Apple Intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text.
- [06:47]
Jeff O'Neill
It to Beth and Steve.
- [06:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can. 1, 2, 3 will that be cash or credit? Credit. 4.
- [06:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you get yours@samsung.com compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy. Rebecca, you and I have not talked about my New York trip at all. So I'm trying I'm going to have there's some stuff I can tell you off air, but I will try to give overview here. I like to ask about trends, what people are seeing, what people are interested in. I made a couple of notes. One is there are a couple imprints we met with that were starting to get on the Romantasy train two years ago, 18 months ago, and I've had some stuff come out and so I was asking how are these things going now? I didn't get a P and L or sales figures for every single thing they did, but by and large they have gone well. By and large they have not been like you know what, we can't be a follow on or the old like we can't be a me too thing is like kind of that phrase we can't use anymore because that gets confused with something else. But it can't be a clone. These aren't clones necessarily, but there is more appetite. There continues to be appetite for more books even as there's more and more and more happening out there within the Romantasy genre itself. The sub genre of dark romance seems to be where it's at right now. Enemies to lovers, I guess is what you would call it in a more conventional trope way. But dark romance with some academia things going on in it is really where it's going and then seeing some movement sort of down the age ladder into middle grade. Of course it can't be it's not going to be as spicy or anything like that, but similar vibes trying out in other places. Speaking of middle grade, I talked with Brenna from Circana about some reading level things and chapter book sales problems and a lot of the people we know that do publish middle grade and chapter books are investing in graphic novels for those age groups because they find that those are selling better. People are more willing to pick them up as reading levels, took a bit of a body blow over Covid and are trying to recover a lot of anecdotal talk about experiences with that. I think that makes sense, honestly. I think hopefully there's gonna be a place for both and robust markets for both text and prose forward and graphic novel forward. But it seems like there is a bit of a. Our middle grade books aren't selling that well in prose. Let's do more graphic novels. Like new imprints and new efforts and things coming out there. I heard about.
- [09:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think that's really smart, especially given the study that we covered a few weeks ago that shows that reading graphic novels and developing a love for reading does translate into being a reader of prose fiction later on in a child's reading life. So that's a great way to meet kids where they are, but continue to cultivate future readers and ultimately future customers.
- [09:43]
Jeff O'Neill
I'm pretty sure that study was cited directly by someone who wasn't me in a meeting, which is always thrilling to me when Nerds. Yeah, let's go nerds. Let's see what else. We always ask about backlist marketing. And this is kind of inside baseball, but welcome to the BR pod out there, listeners about, you know, about 80% of the dollars and I would guess maybe even more of the reading time in the form of used books and libraries and, you know, passing stuff around by hand. Is backlist. Backlist being. I got a couple different definitions what backlist is, but it's basically something that's been out for a while. One publisher says anything that's over two years old from hardcover date, which for something like, it's not hard and fast because Lessons in chemistry comes on April 1st, and it's like two and a half years since it was, you know.
- [10:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
The Da Vinci Code, famously in hardcover for six years. Years, yeah.
- [10:31]
Jeff O'Neill
And some other things like that. I think Demon Copperhead maybe just came out in paperback and things that sell very well. But like, you hear what I'm saying, stuff that's had its moment in the. It's had its first blush of publishing youth and now is maturing into a book kind of people don't care about. But these publishers have giant cat. They have giant catalogs, and there's interesting stuff there. And if you could become a perennial seller and find a reason to advertise those things and let people know they exist, then. Then that's good, right? You don't have to spend all your time on time, budget, energy and resources on front list. But how do you do it? When you have basically all the books ever made to try to pick from, seems like there's real more interest in trying to figure that out at some kind of scale. I know they do it on some of the programmatic places like the Amazons of the world may make sense, of course, but like if you are, I'm just going to pick one of the publishers we talked with that. No, I'll just say they say we have 20,000 titles in our backlist. How are you going to pick what to do? Well, if there's anniversary and adaptation, that's like a little too easy. Right? But what about just something that's really cool that we think if we could get it back in the zeitgeist, especially with, and I think this is key, especially with Instagram Reels and TikTok in which a backlist title can do extremely well. I heard a couple anecdotes about those. I mean, the best example of this, of course, is Acotar. Acotar. But also in a little bit closer to my space. And I'm going to preview a frontless foyer. How do you lose the time war? We've seen a couple other stories of books that have been out for a while that got picked up and they're like, okay, can we. You got to be in it to win it, to get picked up like that and have a sort of imprint changing experience. But you got to figure out what you're going to put behind it. So a lot more talk about that.
- [12:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right now as you're talking about that right now. I'm realizing I'm kind of surprised that none of the big celebrity book clubs or, or even a new entrant into celebrity book clubs has started off on the paperback foot. Like historically most, you know, Dua Lipa just picked.
- [12:30]
Jeff O'Neill
They're there like this week, right?
- [12:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Like celebrity book clubs tend to be in, you know, the TV morning show book clubs. Those tend to be brand new releases, hardcover. It's great marketing. The books are fresh. Like, I understand all of those reasons, but the typical book club reader is reading paperback books. And that's one of the perpetual challenges for publishers is we have these paperbacks, we want to market them, but they're also competing with our front list that's getting most of our dollars. What to do. And it seems like that's. That would be an interesting space for a big public book club to occupy. Backlist.
- [13:04]
Jeff O'Neill
What a flex would be for Reese to pick like an Edna Ferber book. How amazing, how amazing would that be at that level let's see other things out there. Audio continues to be a point of emphasis. I'm starting, you know, again, more back of the house stuff that people may or may not find interesting. There's multiple ways that on the marketing side, these imprints and houses think about audiobooks. Some of them have separate audiobook marketing teams and strategies, some of them don't. I'm of the opinion, and I say this to people's faces, that having some expertise in where people are getting audiobooks is. You could be part of the marketing strategy, but I don't know that I'd be super like, I only want to do audiobooks and say podcasts or something like that, or I don't want to do other things. I think you want to let people know about books the best way they are. I happen to think podcast advertising, and I say this in these meetings, is the best way to let someone know about a book. Because you get 30 to 60 seconds or a pre roll, like sometimes you hear on this show and it's just a lot different. But I think we're moving towards a world across digital and print and audio, where the front list marketing at least, and there's some digital only if you're doing Kindle and some stuff where you do within those platforms. But in terms of front list, like launching a book, it's a lot more. Let's just put it in places we like and let the format chips fall where they may. So that's interesting. But I also know some people who do audiobooks, imprint stuff or audiobook, specialize in audiobook and they know a lot more about like how to work with Audible or doing Spotify Premium. I keep telling people, if your book is available on Spotify Premium, say it in the ad, say it in the post roll, say it in the mid roll. Let people know we got credits to burn out here. Just sitting around. Let us use them. I heard a term for something that you write a newsletter called Better Living through Books. I heard someone refer to that, that almost exact flotilla of books as practical nonfiction. I never heard that phrase before, but.
- [15:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
I have not heard that.
- [15:05]
Jeff O'Neill
I kind of like that. I kind of like that.
- [15:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's more expansive than just like self help. It gets closer to what we're actually talking about when we talk about like. And it's. It's better than lifestyle nonfiction, I think practical nonfiction. I'm gonna put that in my pocket.
- [15:20]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I. The person that was describing said that is. I think that's a checker on a checker for what you're doing with better looking books and how you imagine it over there? Let's see. Oh, mood. Oh. I asked about tariffs because as people may or may not know a lot of paper. This is weird. Paper can come from Canada and they get printed in China or printed elsewhere. And I asked especially some of the kids books and graphic novel folks and someone who worked for a long time over at Yen Press, which is a lot of manga illustrated, is what I'm getting at. Like full color illustrated, a little more complicated publishing situation. If they're worried, what are they doing about tariffs in the tone? It's not even a general tone. Like I had a version of this conversation with three or four people. It's like there's not even enough confidence in whatever to do anything because the dude could wake up on the other side of the bed tomorrow in the strategy chain. So it's like, I mean, until you, until you actually hit a rock, you are as likely to swerve into a problem as away from one right now.
- [16:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. The threat of them seems to be more useful than the actual application of them. When he does apply them, it lasts for 24 hours and then it's a back off.
- [16:24]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. The dawn tariff is a real thing that's happening, right?
- [16:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
That is a. It is a very. Publishers Weekly has some coverage this week if you want a little more detail about how the book industry is thinking about this. The only like live example that I've heard of prices increasing related to book stuff for tariffs is actually in sidelines. Like a lot of the sidelines are also manufactured in China. And some folks that I know who buy sidelines for independent bookstores said that like the. They started getting notifications about increased prices as soon as the president started saying he was going to do this, like weeks before they ever went into effect or were potentially going into effect. That some of those producers were already ready for it.
- [17:05]
Jeff O'Neill
And the dust has largely settled from the post Covid. Right. Sizing euphemism, though I think it's actually kind of true in some degree of like hiring up, hiring up. And then there was some consolidation and got out of our skis and sales came down off the peaks. We had that microcosm of that experience here. To be, to be perfectly honest with you, the mood was good. I would say the mood was good. Glad to hear that whole. Yeah, so I think that kind of covers the stuff that's publicly interesting.
- [17:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
Sounds like a good week.
- [17:40]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh, I've got one. I don't think they'd mind us saying this One of the things that blew me away or I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm surprised about how surprised I was or not. So there's this bit in September. Is it September? I don't know. In the fall, let's put it that way. There is a coming out from little brown young readers. A Twilight box set for I think whatever anniversary we're on now, 2020. It's all you can get. There's like the big one is spreads out the out the wazoo. Really beautiful cover. You get the whole thing. It's like 160 bucks. And they said they had 16,000 pre orders for that already. Like right now, like eight months ahead of time or six months ahead of time which is like a couple million bucks a pre order sitting there ready for nostalgia, baby. Yeah. And like you know, we're to the point where the people who love that when they were 14 are now they got some folding money, Rebecca, mid-30s.
- [18:37]
Rebecca Schinsky
You got some disposable income. It's like that's right in the sweet spot. And those readers have maybe been engaging with romantasy and buying these special editions of other books and they want their fancy Twilights to go with it. We're going to do some 20 years of twilight coverage here in the fall. Vanessa Diaz is going to join me. I think we're going to reread the first book. It will have been 20 years since I did that. So I'm looking forward to the. Looking forward to talking about it with Vanessa.
- [19:05]
Jeff O'Neill
Here's another one you'll find interesting. Ali Hazelwood has another book coming out this summer. It's going to be hardcover for the first time.
- [19:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay. Romance is getting fancier.
- [19:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Get those dollars. Why? Why charge 17.99? We can charge 25.99. I'll be so curious to see what it does to sales.
- [19:26]
Rebecca Schinsky
So curious because I believe the new Sarah Maclean, that is her first contemporary romance that's coming out spring is hardcover as well. Yeah.
- [19:36]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. And I, you and I were on, we went to the A seminar a long time ago talking about do special editions for the fans. We were talking about Toni Morrison especially because it was like if there was a new Toni Morrison tomorrow, which at that point there could have been or there was.
- [19:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
She was still alive then.
- [19:51]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Give us a fifty dollar limited edition, whatever and get the money from the super fans. And this is something that's happening in sort of culture at large. Right. And you could use our Patreon example. Right. Most people can do the Br Pod for free. Most people. This is their experience. But a percentage of them will want something special for a premium price. Give them something. Give them something here. Whereas historically contemporary romance has been. It has been a paperback thing. And I don't know if that's because they weren't super fans or they didn't think about that way. But Ali Hazelwood's, Emily Henry's. I mean certainly the Yarrows where you can spend $39.99 on the target one that people fight over and put on Etsy and then lose their shirt on when they buy it for $300 and it plummets after that. After the fact. But like they are leaving money on the table.
- [20:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [20:41]
Jeff O'Neill
And they are businesses. And this seems to me worth trying. I don't know how successful it's gonna be, but it seems worth trying.
- [20:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think it's a product of the perfect storm of the demographics of romance readership and the centrality of the book as object to social media. And that the romance community has been. The romance community was one of like on the leading edge of online literary communities. Roman had gotten the shaft in literary conversation for decades.
- [21:10]
Jeff O'Neill
That's right.
- [21:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
And the Internet pops up and they're able to find each other and that has expanded into making romance part of mainstream reading culture in a way that's really wonderful and I think liberating for a lot of readers and validating for romance readers who had been part of it for a long time and felt like they had been pushed to the sides and. Right. Publishers have caught on that we can make extra money here. People do have an appetite for something special. But also in a more like general media consumption way. It's publishing catching up with what other forms of media do. For there have always been special editions of albums, special versions of like double.
- [21:49]
Jeff O'Neill
CDs or collector vinyl and other.
- [21:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right. Collector vinyl. You can get your Blu Ray with the director's commentary of a movie.
- [21:56]
Jeff O'Neill
Steel case Blu Ray. Hundred dollar version of a David lynch.
- [22:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
And for the nerd. And until very recently there was not a reading equivalent of that. That you could be a super fan of basically anyone. And you had no way to engage with something bonus. Extra special. Beautiful. Fancy about it there.
- [22:15]
Jeff O'Neill
I was thinking about this when I was on the plane yesterday and I was reading the news. And this is. It's going to be roundabout to get there. I apologize in advance. There's this baseball card that's going up for auction for a pitcher. It doesn't matter anyway. I probably mispronounce his Name, but it's like Topps makes this very super special. I think it might be one of one. There's like one in all the baseball cards for the 2024 season or whatever and this 11 year old kid in California pulled it and it's a big deal and he's, he's you know, going to auction it off or whatever. Is there a world in which we golden ticket books?
- [22:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh yeah, you know, if.
- [22:51]
Jeff O'Neill
What if, what if in 10 of the Emily Henry books there's a handwritten thing that's one of one or one of 10. Very cool because like we talked about the John Green or whatever and we got a lot of feedback telling us how people are using auto pins and signing 250,000. What if you went the other way rather than having every book beside signed, maybe there's 50 that are 500 bucks.
- [23:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [23:15]
Jeff O'Neill
Or I don't know, I mean I feel like there's something there.
- [23:18]
Rebecca Schinsky
Or I think you even, even if they don't cost more, you drive up like early reader engagement with it or you drive up pre orders. If it's like 10 of the pre ordered copies will have this special thing, there's your reason to pre order it or to go to like a bookstore on day one rather than wait for second printings or wait for anything else because you want the shot at those things. I think it was something you said in today in books when you were writing about this of like, do we really need to have someone sign half a million copies of a book? Because is anybody going to be like, well I'm not buying it. If it's not, it starts to become.
- [23:51]
Jeff O'Neill
Like a star bellied sneak situation, right? Like oh, now they've all got stars. Like okay, now not having stars is more valuable.
- [23:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it's publishing trying to figure out how to capitalize on this stuff where like in music we all know that most of the money is made from live shows and it's not made off of album sales and it hasn't been for a very long time. It's live shows and merch books, the books are the merch. And special events for books are not generally money making. The author event is not a profitable enterprise in most situations. So how else can publishers and authors make money and engage with their fandoms by giving them something special. And I think like a golden ticket is an interesting way to think about it. Special editions, anniversary editions, like this is not the way that like you or I particularly engage with the books that we love or with fandom, but I Think we're the weirdos here. Like mainstream book culture is going towards something much more similar to like a die hard fan model of a musician or a movie.
- [24:48]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. And publishers are still trying to get people to their own websites for reasons I both understand and I think is impossible.
- [24:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's just the deepest side.
- [24:56]
Jeff O'Neill
It's just a very hard problem because they want to have a relationship with their readers and they get more of the money and blah, blah, blah. And so what could you offer? And I wonder if, say, I don't know what's coming out soon. I don't know. Let, let's pick Karen Russell. Just. I don't know.
- [25:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
Sure.
- [25:12]
Jeff O'Neill
If you bought that from the period site, maybe there's 10 of them that have, I don't know, something like an original manuscript page.
- [25:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. The new Dan Brown. Like what? Yeah, you open that and 10 people get like an exclusive symbology something or other.
- [25:29]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Because the special editions has driven up the price. But the scarcity could do something else. It means you need to go to that place to get it.
- [25:37]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [25:37]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. And you probably need to pre order because you could say it's one of the first hundred thousand, after that, a hundred thousand, it's done. So you need to pre order and get your stuff on there. And the other thing that does is it puts you on the New York Times bestseller list. You have a better chance at that.
- [25:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
You can try to ring a bunch of bells. At the same time. You could do exclusivity plus scarcity. Like this is a special edition that's only. I'm talking about Taylor Swift. Like this is a special edition that's only available at Target or only available at Barnes and Noble. And five of them are going to have this thing. So Barnes and Noble gets people driven specifically to their stores. The publisher gets people to engage looking for that store special item. You get that big bump in first week sales that shoots a book onto the bestseller lists. And then you also get the online engagement around like people posting that they got the golden ticket. Like imagine Willy Wonka in the era of smartphones and social media.
- [26:26]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, because we talked about how the Taylor Swift book did. Did well. And I talked with the Brennan, we talked about here. It did fine, but we didn't see like lines around the block. Imagine if in 10 of those books there were the original lyrics or whatever to one of those songs handwritten by Swift.
- [26:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
This special edition of the next Rebecca Gyros book has like 10 copies that have a love letter between the two main characters that nobody else is going to get no.
- [26:51]
Jeff O'Neill
And it's in it's. And it's authenticated or whatever. And like in Red Tower it could put it on Soch that. Here's one example. I think the value of 10 would be so much more than the power of 250,000 signatures. And like, I think. I don't even think it would be close, honestly.
- [27:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Not to mention that like if you're trying to collect books and have them be valuable, something that had 250,000 other signed copies makes that. That's not a value add for that.
- [27:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Collection commodity at that point. So I don't know how we got on this necessarily, but I did. Oh yeah, I was just thinking about it. That's how we got it. You're thinking about it or I'm thinking about it. But that idea of the baseball card. Because Topps has been doing collectible baseball cards for a million years. And when I collected baseball cards, it was much more in the volume business. Like all the cards I collected from like 1987 in 1993 are worthless because it was just, they were just mass produced. What they pivoted to later in the 90s and really up to today is you're buy. It's. You're paying lottery tickets and there's like you're gonna get a super special one. Like the Bo Jackson rookie card I was looking for was just as common as every other card in the 1986 no. 87 top series. I'm sure everyone's gonna fact check me on that. But that's important to me personally that I got that. But what they figured out is they can sell as many, if not more cards by having there be 10 Tom Brady whatever things with a lot of times like a piece of their jersey. Like this one has a piece of Paul Skeen's jersey. Skyen. I think it's Skene S K E N E as a piece of the jersey he wore on his first day as a major league, his first start as a major leaguer. Like it's a real thing. And there's been parts of basketballs, parts of courts and all these other kinds of stuff that goes on here. But I think it would be kind of interesting if someone was like. And again, it has to be an author you care about. Like this picture is one of the generational pictures, just not whatever picture here. But they use it as a halo for the whole idea of Topps baseball cards.
- [28:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
You know, that actually pivots us into or can pivot us into one of our other stories.
- [28:46]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh, yeah, let's do that.
- [28:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
I don't think there's a ton to say about, but there is a new collection of Harper Lee's previously unpublished work that's coming out this fall. It's eight short stories that she wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird and tried to get published and was unsuccessful. And then To Kill a Mockingbird, of course, became what it was. And then eight pieces of nonfiction that she had published in, you know, journals and newspapers elsewhere. And the book itself is going to contain some scan, like some scanned pages of her original manuscript and her own notes about it. But like, what if those were special things instead of things everybody got?
- [29:24]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, as a publicity idea and as just a thought experiment that you and I would love to talk about on the show. The content would be amazing.
- [29:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
This year's the hundredth anniversary of Great Gatsby. Like, what about special editions of Great Gatsby? And 10 of them have some golden ticket item related to Fitzgerald's original notes or a letter between him and Zelda or something that like, would be exclusive in some way. If you were going to do it for Dan Brown, I think you'd have to make it like in a really fun way. A puzzle where all 10 people have to come together online and post the things they got.
- [30:02]
Jeff O'Neill
Cane's jawbone. You could make turn into a cane's jawbone kind of a situation there. Or like each of them are a handwritten, like, whatever. Like the thing that's tough about Harper Lee is that stuff that you're gonna put in there already has significant financial value. Like if you put a letter or something, it's probably a $10,000 thing, but maybe if it's, I don't know, an old grocery list or something, like, I don't know that it would have to be that weird.
- [30:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
One of the non fiction pieces in here is a letter she wrote to Oprah.
- [30:27]
Jeff O'Neill
Insane. Insanely awesome.
- [30:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
And one is a cornbread recipe. So like, maybe the Oprah letter makes the book, but 10 people get Harper Lee's cornbread recipe.
- [30:37]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't know. I think it's interesting. I'm glad I read this and then forgot about this week. I am actually kind of interested in this Harper Lee book.
- [30:44]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay.
- [30:45]
Jeff O'Neill
Just because it's not pretending to be something. These are unpublished things before. Like, it is what it is.
- [30:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Not pretending to be. Yeah, it is what it is. The piece in the New York Times that we've linked to here, you know, talks about how these stories explore some of the same themes that readers who have read To Kill a Mockingbird, will be familiar with, you know, life in the south, complicated family stuff, secrets coming out.
- [31:07]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [31:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it's. I think it's interesting to watch a writer's central concerns develop over their. Across their oeuvre. And with Lee, we don't have an oeuvre. We have one book and then we have a manuscript that they called a different book when they produced Go Set a Watchmen. So like, I think it will be interesting to get a taste of what she was doing before To Kill a Mockingbird. And also, honestly, I want to know what she wrote in a letter to Oprah.
- [31:35]
Jeff O'Neill
What does one say? Did Oprah ever pick To Kill a Mockingbird for a book club? Is that interest in this thing?
- [31:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
I don't remember. I don't remember seeing To Kill a Mockingbird on Oprah.
- [31:44]
Jeff O'Neill
You know what, maybe it was that letter that said, you know what, you should pick a four box William Faulkner set for your pick. You know, you know what, Harper?
- [31:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
I know. I feel like Oprah's affection for Toni Morrison did the Faulkner work for us.
- [31:55]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I mean, because here's the other thing that's interesting and it can be the case. And Lee is such an odd duck in her publishing career and sort of sense of, I don't know, especially for a woman writer in the 50s, there's reasons that these stories could have been rejection. Beyond that they're not good or wor. I mean, I could believe that some of these are actually pretty cool and not just juvenile or like precursor kinds of things.
- [32:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
Totally.
- [32:20]
Jeff O'Neill
It could be actually good on their own.
- [32:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it notes in this piece that when the executor of her estate found these short stories, they found also that she had kept the original rejection letters. So like, maybe that's the bonus piece for. For 10 readers is you get to actually see the rejection letter the publisher wrote. It's not something that Harper Lee produced, so presumably that's less valuable. But there's a lot of interesting stuff that might come out of that.
- [32:42]
Jeff O'Neill
I think you could do a lot with it. It's funny, I was reading this piece, Alexander Alter in the New York Times. Of course, I wonder if they fought with her editor about. They give a synopsis of To Kill a Mockingbird. And I was like, huh? I mean, we know to a first approximation that most people haven't read most books. You're talking about if there is an ex. If there's any book you don't need a synopsis of. I think it's probably To Kill a Mockingbird. And again, it's two sentences. I just struck me. It's like, oh, but, like, until very.
- [33:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
Recently, you could not do a public poll about what's your favorite novel and get any number one answer other than To Kill a Mockingbird.
- [33:21]
Jeff O'Neill
Do you think if we did one today, is it To Kill a Mockingbird? No, we should do that.
- [33:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think we should revisit it. Like, we did it early in Book Riot's life. I think the Gen Z readers and the way that school syllabi have developed have represented a shift there. That's a positive shift. That there are, like, you know, frankly, better classics and better works that can go into the canon that address race and that do the things that an English teacher is trying to do. Sometimes with To Kill a Mockingbird, I'd be surprised if it comes. And also, like, the racial politics of having that be your favorite book are different in public conversation than they were 15 years ago.
- [33:55]
Jeff O'Neill
What was the number one on the new York Times reader poll of the hundred greatest books last? I mean, again, this is. This was just the 25 years I can't remember now.
- [34:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
Was it Demon Copperhead?
- [34:04]
Jeff O'Neill
No, it can't have been. All right, we'll figure out. You guys can Google yourself. But again, this is favorite, so this could be it. I guess if I had. If I said, okay, Jeff, it's not going to be To Kill a Mockingbird, what would it be? I guess my Priory would be Pride and Prejudice. Just sort of off the top of my dome. Because you have to go to what have people read in that way. So I'm actually interested in this.
- [34:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
It was Demon Copperhead. I was right.
- [34:26]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, I was wrong. Well done. Congratulations to you.
- [34:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
You know what I was wrong about, though? Conclave won best adapted screenplay.
- [34:33]
Jeff O'Neill
Also, Conclave was not written by the same guy who wrote.
- [34:37]
Rebecca Schinsky
I know. I got that wrong.
- [34:38]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Thank you, everyone. We know. All right, let's do a sponsor break. Over the past several days, three females have been found dead.
- [34:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Looks like someone's going after these girls. Then they have to know to wash their backs.
- [34:56]
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- [34:57]
Jeff O'Neill
You really want what happened if it's when it happened to you?
- [34:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
Exactly why I need to keep going on this.
- [35:02]
Jeff O'Neill
Starring Emmy award winner Amanda C. Worry.
- [35:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
About what you're gonna find. So am I.
- [35:08]
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- [35:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for Career day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad Spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day.
- [35:28]
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- [35:44]
Jeff O'Neill
To be I did not read this piece about an audiobook narrator because I was doing other things. Do you want to just give people.
- [35:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
I just want to point people at the link.
- [35:51]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [35:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Anne Helen Peterson, in her Culture Study newsletter last week had an interview, a nice long conversation that's basically day in the life with a woman named Emily Ellett, who is a freelance audiobook narrator. And it is very nitty gritty the way that you want a day in the life to be of like, how do you organize your work as a freelancer? How do you balance, like, business time and actual production of audiobook time? She has a studio in her home that she uses to do her daily work. It has all of the fancy things. The part that I found most interesting and relevant for an ongoing source of wondering on this show is she notes that she gets paid by the finished hour and that on most days she spends about six hours in her booth to produce three finished hours of audio. So that's how it works for a freelancer. We have wondered forever, like, how much are they paying Meryl Streep if she comes to narrate someone's audiobook? And this, that continues to be a question. Is Meryl Streep also getting paid?
- [36:48]
Jeff O'Neill
She is not getting paid by the hour. I would bet all of Meryl Streep's Oscars on it, and they're not even mine.
- [36:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's not happening. I think you're probably right, but this was the most information that I had had about, you know, how the business of being an audiobook narrator works. It may be different if you're like, specifically attached to a publishing house, but I found it to be really interesting. So we'll just leave the link there in the show notes for folks who might want to check that out.
- [37:15]
Jeff O'Neill
Cool. Let's see. Where else are we going to go? I think we better. Okay, we have to do Catherine Stockett real quick before we Frontless Foyer, the first novel since the Help. Liberty and I were kicking around a episode we had a good time with with the first edition. And you all heard here in the, in the main feed, we were kicking around outside of that, like, we had such a good time. Like, what else could we do? And we had a list of authors we haven't heard from a while that we would like to hear. Another book from Katherine Stockett would not have made my personal list, but I. I guess I had forgotten, like the help. Boy, does that seem like it certainly is an artifact of a different time. But if you had asked me, did she have another. Did she have something after I'd been like May, because I easily could have missed it is kind of what I'm saying. But I didn't. And there's another one and another Alexandra Alter piece. The new book is called the Calamity Club. Yeah, it's a new novel, so I'm not sure what else you want to say about it.
- [38:09]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, so the synopsis that we have is that it's set in 1933 in Oxford, Mississippi, so she'll again be in the American South. This one's about a group of women whose lives intersect as they struggle to get by during The Great Depression. April 2026, as you said. This. This piece says anticipation is high for a follow up from Stockett. But when you've had many years, 15, 16 years since the first novel, and when readerly sentiment about that novel has really shifted, like I don't. I'll be curious, I guess. I imagine we'll have an IT books debate in April of 2026 about the calamity Club. Are readers still looking for Katherine Stockett? Are the readers who liked the Help gonna be interested? And what is she doing? Like, I. I hope for Katherine Stockett's sake and our sake that this is either entirely white characters or that she has learned some things about how she. Like how she handles black characters in the last 15 years.
- [39:06]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. So that's 2009. So a different eon several years before book. I'm kind of glad we weren't around for that initially. The most Goodreads Choice Award for best fiction ever Pick in a lot of ways, both in hindsight and whatever. Here's. Here's how I. My one data point for Are we sure people are excited is that it's not being published by Penguin. It's by being published by Speedglow and Growl, which is a much more literary imprint.
- [39:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, that's interesting.
- [39:31]
Jeff O'Neill
They do. They do some commercial stuff. But I don't know why she's not being published with Penguin. I'd be very curious to hear why not. Much like Jeanine Cummings has a new book coming out is a Holt book, whereas American Dirt was flatiron. I am sure there are stories in both cases about why that happened. And I'll leave that there for now.
- [39:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
And Stockett notes in this interview that she says, I doubt that the Help would be published today for the fact that a white woman was writing in the voice of a black woman. I did get a lot of criticism, but it didn't get under my skin because it started conversations. And so this is either a carefully crafted publicity statement or. And. Or it's an indication that she learned something from that criticism, but not the right thing from that criticism.
- [40:19]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, it's not the kind of statement that I'm like, you know what, Catherine? I'm going to be in on the next one. I mean, I don't think it's a.
- [40:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
It doesn't. It's not a huge confidence.
- [40:27]
Jeff O'Neill
It's not a huge new demerit to me. But I'm like, it's not as interesting of a statement as I maybe would like.
- [40:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
You're gonna have a hard time writing about 1930s Oxford, Mississippi, without writing about black characters. And it's not that she wrote in the voice of a black woman. It is how she depicted those black women and the really, like, paternalistic relationships that their white employers had with them that were the problem with the Help. So I guess we'll see.
- [40:54]
Jeff O'Neill
We'll see. If you want to. I bet you could get a cheap copy of the help on thriftbooks.com if you're so inclined, because they've got 19 million books available there from new to used, varying conditions and editions. If you're a collector or just, you know, looking for. Looking to build out your collection, thriftbooks.com is the way to go. Free shipping to us folks on orders of over $15. They also have a rewards club where every purchase gets you closer to redeeming for a free book. And I have redeemed for some free books myself. They're over there. Over there. Another thing I like from Thriftbooks is that when you're, you know, usually buying something that's less expensive, used, it'll often be an old library book. Because one of the places they source their inventory is from old, you know, libraries that are culling and they got to turn it over, right? There's more and more books, but the libraries don't get bigger. That's how this works. So they're, you know, trying to keep the collection relevant and what's getting checked out. And you'll see, like, this is from the Sheboygan Public Library. And, you know, all the kind of. And you can that's always fun to see in there. But go check out thriftbooks.com for your book buying needs. Thanks for them to sponsoring the show. We both, we have a shared front list foyer. But why don't you talk about Sucker Punch first and then I will talk about Sucker Punch.
- [42:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay. Well, I'm not done with it yet, but I'm done enough to be excited about having read Sachi Cool's new collection Sucker Punch. Her previous essay collection was one day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. And really dealt with like her dating life kind of right up to the point where she got married. And this goes on our stack of books about divorce. Yeah, in a lot of ways this is an essay collection that is largely about her divorce but also about her relationship to her body, about coming to understand herself in new ways post divorce. She's a she, you know, she worked for buzzfeed for a long time. She's had a public writing career that leaks into it. I find her to be so funny and sharp and I would be so afraid of being her friend and having her get mad at me and describe me. One day I was scared to interview.
- [42:55]
Jeff O'Neill
Her for First Edition.
- [42:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
An intimidating, like formidable writer.
- [43:00]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. When she's, when someone's funnier, smarter, quicker and more accomplished than you, where are you gonna go? So I, so this is a way. And you, I think you would actually, you yourself enjoy what I did with, with Sachi. So here's what I did. And also there's heavy stuff here and not for nothing there is, let's call him an antagonist. That's a real person who happens to be a 40ish white guy that she pseudonyms Jeff, which is a very tough spot for me.
- [43:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
When I read that, I knew that you were getting ready to interview her or maybe that you already had and I was like, oh, I wonder if he's going to comment on this that Jeff becomes her her name for like a generic middle aged white guy.
- [43:36]
Jeff O'Neill
And so like you know, the memoir like this, like I'm still figuring out what I enjoy doing when interviewing an author. I'll be very candid about this and I think I said this in the early days of First Edition. What I did for this one is, you know, I'm marking as I'm reading the book and I did it in print. It's a really cool cover. It has like brass knuckles and the engagement ring on it was a really awesome cover. It's a great design about that as well. What I did is I just I got 10 note cards out and on each note card I just wrote a phrase or an idea or an experience, and I've numbered them one through 10. And I had her pick at random. And so, like the first one she picked out, I think was Butthole Eyes. So if you've made it through that part.
- [44:11]
Rebecca Schinsky
I have made it to Butthole Lives.
- [44:12]
Jeff O'Neill
And so she just starts laughing and so she talks about what is the. And then the last one turned out to be why Jeff is such an appropriate moniker for an A hole. Right. And we laughed. We talked about Jeff as a name, so it kind of gave me some armor. But it was a really fun 30 minutes. So I love the book too. Go check out First Edition. We had a great.
- [44:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
We should play that game together with something that we've both read and draw.
- [44:36]
Jeff O'Neill
I will be using that gimmick again.
- [44:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's really fun. There's a. I've seen some. Another interview that does a version of that, but they're asking like really vulnerable questions. And so it's like.
- [44:45]
Jeff O'Neill
But I don't want to do that. I'm not asking vulnerable questions.
- [44:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, it's like, it's a different flavor of podcast. It's not a book show, but they're like, you draw three cards and one of them is like, tell me about your biggest fear.
- [44:55]
Jeff O'Neill
And one. Oh, go ahead.
- [44:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I just. The book is so sharp. It's like exactly what I was expecting from Sachi. I regret a little bit that I didn't listen to it on audio because she would be a great hang. But also, as you hinted, there is some tough stuff. So just a trigger warning for folks for sexual assault.
- [45:12]
Jeff O'Neill
Yep. And some suicidal ideation stuff. Just be careful out there about that. What was I going to say other than that? Oh, I. I think too one thing I've learned doing First Edition and really going back a little ways is I don't know what percentage of people doing interviews about book has read the guest book.
- [45:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
Probably lower than it should be.
- [45:33]
Jeff O'Neill
I think it's lower than I would expect. I also think I pay more attention and so this is a way of showing them I've read the book and that what I've picked is saying something about my reading of the book. Like, it works. Go check it out. Yeah, you should listen to it too. I'm. I very rarely recommend First Edition episodes on itself to you yourself because if you want to listen up. But like, she is so funny and her general laughing at some of the cards being pulled is so great that it's it's certainly worth.
- [45:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
Well, yeah. If you put butthole eyes on a card. I'm really interested in finding out what the other eight were that you haven't mentioned.
- [46:04]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes, yes. She's actually going to be at pals on March 19. For any of you who are also interested, I think I might take Rowan or anyone who wants to go. But I told Rowan about butthole eyes and she thought that was hilarious. And like this is going to be a little more adult than I think you're. Or not prepared for is. This will be an adult conversation told in a very funny way and with humor and candor. And I. It could be a good experience.
- [46:26]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think Rowan's the right age where that can be really thrilling too. That like brush with more grown up content coming from a really funny, smart.
- [46:34]
Jeff O'Neill
I'd rather it be this than reading, you know, flowers in the Attic, which.
- [46:37]
Rebecca Schinsky
A lot of 12 year olds.
- [46:39]
Jeff O'Neill
A lot of 12 year olds get their sort of taste of the forbidden knowledge for like I hope.
- [46:44]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, man, I hope the 12 year olds have moved on to something else.
- [46:47]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't. I mean, I. You know what it is?
- [46:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's fourth wing.
- [46:51]
Jeff O'Neill
It really is. All right. You have two other things on your list I'm excited to hear about. Go for them.
- [46:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay. So I read Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley. We have talked about it. On it. Books. I think it was maybe in one of our winter drafts or previews. Somewhere in there. This is charming as all get out. It was really fun.
- [47:07]
Jeff O'Neill
So excited.
- [47:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, a little debut novel flavor. But like that did not deteriorate my reading experience at all. It starts in college. The girl, main character is sort of a budding. She's a music nerd. She's a budding music writer, not necessarily a critic meets this guy at a bar. They strike up a conversation about the difference between a great song and a great album, something like that. And they. So they, they have this connection. Turns out he's a musician. He starts playing his stuff for her and she is the most candid, maybe only candid source of feedback he's ever encountered where like this guy's hot, you know, he's Ryan gosling playing matchbox20 for you on the beach. And she's the. She's the one person who will be like the hook here is like a.
- [47:56]
Jeff O'Neill
Gender flip from Friedrich and Little Women. I don't know how conversant people are, but that's like a. A classic thing where Joe gives him the book and he's like, I don't like it. I think you can do better. And she's like, what?
- [48:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [48:04]
Jeff O'Neill
No one's ever said this to me. Right?
- [48:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. She tells him what's good, but she also tells him, like, this could be better. Or this is a lazy lyric here. What are you going for? And they develop this collaboration. At the time he's got a girlfriend and they become like, she becomes very good friends with him and the girlfriend. They kind of have this trio. As they age and get out of college, he finds success. Their lives go in different directions, but they're always like, sort of in each other's orbits. And there's just a ton about music. Like, they relate to each other through music. The narrator relates to us through music. It's a really fun vibe. I tore through it. I read it on a plane. And I think it helps if you love music. It helps if you pick up a lot of the references. I didn't know all, but I think I got like 85% of the song references. And it is useful to be able to, like, hear that song in your head while the characters are talking about what makes this a great song. But I don't think it would preclude having a good reading experience if you don't know what the song sounds like. It just adds to it if you do. And much more like readerly and pop focused than like, high fidelity. Like, you don't need to be a music nerd. Gotcha to get into it. I really enjoyed it. It's like, it's a good, fun debut novel and I'll look forward to whatever she does next.
- [49:24]
Jeff O'Neill
Did we ever do the patreon of the hallmarks of a debut novel?
- [49:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
I either have it on the schedule for this year or it's in my notes for next year.
- [49:34]
Jeff O'Neill
We kind of need maybe.
- [49:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think we've talked about how it would be useful to have a debut novel.
- [49:41]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, that's what I was thinking. Like, we need to. We need to be like, ah, here's. Here's K0. But we both need to have read it, and I don't.
- [49:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson would be a great one to revisit and talk about.
- [49:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh, go back and do it that way. Interesting.
- [49:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
Because it's hard. Like, not all debut novels have these. So it would be. It would be difficult to just pick a debut novel.
- [49:58]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, I was just thinking, what if I just read Deep Cuts, like this week and we did it on Deep Cuts?
- [50:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
We could, yeah, sure want to do that.
- [50:04]
Jeff O'Neill
Let's do it. Not that we have anything else going on in the next eight days.
- [50:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
Well, we're gonna have to figure out how to podcast in the same room with each other next week.
- [50:12]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, that's that gonna be a real tough beat for us. And then lastly, Dream Hotel, which is making a late surge for maybe again. I still think Sunrise at the reap Reaping for it books for March. But Agenda pick. The reviews are great. You read it. What's the verdict?
- [50:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
Man, it's good.
- [50:29]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh yes. So happy.
- [50:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
It is so good. It also freaked me out.
- [50:36]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh really?
- [50:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
The. So the inciting incident is the character is getting off a plane and going through customs and she gets pulled like for a special security screening and they tell her we have to detain you because your risk score is too high. And this is in A Minority Report esque. I remember this where an algorithm like the government has enlisted an algorithm in service of crime prevention. And the algorithm has access to like 200 sources of things that are like your texts, your emails, your criminal record, that thing you got in trouble for in seventh grade. Which friend from high school who went to jail once are you still friends with on Facebook? Like all of these things plus like do you have a child? What field do you work in? All sorts of stuff. And it uses all of those things to compose a risk score that determines how likely the algorithm thinks you are to commit a crime. And when your score goes too high that they detain you for a couple of weeks, they send you to one of these retention centers that they are very careful to say is not a jail because you have not yet committed a crime. You're going to go to the retention center for 21 days while they sort out like can you be released back into the general public or not? But of course, like once you are in prison, the prison industrial complex is interested in keeping you there because they make more money when you are there.
- [51:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Also, if I spend some time in a retention center, I think I'm more likely to be to do antisocial things once I'm out there. Right.
- [52:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
But it's basically like is it's impossible. Nobody ever gets out of these places like in this book, right? Nobody gets out. Everything that you do wrong, you get, you know, docked for and your score just goes up. The women in this place know of like two examples of someone who actually got out after 21 days. And I am reading this while I have just walked through facial recognition technology in an international airport.
- [52:28]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [52:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Lalami started writing it in 2014 and put it in the drawer. And it feels like if it had come out in 2014 or 2015, it would have been like, wow, this feels predictive and prescient and scary for what the future might hold. And then she picked it back up during COVID and of course we're getting it now, but reading it right now, when a tech billionaire has accessed a lot of personal data from the American public and potentially has access to like all of it and could theoretically put together something like this was very like, oh, this is not the near future. This is like maybe next week. Which made it both seem a little less sharp than it would have felt 10 years ago. But also very scary of like, it does not feel impossible at all. It doesn't feel like we're so far away from this in the way that even still, if you read the Handmaid's Tale, you think, like, we're very far away from Gilead, you could see the slippery slope that might lead us there. It is not hard to imagine like the exact people in our current climate that would go in for a plan like this and how they might try to execute it. So I found it to be very chilling. And also the resolution of the book does lean into both like the Kafka esque, like an absurd nature of these kinds of places. Lalami is clearly really interested not just in like the technology is scary, but in the fact that once you are caught in a system, the system is interested in perpetuating itself, not in doing right by you. And most people, including the other women in this retention center, are not thinking that way. They have not realized that the system is never going to work for them. And her main character starts thinking like, what would it actually take to get out of the system? What would it actually take to break the system?
- [54:26]
Jeff O'Neill
They cannot perform within the rules sufficiently well enough. They can't play by the rules to get out of the.
- [54:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
There's no, there's no way to win the game. So how do you functionally, what does non compliance look like? Because the whole system is set up to say if you just comply, if you just go by the rules we set up in this place, you know, you know, your risk score will come down, you'll have your hearing, you'll get out. And yet that's never how it goes. Reads like a house on fire. And my heart was just kind of in my throat the whole time.
- [54:58]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I'm really excited to read it. My one concern going into it and maybe even not concern, thought it doesn't have to be a concern to be A thought is that we have the phrase thought crime. We even have Minority Report. Like the idea of pre selecting people based on things in their lives or identities that they might. It's not super new. So I, I'm not going to hold that against it necessarily. Like something that is using. I don't know if I talked about this. I think this got kind of washed out in the end of the year stuff that we did. I don't know that I talked about the Repeat Room by Jesse Ball which came out. But that one's a little bit different where rather than a Judah they you in that one, you get a jury of one person for your crimes, but then, then they get access to your whole consciousness to determine whether or not not necessarily that you did the crime. That's sort of been determined. But like, was it explicable? Like was there something that is a mitigating factor or not? And then there's only, I think there's only two outcomes, like either you're exonerated or you're put to death. So it's really wild. But it's kind of coming from the same idea of like, what if we had access to everyone's interiority before and after because that's what we don't have access to. It's an interesting.
- [56:09]
Rebecca Schinsky
And like, I think in the Jesse Ball example, they are actually trying to come to a real verdict. And in the Lamy book, right, they're not like she, the main character even points out to one of the other women at one point. Like once the algorithm, like it can't read everything about you, so it's searching for specific things. It's not searching for, for, you know, exonerating material. It's searching for evident ways to shore up its argument that you are dangerous.
- [56:35]
Jeff O'Neill
And the stuffy that you still hold at night does not help you say that. You know, they're not going to light up a post office or something.
- [56:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I don't think it's like accidental that we are exclusively in a women's facility in this, that we see how women experience it. And there are a couple pages that show like computer printouts or what some of the components of risk scores. And like your sexual history is part of that. Having had a child increases your risk score. And there's all kinds of things that she's thinking about. I would have liked maybe a little bit more of that. Like what are the things that this algorithm takes that we don't necessarily think are indications that a person is dangerous to whatever the government is trying to achieve, but that the government has determined. Like, is just being a woman one of those? Because men can't bear children.
- [57:27]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I will be reading that. That comes out soon. Or is it.
- [57:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's out already.
- [57:32]
Jeff O'Neill
It's out already. It was a March 4th release date. Okay.
- [57:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, it's terrific.
- [57:36]
Jeff O'Neill
Let's see. I can't remember. So we just talked about Sucker Punch. You go, that's the first, I guess. Also in First Edition, I read the river has roots and then talked to Amal El Mohtar over on First Edition and, and I got some biggest Dickolus stories. And that whole experience of this is how you lose the time war. Had a really good conversation with her. The book is extremely cool. It's like 99 pages. There's some stories of like a deal fell through with a certain company and like all kinds of stuff that goes into it. So I really enjoy that. That is, you can sit down on like a Saturday morning with your coffee and a croissant and like.
- [58:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, 90 pages. Come on.
- [58:08]
Jeff O'Neill
But, but having said that, the audio, there's a lot of singing and music and language and she and her sister perform the songs that the two sister sings on. The audio book was, I was like, I got chills once I heard that. So I might have to go check that out as well. So that was very, very cool also. Yeah, it was a two edition, it was a two episode first edition week last week because I wanted to get the Sucker Punch one out there as well.
- [58:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's fun.
- [58:32]
Jeff O'Neill
I, I, I posted about Ingrained by column. Ro have I talked about it here? Ingrained by column?
- [58:37]
Rebecca Schinsky
You have not. But I, I read your thing and immediately bought it. So let's sell it to the people.
- [58:41]
Jeff O'Neill
So this is, I think a shared interest of ours is memoirs by people who do things for a living. Unlike us who don't. We just do this. But especially people who make skilled people, like skilled people who make physical things or real craftspeople a long time. So this is a memoir by Kylem Robinson. He's a Scottish woodworker and the inciting incident is that he and his wife had started a bespoke high end custom woodworking company where they were building like high end installations for like, they don't say any of the names. I'm guessing, like Harrods wants a new thing for their whatever.
- [59:18]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay.
- [59:18]
Jeff O'Neill
And they spend a whole bunch of money and they spend three years doing it. And it's, you know, very, very high.
- [59:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
End bespoke stuff like fifth Avenue around Swanson. Yeah.
- [59:26]
Jeff O'Neill
Or like private clients who want their own dressing room all made out of whatever kind of special wood from something that's indeed they don't do that in dangerous stuff. But you hear them getting like really high end, one of a kind, labor intensive, high dollar. And they get to the point where they're about to embark on like the biggest job they're ever going to do and they're going to staff up and whatever and the deal falls through. And because they've been organizing the company to get ready to take it on, they haven't been taking on other work because we're not going to have enough time to do it. We don't have the capacity to do it. And because of the long lead time, they can't like go out and scrounge other high end work. So they're really up a creek. And so what they decide to do is to open up a furniture store because we can make tables and chairs and cabinets sort of on spec, get them out and get some cash flow in the door. So that. It's a business book, right? It's a small business book, which I love. But it's also the writing, like I put on our Instagram, like just this paragraph describing the kinds of wood was like crazy moving by itself. And I haven't read anything about this guy. I don't know how he writes these sentences. I don't think there's another book. There's no discussion of like going to get whatever the UK equivalent of MFA is. I have no idea where these sentences are coming from or coming. How they're coming out of his fingers onto a keyboard. So on the sentence level, it's amazing. But then it's also a book about craft. Like there's these little briefly noted places about inspiration, health and safety, finding your voice. So it's like a book about creativity, but it's also a book about him and his wife, like making their life together, about how she would teach and like he feels very pain that she's sacrificed so much and yet she's willing to do it and living. So it's a, it's a, it's a marriage book, Rebecca.
- [61:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Wish people could see your face right now.
- [61:09]
Jeff O'Neill
And then also his dad was a woodworker who turned to woodworking because his career fall apart. So it's a dad and sons book, man. And then I did an audio and he's this unbelievable Scottish accent I get. I was over the moon. I was like the third of the way through, I was like, this is going to be one of my favorite audiobooks ever. Not just this year. Ever.
- [61:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
How did this come across? How did this come to your awareness?
- [61:30]
Jeff O'Neill
I was going through a flipping SNS catalog.
- [61:34]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [61:35]
Jeff O'Neill
And then I saw it at Pals. It was post pub. And I looked at it and I read a few pages and I was like, what in the hell? And I'm sorry, Pals. I'm like, this is not. This is a Jeff audiobook situation. I'll buy other stuff from Pals. I did not buy it from Pals, but then I bought a hard copy. I want to have this. I listened to it and I bought a hard copy.
- [61:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Wonderful. I'm looking forward to this one.
- [61:57]
Jeff O'Neill
I guess. I have some other stuff, too, but the one that will take us out of the episode, I think, because it's going to preview our next. Is it our next Patreon episode takes us by Christina Rivera Garza. Is that next week?
- [62:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes, that's this week. Yeah.
- [62:07]
Jeff O'Neill
We just recorded with Vanessa Diaz. We had talked about in our winter preview as a like a maybe a Dan Brown literary mystery. Little Higher Brown. We talked about it this morning. And I invite you all to listen to the Patreon or the preview that comes and I'll say no more about it right now. Do you think that's fair? That's a tease.
- [62:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Being a very mysterious man. Yeah, that's fair.
- [62:25]
Jeff O'Neill
I got all my enthusiasm out about ingrained and we already talked about it for a minute. So, you know, I think that's. Yeah.
- [62:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
You want to know what we thought about the book? You got to come to the book club.
- [62:33]
Jeff O'Neill
Got to come to the book club. So those are. Those are. There's some other things, too, but I, I'm not sure I'm going to be reading as much this week, so I'm going to keep a couple in the chamber for future front. Let's. At this point, would you like to hear quickly about I got to fly across country by myself. So it's Jeff's movie playoffs.
- [62:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
How many movies did you watch? And how crazy is the mix?
- [62:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Over the week, I watched nine movies. Tell me it wasn't that. So they were Wolf's, the Clooney pit thing.
- [63:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay.
- [63:01]
Jeff O'Neill
A real pain. Yeah.
- [63:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, I watched a real.
- [63:03]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. The Taste of Things, Snack Shack, Little Women, Rebel Ridge, Janet, Planet Blitz, Godzilla -1 and Saturday night. Those are the movies that I watch my single. Well, Little Women was a. I was rewatching it to see if it was a good family watch. I actually love that it's the. The Gerwig. One, which is pretty terrific. So it wasn't a new to me, but I did watch that. I think if I could only have watched one of them. Is an interesting game to play. I think I'm picking the taste of things.
- [63:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's like a perfect movie.
- [63:35]
Jeff O'Neill
God damn it.
- [63:36]
Rebecca Schinsky
I saw that in the theater and the like just the kitchen noises coming through. The Dolby surround sound. Juliet Binoche like roasting a chicken. What more do you want in life?
- [63:48]
Jeff O'Neill
It's really good. And there's some things that I'm a little. I know there's some spoilery things. Like really does you have to do it that way? But also it's beautiful and whatever. I thought a real pain was very good. Kind of the surprise to me and I'd had. I knew I'd wanted to watch it as Snack Shack, which is an indie.
- [64:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
I've not seen that yet.
- [64:04]
Jeff O'Neill
It's an indie movie that came out a year, I think last year, but it said in 1991 in like a. In a mid sized town in Nebraska. And I think it's Omaha. So it's like literally 110 miles from me when I was that age and I was not as dazed and confused adjacent as these people's antics was. But I just got. I knew the world, you know, put mowing the grass and then putting the grass into garbage bags.
- [64:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [64:29]
Jeff O'Neill
Like that's a. No, that's a specific. Like I was like. That director totally knows because when we were mowing yards in 1991, we put the grass in black plastic garbage bags and threw it away. That's the 90s equivalent of that scene in Mad Men where like Betty and Don get up at the picnic and just throw the trash onto the ground and walk away. Do you remember that sequence from Mad Men? I gasped aloud like they'd slaughtered a baby seal in front of my eyes. But like probably people seeing that, like, what the hell is that kid doing? But like the concerns like there's at one point where the kid is just sitting there and they turn up the cicadas in the soundtrack and I have like a visceral experience with that. Like. Anyway, so that was one where I was like. I enjoyed just like, oh, that would be like me watching American Graffiti in 1971.
- [65:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
I will cycle that up the list like of my things I need to watch soon. That sounds great. I also watched Janet Planet on a Plane like six months ago.
- [65:24]
Jeff O'Neill
That is a movie. That is a movie that they filmed.
- [65:26]
Rebecca Schinsky
It is a movie. Yeah. I felt a little bait and switched between the synopsis of that movie and the experience of that movie. It's not like a great plane pick, I don't think.
- [65:37]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I don't really know what I like to watch on a plane. It's something that other people in my house maybe don't want to watch. The one I should have saved because I think Michelle would watch it and enjoy it. I mean some of them she would have too. The Rebel Ridge. There's definitely someone we could have thrown on. Do you know anything about that movie?
- [65:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think I've heard about it, but I don't. I haven't seen it.
- [65:55]
Jeff O'Neill
It's an action thriller that's better than it has any right to be. I forget the main character. My memory was. I think I heard about it on the watch actually that it was going to be a John Boyegas vehicle. But they got this other guy who's amazing and he is subject to a legal civil asset forfeiture law in Florida and gets mixed up with the. The fuzz down there.
- [66:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
I know.
- [66:20]
Jeff O'Neill
And you know, finds a. Finds a. I guess a Coke. Not a conspirator but someone who will help him out. And they're trying to beat the system and working within it. Plus he just happens to be the world's greatest living expert in this particular martial arts. So he gets to beat people up. Don Johnson plays a scuzzy local police sheriff and absolutely choose scenery. It's a. It's a really good. I just want to eat some popcorn. It has better. It's like. Yeah, what you want? Like those Jason Statham, Chris Helmsworth like grindhouse movies to be. It's that but just elevated. I don't know. I don't know how they did it.
- [66:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
It was really good. I will shout out for folks. It's the 20th anniversary of before Sunrise this year. I watched that on a plane last week. That shit holds up. Someday I'm gonna. Which one?
- [67:06]
Jeff O'Neill
Which one?
- [67:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Before Sunrise.
- [67:08]
Jeff O'Neill
No, no, but which is the three is your favorite?
- [67:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, that's an impossible question.
- [67:13]
Jeff O'Neill
I think it's the second one for me.
- [67:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean the ending of the second one that you're gonna miss that flight.
- [67:18]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I mean it's all timer one of.
- [67:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
The sexiest moments in all of film. But I love Before Sunrise.
- [67:24]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I guess the. The second two still feel more current. Just come older and closer to age. Whereas Before Sunrise feels like an artifact.
- [67:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
Of the 90s which is floppy haired Ethan Hawke. Just it perfect.
- [67:38]
Jeff O'Neill
So there you go. All right. The next time you'll hear from us. Will be in the future, but especially the Patreon. What are we recording for the second show next week?
- [67:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
Next week, the midweek episode is going to be a look at the antidote by Karen Russell.
- [67:52]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. And that's in the regular feed.
- [67:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's in the regular feed. That's an Is it good? Kind of the treatment we did for.
- [67:57]
Jeff O'Neill
Sally Rooney, which I didn't know now lives in Portland, Oregon. Did you know that?
- [68:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, I did not know that.
- [68:01]
Jeff O'Neill
I didn't know that either.
- [68:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
Karen Russell was allowed to leave Florida.
- [68:05]
Jeff O'Neill
You know, I think, I think at some point they're like, Karen, you know too much and we appreciate you, but you're giving away too much secret.
- [68:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
So we're gonna ask you to. I mean, that means Kristen Arnett is next.
- [68:19]
Jeff O'Neill
My other thought was maybe it was a Highlander situation with Lauren Groff.
- [68:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's true. Because you got Karen Russell, Lauren Groff, Kristen Arnett. Laura Vandenberg is from Florida.
- [68:28]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, and also Vandermeer moved to Port, Oregon, who's also one of the great Floridian writers of a particular. I mean, it's a little, you know, climate dystopia, but it is certainly of a you. If you were going to name the great region of Florida, half of them apparently live in Portland, Oregon, which is either. Which is very concerning to me for some reason. Do they know something I don't? Because I've got tilt in the back of my mind right now and I'm like, are they, are they kind of like it's not rats jumping ship. It is, you know, it's the cicadas coming to where there's going to be interesting food to nosh on in the.
- [68:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
Next few days maybe. Yeah. I think getting out of Florida is maybe self explanatory right now.
- [69:03]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Well, I mean, I could certainly understand that, but I, I was reading. No, I was at. I went to an event at Pals and Karen Thompson Walker was going to be interviewing Karen Russell. No, the other way around. Karen. Karen Russell was entering interviewing Karen Thompson Walker for her new book. It's like they flew Karen Russell out here. I mean, that's maybe their friends or whatever. And then I looked up like, nope, she lives in Oregon now. So she's one of the people they get. Anyway.
- [69:26]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's great.
- [69:27]
Jeff O'Neill
So interesting to me.
- [69:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
I love this for Portland.
- [69:29]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. So anyway, speaking of Portland, come see us 3-13-book riot.com pals. I put a special page where it redirects. You just click. But there's also a link in those show notes directly to get there because the URL I can't say the eventbrite URL. It's I feel like a maniac trying to just do that URL. And we know people don't go to show notes, so but they might go to book r.com powells2ls on that.
- [69:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
All right, come say hi to us at the event. We do want to meet you.
- [69:54]
Jeff O'Neill
We do want to meet you. It will be awkward for 30 seconds and it won't and it'll be fine. I am very tall. Rebecca is short. We don't look like what you think we're going to look like. We could just rst on either things people say to us, which is fine, that's a normal reaction. But we can go quickly into me asking you awkward questions about how you found out about the show and what do you like to read and how funny I am and how much of a bummer it is for me that Rebecca's right all the time. We can really commute.
- [70:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
You did win about Conclave, though, so you should hold onto that one for a while.
- [70:21]
Jeff O'Neill
No, it's okay, you know. Oh, you don't have to tell me what I have to hold on to. Don't worry, I don't need the help. It's a very short list, so it's easy to remember. All right, thanks everybody.
- [70:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and we hope you'll enjoy this excerpt from the audiobook edition of Advent by Seth Ring. Thanks again to our sponsors at Blackstone Publishing.
- [70:50]
C
One the terminal beeped softly, and Mark's shoulders dropped in sharp relief. He knew he had enough credits since he had finally gotten paid, but the possibility of rejection still haunted him. Hoping his relief wasn't showing on his face, he stepped through the open doors onto the train, looking around in a vain hope that he'd find a seat like normal. Nothing available. With a sigh, he moved to the other end of the car, wedging himself between a seat and the exit door. With barely a hum, the train took off, moving from a standstill to blistering speed in a fraction of a second without any noticeable shift in inertia. Catching sight of the faintly glowing mana circuit tracing its complex pattern along the ceiling, Mark idly wondered if they had built in the inertia dampening effect, or if the lack of movement was just a byproduct of good insulation. As always, the train cars were packed with commuters heading back from their jobs or from the training camps. A few young men and women still dressed in bright blue school uniforms, sat a bit farther down the car, chatting quietly with each other. Mark felt a pang in his chest, unsure if it was nostalgia, a desire to experience the camaraderie of school once more, or the dull pain of missing friends. With a sigh, Mark turned away, looking out over the city that blurred past. New Emory was best described as strong, with little thought for the elegance of civilization, but to Mark's eyes, it carried a brutal and enduring beauty. Bright lights lit the center of the city, highlighting the massive skyscrapers that dominated the central district. That light, driven by the giant mana refineries hidden under the city, grew dimmer and dimmer the farther it got from the city center. And as his eyes moved out into the surrounding rings, the buildings got smaller as well. Everything in the city, every institution, every organization, every business was oriented around one thing the exlian threat, the ever present, ever growing horde of mutating monsters who roamed the wilderness. Mark's life was no exception. Catching sight of a bitter smile in the glass, Mark quickly tried to correct his expression. He knew from personal experience that it was better to keep up a chipper appearance, or at the very least, something neutral that wouldn't automatically put others on guard. Pushing aside the frustration threatening to boil up inside him, Mark tilted the back of his head against the cool glass window. He often caught this train after finishing up work, and the same tired faces that he always saw were present, heading to whatever home they had. At the far end of the train, he spotted someone new, a young man with a firm expression and a crew cut that looked freshly done. He wore an olive green uniform, undecorated save for a simple patch on his shoulder. Mark was too far away to see what it read, but he knew its inscription by heart. For glory, for humanity, mark whispered under his breath, a hint of excitement pushing aside his frustration. The soldier must have noticed Mark's stare because he suddenly looked up, his sharp eyes flashing with a strange power. Startled, Mark turned his head away and then, unable to resist, peeked at the young man from the corner of his eye, only to find that he was still staring straight at Mark, a small smile on his lips. The soldier nodded and then put his head down again. But the feeling of excitement persisted even as the train car rang with the soft chime announcing Mark's stop. Stepping from the train onto the platform, Mark, Mark walked through the dark streets lit by flickering street lights placed on the nearby buildings. The environment, though it looked grim, was familiar to Mark. He had lived here almost his whole life, and his mind was occupied with the man on the train. That uniform, and more importantly, the badge that he wore, marked the young man as a member of the city's Defense Force, the most prestigious of the three branches of the military, the one Mark desperately wanted to join himself. When he arrived at his door, he punched in his key coat and groaned when he heard the familiar annoying whine of the lock on his door failing to disengage. The sound brought reality crashing back down on Mark, and with a frustrated sigh, he bumped his head against the door lightly. This area had once been nice and everything had worked perfectly, but increasingly strict power rations left the mana circuits barely able to pull the mana they needed, resulting in their all too frequent failure. Waiting until the lock reset, Mark tried again. When it failed for the fourth time, he just shook his head, annoyed, and walked around the building, hopping the fence to get into the small backyard. It was technically against the law to leave a door or window unlocked because of the ever present ex lian threat, but Mark had spent one too many nights sleeping outside, unable to get into his home to care. He'd left a window on the second floor open a hair, hoping it was a small enough gap that it wouldn't be noticed by any patrols, or worse, by an Exlyn that had sneaked into the city. With practiced ease, he scrambled up the first floor window, using a drainpipe to brace himself as he jumped to grab the sill of the second story window, all the while balancing his backpack on one shoulder. Wedging himself into place, he ran his fingers along the window. The tab he had left was still in place, which meant that the window hadn't been opened. It took a couple of tugs to get it open, but that was better than standing on his porch all evening listening to the lock whine at him. After the window was pushed up far enough, he shimmied himself up and rolled in, his hip slamming into the floor with a thud.
- [77:23]
Jeff O'Neill
Ouch.