← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
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I spent over $100,000 building my dream home, office and production studio. And today I'm going to give you a tour. So this is the studio spent probably over $100,000 building this whole thing out. You can see we got sound panels all around the room. These sound panels are intended to insulate the sound. Obviously I did that because oftentimes even if you have a really nice mic, like I have that shure mic over here, if the room is really echoey, then all that sound is going to get picked up. So you don't want that. So we created all this ins over here. I have one of my most prized possessions, which is some of my favorite books. And I also have a handful of rare books, which is pretty cool. There are these stores around the world that sell rare books like first edition prints. And one of my favorites is called Peter Harrington's, which is in London. And I bought a handful of these books from it. So I figured I'd show you this. So first is, I have a first edition Harry Potter. This is the second book in the series, the Chamber of Secrets. I can't remember how much I bought this one for. It was like a couple hundred bucks. But this is a first edition of the paperback print that I grabbed in London. This one I thought was pretty cool. Charles Bukowski, one of my favorite authors. This is actually a short collection of poems that were never formally published. So it was just published in this little pamphlet, which I thought is pretty cool. Same thing. This one was a couple hundred bucks. This is a first edition, first impression. This is one of only 400 copies that was ever printed. Charles Bukowski is an amazing fiction literary writer. If you've never read him, this is really cool. This is the novel that got written based on the Star wars screenplay I bought this book for. It was a little more expensive, I think it was. Yeah, about 500 bucks. What's cool is that it's signed by the ghostwriter who wrote the novel. So George Lucas came up with the story and wrote the screenplay, worked on the movie, and then they did a novel adaptation and based on that. And so this is the ghostwriter who wrote this book and then signed it. So I thought that was really cool. Especially because of all the years I've been ghostwriting. I thought that was awesome. And then this one is Nikolai Gogol, written by Vladimir Nabokov. I mean, this is a first edition. Cost me about 300 bucks. And this is one of the first books that Nabokov wrote. One of my favorite authors in the English Language. So it's. A Russian authority wrote this book in English about another Russian author, Nikolai Gogol, who really pioneered magical realism in literature, which is really cool. And then over here, this is the last book I'm going to show you, and it's one of my favorites, is on this bookshelf over here. So this is. This one was more expensive. I think this was like two or three grand. This is a first edition James Bond, you Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming. First edition. Let's see. Unmarked internally. Yeah. One of the coolest books in the series. I love the James Bond series. Fun fact. When I checked this out in London, they took me into the basement and they showed me a journal that he kept when he was walking around Japan coming up with ideas for the James Bond series. And that journal you could buy. It was like a tiny little journal that he kept while he was walking around the city and you could buy it. The only problem was it was $80,000. So I thought that was probably a little steep for the journal, so I went with the first edition. You Only Live Twice. This is the production studio. So I had this whole desk built down here. I'm gonna end up putting a keyboard so that I can do some cool background sound effects. I played classical piano for 20 years growing up, so I love having that as a hobby. When I record, all the audio actually gets piped into this system. And so here I'll use logic on the computer. I'll record all the audio. Sometimes if I'm doing my own sound design, I'll do that here. I'll. Otherwise, this is where everything just gets uploaded and then I send it to our team. All right, so this is the main desk. This is where I spend all my time. You know, it's hard. Like. How do you talk about the life of a writer? Well, the life of a writer is I basically sit there and I sit there for about 10 hours a day and I write. There's not a whole lot to show. It's just me sitting in the chair working at this desk. But this is a big table. I've got a lot of different stuff here. These are all the different books that I'm currently reading. I don't really read books linearly, and I also don't read for pleasure. I really only read to study, and I'm always studying something. So, for example, I'm reading these two books right now by John Truby, all about the anatomy of story and genres in fiction and storytelling. Both of these books are incredible. Michael Crichton The Andromeda Strain. I read this like 15 years ago. It's awesome book. I think. Nobody does thrillers better than Michael Crichton, so I love studying his stuff. I've got some David Foster Wallace essays. He I also. This is like the degree to which I nerd out. I have the thinkers thesaurus. So something that I'll do is a lot of mornings before I dive into work, I'll actually just pop that open and look up words that I've never heard before or look at words and I don't know what their meaning is. And I try and teach myself and just keep expanding my vocabulary. This is a journal that I keep. I always keep like a leather bound journal with me everywhere I go. I just write down ideas, book ideas, content ideas, video ideas, product ideas. I just put them all in here. I'm currently reading this lit RPG called Dungeon Crawler. Carl. This has been really entertaining. Got some Brandon Sanderson. Yeah, all sorts of books that I've been working through. And then here, this is where all the work gets done. So I'll sit here, I'll write all day. I use this camera for, you know, video chats, zoom webinars, live master classes, loom recording videos like this is just quick and dirty. And then behind me I have this larger teleprompter system. So this is a teleprompter connected to a Canon EOS R5. And so what happens is I will take the script of the thing that I am recording from the main computer over here. That script will go to this teleprompter and I'll read the teleprompter. This is how I do most long form YouTube videos. And then the camera that's connected to this teleprompter pipes all the way back into that hard drive and then I dump that hard drive onto the main computer. That's where all the magic happens and I do it all here. I usually always have one of my books sitting here. Nice little subtle promo. And then yeah, whenever I'm recording, I'll just bring this mic closer here, this is where I'll record and how I'll record all of my video content. And this is also where I've been doing audio books lately too, which is pretty cool. Sometimes I'll sit here, sometimes just to change it up, I'll just spin this out and I'll actually position it over there and I'll sit by the main computer just to feel like I'm in a different environment. Last but not least, I've got the big screen TV on that wall. And if you notice, I currently have a undead mage grinding in the World of Warcraft. When I was a teenager, I was one of the highest performing and highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America. I feel like gaming really gave me the foundation, helped me build the skill set of just grinding. There's a lot in gaming that's really boring, but you do what you have to do in order to collect the reward and, you know, get the achievement. So I'll often just have these gameplay videos playing in the background because whenever I'm trying to get through something really boring, I like to look up and remind myself, yeah, I mean, if I wasn't doing this, I would just be grinding Murlocs in the World of Warcraft, trying to get some reward. I might as well just do that in real life, right? Instead of getting, I don't know, some magical staff, I can just make more money in real life, you know, maybe buy a sports car, right? So I like keeping that there as motivation. That's. That's the Office Tour kind of simple. I think what's funny is, you know, I spent all this money building this and I thought it was so cool. I still think it's so cool. But the joke is I'm doing the same exact thing at this desk that I was doing 10 years ago. 10 years ago I was in a studio apartment with no air conditioning and no heat and had no money, and I had a $15 desk from Goodwill and I was just sitting at the desk and I just wrote. And now I'm surrounded by all this stuff, but I'm still just sitting here doing the same exact thing. So I think all this stuff is cool and, you know, it's cool to give the tour and you can see where I work and all this stuff, but really, at the end of the day, I don't really need any of this. I literally just need a laptop and a table. So I hope you enjoyed the Office tour and if you have any questions about things that I've done in the studio, or if you want to know more about a certain part of it, just drop me a comment and happy to answer. Sat.