[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to another episode of the Capes and Tights podcast right here on capesandtights.com dot. I'm your host, Justin Soderbergh. Once again, this episode is brought to you by our friends over at Galactic Comics and collectibles in Bangor, Maine. You can visit
[email protected] or find them on social media. This episode is Adam Caesar returning once again. One of our favorite guests here on the podcast, Adam, is a Bram Stoker award winning author of the Clown in the Cornfield series that has clown in the Cornfield one and clowning the Cornfield two, as well as Clown the Cornfield three, which dropped yesterday, August 20, at your local bookstores and bookstores everywhere. He is also the author of books like Video Night and the upcoming Influencer, which hits October 1 at bookstores everywhere as well. He also wrote the dead mall comic series over at Dark Horse. But Adam joined us to talk mostly about clown the Cornfield three, the Church of Friendo, as well as a little bit about influencer, the book he has coming out in paperback on October 1 from Union and Square Company. So check out this episode, but before you do, visit us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky threads, as well as rate reviews. Subscribe all those things over on Apple, Spotify, and all our major podcasting platforms. You can also view the video portion of this over on our YouTube channel and for more information about everything, reviews, all that
[email protected]. dot this is Adam Caesar, a Bram Stoker award winning author of the Clown in the cornfield series, talking clown in the cornfield three, the Church of Friendo. Enjoy, everyone.
Welcome back to the podcast. Adam, how are you today?
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Hey, what's up, Justin? I'm really good. I'm really good.
I'm tired. But this is the first interview of this whirlwind interview tour and in person tour. I'm actually touring physically for the first time for this book, so it's gonna be pretty well. By the time people listen to this, I'm gonna be, like, in Houston or something. I'm gonna be very tired.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: It's just gonna get worse from here. Connor Kornfield, my sharpest. If people are like, what's wrong with him? This is it. This is the apex.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: This is the beginning of the end, though, I guess, let's be honest. Let's see, because clown in the cornfield two that came out in 2022. Did you. You didn't tour that book, did you? Did you go around a place I.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Did a lot of. I did an informal tour. I did a guerrilla tour, we'll call it for clown two. I got.
They each, each come out two years from each other pretty exactly. It's 20 202-022-2024 and we'll see if people, if enough people buy this. 120 26. But for that one, I did a fun thing. Wherever I got in the car with my brother in law and we just.
He showed up in my house at like five in the morning, and it was like, let's drive as far south as we can.
And then when the first Barnes and noble, like, wherever we hit, when the first Barnes and noble is open, we'll stop there and then we'll start going north. So we drove south and we hit, like, I think we did 25 in two days. We did this twice. And I just signed every copy of clown two and clown one on the east coast from Virginia all the way up to North Jersey, which was a lot of fun, but it was very informal. By the time we reached the last one, I think it was. I forget it was one of the ones in North Jersey, but it was not the northmost one. It was like when we were on our way back and they were all closing, it was like 09:00 and they closed it, like, 930. And I walk in and there's an empty Barnes and noble, and the manager is like. She's like, standing at the customer service desk like this. I didn't call any of these places beforehand. It was completely grill. I was just going in, and you never know with these things. You get some. You get a hero's welcome. Or they've, like, I've heard of these books. And then sometimes I, like, I'll take my books up to the customer service desk and they'll think I'm trying to, like, do consignment. They're like, are those yours? Did you bring those? I'm like, no, these are yours. These are the stores copies. So, like, so, like, you get a real variance. But I'll never forget, like, the last, like, the 25th store.
The manager, she was standing there with her arm crossed. She almost looked a little pissed off. And she's like, I heard of you.
Because I guess all the managers kind of talk and, like, as they, like, charting my progress on this as I've been driving around. But she was. She couldn't have been nicer. But it was so funny because she already had the books already out and on the. On the customer service desk, just guessing that I was going to. That I was going to show up.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: They're like, tracking you in a board behind this customer service. They don't see you.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: She revealed to me that they kind of did. She's like, oh, we're all in. Like, she's like, everyone in this pod of bars and nobles, like, all the managers are in like a group text. So we knew you were, like, tooling around, which is great. But this one, now, this one's very formal. And the last one was all Barnes and noble. This one's all indie bookstores.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Bookstore.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, indie bookstores, like, I've heard about for years, and I've never had an. An excuse to go to great. I'm going to see, starting out with the har house and bucket of blood.
So bucket of blood is providing the books, but the har house is like a kind of like a horror merch store. And like, they do shirts and stuff like that. They're, they're in Chicago, but they're, the stores are very close to each other, so we're going to do that. That's going to be like the kind of grand opening. I think we might even have a special tour t shirt there for people coming to Chicago and then Houston, Texas. Uh, murder by the book, which I've heard such good things about. Um, then up to Boston, which I went to school in Boston. Brookline booksmith was like the, you know, other than like the brattle and the Coolidge Corner Theater, like those. That was probably the place I spent the most time. So it was really cool. Doing an event with Paul tremblay there, then New York, brooklyn, clay, macau. Chapman's my in conversation there and then finishing up back at home in Doylestown. So really quick, really quick tour. I know a lot of people were like, come to Florida, come to the west coast. And I really wanted to, it just physically was impossible. I wanted to hit as much the, in five days, I wanted to hit as much.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: So you think it's touring artists now, like a band, like, you get. You're like, you're ready?
[00:06:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm going to, like, I'm going to. I'm sure I'm going to. I'm going to wake up from my, like, all my flights are like, really early or really late because, like, I didn't. I wanted the cheapest flights. So, like, I'd be putting my headphones on. It's going to be like motorhead. We are the, we are the road crew. And I'm just going to like.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: That'S amazing. I was actually looking at it. I'm like, oh, my gosh. You come into Boston, it's only a couple of hours. Like 3 hours from here. I was like, I'll just drive down. I'm like, wait, it's a Thursday. And now that I just missed, like, seven days of actual work because of.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: COVID I don't even think my work bringing up a good point. If people aren't going to be able to see the tour, which they'll hear this when the tour is, like, half over. But there's always my local bookstore, children's book world.
They sell signed and personalized copies. You just got to tell them your personalization. They'll ship anywhere in the US. They're great to work with. I go there once a week and just sign a stack of books. And yes, if you want any of the clown books signed, if you want influencer signed, even dead mall, they can just sell it to you.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: I love even dead mall.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: You pay cover price.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Like, you throw, like, even dead mall. If you want even dead mall, no one.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: No one reads. I love dead mall, though. You know, it's tough. It's tough to get. To get folks. I mean, I'm on a comics podcast.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: So, you know, but I. Yeah, and it's phenomenal. I think everybody should read dead mall. I think that's, you know, if you should re edit Reddit, you should buy it signed from Book world. Yeah, there we go.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: We got all the plugs in up front. We are going to talk about, like, actual stuff and just try to stop selling people stuff in a minute.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: Okay, we're over. See ya. That's what this is, all promotional.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: We got all the plugs in.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: So this is now, I mean, you've lived in the clown world. Like, you mentioned 2020, which obviously, again, we talked about you not touring really for 2022. You obviously didn't do a book tour in August of 2020.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: No, there's very different launch. Yeah.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: And then, which is actually kind of funny, we were, my wife and I rewatching Superstore. I don't know if you ever watched Superstore, but if anybody's ever worked in retail, this is one of the funniest shows because the fact that it's like a fake Walmart and all the, like, even the craziest stuff that's ever happened in a retail store, they do a gag on it on this thing. Like, they'll be walking down the aisle where, like, there's toilets, you know, for sale, and there's just a guy sitting on one of them going to the bathroom. And it's like, the things that you go with that doesn't happen. And someone's actually probably in a retail store. But the last season happened during COVID like, so, like, they actually said, okay, retail stores did this, the masks, everything. And so they did a whole gag the entire season on it being during the pandemic. So people wear a mask, and she's like, oh, look at this. Laser. Laser. What's it called? A laser tags place. Opening back up now. And she goes, wow. I know they had a fire there, like, a year ago, but it took them a long time to open back up. And the guy at the other register goes, plus, Covid, it's not just that.
It's the same thing. So, yeah, there's pandemics that happened and things got delayed, but now you're actually being able to actually go into places is really cool. But my point of this is that 2020, 2022. Now 2024. So you've lived in this, like, plus you wrote clown of gone for one. So it's been, you've been living.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: There was a longer gestation period in that other side, so, I mean, probably like six years. Six years living in Kettle Springs, in a way.
Yeah. It's, it's, it's funny because I'll talk with my, I'll talk with my agent. Not, not so much my editor, but, like, I'll talk with my agent and he'll, he'll be like, you know, be like, I want to continue the clown books because, like, my, a lot of my messaging around three is even, even Harper's. Like, they're calling it a trilogy. And I'm like, don't call it a trilogy because trilogy, like, you know, there's, you know, some storylines end in book three, but I still want to keep doing them because that's kind of, to me, that's the pleasure in some ways, of the slasher, of the slasher franchise is kind of pushing it in different directions and seeing how much elasticity, whatever conceit you have can go. And I don't think we're done.
I don't think I've run out of energy with three. So I'll be talking to my agent, and he's very nice guy, but he's an agency. Just like, how many do you really think you could do? He'll say stuff like that, and I'm like, hey, man, let's just keep trying to get them interested in it because I can keep going. You don't have to ask that. I can keep going. I really do I like living in the world? And it's so funny how I became like, a serious guy. I mean, I was writing, I was writing books for ten years before the first clown of the cornfield. And the first clown on the cornfield wasn't even intended, wasn't intended to have sequels.
So this idea of falling so in love with the characters and falling so in love with the world and falling so in love with the format of the slasher and being like, I could write these forever is such a new thing to me and it's such a, gives such interesting challenges. So much different than writing a standalone book. The fact that I have like multiple documents anytime. Drafting one, like when I was drafting three, like, I had, you know, our style sheet for two, which has like a cast of characters and, and locations and places where I'm like, I'm a stickler for kind of continuity and wanting to bring things back and make it feel like a real place. So it was like, you know, you have to be all the, everything has to be correct. Everything, every little thing about the timeline. Like, it's an alternate timeline from our timeline and the books are a varying distance from each other within that timeline. And there's certain things, this is a little bit exclusive for you and it's not even something that I've gotten Harper to agree to, but I would like to do a couple of stories that take place in between books because there's some things alluded to that happen between book one and book two and book two and two, three that there's little places that I have in my head can, and I have, like, well, actually, this happens to these characters even though it's not essential, it's not essential for these stories you're telling. But it's like, it's one of these things where like, I like to keep a running tally. So it's getting so much more complicated. But what I found is that that challenge is a good thing because it means you can't do the same thing. Like, I have like, a bag of tricks. I look back at my, like, backlist books. I look back at like video night and tribesmen and, and zero lives remaining to an extent. And there's, there's scenes in those books that are almost like cribbing. They're like, I know I'm good at creating a certain kind of tension and doing a certain kind of set piece like this. And I almost just like, I just like, self cannibalize that I do a scene or a similar thing or, you know, invert a scene. You can't really do that in. You can't really do that in a, in a series that's meant to be read kind of in a row. So it just forces you to do different things. It's like, well, I've already done something like that, so it can't be that. What else can I do? Which is it's, it's really nice. It limbers you up at like, keeps you on your toes in a way.
And then people are going to read three and be like, well, he's totally lost it. He's like, he's like, the people are going to read three and be like, what is he like? There, there were other places he could have gone. He didn't have to go what three is. And, you know, we can talk about three because you're one of the few. You're one of the few people who's read it. We were talking about this a little bit before getting on the mic.
I was kind of being like the Hitchcock psycho thing. Don't spoil. You're not allowed in the theater ten minutes after psycho starts. A little like that. I like that showmanship. But I also think it's kind of essential to fully enjoy clown three. I didn't want too many review copies floating around because I didn't want people who had paid their money for the book. It's $20 hardcover. I wanted people who paid their money and got it day one to have a fresh, surprising experience. I didn't want, I didn't want, like them to have lived it, you know, ten times in Goodreads reviews, if that makes sense. Yes.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Do you think that because of your success with one and two that it would allow you to do that? Because obviously this was your first book in the series. It'd be very hard to just not have people know anything about it.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: You can start with some of the things that are in this.
And that's what I kind of like, that's, we were talking about that idea of like, what do I like about slasher series? I like, I like the odd man out in the slasher series. Like, I'm a big fan of, like, the season of the Witches and like, the Freddy's revenges. Like, so I like, I'm an extra big fan. I'm tipping my hand a little bit here, but I'm an extra big fan of Halloween ends, which, which is, so I got on the call every, before we start a clown book, there's always a, there's always a call with Harper and it's like, okay, pitch, pitch what it's going to be.
And like, best, you know, like, if we don't like it, you're going to have to pitch again. Like, and this one, my opening line was like, well, I want to write the entry in the slasher that no one likes when it first comes, but it takes 15 years, and then everyone loves it. Like, look at season of the witch. It's one of the, it's probably, like the top. It's probably the next to the original. It's probably the most liked, the most talked about, the most memed Halloween movie.
And then, and then, like, I saw them just, like, start putting their head in their hands and I was like, wait, wait, wait. But it won't take 15 years. It'll just take to the end of the book. That's what I was like. I was like, I want to do the weirdo one, but I don't want it to have to take 15 years for everyone to like it. I want them to come around to it by the end of the book. And I think that's, you know, there's, the book is about, the book focuses on Quinn maybrook. I think that's not too much spoiler to say.
And it picks up directly from the end of two.
Two ends with, this is slight spoilers for the second book. So if you haven't read it, two ends with a scene that kind of teases what three is going to be. And I didn't want to cheat. I didn't want to not give people the resolution of what that scene is, but I didn't want to give them exactly what they think that scene is. I think there's a very big, you see it all the time in tv writing. It's not so much in movies. You see it all the time in tv writing. This idea of, like, listen to the fans, give fans what they want. And then, like, you get this point where, like, twitter is like, writing the last seasons of, like, a lot of tv shows. And I hate when that happens because it never, it never actually feels like the show. It always feels like some kind of weird fan fiction y riff of the show. And not that these are tv, but they are. I'm a human being. I go on the Internet, I see what people are saying about the books, and I see what people, you know, would express likes and dislikes, and I don't ever want those to influence me to the point where I'm not telling the stories I want to tell. So my pitch for this book is that idea of like, you get what you think you're going to get at the end of two, but you don't get it in the way you think you're going to get it. And that was kind of a key inspiration for the book. And there's a ton of subplots in this book, and there's a ton of things that aren't with Quinn Maybrook, but for the Quinn storyline, it was like, okay, this is gonna be some kind of revenge story. And what are my favorite revenge stories? My favorite revenge stories aren't the prototypical ones. They're not the. They're not death wish or not, even though I like, I love all kinds of revenge movies, but they are the ones that are a little bit more out there and a little bit more like, like sympathy for Lady Vengeance and, like, you know, like, within the, even the park chan wook movies, it's like, old boy isn't my favorite one. Like, you know, misrevention is probably my favorite. So it's like that idea, like, let's do something a little bit more akin to that.
And then there's a lot of, there's a lot of influences in this book. There's a lot of, like, weirdo hodgepodge digressions and interesting characters that show up because it's kind of, it's a road trip novel. So it's like, what I love about those movies is that you can have almost episodic interactions with different slices of America and different, different people from different walks of life. And that's kind of what this book is about. But it's also about people in clown masks cutting heads off. Like, it's a. How do you do. How do you do both?
How do you give people what they want and what it says and not, and feel like you're giving a product that's not disingenuous. But how do you also do something that is new and feels fresh and doesn't feel like you're just playing the hits?
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Well, I've always been, you know, this is obviously tv versus tv and movies versus books, but I've always felt like I've loved the Halloween series. I've loved, you know, those kind of horror movies. However, I do feel like at the beginning, Halloween one, Halloween two, those kind of things are believable. And then when it gets to a Halloween 17, you mean, like, when you get to a point, you have to. Then it starts to become supernatural, way more supernatural than it was probably intended to in the first place. You get this, like, okay, how many times can Michael Myers almost die? Or how many times can he live in this one town before getting caught and breaking out? And you know why I love the show? The show prison break when it was on Fox like a love, season one and season two made sense.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: How many times did they get out of prison?
[00:19:04] Speaker A: How many times let this person break out of prison? And so I think that there is something that's been said about, like, with, with season of the Witch and so on where it's like, tell a story. You know, the benefit of this one is that where season of the witch is different in a sense that it didn't have anything to do with. Right. It's a completely different story, whereas this book, at least Quinn is in the book. I mean, like, there's one of those things that's, like, deviating somewhat, but you still have that mean you're Laurie Strode or even your Michael Myers kind of thing in this book. That's what's different. That makes sense.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: And I used that maybe a little too much when I was building buzz, like the idea of season of the witch, and I didn't. I think people took it to mean, like, anthology. I think people took it to mean like, oh, it's not. And I was like, oh, no, no, no. If you started reading this book, if you hadn't read the other two, God, you're going to be lost. Like, there's deep lore. Like this is, this is, if anything, this is like the most intensely connected to the other book. You have to kind of know what's going on. But it's also playing with a lot of the other factors that you talked about. Like there is in Friday the 13th and in Halloween and in almost all of them, there is, if you go on long enough, your legends become kind of supernatural. And that's a big part of this book, too, which is something that I don't even know, even though we're a couple days out from the book coming out, I'm sure some people have read it and I'm sure other people haven't, and I'm trying to convince them to read it.
I'm high on my own supply, but I love this book and I love this world and I want people to enjoy it, but I do think there's stuff in this book that is like, okay, well, is this going to go supernatural? What is the. And it's coming from my love of the genre and all our collective knowledges of the genre, and it's coming from what's going on with slashers in literature because I think slashers are. We've talked about this before. I think last time. Slashers are, is an endemically cinematic genre. Like it's a, it's a film genre, but, but in the last, since the first clown book came out, there's been so many entries in uh, you know, the canon of literary slasher and like what Stephen Graham Jones is doing and all these different, like, so I think this book is a little bit reacting to that too. I think this book is uh, is the idea of like where do you, you know, if you've read the Jay Daniels books and you've read the first two clown of the Cornfield books, I mean these are, these are intended for teen audiences, but even a teen audience that's only read the first two clan of the cornfield books and maybe hasn't read wider is getting a little bit more comfortable with this genre and what, and maybe even what the limitations are and the expectations are. And it's on today and it's on to me to entertain myself and do, you know, do something different and look at what my contemporaries are doing and Josh, Josh winning with his, with heads will roll and try to, Brian McCauley, try to do something different here. All the.
You weren't supposed to die tonight. Like all the teen slashers that have come out, there's someone in your house.
There's now a larger tradition than when we started of this, both in the YA genre and I, you know, even like, even, even someone like the, even like the thrillers, even like the Karen McManus books to a certain extent. It's like these, there's this, this ten little indian style to these things.
So it's just, things got to get souped up a little bit for, you know, for there to be a clown in the cornfield. Three things gotta like, you know, there's even like, there's even a cinematic clown slasher, there's even art the clown. There's like these things have to get not so much reference because these aren't referential books. These aren't meta books at all. But they have to enter the stew and they have to enter my subconscious a little bit. And I have to reckon with them as I'm writing these teen slashers that I want to be accessible to a teen audience.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: You gave me goosebumps a little bit. Every time I hear Stephen Graham Jones and you talk about JD and I was like, get goosebumps. It's just one of those things that's like, Steven has done an absolutely phenomenal job with the slasher stories, and I was a teenage slasher was actually phenomenal as well. This year came out.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: But I love that one.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: It's phenomenal. It's amazing. And then obviously, you mentioned, John, the one thing about sex when you're getting Covid this past week, dude, is that the fact that the publisher for heads will roll chose our poll quote for the back. My poll quote for the back of.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Oh, nice. I have it right here. Is it on here?
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: Look, that.
And I wasn't even.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: My local bookstore has it on my hold shelf because I wasn't even able to go get it yet.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: You'll get it.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: I'm like, oh, crap.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: It's got your name on it, literally.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, it was kind of funny when he reached out about that. But no, I'm the slasher thing, but also the clown thing. We talked a little bit about this when you were on, you know, back, like, in the fall of last year, is that, that the clown story itself is a story that you have to live up to. Like, there's like, you have it. You have things that, you know, and nowadays in cinematic signs with, like, art the clown doing his thing and stuff like that. Like those. It's not just you're telling this great slasher story, but it's also revolving around a clown, which. Which could be a complete miss if you don't do it right. Like, you mean, like people could kill you for it.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: Talked about that last time of, like, I wanted to minimize the clown elements, but I didn't want to completely ignore it. Say it on the. It does say it on the name. And I think it's like, without having to do gags, without having to do, like, you know, the little pile flower full acid or something like that. Like, without having to do the Joker stuff. Like, how do you, how do you extend and keep talking about clowns and their history and how do you. And there's this parallel in the books about clowns in the United States and masks in the United States and all this stuff. It's all reflecting on both americana in history and current events. So it's like, how do you keep furthering that? And that's. This book is a big part of this book is the idea of, like, well, if the premise of Planet Cornfield one was people wanting to go back to the way it was, people wanting to go back to this imagined America of the 1960s, this kind of very bucolic mom and pop store diners, that kind of thing. Car hops, if you wanted to go back to this idea of, maybe, for lack of a better term, what boomers think America should be.
Well, what is the premise of three? If that didn't work, if that experiment didn't work, what do you do? You go back further. You go back further in time. You want to put.
I think there is something. There is something to that. And I don't think the books are overtly preachy. I think they're. I think they're. They're fairly. They're, you know, they're political in the. To the extent of, like, you can tell when they were written.
But I think. I think that a big impetus for.
For clientele Cornfield three was I. I had gone to.
I don't think I've told this story. This is. This is a fresh story. I've told this story to the publisher, but this is as good a time as any. But I had gone to a. I was invited to a teen book festival at a library in.
Down south. In Texas. Texas isn't really South Texas, Texas, but it was in between Dallas and Fort Worth.
And I was like, this is, like, the first time I'd had some.
My airfare paid for. Like, I was getting, like, reimbursed for all this. I was like, wow, they're, like, flying me out. Wow, this must be such a big deal. And I land, and they had multiple authors. Authors who were bigger names than me were there.
And they pick me up from. The librarian picks me up from the airport, and she tells me, yeah. I was like, well, how many kids do you usually expect? And she's like, oh, well, the local school districts, even though it's on a Saturday, they drop them all off. They drop all the busloads of kids off. They just have them sign up. And I'm like, wow, that's so cool. What a great. What a great thing. She's like, yeah, but, like, this year is a little weird because, like, they were. There was some. There was some discussion about, like, pulling books from, like, not our library, but our sister library. And then, like, guys showed up with, like, the week before, like, a guy had shown up with a gun to, like, storytelling, like, a kid's story time to, like, kind of, like, intimidate, like. Like, wanting to ban books and stuff like that. And I was like, ah, you know, like, you hear about that stuff on the news, and you're kind of like, I know it's. I know it's real, and I know it, like, impacts local politics, and it impacts the, you know, school boards, and it impacts. But you never think of it as impacting something that's completely innocuous and completely apolitical and completely. So I was like, oh, that's weird. I hope that doesn't have any impact on the thing. And the next day was the event, and she was like, you know what? The attendance might be soft this year, but we usually have 500 kids that show up. We usually have about 500 kids to show up the next day. No bus. All the sending districts didn't want to, didn't want to sit because they were like, well, it's dangerous. Like, if people are going to show up with guns, we can't. We can't do it. So it's like, it was so sad. It was like one of the, one of the weirdest, saddest moments. Like, because I was. They flew. They flew me in. They had a stacks of books for all the authors. And, like, it was just the kids. Like, you know, it was great to talk to the kids who came, but it was like, yeah, it was like maybe 25 kids for the whole event that was supposed to be 500 because it was the kids that were really insistent that their parents take them. All the kids that were, that were counting on the schools to bring them didn't go. So I was like, wow, this is like, this is going to be, this is going to make it into a client of the cornfield book. And it kind of does. It does in three. It's this idea that, like, you're, if you want to get that regressive and you want to get, like, tamp down that hard on what your kids are doing or what you're perceiving your kids to do or what you're perceiving your kids to think, how would that.
What's, what's the level up of that? And how do you make it a slasher? And that's what I. That's what. Three. That was the seed of three in a. In a way. And I'm talking so in such a roundabout way because I don't actually want to talk about what the main plot of three is. I know we're in, but does that make sense?
[00:29:06] Speaker A: And I read it and it makes sense to me, and I want to say, as a way to pitch it, so I will say preface everything that, not just because Adam's on this podcast right now, but clown in the cornfield one is my favorite book of all time. I'm not even. It's not.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: That is. That is incredibly kind of you to say. I don't know, man. That's thank you.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: And so, like, it is. It is. It is. I don't know, there's something about it and it, you know, maybe it is because it's a ya and you. You have, you know, there's realms that you lived in because it's a ya that I kind of like that. You know, I don't know exactly what. How to pinpoint why, but I just. The feeling I get after reading it and so on and so forth. But I will say that I'm also speak the truth in the sense that if I didn't like two and three, then I would say I didn't like two and three. I'm not just saying because I like number one, then you have to read the rest of them. There's a lot of things out there that number one is really good and everything else sucks. There is truth. There's a couple things out there that number two is good and everything else sucks.
But yeah. So saying that is that I truthfully believe why you're beating around the bush a little bit. I understand why you're going there. And I will say that as someone else. This is not just Adam saying this. This is me saying this because there's reasons why I can understand you're putting beating around the bush. I do think that coming into something fresh, I mean, the number of times that it'd be like watching a sporting event, knowing the score. And I think that there's a reason why that Adam's doing this and I believe in it, but it still has. If you like clowning the clone for one and you like number two, there's no reason why you shouldn't like number three. This is not like there's things that.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: You'Re going to like about. I'm trying to be a little circus back in like, what the plot is. It's not. It's not like I'm like, I didn't write, you know, a buildings Roman. I didn't write like, you know, it is a buildings Roman in a way, but it's like, I didn't write this. I didn't write. I didn't write a merchant and ivory story. They're not like, you know, they're not like, it's not a completely, you know, this isn't Downton Abbey. Like it's. It's, it's. It's. It's still clouded a court field. I just. I'm just being a little circumspect in how I. How I talk about the plot. Yes. Because I don't want I don't want people to ruin it. And there's that idea of, like, the thing we can talk about is we could talk about kind of the title and the main, like, yes, ideas behind it. It's called the Church of Friendo. And I think a little. I think already people got a little leery when you see that cover.
That was my first pitch for the COVID And I was like, well, there's no way they'll do this. They're like, oh, it's just a silly scarecrow. There's no added imagery at all there. But I think people.
I think people who, you know, you love the cloud of the cornfield book, the first one for plenty of people who didn't. And they didn't. They didn't like it because they felt maybe slightly attacked by, like, what the twists ended up being and what the central themes of the book are. And they thought maybe I was being a little simplistic in, like, the worldview and stuff like that. And that's one of those things where I'm like, I see it and I don't. And I think in these sequels, I'm kind of, like, reckoning with that. And I think it's like, well, let's. Let's make these themes and let's make these ideas not what you think they're going to be at first, especially if you didn't like the first book. Like, if you're like, oh, this guy's just like, getting on his soapbox because he's like, whatever. I don't know. I don't actually. I don't think like those people. So I don't really have a good frame of reference for 100% why they didn't like it. But I think the idea of calling it church a friendo and having that somewhat incendiary cover is you're like, you're. I'm having a little bit of fun. I'm like poking a barrel. But I think once you get in the book, what's funny is that it has this.
It has a theme and it has these characters. One of our main characters is in this church, the titular church. And she is not. It's not a joke.
She is not treated, she is not talked down to. She is a person of faith. And I take her face very seriously. And I think this idea of, like, I'm not making it like, it's not like a joke. I'm not, like, taking swings at, like, tell evangelists. I'm not taking swings at, like, Joel Osteen and stuff like that. I'm taking the idea of religious faith very seriously and also, also leaving the door open for the idea of if you're not a person of faith and if you're, and if you, if you don't have a religious background, you probably have something in your life that you feel that strongly about, you have something that is your church. There's this whole theme in the book of everyone has a different church. And as Quinn's going through her journey, she's meeting all these people. There's people, there are juggalos in the book, which is the first time that I'm publicly acknowledging that there are juggalo characters in the book.
To them, the gathering is their church, and there are wrestlers in the book. There are pro wrestlers in the book, and this is their idea that the squared circle is, is their church. There's this, there's, there's this theme of, of being open to the idea of not only faith but worship in a, in a broader sense. And I, and people will hear this from me and having read the first one and will not think that that is where I'm going to be coming from when I, when I talk about this stuff. So I want to kind of set people at ease who think, who are, see that cover and are already recoiling because maybe they don't see politically eye to eye with me and things like that. The book is nothing. The book is not a hit piece on church of anything. It's a, you know, it is an exploration of faith and what it means to be a person of good, of strong moral character and having a background in faith.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: I actually was surprised in a sense that, like, obviously, this is not exactly what the book is about, you know, but the name Church of Friendo, I was actually surprised that this hadn't, that I know of been done as much. The idea of having a slasher worship, you know, like, even the ideas of who the slasher the killer is, the morals, the beliefs, all that stuff of what that, why that person does what they do. Like, there isn't a church of Michael Myers book, you know, like, there hasn't been.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: That's the thing. There's. And there have. They flirted with it, too. They're flirting with it in, like, in tie and stuff with the jason. With the Jason books. And then, and in five, there's this idea of, like, the cult of Thorndye. And there is this, you know, there is this, like, paganistic way of looking at some of the slasher lore, which I, we had, the one discussion we had which was like, I got a little bit of pushback from Harper was like, does it have to be church? Can it be the cult of friendo? And I was like, no, because we already have a cult. We already have. We already have. Michael's already got the cult authority. I don't want to do cult. It's church. Like, let's go. And. And that was like, you know, that was a. There wasn't even an argument. It was just them saying, does it have to. We have to use the word church. And I was like, I don't want to use the word cult. Let's use the word church. Yeah. And that was. That was to their. To their, you know, to their, um, to their credit, they. They let me have a little bit of creative leeway there to just be like, no, I think the book should be called church.
Yeah.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: It surprised me in the sense that I almost kind of. I liked it as, like, you know, a next step in the evolution of. Of these characters. And I think that, you know, again, back to the whole, if you just stayed in one town, did one theme. Okay, cool. You know, Friendo comes a lot, you know, the whole thing from number one. And then if you just did that again, it happens again. And then it happens again. And it happens again. It's like, would I read those books 100%? Because I like what we live in. It's the same thing. I have a problem with, or people have a problem with in, and I feel similar to is in adaptations. So, like, if someone takes an adaptation into a film, or I say in the comic book world, if you take an adaptation of a comic book character, put them on in the Marvel Cinematic universe, for example, and they change some things up and change the storyline, I'm like, well, I want the character on the big screen. I want the idea of the character on the big screen, but it doesn't have to be word for word, speech bubble for speech bubble from the comic books, because I want something new. I want something different. I want to be able to. To live in the world of these characters, but have something to surprise me, something to keep me going. If you just retold Colin the cornfield one again in a third rendition, it would just be like, oh, cool, I get to live in this world again. But in the same sense, how much meat is there? And I feel like that's what's cool about the progression you've done with one, two, and three, is that it gives me something new, something fresh, something that I can experience. Quinn Maybrooke. I can experience some of the themes and friendo and all that stuff over again, but twist it up a little bit to make it so that it's new and fresh and unique.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: I appreciate that. And it's partly because I want them to be different and new and fresh, but it's also. It's a little bit selfish, too, because these things take me a year. I don't just, like, I don't bang these out in a month. You know, like, they take, like, there's like rounds of notes and rounds of revisions and there's. There's like a lot of phone calls and stuff like that. Because it's like, I think really hard about this stuff, like, we were talking about with just even general, like, continuity and like, and not wanting to repeat, like, character beats and set pieces. It's more than that. It's that idea of, like, I have to justify to myself and entertain myself because I'm very lazy, too. I have to be excited about the workers not going to get done. That's the idea of, like, it needs to feel.
It needs to feel vital to me and it needs to feel good in order to get me to sit my ass down and do it. Like, so, like, there is. There is. There is a certain amount of, like, I need to be energized by it. I need to. I need to feel that idea. And I think that. And it comes through in the writing. It's form helping function because you have to be excited and then the reader is going to be excited. I don't even know how you would like because writing for me is such a.
I wouldn't say a hard process, but it is. It is. It does require effort and it does require, like, all hands on deck cognitively. Like, I need to be, like, really, you know, in the zone, like, in order to even make progress in writing. So I think it's not something I can just passively do that. I think, you know, I couldn't imagine writing the same thing over and over again, you know, for lack of. For whatever people's take on three is going to be, because it does have such interesting thing. Like we already mentioned, there's juggalos, there's. There's.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: There.
[00:39:24] Speaker B: There are hitmen there. There's. There are several references to the seventies revenge road genre of Phil. There's like, there's dirty Mary Crazy Larry in there, there's vanishing point, there's race with the devil. There's a Winnebago in this book. Like, there. There is stuff that's. That's pretty far afield from our normal slasher tropes.
But it's all because not only do I, I'm not just throwing in the kitchen sink to entertain myself. I want to tell myself a story that I want to hear. Yeah. You know, that's, that's where this book comes from.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: Well, I think that it's hard enough living in the same world with the same characters and things like that to change that up. But like, you know, next week actually on the podcast is Daniel Krause returns to talk about pay the piper. And he writes, he was just talking about it like, every one of his books now is becoming a different genre. It's in a different genre because it's like, I just need to twist things up a little bit. I don't want to just sit in the horror genre. I just don't want to sit in Sci-Fi and so on and so forth.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: He just sold, it's a saga. He sold like a space opera.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: Living in that different world.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: He's an interesting, he's an interesting writer because he's just like, I see him as a very pure kind of writers writer. Like you said, I had told someone, oh, and then I'm doing a sequel to Clown. They're like, oh, mister sequel guy here. I'm like, I kind of am. Like, I do, like, I like, I like telling the same, you know, the, like we said, the obstruction of, of working in the same world. But I do, I do see what Krause is doing there is that idea of, you want to hop around, you want to be creatively fulfilled. And he's so excited that, like, he was telling me that book, he just, they just got announced at Saga, I think, like two years ago, two and a half years ago. I was with him at one of the scares that cares. We were having like breakfast and he was, he was telling me about that book. So it's like, just imagine how long the lead times are on these things. That book just got announced. It's probably not even finished. It's probably not even into arcs and stuff yet. So just from the announcement three years ago, he was like, I got this great idea and the ship is made as an organic world ship. And he was telling me all about this thing that I'm reading, the publishers marketplace announcement, and I'm like, oh, shit, this is the book. This is the one that he was telling me about. Which is, first of all, there was an announcement for like, you know, some six figure deal and like a two month deal. Like, that's awesome. But you love to see like someone's passion and they're taking this stuff seriously and they're, they're insistent on writing to a certain level and to a certain quality, and then you see them rewarded for it, too. Like, you see, like, like you look at whale fall and how the book, I think it sold really well. You see nothing but good reviews about it, film adaptation, all that stuff. And like, you, I love seeing things like that because I love seeing good work rewarded. It just seems cosmically, just to me, of like, this idea that like, this is, you know, these are, these are books that I love. And I know that there's, there's a lot of people in the horror scene right now having that kind of success. Like Rachel Harrison, who I think we talked about on the podcast before, and it's like Eric LaRocca. Like, this is like so heartening to me. It's like not only people talk about like, the health of the genre as a whole and like how like, oh, it's a great time for horror and like, horror is hot again, but that's always, that's almost like, that's almost just seeing the forest for the, like, and not seeing the trees kind of thing. Like, it's like, it's like, it's like. No, it's like these are, these are like specific cumulative victories like, that are building. Like, it's specific individual victories that are pushing a genre forward. It's not, it's almost not like the other way around. It's not like, it's not like editors are just like, boy, like, you know, we had this hot and cold tap of horror and now we're just going to turn it on and now we're going to publish all that.
[00:43:08] Speaker A: It's.
[00:43:08] Speaker B: No, it's, it's. It's like the. It doesn't just come from the getting place. You can't just get these books. You know, like these. These books have to be conceived and written and fresh and original and in, like we were talking about with me and Doctor Jones, like this idea of like maybe in conversation with each other because I'm so glad that I read. I read the angel of Indian Lake, I think might have been the first book I readdeze after I had approved the PDF for the. For clown three. Yeah.
And I'm so glad I didn't read it while I was writing it or when I could have changed things. Because there's stuff that, like, there's stuff that happens to Quinn, that happens to jade, like down to the exact. Like they like, there's like, literally injuries that happen to Quinn, that happened to Jade. Like that. They're almost exact that I'm like, this is, this is wild. People are gonna think. People are going to either think I ripped him off or I'm referencing that. But it's like, no, this is this weird. Like, I email with Doctor Jones. I read all his books. Like, he, he's kind enough to read mine. We've got a cover blurb on influencer for his, you know, his, like, it's, it's, it's. No, it's these. It's these artists working in a, in a world, in a continuum at the same time and like, being a weirdly on the same. In the same genre, being weirdly on the same wavelength. And it's, I think they're such interesting books to read together. If you like, you know, clearly you need to read the first two books in each series, but I think if you read clown three and you read Angel Indian Lake, they're like these weird sister books that I did. I hadn't read it. I hadn't. It was the first book I read. I'm going on record here before. People are like, why is he, like, writing an homage to angel of any, like, no, you'll see. Like, they're like, they're these weird, like they're playing telephone or something, these, these books.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: Yeah, great, great mind sneak alike. You know, great mind sneak alike. It's basically, yeah, no, see, I had it happen. So as a, as a day job, I'm a graphic designer and creative director for a brewery. And, and in that time, a couple of years ago, I created this label of a ski label, ski themed label. Snow with trees and all that stuff with a beer can. And like, I sent it to the printer two days later. It takes two, about a two week span time from printering design or sending to the printer and having the labels in hand in that. For that tweak period. Another brewery in Maine came up with a label that was like the same color scheme, the same theme, like, even with. Even down to a similar name to ours. And we had no discussion.
[00:45:27] Speaker B: It's just like, yeah, creativity is so weird because they're like, as much as we like to think, like, I am a true, I am a true soul of creative, we are all, we are our little input machines. We're just the, you know, we're just like, our brains are just computers that are just the beep boop, boop, boop. Like, turned on, a certain switch is turned off and there's probably something in the world that you as a designer and that person as a designer were taking in similar inputs because you're both in Maine, like, and ended up on the same. Like, that's just, it's, it's interesting. It's like, it's a, it's a very good example of what I'm talking about with that clown, three angel indian like parallels.
[00:46:06] Speaker A: And actually, in the comic book world, I even thought about the other day was like, Spider Man. I went to the comic book store, I looked at the shelf, and I saw a new Spider man comic book. And I look at it, I go, how is it possible that there's been thousands of Spider man comic books out there and very few of them look, I said, identical. Like, look. The same theme of the COVID Yeah. Except for when you're doing an homage to someone else. Obviously, that's different. Looking at a new comic, he's picked.
[00:46:27] Speaker B: Up that machinery a lot of times.
[00:46:29] Speaker A: Yeah, the pose. And I'm like, how is it possible that someone, and how does it not influence you as a creator? Obviously, someone who draws Spider man looks at other Spider man comics and looks at other things and have you not go, oh, crap, that looks identical to this one, and it's the same thing. It was almost impossible.
[00:46:46] Speaker B: I think about, like, I'm like, well, how many stories really are there to tell? And how many? Like, it's, but it's even, like, I find, you know, graphic artists and people who, and people who draw and illustrate and illustrators. Like, it's so amazing because I always like watching, like, how they do things. Like, certain people use reference photos and stuff like that. And it's like, well, it's just like, the human anatomy is, like, crazy too. Like, the way, like, the amount of articulation you have and, like, where you put the camera, it's just, it's just, it really is kind of limitless. Even though it seems like it shouldn't be limited. It's like, you know, it's a person. It's one figure on a page. You should be able to do it, you know? And I I'm kind of heartened by that. I do. I think about it sometimes in a, in a bad way. Of, like, yeah. Of like, ah, you know, every story has been told kind of thing, but you, if you think about it. No, like, because it, like, there's, there's where you are in time, and then there's, and then there's you, and then there's everything else too.
It's like, everything because even your labels, I'm betting they're, you know, I betting if someone knew your work really well, they'd be able to be, like, blind, you know, swap them around and be like, which way? Which ones? Like, you feel like that one. You know?
[00:47:53] Speaker A: Like, yeah, it's crazy. It's on that side. But it's also one of those things that it's like, I don't feel like there's something wrong with doing something similar to someone else. Like, even if you did have influence from someone else, like, someone's. A lot of these stories are original, but some of them are just out there. It's like, it's just a story that you told. A slasher is. It's like a prototypical. There's like a.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: No, it's.
[00:48:13] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a high line.
[00:48:15] Speaker B: You've got it. You got a set. You know, especially, like, where for the, you know, the first. The first clown gotta set. Even though things are done differently than a lot of slashers, there's, like, kind of like a mass killing element to some of it.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: It's that idea of, like, of, like, I didn't have to worry about structure at all because you have it right there. Like, it's like if you watch enough of these films and enough of the great ones, like, you can chart. And it's not, you know, people love the, you know, people love the save the cat, you know, structure of screenwriting. It's not. It's for the slasher. It's very much not that, because it was invented by. It was invented by guys across the US and Canada, some of them with mob money who are looking to make, you know, like, they were not. They were not reading, you know, the hero's journey like they did. They didn't. They didn't build it that way. And it didn't have. And it didn't build that way through that. Like you said, imitation through that kind of like, well, we need one like this. So you go make one. And they didn't study it too hard. It's not like they. They made their own thing and they made slight variations and then they all carry forward into this, what we think of as a prototypical slasher, which is kind of anything but just a. It's just a chassis that you can build a car onto, like, which is fun for me. That's. It's a lot. It's a lot of the way how I. Even before the clown books, how I approach stories, like video night was like, well, what if I did a. You know, it's about the eighties, and it's about videotape culture, and it's about horror movies. It's like, well, what were the movies from around then that I liked the best?
And it's Frank Heinelater movies and David Cronenberg movies and Fred Dekker movies like Night of the Creeps. It's like that. I think, well, let's put them all. Put them on a blender. What are the things I like about them? What are the things that I would do differently? What are the things that speak to me? And let's. Let's do my version of that. And that's. That's how I. That's how I approach pretty much every book before clown and in some ways, every book after influencers. The one that's not really like that.
[00:50:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:50:13] Speaker B: Influencer is the one that I think people have a lot of comps for. Influencer, like, I think you is a comp that happens all the time.
I think they put you meets Carrie on the back of the thing. That was another one where I didn't really the sales copy. I was like, yeah, whatever you want out there. There's no supernatural, but there's no real carry in it, but we'll take it.
[00:50:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it's weird. And some of those, I don't ever believe, like, someone was like, kind of like, okay, I can see that. You know, I can understand what you're saying on that, but, like, no, yeah.
[00:50:45] Speaker B: That'S pretty funny, but. But that was the one where it was like, well, I want to start with the family annihilation. I want to start with a murder. Start with a series of horrific murders and then work backward from there.
So that was the one that wasn't really conceived in a genre, and that's coming out in October 1. So I have two things to pimp on this show, but if you've read the clown of the cornfield books and you like them and you want another ya book that is way more disturbing and way more stressful.
[00:51:20] Speaker A: It is the best part about the influencer, in my opinion, that it is disturbing in the sense, but, like, you get that out of the way very early. You mean that? Like, it's like, it's not one of those things where you're, like, halfway through the book and you're like, what the hell? This is like, the first, like, I don't know, 15 pages. You're just like, guys, this is it. This is like, yeah, we're set a.
[00:51:40] Speaker B: Tone in the first 15 pages. It's like, a. It's a. It's a little bit of a. You know, it's a. It's something you steal from movies, too. It's that idea of like, of an opening of a, you know, a cold open, like you're thrown right into it. And it's this idea of like, well, you're gonna see basically like the strangers or funny games. You're gonna see it in miniature. You're gonna see it in that 1st 15 pages. Yes. And then you're gonna work backwards to figure out, what the hell was that?
Why did they do that? And like, so that's what influencer is. And then influencer splits between. It's a dual narrative book because it was.
[00:52:16] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: The interesting thing about influencer is it's coming out in paperback now, but it was actually. It was an audible original. It was a book that I had sold to audible and their input because it sold it as a partial, where the original version of influencer was written third person, past tense and similar to the clown books. And they were like, well, this is kind of a dual narrative because you have this character Aaron, who is this social media influencer and sociopath, and then you have this character Crystal, who is a girl at his new school. She's kind of a wallflower. She has many different assorted anxieties and neuroses, kind of like I have. And it's like, let's. She's the one person at school that figures this guy out. She knows who Aaron is. And then you just basically switch back and forth each chapter playing this game of cat and mouse where Erin's gearing up to do something horrible and she's going to try to stop him. But you don't exactly know how that's going to play out and if she's going to succeed and how much of his plan he's going to get to enact before she succeeds. So in that way, it's the closest thing I've written.
Every time.
Every time someone refers to the clown of the cornfield books as a thriller, an angel dies.
I don't really like that.
I grew up feeling that the t word was a dirty word.
I did not like the thriller word as a kid and as a high schooler, I've grown into it. I understand now that, no, there actually are generic differences.
It is its own genre. It has its own set of expectations and things that you need to do in order for readers to feel fulfilled or viewers, if it's a movie, to feel fulfilled, that they saw a thriller and not a horror movie.
At the same time, I do still consider this a horror book. To me, it's very horrifying. It's kind of definitely my scariest book in a lot of ways. Definitely my most violent book in a lot of ways. But there are all these thriller elements. There's all this stuff that's a little silent salami, a little.
There's. There's all these. There's a techno thriller element to it. So there's. I. It's the one book where when the publisher calls it a thriller or when readers call it a thriller, I'm like, you know what? I'm not going to correct it. I'm not going to get upset about that one because, you know, that one's on me. It is kind of like a thriller in some respects, but so if you're. If you're a reader that likes, is a little closer to the thriller end of the spectrum, you might. You might enjoy influencer, which didn't go away as an audiobook. The audible did this beautiful production. Christopher Briney from the summer I turn pretty, and the new mean girls, which I actually just watched, is very good. He's very funny in it.
He plays Aaron. And Crystal is Isabella Merced from the new alien, alien Ramos.
She's one of the stars of that, and they do a great job. It's an audible original, so if you already pay for audible, you already have it. Yes. If you're listening to this podcast as a podcast, go, go listen to it right now. But this is the paperback edition, and I wanted to do something special because I know how collectors are, and I know how it's like, the idea of this not existing in the physical world kind of rubbed me the wrong way. So I was very much a proponent of like, okay, so it could be an audible original, but can we, at a certain point, can that exclusivity window be over? Can we release it as a book? Because I wanted to write it. I wasn't writing it as a teleplay or, you know, as a radio play. I was like, I was writing it as a book with a capital b. So this is the definitive edition because it puts some stuff back in that would have been really hard to do on audio. There are chat logs in the book that are. You don't get to hear in the audio version that are basically how Aaron does what Aaron does to a certain extent. So those are, those are reproduced in the influencer paperback. So if you've already listened to it, you want a little bonus.
Those are there. If you want to double dip? Because that's a very hard thing to do, is that I own freaking 50 copies of the evil dead, and they're all different and they're all beautiful, like little snowflakes.
[00:56:25] Speaker A: I'm a hybrid reader, Adam.
Other than advanced copies of things, like, it's, most of the time, I'm a hybrid reader. So I'm, like, reading all the way to work in the morning in the office, I'm listening to the audiobook. I've, you know, end a chapter, and then I go pick up the physical novel or whatever, and I read the physical thing. So it is one of those things. When it came out on audiobook only, I'm like, okay, whatever this is, you know, this is what it is. But having the physical one, and also, I am a collector in that sense. You know, I'm a designer, so I like the COVID art, too. So the COVID art is phenomenal for the, for the paperback as well. And so I'm glad, in my sense, I'm glad it's different than the audiobook in that sense, just because it's something different and fresh.
[00:57:02] Speaker B: Tiny bit different. Yeah, it's a tiny bit different. There's nothing. There were, there were discussions, like, with the editor, like, oh, what if we, what if we kill this character that survives? Like, do that? I was like, no, no, no.
I just didn't want. I wanted it to. This is, this is me wanting to do right by readers that have supported me. I want them to be able to read it, especially if, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people who can't do audiobooks who don't enjoy doing audiobooks. I don't want them to miss out something on something that's, like, to me, it's not like a throwaway. I also think when you do stuff like that, when you do, you know, oh, it's a, you know, it's a kindle, original, short, like, and then, like, it's only on one format or it's only on one thing. To me, it feels when I'm a fan of someone, even if I love their work, I start to consider that inessential or, like, a lesser, you know, oh, maybe that's a lesser attempt, even though the author probably doesn't feel that way. I start as a collector and someone like, I start coloring it that way. And I think one of the big impetus of getting influencer out with Union Square books was the idea of, like, no, we want this to be a very deluxe, treat it like it's its own launch. Treat it like it's its own thing because I work very hard on it. I work just as hard as I work on the, on the clown books. I want it to feel. And I think it's, in a lot of ways, I think it's my best book because I know, like, if you were to like, gun to my head, ask me my favorite of my books, I probably say clown three or clown two. But you can't just, it's so weird to recommend, like, a sequel. They're like, well, what about clown one? It's like, I love, I think cloud one's great, and they're clearly there. There are people that think it's the best of the bunch, but to me, it's not so, like, my personal, to be able to have a shorthand to be like, oh, my favorite one is book three of this series, but you got to read the other two to get to it. Like, at least with influencer, I'm able to be like, what's your favorite book? Here you go. Beginning, middle, end. By the time we're done, we're very done.
[00:58:59] Speaker A: It also loops in, like, with influencer, it loops in independent bookstores, too, which is one of those things that's not negative, in my opinion. It's not negative to use, to have an audible original. That's an awesome thing. Obviously, if this is the only thing it is like, where you were, it's the only thing you had out there was this on audible originals, it would kind of suck for you. Both. Multiple reasons. One, if you go to a book, horror conventions and things like that, you don't have anything. Like, what are you handing out? Like, little promo cards.
[00:59:24] Speaker B: I've done that before. I've had digital books before I had the book. Mercy House came out as a digital only with Random House, and it's still such a bummer that I can't be like you said, I was handing out ones with like, it was even before QR codes, I had little, like, go to this website.
It was just, it was such a pain. You know, you're standing there at a convention and telling someone about a book you can't have sell it to him. I think that's exactly, that's a big part of it because I do a lot of conventions and I do a lot of bookstore appearances, and I want to be able to hard sell someone and be able to handle the book and be like, here you go.
So I think that's a big part of it, too. And there is like, look audible paid me. Love them.
The checks clear. It was great. There is that idea of, like, well, it lives with this one giant corporation that even if you're. Even if you. Even if you read audiobooks in a different way, if you read them through Libby or if you read. If you. If you were. If you're an itunes person, you don't have an audible account, you can't get it, which is such a bummer to me. So it was that a big part of that democratization was like, now there's an ebook version through all ebook vendors. Now there's a. Now there's a paperback version through all vendors. Like, local bookstore is going to have it. Your indies are going to be able to sell it. And there's a little bit more of that broad reach in a way. In a way that I. Yeah. That I like. I want everyone to be able to read it. I want it to be available to as many people as possible to enjoy, or, you know, in this case, scare quotes. Enjoy. Like, they're.
[01:00:50] Speaker A: We're twisted. We're twisted individuals. We do enjoy this.
[01:00:52] Speaker B: Like, my wife reads all my stuff, and it's not like she's a horror fan, but she's just, like, invested in me. But when. When she had. She had read influencer, as, you know, in galleys as a, you know, as a. As a word doc. And then when the. When the. When the audiobook came out, when the finalized audiobook came out, she's like, I'm skipping the first chapter. She just didn't listen to the first chapter. And I'm like, I get it. I understand. So, like, that's the kind of book we're talking about here. That's the book where the person that loves me the most that should want to, like. Like, listen to. It was like, I'm good. Like, she didn't want. She want to listen to that first chapter again.
[01:01:26] Speaker A: Trust. It's fine. And trust. I know what's going on here.
[01:01:28] Speaker B: I trust it's okay.
[01:01:31] Speaker A: There's, like, so many spelling errors, guys, in the first chapter, because no one else.
[01:01:34] Speaker B: Exactly. No one reread it. Even the editors were like, oh, no, this is wrong. There, like, six times. Now.
[01:01:42] Speaker A: What's funny is I get these galleys and I get these advanced copies, and very rarely do I actually, every once in a while, I pick up on a double period or some sort of, like, error. It's. Obviously, it's not the finished copy, but I just read a parks welcome to Pawnee from Jim O'Hare, which is a memoir of type of the parks and recreation. And he was Gary Jerry whatever from parks and rec. It was phenomenally written, but there's definitely a line in there where it's like, add next paragraph right here that I.
[01:02:07] Speaker B: Was just like, I've seen that narcs.
[01:02:10] Speaker A: But I'm like, wait, is the extra paragraph here? And they just didn't delete that line? Or am I still missing a paragraph? I'm like, I feel like I'm going to need to compare when I actually get the book in November.
But it was just kind of funny on that side.
[01:02:22] Speaker B: You know, how the sausage is made now.
But.
[01:02:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So, influencer, it's October 1, which is obviously a little bit farther away. So you can pre order that at your local bookstore.
[01:02:31] Speaker B: You can. There's the sign ones at children's book world. There's, you know, Union Square. I don't know. I don't know how much they talk about this, but Union Square books is technically, is a company owned by Barnes and Noble, which is interesting. But they do, they do sell through indies. They sell through bookshop, through all of them. But I find it so interesting that there's like split custody of this book. It's like, well, Amazon owns half and Noble is putting out the other half, or I guess not owns, but like, yes, distributed. Distributed exclusively through bars. But it's like they're, it's like they're like, it's like they're fighting. It's like the War of the Roses.
[01:03:05] Speaker A: Over here, but yeah. And then obviously, as of this episode, dropping clown in the cornfield three, the Church of Friendo is available at your bookstore. So you should, if you're listening to.
[01:03:16] Speaker B: It, the week it comes out, it's launch week. Yes. Nothing. Nothing beats a sale during the launch week. So please, if what I said dissuaded you, I was wrong. I was very tired and I said it, said it the wrong way. Imagine that.
[01:03:27] Speaker A: Here's the thing, the way that you.
[01:03:29] Speaker B: Would like it to be.
[01:03:30] Speaker A: If you don't like it, give it to a friend. There you go.
You can give it as a gift. You can, you know, donate to your local, you know, goodwill and someone else could buy it. But don't buy it first.
[01:03:39] Speaker B: And then.
[01:03:42] Speaker A: But, yeah.
[01:03:42] Speaker B: And so as you wrap up, they look great.
[01:03:45] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[01:03:46] Speaker B: Here's the thing. Because we're all collectors and because we are, we are on a partially comic book podcast. They look unbelievable when you stack them together.
[01:03:56] Speaker A: Apparently you have the.
[01:04:00] Speaker B: Let me get them all. This will be the first. This is the first time I'm seeing.
[01:04:04] Speaker A: Them together, and I see that you respect so much, Adam, is that they. All of the fonts are roughly the same size. They're all, like, same direct. I don't know. I've read books where it was like, clown on the coinfield one, and then the number two, it was Adam Caesar. Really big.
[01:04:19] Speaker B: Or they'll switch up the format. Or they'll switch up, or one will be slightly bigger than the other one.
Sometimes it's. Sometimes it's not the publisher's fault. Sometimes it's like, yes, paper stock or something like that. But we are got. We've got so lucky.
And I will say the first. The first draft of this. This. This one was the spine of Colin Cornfield three. I think they tried to use black again. I was like, we can't have it.
[01:04:44] Speaker A: Black.
[01:04:44] Speaker B: Can't have it.
[01:04:44] Speaker A: Double up.
[01:04:45] Speaker B: We gotta, we gotta, we gotta. This is the folkar one. So we gotta go earthy tones. We gotta go dirt and dirt and wilted corn. So that. So this is. A lot of thought goes into it. It's so funny that I, like, had no. I had absolutely zero input on the.
On the back cover copy. Like, not that I didn't. Not that I. Not that I didn't. Wasn't afforded opportunity. I just didn't. I was like, yeah, that's good enough. But when it came to. When it came to, like, what you're saying, that idea of design, and I'm like, no, these have to line up perfect. You need to incentivize people to line these suckers up on their shelves, get.
[01:05:16] Speaker A: Them all on there.
[01:05:17] Speaker B: I'm. I'm a little. I'm a little, uh, for clemp right now. This is gorgeous. This is the first time I'm seeing them all three stacked next to each other. They look awesome.
[01:05:24] Speaker A: They're beautiful.
[01:05:25] Speaker B: If nothing else, they'll look really nice on your shelf.
[01:05:27] Speaker A: And that's why you got to get it now. You got to. Don't wait for the paperback hardcover and so on and so forth. And, uh, is, uh, just quickly, as we finish up here, is, um. I can't remember your name. It's doing the audiobook. Is the audiobook coming out?
[01:05:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Jesse Velinsky. Jesse Wolinski is back for round three. I actually haven't heard it yet, but we were talking a little bit, her and I were talking a little bit about she had sent me some kind of juggler meme because she was like. I was like, oh, yeah, that's true. You had to do like juggler voices in this book. So I can't wait to listen to Jesse's performance of it.
Their audiobook drops the same day. So you can go over, click over and grab that.
Yeah. And there's, and there's, people are going to be excited. I don't actually know. I don't think they replicate it in the audiobook. But if you get either the print or the Kindle, there's my afterword in it.
This is a little bit of an exclusive, too, because I'm talking about in the future because we're talking in 20 days from now. But this is the, the afterward is about my experience on set of the client of the cornfield movie. So that's a little, that's a little, that's a little tease for you there. So that's, it's so funny because post about these books, people. Yeah.
[01:06:41] Speaker A: That's in post production now, right?
[01:06:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's always, it's, yeah, I think it's done. Like, I, I don't know. I, I can't, I can't say too much. I get myself in trouble. But I think it's, I think it's done like maybe.
[01:06:53] Speaker A: Well, according to IMDb, yeah.
[01:06:56] Speaker B: It's more than a rough cut. It's more than like an assembly cut. I think they're like, it pretty done. Like, um, but it's so funny because I post about these books and, and people remember that there was a movie announcement and they're like, they want information about the movie. And of course, I want to give it to them. But I also, like, like, they'll, like, send some kind of, like, corporate, like, hitman after me and I'll, like, just end up, like, I'll end up having an accident. Like, I can't, I can't talk too much about it because there hasn't really been any kind of formal announcement. And I want to, you know, just for hype reasons, you want to wait until there's, like, trailer or a poster or stuff like that you want to share, like, the official stuff. But I have sitting on all this, like, cool, great stuff and, like, fun anecdotes that I, like, can't, I wish I could use on a podcast. Like, yeah, I got all this cool movie stuff, but what I can say is the stuff that's been announced, like, it's Eli Craig who directed Tucker and Dale versus evil directs this. I haven't seen the movie. I've talked to people who've seen it. I've seen, I've seen selected sequences. I've seen more than a trailer, like, more than a trailer or less than the movie, I'll say. And the stuff that I've seen just really makes me want to see the movie. It's really.
I think people who like the book are going to be very happy, and I think there's enough new stuff here. What's interesting is, I think everything stays roughly the same, and a lot of the kills are different, which is great. It's like a.
It'll keep you on your toes. But I also hope that when the finished film comes out, people won't feel like, oh, well, that wasn't like the book. It's like. It's like.
[01:08:26] Speaker A: It's like the book.
[01:08:26] Speaker B: It's so many integral story ways, but in the. You know, in. In the ways that are. That can be new and exciting and novel and cinematic, it's. It's. It's its own beast. Like, it's very much, you know, it's. I'm. I'm a film student, so I'm gonna be like, you know, I'm gonna go alter theory. I'm like, it's, you know, it's Eli Craig's film. Like, so, like, when I. You know, when I talk about it, I don't talk about it in any sense of ownership, but it's not in the way of, like, it's not in the way where you hear authors, like, talk about it, talk about movies that they don't really, like. Like, adapted from their work, that they're kind of, like, distancing themselves. I'm not doing that. I'm doing the. I'm doing the pretentious film school guy thing of, like, it's, you know, it's his movie. That's it. You know, it's the director's other talented artisans. I was literally there for a day. I didn't do crap. I was like. I was like, wow, look at all these hardworking people. And I'm just standing there, like, literally take it up.
[01:09:15] Speaker A: You did your work. You wrote the original.
[01:09:17] Speaker B: Like, they kept having to keep, like, they kept being like, you know, it was. It was an outside set. It was like they closed down the street. It's. They basically. They basically built kettle springs. So I had to be like, I had, like, I had a lot of, like, I crossed the street or I'd moved to a different place, and I look as. I look, like, I look. I look like a twitchy, you know, weird guy. They think I'm like, a looky Lou. They keep thinking security kept coming up to me and be like, you get a medicine. Like, I kept getting thrown out of kettlespring, and I was like, I was like, this came from my mind.
[01:09:49] Speaker A: Well, I know what happens at Kettle Springs, so you might as well, you might as well just laugh. So it's probably not a good.
[01:09:54] Speaker B: Yeah, so I have, like, fun stories like that, and then I have other things that are more specific that I'm not.
So we'll, that's, we'll leave it at that as a little tease of what. If you pick up the book, you could read more than has been announced about the movie.
[01:10:09] Speaker A: That's awesome. And I'm excited to see Will Sasso. Will Sasser is awesome. I love seeing him as an actor.
[01:10:13] Speaker B: I know that that's on. I know that that's on IMDb. I didn't even, I don't even know. I can't even. I really talked about the cast publicly. I know. I think everyone will say there's more people. I'll say there's more actors in it that are on IMDb. What's interesting is there are more actors in it that are on IMDb. But I think when, when you make a movie and you kind of, it's a lot of, like, it's a lot of, like, people's, like, reps and their managers stuff, like, hook up their IMDb and you can't really, like, no one's gonna stop them from doing it. We haven't really announced, like, there's been no trailer. Haven't really announced in the movie who's in the movie. But I'll say there's more people than there are currently on IMDb. But everything is on IMDb is correct. Yes.
[01:10:49] Speaker A: And I will say, I won't say anything else.
[01:10:51] Speaker B: If you want a little scoop, you can go do that and we'll say, so, God, I gotta find. I got such a.
Have me back on the podcast for. Hopefully there's gonna be a, if enough people buy it this week, hopefully there'll be a clown of the cornfield four. You could have me on the podcast and ask me a funny will sassa story. It's also funny, but also kind of depressing because I'm such a nerd.
[01:11:10] Speaker A: So it's like, and I'm saying we can check that out yourself. People on IMDb, but, like, who they have as Quinn also did not make me think it doesn't look like Quinn. Not saying that that's what I had in my mind of Quinn. But when the casting was done well in my opinion, because I do feel like, yeah, it doesn't not look like Quinn.
[01:11:27] Speaker B: It's an interesting choice. I'm very excited to see the film.
[01:11:32] Speaker A: And her, which I am, too, I'll tell you right now, Adam. My daughter's name is Riley Quinn, and there is, there is a connection there. I won't say that it's named after Quinn Maybrook, but I will say that the name, reading Quinn in a book put the name in my head, and that's my wife and I talked about naming my daughter.
[01:11:49] Speaker B: That's very, very nice.
[01:11:51] Speaker A: Like I said, I hate to credit.
[01:11:52] Speaker B: For that one, though. That one.
[01:11:53] Speaker A: Well, I'm a comic book fan, and my son's name is Nova, and it has, literally has nothing to do with Nova, the character. It's just a name that stuck in my head. And I was like, let's do this. Let's do Nova da da da. So now I have, like, a thousand Nova.com books inside comics and all this stuff because of it. But there wasn't, like, I named him after Nova. And same thing. I didn't name him, but, like, there's a, it's a, it's in the mind. It's in the ether. It's got, you know.
[01:12:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's how the mind works. That's great.
[01:12:18] Speaker A: Exactly.
[01:12:18] Speaker B: That's great to hear. That's, yeah.
[01:12:20] Speaker A: So Quinn. So she won't be watching anytime soon or reading the books anytime soon, but one of these days, I'll have to.
[01:12:26] Speaker B: Think they'll be vintage when she.
It's gonna be like a first edition movie.
[01:12:31] Speaker A: Signed first editions, paperback.
[01:12:33] Speaker B: Exactly. There you go. You got her legacy there.
[01:12:36] Speaker A: I'll have to buy two, right. I have to buy everything in two so she can have her own version of it because, you know, that's why I have Nova number one. I have two copies of it, one for me and one for him. When he gets older, he's not allowed to touch it yet, but when he gets older, three now, but, yeah, but, yeah. So clown and cornfield three is out. Now. You can buy one, and two are also still available out there. So buy all those or listen to audiobooks.
[01:12:58] Speaker B: People have a hard time thinking, they think because they go out to the Barnes and noble and they only have the soft covers there. If you want them all to match. The hardcovers are, they're on Amazon. They're on all e tailers. They're still technically, I think, still in print. And you can get a nice, fresh copy to match your other ones. Also, the thing about the hardcovers is that they routinely are cheaper than the paperback. So if you want them to line up, don't think that that's any kind of cost impediment. Just go buy one and two on hardcover and they'll line up with your, your three hardcover. I get a lot of requests. People get bummed that they can't get a soft cover right away or you can't get a paperback right away. It's out of my hands. It's not like, not like people get like kind of angry at me and I'm like, this is not something. I know some, I know some, especially ya books do the hardcover and the paperback at the same time. I think they're just, it's just not the model Harper uses. Um, so you just gotta wait. It's like, it's like nine months usually, um, for the paperback to come out.
[01:13:53] Speaker A: But there is a way for marketing. Uh, exactly.
[01:13:57] Speaker B: It's another push. It's like you launch the book again kind of thing. Like they'll launch it for Christmas kind of.
[01:14:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:14:01] Speaker B: Which, I understand it. Or they'll launch it for, I guess, next Halloween. Yeah, Halloween is, which is, which is, um. I understand why they do it. Um, but know that that's not my decision. I know people are sometimes get, they're like, where's the paperback? Or I'm like, I'm a hardcover. I don't, not going down to kinko.
[01:14:19] Speaker A: It's like, it's not like, yeah, exactly. You're printing these all in your house, your real basement, your kids down there, very young kid out there making bootleg.
[01:14:28] Speaker B: We're making bootleg kind of the core fields, like I'm gonna take.
[01:14:31] Speaker A: Well, that's what you did for influencer, right? That's why how you got the paper back is you were making like, well.
[01:14:36] Speaker B: I do have, for mercy House, I have a, I have a, I went to Kinko's and I printed it because I was like, there needs to be a physical edition of this ebook. Otherwise, like, there's like once the EMP goes, it's gonna be wiped from existence. I need that.
[01:14:49] Speaker A: Well, we have that. And actually just quick antidote before we go on, finish this up is that we're reading that as part of your whole year long of books Mercy House be reading in September. So if anybody wants to join around, join in on us all reading it together.
[01:15:01] Speaker B: So. It's so gross.
[01:15:03] Speaker A: Yes. I'm excited. I haven't read it yet.
[01:15:05] Speaker B: I hope you enjoy.
[01:15:05] Speaker A: I'm excited. Yeah, I'm excited to read it. I have it set to read in September. And also one last little pitch. I loved last. Was it last night? Yeah, I loved it. It's available on Amazon prime, everybody you.
[01:15:17] Speaker B: Can'T see, but yeah, it's fun. I think it's on Tubi now. I don't even know. I think it's on to be so, like, people were asking before how they saw it and they kind of were like, bummed. I was like, oh, you got to pay $5, like, to watch it on itunes now. You don't have to pay now. You can just watch detergent commercials in between it.
[01:15:34] Speaker A: And I think actually, I went online, it says it's included in my prime. So if you have Prime, Amazon prime.
[01:15:39] Speaker B: It'S included in that, too.
Yes. It's a cult. Takes over a bowling alley.
It was a movie born out of the fact that director Jamie Nash and I were approached by producers who basically said, we have a bowling alley. And we're like, you have a bowling alley? And they're like, yeah, but they're not going to knock the bowling alley down. They're like, they're going to knock the bowling alley down. And they're like, yeah, can you write a movie in a week that uses this bowling alley? And we're like, write a movie.
It goes on like that. It's the who's on first bit. But that's very proud of. Very proud of that movie.
It's weird because, again, I don't take ownership because it's Jamie's movie. Jamie directed it. And we've got another picture that I did with those same producers is actually playing frightfest in London. Yes. Right when this is like the weekend this goes up. Yes. Jill Kisbergin's the ghost game. Wrote the script for that one, too. I've gotten to see both of them. Ghost game is doing a festival tour right now. Just did. I saw it in Chattanooga when they played it there.
But yeah, these are, it's weird. The movies are weird for me because I don't, I promote my books like, I promote my book like they're all me, like promoting the movies because I'm like, I love them and I'm, and I feel very proud that I'm to be involved, but it's just like they're, you know, they're things, a whole team, you know, they're a team effort. I was part of every small, very small part of the team. Another thing, kind of like the cloud movie where I was like, I was on set for a day at each of these just because I was like, I wanted to be a lookie Lou. And, like, Michael C. Williams from Blair Witch project is in.
Is in. Is in the ghost game. And I was like, let me go down and, like, get a picture with him. Like, you know, like that kind of thing.
[01:17:22] Speaker A: Like, he didn't walk around set being like, do you know who I am? Do you know?
[01:17:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I. So I. It's funny because Jill, you know, they clearly, you know, they had a better relationship because they were, like, shooting for three weeks, close quarters. Like, she has. She has a picture of, like, her and him, like, standing in the basement against the wall, like, at the end of Blair Witch. And I'm like. I'm like, oh, man, it would have been cool to get one of those.
[01:17:45] Speaker A: Well, it's so funny how, like, if people do that, like, my buddy Paul, who owns the comic book store in my area, my local comic book shop, Charles Soule, just came in randomly. Like, we live in Maine. This is Bangor, Maine. Like, this is. We're in the middle of nowhere in a sense. Like, we are. We're a city and stuff like that. But, like, having some best selling author, a comic book writer, just drop in. It's really crazy. And he goes, he left, and I was just coming from work, and I missed him or whatever, and I said, hey, you get a picture? He goes, I didn't want to be that kind of guy. I'm like, dude, I understand that, but, like, you're the owner of the shop, and I know you're not coming back.
[01:18:14] Speaker B: He was all right to do it. Yeah.
[01:18:16] Speaker A: He's not, like, walking down the street, and you're just like, they're at home. They're trying to get some groceries. You're at the grocery store taking a picture with them. This guy's in your shop. You're in charge of the situation.
[01:18:25] Speaker B: There's certain spaces where it's okay. Like, it's. You don't want to. You know, there's certain spaces where. Where fan interaction is. And you can get a little, like. And I do. Like, I have stories where I've met people, and I haven't. Like, yes, of course it would be inappropriate to bother, but, like, waiting for.
[01:18:40] Speaker A: A doctor's appointment and you're, like, in.
[01:18:42] Speaker B: The picture, like, you're getting. You're getting, you know. Yeah. You're getting. You're getting.
[01:18:46] Speaker A: You got to get your corner.
[01:18:48] Speaker B: I wrote that outfit down. I wrote, like, you should be wearing khakis. Like, let's get a picture.
[01:18:52] Speaker A: Like, but, yeah, yeah. So you got all kinds of stuff coming up here or things that are available right now, which is amazing. We're big fans of your work at Deadmall as well. Phenomenal graphic novel. That's over.
[01:19:05] Speaker B: We'll do a dead mall sequel. I know. I've talked to dark horse. Like, was interested, and they wanted to do it. I just. It's just like, how many. How many, how many hours in a day do I have? So it's like, it's one day, and it's one of those things where it can sit on the back burner for a little while. I think we can still do it. Well, I love it.
[01:19:19] Speaker A: I'm sure they'll, like, have you back. And, you know, and David's work on that is phenomenal as well.
[01:19:22] Speaker B: Oh, he's still good. And so he's grown from strength to strength. The new series, he's honest is beautiful. He's doing. Doing wonderful work.
[01:19:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So. And then you got, you know, cloud in the cornfield three right now, and influencer out in October. Yeah. And we'll look for that news in the movie.
[01:19:39] Speaker B: We'll open news on the movie. And then. And then I'm, like, going into hibernation for, like, a year and a half. That's so weird. It's because, like, I got, like, I got all this stuff coming out. I got, like, a bunch of, like, short stories that are published in, like, the next two months, too. But then it's like, all right, that's it.
There's nothing else to publish. I just gotta, like, not like, I go away now. I go away for a while. But people.
[01:19:58] Speaker A: I'll put it here, though.
[01:19:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:20:00] Speaker A: If you have. If people buy the book. And so I'll tell you right now, Adam will be back on the podcast if clown on the cornfield four comes, which is we're all hoping for.
[01:20:09] Speaker B: That is a promise.
[01:20:10] Speaker A: Clown the cornfield for season of the friendo.
[01:20:14] Speaker B: Oh, it already is. Not official yet, but I have a title. It's such a good title. It's such a good title. You mentioned what it is.
[01:20:23] Speaker A: Yeah, you mentioned the stories in between. Quickly, I want to. Really want to end this. Stories in between is. I just actually appreciated that you heard of Nita prose is the mystery guest and the maid and those books that came out over the past couple years, and they have another one coming out next year, but they just wrote the mistletoe mystery, which is a short novella that came out that was just, like, a story to, like, wet people's whistles before they get to the next novel, and those kind of things were fine. I read it. It took me, like, a day to read, and I just read it out there. It wasn't very groundbreaking, but it was a phenomenal, like, little, like, oh, I want to live in this world and tell a story.
[01:21:01] Speaker B: People want that they got to tell hard because I, like, pitched this, and they've already been like, like, so I really do want to do it, like, and I'm keeping these. It's funny because it's like, like I said, they don't go bad. I have these. I have these blanks, you know, in between these books where I have little, little. It's funny that you say the mistletoe mystery because one of them's. One of them is a Christmas story because I don't want to dedicate a whole book to, you know, I know terrifying trees doing it. I don't want to do a whole, you know, Christmas.
[01:21:28] Speaker A: Well, that's why I think Brian McCallie's.
[01:21:29] Speaker B: Books a long time to be, like, in the Chris, especially if you're reading in the summer, you're gonna be like, I'm not feeling very christmassy, but I have a little. One of these. One of these little one offs I'm talked about is with fan favorite characters during. Would take place during two and three. After two, but before three, and it would be a Christmas story.
[01:21:45] Speaker A: I'd read it.
[01:21:46] Speaker B: There you go.
[01:21:46] Speaker A: You got one. So email. I, like, create, like, 17 different emails.
[01:21:52] Speaker B: People want to know. Rust Cole story. The Rusty Cole at Princess is the. Is my pitch for. For one of these. One of these novellas. You're getting all kinds of.
Or maybe I'm just, like, maybe just loopy and I'm just saying, like, talking myself into the grave here, but, yeah, that's. That's one of my, you know, what am I.
[01:22:10] Speaker A: But, yeah, it's possibility. People turned this off, like, 20 minutes ago, so it's fine.
[01:22:14] Speaker B: I'm on YouTube. I know. Like, I see my completion rates. Yeah. Even my tiktoks. And if my tick ties get to 40 seconds, like, 1% of viewers, like, reach that end. Like, so, like, it's like, I understand. We could say anything we want right.
[01:22:29] Speaker A: Now, but, yeah, I appreciate you taking your time out of the day, rescheduling. We had some. I was ill.
We're doing great here, and I appreciate it, and I'm really looking forward for people, other people to read clown the cornfield three because I like talking to people about books, and I obviously can't talk to people about books.
So I gave, so I had a paperback copy of one and I had my hardcover, and I gave my paperback copy to a young adult, and they loved it. And I was like, okay, you can get number two and so on and so forth. So now I'm excited to see where they go with that too, because it'd be fun to interact with that person too, but very, very interested.
[01:23:10] Speaker B: I'm very excited, but also a little bit dreading. I'm excited to hear what people think. So we'll see.
[01:23:15] Speaker A: Hey, you guys think by the time.
[01:23:16] Speaker B: This interview airs, I'll know and I'll be very depressed in a Houston airport motel.
[01:23:22] Speaker A: So you're the guy that ruined the clown in the cornfield.
[01:23:27] Speaker B: Don't hit me.
[01:23:27] Speaker A: Yeah, but, yeah, I appreciate. And you can check out, Adam has a website. You can check out stuff, too. That's where you can also find the books.
[01:23:34] Speaker B: I got my, I got everything.
[01:23:35] Speaker A: Social media.
[01:23:36] Speaker B: If you find me in one place, there's a little, I love Linktree, so there's like, there's like a little smorgasbord of links if you're, if you're interested in anything else. So you find me in one place, and if you don't like me there, I'm probably more entertaining somewhere else.
[01:23:49] Speaker A: You don't like them there that you're.
[01:23:51] Speaker B: Yeah. If you don't like me on TikTok, you'll never like me anywhere, so.
[01:23:55] Speaker A: But I really appreciate Adam.
[01:23:57] Speaker B: Thank you, man. Thank you so much for taking the time.
