[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to another horror week episode of the Capes and Tights podcast right here on capesandtights.com dot. I'm your host, Justin Soderbergh. This episode is once again brought to our friends by brought to you by our friends over at Galactic Comics and collectibles in Bangor, Maine. Visit
[email protected] this episode is Nat Cassidy, award winning playwright, director, actor and musician. He's appeared in such shows as Blue Bloods, the Good Fight, Quantico and so much more. His plays have been on off Broadway, New York award winning, up and coming whatever you want to call him in the playwright world. But he's also directed some things and he's acted in some things. And he's also an author, and that's the reason we're here to talk to him this week. He's the author of books like Mary Nestlings and the upcoming novella rest stop that comes out October 15 from shortwave publishing. And also, he has a book that you can pre order right now called when the wolves come home that comes out in April of 2025 from Tor nightfire. But this episode we're here to talk about rest stop, his novella coming out October 15 from shortwave publishing. Enjoy, everybody.
Welcome to the podcast. How are you today?
[00:01:13] Speaker B: I'm doing well. How you doing?
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Good. I'm doing wonderful. First off, you know what? A couple days from now, someone's birthday is. That's what I've heard.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Bruce Springsteen, Tony DeFranco, Michael.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Well, it's funny because I've said that before to someone. They're like, where'd you hear that? It's not. I go, well, Wikipedia is one of them. He's like, that's not true. That's actually not my birthday then. But yeah, if you google it, it actually is. Right? So is your birthday. Your birthday is coming up here on the 25th. So there you go. You'll be 26. Yeah, there you go. So I was thinking to myself, like, this is actually coming out, I think, October here, October 3. And so it's actually a happy belated birthday when this actually releases. But happy early birthday when we're recording. So it's right in the middle. Um, but you'll be 26.
That's great.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: I'll be 26 again. Uh. Oh, my God. I am kind of close to 26 twice, aren't I? Not yet, but. Oh, God.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: But that's great. So it's your birthday. It's, it's good time of year. It's horror time, which really let's be honest, horror time for us horror fans is 365 days a year. But it's, you know, I'm getting in the mood and actually, it's funny because I think you posted something or someone posted something. Something that I'm actually, like, getting in the mood by reading nestlings. But yeah, so I was trying to get it done before we talked. But you know what? I'm a parent. I got full time job.
This.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: I'll take those reasons. Other than like, I'm just not vibing with it. I don't like it very much. It's too long, if that's true.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: But this was perfect. No, that's too long. No, just kidding. But yeah. So we're here to talk some horror stuff versus our horror week. This is like the second or third year we've done it and we're doing that. So this, this week we had, CJ Leed is joining us. We have, we did a review of swamp thing, the movie, with a friend of mine. We got Clay McCloud, Chaplin, Chapman coming on. That's a two for, that's a two for one. Because he writes comics. We're going to talk comics, but we're also going to talk his books. And we have a couple of comic book writers in artisan. So it's a fun, it's a fun week here. We do this with. Throw you right in the middle here so we can talk some horror stuff. But you're, you're a man of many talents.
You're not just, you try, I say talents. You do a lot of things. I don't know how well you do them all because I haven't seen them all. But I'm saying is that you try at least multiple things.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: I do. I do. In fact, I'm in the middle of editing a video I'm going to post as soon as I get off of this, this, this chat of playing some more songs. My little procrastination. Procrastination playlist, as I call it. So you can judge for yourself if, if that's worth watching or listening to.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: I mean, I see people have many people with many talents, many things they do. Authors, writers, playwrights, actors, directors. You basically can say you have that. You do that because you've done it at some point. You mean like those people who, when you see your New York Times best selling author, you can say that forever, even if it's only happened once. It's like this. You check that box off. Would you consider yourself all of the things that are listed, like on your website, but right now, currently, or is it more one of those things like, you did act and you're not going to look, you're not acting currently or is it. Or you just say those things? Are you just who you are as a person?
[00:04:20] Speaker B: That's all me, baby. Yeah.
I am a semi officially retired playwright. I don't really write plays anymore, but I do have a couple of ideas that would be best fit for that medium still kicking around that I'm like, maybe I'll get to that one of these days. But I use all of those skills for whatever I'm doing anyway, so. And, you know, I'm still a working actor. I'm still auditioning. The industry has slowed the fuck down.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: So that's not my fault.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: But, yeah, I'm still. Still doing everything pretty much as much as scheduling permits. So, yeah, it's still a part of the package.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: That's awesome. I stumbled upon you via books and novels and novellas, so that's where I know you from. And then obviously, yeah, and that's funny.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: That's my primary focus right now. That takes the most amount of time and the most amount of, like, effort and energy. So, like, that's. That's number one in the priority list right now.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: And it was funny because as I was getting prepared for this, I was like, oh, maybe I'll watch, you know, the episode of Quantico or, I mean, we all watch, you know, a good fight episode or Blue Buds episode. And I was like, I don't have to. If you go to YouTube, your sizzle reels on YouTube and get all the clips on there, right there, I'm like, oh, I can just watch all the episodes wherever we're in right here. You know, it's kind of funny to see. I get that one of those people that you ran into via writing to see someone acting and not know that you were an actor when I first stumbled upon you. And that's kind of funny to watch. So it's a little cool thing to figure out. It's the same thing with when you find out someone writes rights movies and like Brian McCauley had on and then other people who have had on who have written other things or have done other stuff, and I'm like, oh, that's pretty interesting. I mean, Adam Caesar just wrote a book, wrote a movie and so on. So it's kind of fun to find out your more multifaceted outside of an author. But. But we're here to talk books, and so let's dive.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: You don't want to talk about what it's like to be on the set of Bull, CB's hit bull.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: No, no. I actually want to see what it's like to actually audition for this stuff. And actually I want to hear about your rejection calls. That's what I want to hear. I want to get you right down to the, when someone doesn't give you the job. That's what I want to hear. Now it's a, it, it's a fine thing to see because you get, you live your life so multifaceted that you have all the stuff to bring into stuff like writing and so on and so forth. Like you live. You could write a horror book about auditioning for roles if you wanted to.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: There's some of that in my upcoming book, my next book that comes out in April. The main character is an actor in LA, so there's a sprinkling of that. But most of the time there's no real rejection call. You just never hear back.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: You are a musician too, and that's a theme that you've had in multiple books. I know it's in, in Nestlings, obviously is in rest stop for anybody who's read the description for Rest Stop, the novella which is coming right around the corner here on October 15.
So you have that stuff you filter in and you weave into your stuff. But what is your horror story? I guess your story, your origin story on becoming a fan of horror, but also, obviously, again, wanting to write horror novels or novellas, it is a, it's.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: A tale as old as time. A tale as old as me, at least. I've been a horror obsessed person pretty much as long as I've been conscious, or at least as far as I've been aware when I was a little kid. If it was spooky, if it was macabre, if it was scary, I immediately wanted it. And it, like, you know, especially when I was a kid, it fucked me up big time. Like, it's not like I was always inured to it, but I was just compelled to. I was drawn to it. And part of that, I think, is that my mom was a big genre fiction consumer.
She loved Sci-Fi she loved horror. This was also the early eighties, so it was like the height of the paperback boom. And she was reading all of that stuff that was contemporaneous to the era anyway. And I have a very early memory of her reading Jurassic park when it came out. Just, I can remember her on the couch with that white hardcover book. And I was, I was single digits at that point. But she, she got mad at me because I kept bugging her and she really just wanted to fucking read Jurassic park.
And I get it. I totally get it.
But that's a very early memory. And also my mom, I always wonder how soon I should jump into the heavy shit. But my mom had MsDhe. She had Ms my whole life. And also very, very early memories of her, like having to be whisked away to the hospital and stuff like that. And so that was a thing that me and my brother and her, she was a single mom, just kind of had to get used to and acclimate to and metabolize, as it were. And I think horror was one of the ways through which she did that and kind of passed that on to me. My brother was much more of a Sci-Fi guy than horror, but she and I would watch horror movies and talk about horror books all the time. And I think it was a kind of indirect way to talk about things like life being finite, bodies being fallible and stuff like that.
So some of it is nurture and some of it is nature. I just have always loved death and destruction. It's kind of how I got into acting too.
I became a Shakespeare nerd very early on at like six years old because of hearing about Macbeth and what Macbeth was about.
And so like, that kind of set me on these parallel tracks of wanting to write horror and tell horror stories and also wanting to act in Shakespeare and things like that. Stories that are bloody and tragic and violent and ironic and all that stuff.
Yeah. So it's just kind of always been my ethos. The way I look at the world, bad things happen.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Yes. I feel like that's the majority of horror fans story is not exactly, but the idea that they've been fans for a long, long time, as long as they can remember. And there's a few people like myself. I mean, I, to the two, I don't know, five years ago, six years ago, it was more along the lines of I thought that that horror was more always jump scare stuff. Like, I didn't grow up on horror. My dad didn't watch it. My mom didn't watch it. Brothers, friends, all that stuff. We were into sports mainly. And it just was like, just not one of our things. And until I started watching some horror movies saying like, wait, that's a horror movie. Yeah, that's definitely a horror movie. Like, you know, alien is a horror. Jaws, some of these movies that you'd think that are not horror movies. Like, no, these are horror movies. Totally, I always assume, and connected them with action or something else and Sci-Fi or whatever. But, yeah, it wasn't until more recently where I'm like, oh, no, I'm just freaking hooked. And my wife's like, are you okay? Like, now, now to the point now my wife's the one asking me if I'm okay. I should trade straight. You know, do we need to check on you? You know, we're obsessed with death and destruction and things and, and, but horror as a genre is a wide genre to it. I mean, there is this suspense horror, and there's thrillers and all this stuff that goes into this, you know, genre that there is. And then there's some visceral stuff and, you know, we have terrifyer two, three coming up right now, which is, I heard is, like, absolutely horrendously violent and gross, which, yeah, each one's gotten, like, just that much more. And you just announced that there's a fourth one coming. And I'm like, oh, my God, what is going to happen on this? Is someone in the crowd of every movie theater gonna get murdered? Is that how this is how this is gonna end?
That's how serious we're gonna go? But, yeah. And so I've just fallen in love with it because of the wide variety that there is actually in the horror genre.
And so would that be movies or books or so on and so forth? I'm in Bangor, Maine, so I am next door to Stephen King or Ground Zero, and I hadn't read a Stephen King book until 2022. Oh, wow. So there's that. So that was the whole thing. And so Stephen King being in my backyard, and I used to, I literally lived like a block from his house in high school. And so people, oh, Stephen King this, Stephen King that, whatever. And I'm like, oh, I know who he is. Don't really care. And I mean, I didn't see, like I said, I saw it because we had the losers coming to the comic Con in Bangor. And so I was like, oh, I got to see this movie. If they're going to be coming there. I got to know who they are.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Right?
[00:12:46] Speaker A: And that's where I got involved in all. Start reading this stuff, read Sam's lot, all that stuff. So, yeah, it's kind of funny. It's, he's my, he's my neighbor, or his house is my neighbor, let's be honest.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: He's more flirty in now than me.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: And I wasn't into it, so it's cool to see someone, like I said, I like the people's stories that are, like, a long time, always been there, kind of ingrained in their stuff. But again, same thing for me. I like the idea of having someone who's like, oh, it's new to me, and I get to live it all now. I get to watch Halloween for the first time. I get to read Sam's lot for the first time, like I said. And so as a adult with some sort of a functioning brain and understand it, which is pretty cool in my opinion.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: But I love. I sometimes envy people who are on that journey because you get to, like you just said, you get to experience these things for the first time.
The flip side, sometimes I feel bad for people who are on that journey only because there are especially of, like, I don't want to speak for you. I don't know how old you are, but for my generation, like, 40 year olds, there are so many movies from the eighties and nineties, especially from the eighties, that are so objectively bad. Like, they are bad movies that are so precious to me because I watched them before I had a fully formed brain. And now, like, even to this day, I can watch them in, like, adult brain is like, wow, this is so bad. But I love it. Like, the experience is so pure because it just brings me back to that feeling. So I do feel bad that you don't have some of those in your back pocket. Yeah, I was just like, I don't. I'm. There's no criticism that will penetrate this movie at all.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yes, exactly. Some of it also is not knowing. Like, it's one of those, uh, what was I watching recently? I forget what I was watching recently. I knew there was a second season or I knew there was a sequel movie, and so I was like, I changed things. Oh, I was actually, um. No, it was reading, um.
What book was that? Uh, the kind worth killing by Peter Swanson.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Reading that book. And then I went to this. I go, oh, I feel like that book would end differently if I didn't know there was a sequel. You know? Like, I didn't. I feel like I would have felt differently at the end of that book than not knowing. But then I was like, I know there's another book. And then a talent for murder came out after that, and I'm like, okay, I know there's a third book. So, like, that's the same. But Halloween, when Halloween came out, if I was alive and could go to the theaters, you'd never know there's another movie. Coming right. Or like the fact that Jason's becoming a iconic character from Friday the 13th when he didn't even exist in the first movie. In a sense, like the Jason you picture with the mask and all that stuff isn't in the first movie. And so that stuff, like, would change the way I, after I now know there's 30 Jason movies, I'm like, okay, this is different because, you know, looking into that, I'm 38, so I'm not that far behind you. And there are some things I actually watched. Ever heard of? I don't have the VHS taper here. No. Elvis the Rock and reindeer was follow that. Sleigh was a Christmas movie, a Claymation Christmas movie. It was about 30 minutes long. It's not available. Anyway. I bought it on VHS because, like, I needed to see this movie and I was one of the greatest movies ever as a kid and one of the greatest movies ever. And then in my mind, I also thought it was a full length feature film. And I. It's like 26 minutes long and is not that good. Yeah, but like, I.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: If I mean something.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Power, Power Rangers was the same thing, too. Power Rangers to me was like the greatest tv show ever. And then if you watch back, go back and watch that now, you're like, oh, my God, that is horrible. But, yeah, so, yeah, it's both sides of it, you know, but I'm 38 now. Got plenty of life left. Hopefully I can squeeze in a bunch of stuff and. But also reading new stuff. And I guess we were here to also chat about a book that's coming out in Novella. Rest stop. I have my advanced copy, kind of. I really just emailed Alan and was like, hey, I bought it. Can you please just send it to me?
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Give it to me.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: He's like, well, he usually sends out. That's the cool thing about shortwave, is that they actually sent. If you pre order it, a lot of times you get it a couple weeks early because they actually, like, they already have him in house. So they just sent out whatever. So I would have had it by now anyway, but he, or, or soon anyway. But I also wanted, because I'm seeing Tanya Powell.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Oh, sweet.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: On October 19 in Massachusetts. And so I wanted my cicada as well. So he sent me my cicada copy. But rest stop, I don't ever want to use a public bathroom again. Thank you. I appreciate it. I guess if that's what you're ruining for people, there's other things that people have ruined with movies and books and stuff in the horror genre that people are like, oh, I never want to see. Or like, american pie has ruined apple pie for a lot of people or.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Made it better for some people.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I guess ruining public bathrooms isn't really something that's a high bar to meet.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: Or at the very least, like, you'll go into a public bathroom a little more prepared. You'll make sure you have your phone.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Well, that's the thing. So I do my reviews and stuff like that, and then I usually look at Goodreads so you don't have to. I look at Goodreads.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: Oh, I look at it twice a day at least.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: And nine inch novels wrote, their only review is like five stars. It says, I will never leave my phone in the car again. That's the only review that was on there. Like, that's all they wrote was that. I'm like, that sums up the book pretty easily.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: And as a paranoid person, I feel like I've done someone a service so that they never have to be in this situation again.
Well, let's check the lock.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Well, my wife knows this. Like, I am a.
I have to use rest there when we go on trips. I am a person who has to use the bathroom quite often. And so I've gone to the bathroom in some pretty sketchy places and porter potties that were probably porter potties probably for construction workers where I'm like, oh, it's just got to use it and so on and so forth. So it hit a little close to home here being like, this is not going to be fun. So I think even in my review, I said it ruined public bathrooms to me. Or at least I'm going to start peeing with the door open and people are just have to deal with it.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: So it's ruined bathrooms for everyone around you now.
[00:18:49] Speaker A: Everybody now has to. But it's not even that. I mean, this whole thing is bloody. It's visceral, it's hallucinogenic, it's claustrophobic, it's creepy crawlies. Like, there's everything that I just mentioned about a wide variety of genre things in the horror genre. It's all in this 160 page.
How did you do that?
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Well, thank you. That means a lot to hear. No, I really just wanted to write a kind of locked room. Extreme or extreme for me and the sort of work that I do, horror story. And yeah, I similarly am very well acquainted with public bathrooms. I have a bladder the size of a fucking walnut.
So I make rest stops quite a lot. And there is one actual rest stop that my wife and I stop at all the times that's on the way to where she grew up in eastern Pennsylvania. And we live in New York City, so we're driving that way all the time. And every time we would stop there.
This little gas station in New Jersey, because they'll fill up your tank for you. So we always try to stop in New Jersey.
And, yeah, it is that weird combination of vulnerable and intimate and claustrophobic whenever you're using a gas station bathroom anyway, because you usually need to be using it. So it's like a respite for you. It's a good thing. It's a godsend, but also, it's usually disgusting and seedy, and you're not quite sure if you're even, if it's even private. Yes.
So, yeah, I just love that feeling. I love that feeling of I don't know what I'm gonna do in this, but, like, there's a thing I need to do, and I'm gonna just try and do that, but things could go sideways very easily.
Yeah. So. I'm glad to hear it worked on a number of levels for you.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: It did. It's funny because I always just think about public bathrooms as one of those things. It's like, we all use the bathroom, so. Yes. Okay. The men's room, the urinal, you know, we all aim. But maybe you're on your phone, maybe something's sneeze or something happens, and you go a little awry or. Or splatter or whatever that is. So that's around the toilet should. Should be dirty in a bathroom. Like, that's. Just give it. Right? But for some reason, in public bathrooms, it's like, shit on the wall. There's, like, people like, I don't know what the hell happens. There's, like, blood, and you're just like, what? Did someone get murdered in here? Like, what is this, a real life word? Yeah. What happened? I want to know what happened in here. Maybe I don't want to know, but I still need to know. And. But that's the thing about the idea that you're getting trapped in a bathroom or shut into a bathroom, a locked room type horror in a place where you're like, you don't even want to sit down. You barely wanted to. If you had to take a shit, you barely wanted to sit on the toilet, let alone sit down and have to stand this whole time. And then other things go awry. I just asked of reading this book. I was just like, I'm so glad this was a novella.
If this is like a 350 page book, I don't even know if I would have been able to make it to the whole thing. No, but, but it's not just that though. Like you deal with all of that stuff that makes you want to read with the lights on, or again, like we talked about, like ruining public bathrooms, that kind of joking around about it, but it deals with faith and life decisions, generational trauma, stuff like that too. So, I mean, we mentioned terrafire. I mean, terrifyer is there to gross you out, scare the shit out of you and have a good time. There's no lessons to be learned in terrafire other than if you see a clown in the middle of the night, run the other way. Like, that's just like, even, don't screw with them. But yeah, but there's other stuff. So is that obviously as an author you want multiple levels to your novels, but like, that was important. I'm guessing putting in this, it wasn't just the sketch.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Yeah, that tends to be the way I operate. And for anyone who's listening to this, who hasn't read rest stop yet, the bathroom is not that gross. If you're sketched out by like, shit all over the walls, you don't have to worry about that in this book. It's a little cleaner than that.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: Although I have seen those bathrooms myself and it is always just mind blowing. What? How did that even happen?
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:23:03] Speaker B: Or the thing that always brief tangent, the thing that always just enrages me is people who spit gum into the urinal.
Like, someone's got to clean that up and that thing's going to be sitting there like soaking up piss.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: And the person who's going to clean it up is the same person who would spit it. The person who goes in is not going to want to touch that thing. No one cleaning those bathrooms are paid enough to take some out of the toilet yet.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: It's so inconsiderate. It just boggles my, I told my wife about it months ago and she was like, what? People do that? I was like, yeah, I have a lot of faith in mankind, but whenever I see gum in the urinal, I'm like, or paper towels.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: I've seen paper towels in the urinal too. Like, where do you think it's going to go? Where do you think this is going to go? No, there's a small little slivers of holes in a drain there. I don't know where you think this is going to go.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Human beings, I mean, yeah, as a segue, human nature, human experience. Those are the things that have always preoccupied me. They preoccupied me as an actor, they preoccupied me as a playwright.
And I as a lifelong horror fan or obsessive horror student or acolyte, whatever you want to call me.
I've always been very defensive about my genre and its merits and the import that it has. And so because of that, whenever I write anything that is ostensibly a horror story, I cant help but try and have it explore certain aspects of the human experience in a. You know, it feels almost too pretentious to say, but that is working on levels beyond just the attempts to gross out or to terrify. I want to work on those levels too, because that's part of the fun of it. But I think horror is a great trojan horse genre because you can sneak in these other things, these other dilemmas, these other.
These other layers, while also having an entertaining and thrilling and gross and unsettling sort of story. I mean, I've already broached the Shakespeare references, but people forget Hamlet's a ghost story.
It starts with a fucking ghost on the walls of the castle. And we don't even know if ultimately it is a ghost or maybe it's Satan himself just trying to drive this poor danish prince mad. But it's also a beautiful, brilliant exploration on agency and on fate. And Macbeth is the same way too. Oedipus is the same way too. There are all sorts of myths that are, you know, we're kind of used to them because of cultural familiarity, but on the surface they're just really fucked up, nasty little stories.
And yet we use them as psychoanalytic terms. We use them as shorthand for the dilemmas that we face mentally all the time. Like, there are resonances to horror stories that go far beyond just the superficial. And I always try and honor that in anything I'm writing. And rest stop, as you've already alluded to, was very much. I was trying to write about generational trauma and, you know, the. The things that we are kind of going through as a country without, like, trying to get too specific, too bogged down into one particular time, although it is set during a very specific time. Yeah, but I wanted it to be about these kind of larger things, about, you know, even. Even the title. This hopefully isn't too much of a spoiler, but as it gets discussed later on in the story, you know, I'm a big obsessive kind of history nut and especially went through a big world war two phase as most middle aged men do.
And, you know, especially given, like, my family history and background and stuff like that as well.
This story touches on how crazy it is that, like, we came of age during a time of relative peace and prosperity and things like that and how that is an aberration from the historical norm of our species writ large. These moments where it's usually a lot of tumult, a lot of insecurity, a lot of death and destruction and things like that. And so the story kind of touches on maybe this moment in time in which we found ourselves was just a rest stop between periods of atrocity. And that sounds very heavy and nothing fun to think about. But again, it's a horror story and that's part of the delight. Like, you can talk about these things.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: In entertaining, hopefully knock on wood manner, and then leave the reader to, like, think about that sort of stuff. I love that. I love thinking about that stuff. I love confronting mortality. I. I became a horror fan because my mom had a degenerative disease, for fuck's sake. So, like, yeah, I love that about the genre.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: It's. It makes it a. When you go to write these things, do you think about that stuff first and then add the horrific stuff in there? Is it like a together? Like, it just comes to you as you write it? Or is there something like, I want to make sure that I have this, this and this, and then I'm going to make these horrific things go around about it.
[00:28:29] Speaker B: They tend to develop around the same time. But usually I am a scenario writer first. Like, oh, like the what if will come first. What if you got trapped in a bathroom? What if this happened? Or with nestlings? What if you won an apartment lottery and the building had some surprises in store for you? So that'll come first. And then usually just through, like, genre shorthand, like a very bird's eye view sort of outline comes to mind. And I tend to write character first. Like, the character is always the primary vehicle I want to explore a scenario through anyway. And a lot of that comes from being a playwright and from being an actor. So, like, a character arc will begin to come to mind. Like, who do I think is the protagonist for this story? Where are they beginning and where are they ending in a way that is satisfyingly different from where they're beginning. And with that in place and with the kind of general what if in place, then the sort of resonances will start to come to mind of like, oh, what could I say with that journey? What is a background that they could be coming from? What is what are some analogs that would be interesting to explore through those, through that scenario, through that character?
So it develops second, but it's kind of a close second because it starts to tie in really, really intimately with the character arc.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: So like I mentioned with terrafire, I don't want to hound on terraform, but the idea that I feel like Damian Leone is like, writing all the horror, like horrific, like people getting cut in half kind of scenes, and he's like.
[00:30:09] Speaker B: What if I saw a woman in half?
[00:30:11] Speaker A: Yes. And then we'll put a movie around that and see what happens.
And I'll be honest, out of all those, like, gory, gory, gory slasher pukey kind of like movies, it actually, they're pretty good. So, like, I won't, I'm not shitting on terrifyer at all, but I'm saying, like, it's just kind of funny. It does seem like let's gross the hell out of people and we'll put a story around it, whereas there's different ways. Like I said, there's such a wide variety of what you can call horror. And I think that, I think the most horrific things. And, and I will say I recommend Jeremy Dauber's book American Scary that comes out October 1, which is what scares us in America. He wrote a book called American Comics a number of years ago, a couple years ago that's about comics in the United States, comic book, comic strips, all that stuff. And he just watched basically every horror movie since 1919 or something like that, some crazy amount of time, and then read a bunch of books and did a bunch of stuff. And just what scares America and what basically boiled down to is things that the unknown really, like, let's be honest, like the unknown things is what scares, scares us as people. And I think that a horror story such as this, where it's like this could be real with a quick, you know, a little bit of a deviation to the unreal scares the shit out of me. And I think that. I think that's the biggest thing, creating some real estate. And that's what horror to me is. Things that could be real that have something slightly different that makes it nuts. You know, that slight deviation that makes it a not real thing that you go, okay, you know, paranormal activity to me, scared the crap out of me when I went inside in the theaters until basically the very end, which they changed from the original movie where they kind of like CGI did and made this thing jump with the screen and all that stuff.
Yeah. Like, if you haven't seen it like it's been a number of years. I can't, I don't think I can spoil it on that one. Paranormal activities came out, been out for a while. But yeah, as that movie progressed, you're just like, this looks like actual found footage. Like, this is insane to me. Far more than Blair witch project, far more than any of these other ones in that sense. And so what can you scare me at is these things that are real that could be real, things that could go awry. Like I could drive to a bathroom and get stuck in a bathroom and stuff like that. That's all realistic stuff. And then you have a little bit of deviation in it and make it so that it's okay. This is a novel. This is a work of fiction. This is not real and so on and so forth. But yeah, I think that a horror story needs to scare me. It needs to make me feel uneasy. It needs to, I like visceral, I like stuff like that. But I also need more to it. You can't just do that. And I think that's you accomplished with so far, nestlings and rest stop.
So you have a couple of novels out, you have another one coming out in April. What made this a novella? Was it just the length that needed to be?
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so.
You know, I can, I could have probably made it a full length novel if I'd set my mind to it because I tend to write a lot. I like to explore, as any of my critics might say.
But yeah, I love novellas. I think novella is a great length for a horror story.
And so I wanted to write something that was that length. I love short stories, too. But to me, the fundamental purpose of a short story is driving to like a punchline. Like short stories to me are like a joke format, novellas are like a monologue format, and novels are like a full length play format, to me, to put it in abstract terms like that. And so there's something about a story that's long enough to get the sort of depth and nuance that you could get in a novel but still kind of have the short, sharp shock sort of feel that a short story has.
And I think that's great for horror. Like, you get to know this person, you get to feel a relationship with this character, but it still doesn't feel like you're going to go on this epic journey with, you know, a lot of time passing or a lot of scenery changing or something like that. Like it's still, it still feels a little unsafe for the character, even though a novel can end very poorly for a character, you get like a full life with that character usually, but with a novella, it can feel like, you know, you can still have that, like, abrupt sort of like, oh, fuck, it's over sort of feeling, which I think is great.
And, you know, I am the exact opposite of you as far as, like, Stephen King history goes in that I grew up very far away from him, but I've been obsessed with him as long as I've been alive.
So I've read everything the man's ever published and then some. And I love his novellas. I grew up loving his novellas.
Hopefully one day I'll be able to put four of them into a collection that'll feel very, very comfortable and familiar to me.
But, yeah, so it's just like a great length for a story. And I really wanted to try. This is my second novella, actually. I have another novella that has not been published yet that maybe will be one day. It needs a little bit of attention. But yeah, I like it. I like it a lot. And I try and write, like, little short pieces in between the full length ones. Anyway. Yeah, buy some time and publish in case I have like, a year where something's not coming out.
So there are a couple more novellas that are, like, on deck to write right now.
[00:35:47] Speaker A: Oh, I guess a follow up question that too is like shortwave publisher. I say up and coming. They've been doing stuff, but they're getting, Alan's doing a bunch of good stuff right now. What led to ending up at shortwave?
[00:36:00] Speaker B: I love shortwave. I love Alan does incredible work. For those that don't know, shortwave is basically just one guy named Alan who's brilliant. He's a brilliant designer. He's a great writer, really love the human being.
And yeah, I'm trying to figure out chronologically what is more information than you need. But basically, so I have two, uh, short stories out with short wave already, little chat books, um, because they do some great chat books, uh, as well. And I had this novella, and I also had a basically, like an empty year, um, for this, this year, 2024. Uh, my next book. My next full length book isn't coming out until 2025.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: And so I had nothing that was slated to come out this year, and that was not okay with me. I needed to have something come out.
[00:36:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:56] Speaker B: So I wanted to have this novella come out, and I knew that I offered it to my main publishers to tour nightfire first, but a, they wanted some things done to it either make it shorter or make it longer. And I was like, I don't know, that might not be right. So they felt comfortable with passing on it, but also, if they weren't going to pass on it, it wouldn't come out until 2026 or something, because things in tradition publishing take a long time. And I was like, no, I just want something to come out in 2024. So I knew I was going to go an indie route. And once I got the blessing from them to take it to an indie publisher, shortwave was pretty much right at the very top of the list because of the great work that Alan does. I knew it was going to get a great cover. I knew it was going to get great attention editorially.
Yeah, I was just, like, super excited to work on this with him, and I'm really glad I did it. Got a couple of other offers from other places. It also would have been great places I would love to work at. But I knew that the sort of attention it was going to get, a short wave, was exactly the kind of attention that it needed. And there are aspects of this book that wouldn't exist had I not gone the route that I went with, you know, ideas that I bounced off of Alan and things I was able to discover thanks to the amount of time he was able to give me and stuff like that. So I'm so grateful that it's with him. It's been, it's been a really wonderful experience.
And it's almost easy to forget. Shortwave's only been around for a couple of years. Yeah, but they're just fucking banger after banger after banger.
Yeah, they're doing great work.
[00:38:34] Speaker A: And their killer VHS series is absolutely phenomenal. And, oh, yeah, I got the. Where'd it go? They send you like, a little, like, card. Membership card, too. Yeah, when you do it. So, yeah, you're a card member. Like you used to go, us old people, I say, I said, we're five years apart. We could, we can see that. I used to go actually rent movies, actually. Speaking of that little side, I just watched a video on instagram this morning about rookies in the NFL getting asked what a vhs tape was. They handed some rookies in the NHL or NFL a vhs tape, and literally, they didn't know what to call it. And they call it. Handed him a floppy. A floppy disk, and they kept on calling it a cd.
I was so. Oh, my God. I was. I was. I was like, I was appalled. I'm like, I don't care if you grew up in this time. Whatever. I know what a beta is, and I never had owned a beta. I have a laser. There's a laserdisc of five o goes west over here. I grew up during that. I didn't have one like a laser disc player, but I have a laser disc, so I know these things. And maybe it's because I'm in pop culture and I like, you know, that's where this breeds out of this stuff. But, like, I don't know, I was just like, thinking to myself, I'm like, there's no way they're not going to know what this is. And a bunch of them were calling it a VCR, which. Okay, okay, you didn't grow up in it. Let's be like, whatever. It's, it's a VCR, plays vhs, okay, but like, some of them were like, I have no idea what this is. And I'm like, oh, my God, I can't believe that. If you bother the crap out of.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: Me, I remember seeing an anecdote. I think it might have been a post or something like that, or a meme or something, but someone was describing showing their kid a floppy disk, and the kid thought that it was a 3d printing of the save icon.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:09] Speaker B: But. And it's not that, like, those aren't even the true floppies. I remember. Floppy.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Yeah, the floppy, floppy ones I had, you'd like, installing a program on a computer was like 17 of these things just to put it on the computer. I'm like, one of those floppy disks. Like, it's like, that's not even, like, nothing is that small anymore. Like, no size, file size is that small anymore. I mean, download 20 gigs of things in no time. Whereas back. Yeah, it's just, I don't want to sound too old, but, yeah, that's, that's a. It was kind of funny, the VHS thing. It's killer. I. It's a killer. No pun intended there, but yeah, I mean, everything's there. Doing so, so well. And these, in these one, these other ones, like, I got introduced a short way through killer VHS, and so there's those, you know, Brian McCauley's got a guest in the podcast is coming on in October as well, to talk about his candy cane kills books over there, and. But then I started reading the other, you know, novellas that they had going on over there, and it's where I stumbled where I came into, you know, contact with rest stop. But yeah, it's a great thing, and I'm glad you mentioned the COVID Really quickly, before we wrap up, here is. The COVID was technically a temporary cover, wasn't it?
[00:41:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. This is just how good Alan is. Like, he just whipped that up so we would have something to announce the book. And when it came time for, like, the. The actual final cover, we were both just kind of like. But that's. People. A, people liked it.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Like, they really liked it. And b, it's just. I don't want anything different. Like, it's.
[00:41:31] Speaker A: No, it's perfect.
[00:41:33] Speaker B: And if you read, things have been added.
[00:41:34] Speaker A: But, yeah, if you read the book, like, if you. It fits. Like, there's no. It tells the story without telling. Without giving anything away. It tells the story. It tells part of the story on it. But also, like, after you read it, you walk, like, after I read it, I read the PDF that he sent, and. But then I got the physical book, and I looked at it again, and I'm like, wait, there's a lot of. This is cool. I like you just, I don't know, something about it that some. Some covers are just artistically good looking, and some covers are actually, like, again, there's, like, Easter eggs almost on the front of this thing that you kind of, like, get to know. And it came in the. It came in the package with. With.
[00:42:10] Speaker B: Hell, yeah, it did.
[00:42:13] Speaker A: That's one of those elements.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Oh, look at that little mic.
That's one of those elements that. That wasn't in the draft that I submitted. Yeah. To short wave. Like, that was something that I kind of realized towards, like, the second or third draft or something like that. That would be fun to incorporate.
So Alan was just like, yeah, I love that. And ran with it, and now it's a big part of the marketing to.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: The point where it's. Yeah, you get these things, and that's huge to me. I do think that, like, I am sitting on both sides of it. I'm a huge fan of everything that I. That I read. I say everything I read, but when I read things, I read them because I'm a fan of things I'm reading. I'm horror. You know, I've become a fan of yours. I've become a fan of short waves. So that's the reason why I'm reading it in the first place. But I'm also on the media side of it, which I'm trying to promote these things and give honest reviews and things like that. But, like, this is like, mad Cave Studios, which is a comic book publisher sends out these tubes or they haven't in a little while. But these tubes that have a poster in it and some things in it. And like, they send other things like this. Like I got candy cigarettes about a graphic novel where a guy, the main character, smokes a lot of cigarettes. And I've gotten charred remains about a firefighter. They sent a matchbook that had the charred remains logo on it. So, like, all these things, like that means a lot. And so if you can get that to the hands of the people, it also makes me want to buy it from shortwave over any other publisher or any other store, even including my local bookstore, is you want to like, see what comes with it or see the, you know, the bookmark that comes with it. My nestlings bookmark is actually the bookmark that says rest stop on it, which is really weird. But all that stuff's cool and it adds to it.
[00:43:46] Speaker B: So.
[00:43:46] Speaker A: Yeah, but I would say that, you know, obviously you haven't launched the book yet. The book is still coming out. But I think it was success already. And so that's pretty cool. I think that teaming up with shortwave was a good thing for you, and I'm pumped about it. So October 15, it hit shelves and we, we link on our website and on a podcast to Bookshop dot org's selling of it because it also helps our local bookstores in there, too. So if you want to order online, you can go through, there is an affiliate link on there.
You can pre order it now and so on. It's available, going to be available at all bookstores. So just buy where you want it.
That's my biggest thing. Buy local, but also just buy it. So, like, in the end, if you don't, if you decide I haven't been able to get to the bookstore yet, just buy it online. I don't care. Just buy it. It still benefits you as the author and the publisher, so just still buy it.
[00:44:40] Speaker B: Sometimes I'll get asked by people who are like, is there a place I should buy it from? And I give them the exact same spiel. Local first, if you can, and then just, no, just buy it. Buy as many times as you can. And in fact, for anyone who follows me on, it's definitely on Instagram. I think it's on Twitter. And wherever I have like a bio link, I have put together a spreadsheet that anyone can access that has a bunch of indie bookstores for every state. So whatever state you're in, if you want to shop local, there's a link that'll take you to, like, my author page at a bunch of different local bookstores.
[00:45:20] Speaker A: So that's awesome.
[00:45:21] Speaker B: Try and make it a little easier. I used to work at a bookstore, an indie bookstore. I know the struggle.
[00:45:26] Speaker A: It is. It is, and it's one of those, also one of those things in my local bookstore, indie bookstore is downtown Bangor, which is horrible for parking, and I very rarely get in there. So a lot of times I'm like, hey, did you brawn the guy that owns it? I was like, can you just and I'll go in like once every six weeks, eight weeks, and I'll just buy a stack of books. I'm like, can you mind just holding them for me? I'll be in it at some point. And sometimes I'm just like, no, I don't want to go downtown, so I'm just going to work online. But yeah, there's that shop local. But in the end, the very last thing, buy it versus don't buy it. That's the big thing. Like support the book, the publisher, the author, all that stuff. But yeah, so that comes out. Rest stop. A novella comes out shortly. Publishing October 15. Pre order it now or grab it when it comes out. But yeah, pre ordering always helps. But quickly, before you get off here and finish here, you have a book coming out in April. I just wanted to touch on that when the wolf comes home. That's actually with Tor nightfire, like you mentioned, your publisher. Do you want to just touch a little bit on that? I haven't read it. I haven't. Obviously nothing's. But I just want to make sure that people are aware of another book, if they're a fan of yours that's coming out.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: Yes. Thank you. I am so excited for this book.
I am also so honored to be a nightfire author as well. I've so lucked out with publishers. And Nightfire, I think is in the trad space, the best one. I love every title of nightfires and I'm very honored to be part of that roster. And this book when the wolf comes home, which comes out in April of 2025, let's see if Mary here's how I've been describing it. If Mary is kind of my homage to unreliable narrators and ghosts and serial killers and Carrie and the dark half, those are my Stephen King comps and things like that first person narration and just really weird Giallo J horror kind of vibes. And if Nestlings is my homage to Rosemary's baby in Salem's lot and seventies paranoia, pot boiler thrillers and stuff like that, then when the wolf comes home is eighties paperback airport action pedal to the metal horror blockbuster sort of vibe. Like it is. It's a chase novel. It's action set piece after action set piece. It's kind of, for anyone who thought that Mary or Nestlings is kind of slow burn, this is just like, okay, fine. We're going fucking full tilt.
It's kind of inspired by Terminator two in a way. Terminator two and Twilight Zone and Ursula Le Guin's Lathe of heaven and Firestarter and it and a bunch of other comps that go into it.
But it also is still very much like, about serious things and is exploring some very human dilemmas and, you know, still very character forward. So if you like those aspects of my novels, it's still very much in line with that. It kind of forms an unofficial trilogy with Mary and nestlings in a way. And it's about a frustrated young 30 something actress living in La who's really frustrated with her life and her career. It's going nowhere. She's working a shitty job in a shitty diner under a highway in the middle of nowhere, La. And her dad, who abandoned her at, like, six and she hasn't really spoken to in decades, has just been found dead wherever he was, living on the other side of the country. And she's wrestling with how she feels about that. It's hitting her in ways she wasn't expecting.
It's really bumming her out in ways she wasn't expecting. And she has a horrible experience at her diner job during the graveyard shift. And she stumbles home in a daze, trying to process everything that has happened to her and realizing she needs to fix her life and understand some things about herself better. And she hears this rustling in the bushes, and she goes to investigate, and it's this little boy who's clearly on the run from something awful. And she takes the boy inside. He's like five years old. She tries to get his story, what's going on, but before she can really get that, the kid's dad shows up demanding him back. And she doesn't want to give him back. She doesn't trust this dad. She doesn't like any of this. And the next thing she knows, this hideous monster attacks.
She's on the run. Everybody is being slaughtered around her. She and the boy are running. And the kid's dad, who as far as she's aware is this monster, is after them, just kind of creating absolute havoc in his wake.
And they have to try and figure out how to survive and escape this monster, this monstrous dad. It's all about dads. It's all about childhood fear and all sorts of stuff like that. I'm so excited for it. I love this book so much.
And, yeah, that's just, like, the first, like, I don't know, 20 pages, 25 pages. So there's a lot more from there that you'll just have to wait.
[00:50:50] Speaker A: Yeah. See, April 22 comes out from Tornado fire, and that's also available for pre order. Let's go see that whole.
[00:50:59] Speaker B: Oh, my God. For those that don't know, preorders are, like, the most important thing for a book. They tell bookstores how many copies to order. They tell reviewers what books they should cover.
It is like, the most important thing that a book can have is good pre order numbers.
[00:51:15] Speaker A: It is. And I say, I would say the vast majority of retailers who buy online, at least you preorder something, you don't actually pay. They don't actually charge you for the book until you ship it. So it's really no hurt to you to order it now versus going, if you're going to get it on the day it comes out. You might as well just preorder it now. And I know, again, corporations, things like that. But I know I've ordered books on Walmart that have come on Saturday for the release on Tuesday. So you actually might actually have an opportunity to even get a couple days early because of this. But, yeah, but here's also bookstores who put it up like a week.
I don't know what is going on there. Sometimes I walk into Barnes and Noble, I'm like, wait, that book comes up next week. Why is it another shop now? Feel like the workers are just like, get it out there. Let's put it out. But no, um, yeah, so inverse is.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: Very brief side, uh, side anecdote. When I was working at this, I was a manager at an indie bookstore in the, in Greenwich Village, uh, in the early two thousands. And I was working there when the two final Harry Potter novels came out. And those were so embargoed that they were, you know, obviously we got thousands of copies of sent to us in advance, and they just had to sit in our back room, in our tiny store back room. And you couldn't even fucking look at them. You couldn't acknowledge them. You just had to, like, be like, no, they're not there. They're not there. Those books could not go out early. They couldn't even be open. The boxes couldn't even be opened early. Yes. So militarized.
[00:52:40] Speaker A: And it's true. Most, I think most companies are going to say they want you to wait, but some people just like, you know, I got, I sent an advanced copy of something as a thank you from IDW Publishing and they sent me a book in the mail and it says, like, release is September 21 and it's just a warning. Even though I'm just like, I'm not even a retailer, I'm just, you just send it to me. Thank you. And so on and so forth. But yeah, and I, my local comic book shop, galactic comics, orders their Marvel comics and stuff through Penguin Random House because that's their distributor. And so I could also use him to get novel so he could order a novel that say anything. That's Penguin Random House distributed. I could, I could order, and a lot of times his order comes in on Thursday and I'll be like, on there on a Friday. He's just like, just buy it now. Just go like, I don't want to hold it. I don't want to like, like lose it. I want to ruin it. It's, I'm not used to carrying novels. Just take, just pay for it and take it and go home.
It's not like I'm gonna be online being like, look what I got. No, but yeah, yeah, that was the, that was the world of books versus other thing. I don't know, but I guess this is also the world versus you in Harry Potter.
[00:53:44] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Not there yet, so there's probably not going to be an embargo. You could maybe get it April 18.
[00:53:50] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But no, pre order is the biggest thing we want to say and grab.
Rest stop October 15 and obviously Mary nestlings, all those stuff you can grab too, while you're there, if you're big. You're interested in finding out more about Mister Cassidy here and what books that he likes to publish out there. And then, hey, maybe throw in a character, an episode of Blue Bloods or a good fight or Quantico or all the other hundreds of shows you've been on. Right?
[00:54:17] Speaker B: You'll send me, I don't know, a dollar 30, whatever I make for.
[00:54:24] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
But. Or you can also buy copies in German like I did for clown on the corner.
[00:54:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:31] Speaker A: Someone's like, do you know German? I go, no, I just wanted it really bad. That was late night. My son wouldn't sleep and I wanted to shop, so I got that. I got the french one coming too.
[00:54:39] Speaker B: That's awesome. But I know Mary is coming out in Serbian and nestlings is coming out in Turkish.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:54:48] Speaker B: I have another novel of mine.
I wrote a novelization of a podcast. My first book that's out in Japanese.
That is the coolest thing. When you get a foreign edition of your book and you're like, I don't even come close to speaking this language.
[00:55:04] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: I don't even recognize words in this language.
[00:55:07] Speaker A: I ordered the. Because I'm a big Adam Caesar. I love Connor the cornfield a lot. And so I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And so the french copy is dope. I mean, the french cover is, like, a phenomenal. So I was like, I really want that. But then I was, like, scrolling through, and I'm like, this is hideous. Like, this is horrible. And I'm just like, I need this now. This is horrible. The only thing I don't like about it is that the German. The letters go, oh, interesting. So, like, that's backwards. Yeah. Like, it should be like this. Yeah, yeah. But whatever. I'm like, I don't know. It's just awesome. And I like looking through it, and I'm just like, I don't know any of this. I know the word Quinn because I named my daughter's Melanie's Quinn after Quinn Maybrook, but, yeah. Yeah. See, and Paul. Paul Tremblay's got a quote on the back on this one, too. It's Paul Trembley's name, and then the rest of it is in German.
[00:55:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:55] Speaker A: But, yeah, it's a pretty fun thing. So, yeah, that's pretty cool. Do they send you copies of that, too, or is that something you have to, like?
[00:56:01] Speaker B: Usually, yeah. You'll get, like, one. One or two?
[00:56:04] Speaker A: I was gonna say one. It's. Probably doesn't want any more than that. What are you gonna do with six cosmos, japanese version of a book, but, yeah, that's pretty cool. But, yeah. So check out, you know, pre order rest stop is what we were to talk about. But, you know, buy all your books, and then when. When the wolf comes home, April 22, 2025, from tornight fire. So grab that, too. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast and talk during horror anytime. Absolutely wonderful. You know, and keep up that good work. Keep up the writing. You know, I haven't finished nestling, so I'm not going to give you a pre. It's good so far.
[00:56:40] Speaker B: Hey, thanks. Whatever gets you to the next chapter. That's the whole thing.
[00:56:43] Speaker A: I don't have to do it anymore, right? We've already talked, so I could just stop reading it. I just go to the next book.
[00:56:48] Speaker B: Through the last page.
[00:56:49] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. I've tried that before for a book that I couldn't, I just couldn't get through it. I'm like, now I don't even know what the hell happened though. Like, it's like trying to read the last chapter being like, who? Do we introduce a character here? No.
Yeah. I appreciate it. I really do. You'll come back at some point in the future, but you're busy and I'm glad you took the time out and talked to us, but enjoy the rest of your week and hopefully the next couple weeks. The numbers are fantastic. And short wave was like, oh, my God, I can't believe we got a chance to do a book with you. So I'm hoping that's the case.
[00:57:20] Speaker B: That's the hope. Thank you. Happy core week, everybody.
[00:57:23] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Have a good one.
