Show Notes:
Today is part one of two where we are talking to Zachary Jeffries about his novels. Over the next 2 weeks you will hear about writing in middle school, his mom encouraging his writing through journaling and creative writing, not to let age keep you from doing what you want, making writing friends online, building your team to help you make your book better, using movies for inspiration, using social media to monitor the book game, writing after everyone has gone to bed, and collecting advice to apply later.
Zachary’s Website – Zachary’s Facebook Page – Zachary’s TikTok – Zachary’s YouTube
Zachary Jeffries hails from the southeastern United Sates where his first jobs were lawn mower, pizza cook, and stable hand. His overactive imagination and love for reading led to to various routes of storytelling through improv, screenwriting, and the Chicago theatre scene. After working under a myriad of names, Jeffries now writes contemporary Young Adult fantasy brimming with tropes, humor, and action. Along with The Unseen Curse and Angel of Fate, Jeffries also publishes middle grade books under the pen name Z Jeffries. You can read books from either pseudonym by signing up at ZJeffries.com.
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Transcript:
Speaker A: Welcome to Freya’s Fairy Tales, where we believe fairy tales are both stories we enjoyed as children and something that we can achieve ourselves.
Speaker A: Each week we will talk to authors about their favorite fairy tales when they were kids and their adventure to holding their very own fairy tale in their hands.
Speaker A: At the end of each episode, we will finish off with a fairy tale or short story that is close to the original authors version as possible.
Speaker A: I am your host.
Speaker A: Freya victoria I’m an audiobook narrator that loves reading fairy tales, novels and bringing stories to life through narration.
Speaker A: I’m also fascinated by talking to authors and learning about their why and how for creating their stories.
Speaker A: We have included all of the links for today’s author and our show in the show notes.
Speaker A: Be sure to check out our website and sign up for our newsletter for the latest on the podcast.
Speaker A: Today is part one of two where we are talking to Zachary Jeffries about his novels.
Speaker A: Over the next two weeks, you will hear about writing in middle school, his mom encouraging his writing through journaling and creative writing.
Speaker A: Not to let age keep you from doing what you want.
Speaker A: Making writing friends online, building your team to help you make your book better using movies for inspiration, using social media to monitor the book game writing after everyone has gone to bed and collecting advice to apply later.
Speaker A: Angel of Fate.
Speaker A: This Grim Reaper just met his fate.
Speaker A: High school sophomore Michaela Colfax was perfectly happy with her life until she inherited a mysterious pair of scissors.
Speaker A: They don’t cut.
Speaker A: But when holding them, Michaela begins seeing things like lines between people connections.
Speaker A: With the scissors, she uncovers the ancient power of her lineage of Greek faiths.
Speaker A: If Grim Reaper in training, Kane Morgan messes up one more soul Harvest, he’ll remain a disgusting human for the rest of his existence.
Speaker A: But his new target has supernatural connections tying it to Earth.
Speaker A: Now Kane’s only hope is to find some force powerful enough to cut these ties.
Speaker A: Can Michaela embrace her destiny fast enough to preserve the balance of life and death?
Speaker A: Can Cain tolerate a human long enough to make Michaela into the fate he needs?
Speaker A: And for the love of the gods, can the two of them work together for 1 minute without fighting?
Speaker B: So the podcast is Freya’s Fairy Tales and that is fairy tales in two ways.
Speaker B: All of us either watched movies of or listened to our parents telling us or read our own fairy tales or short stories when we were a kid.
Speaker B: And then it’s also the journey of spending weeks, months, years working on your own books to then get to hold it in your hands as a fairy tale for you as well.
Speaker B: So I like to start off with when you were a kid, what was your favorite fairy tale or short story?
Speaker B: And did that favorite change as you got older?
Speaker C: I was definitely into the Greek mythology was my fairy tales growing up.
Speaker C: Specifically, my mom was an English teacher at the time, and so it might have been a little more literary than some people.
Speaker C: Yeah, we didn’t get the Disney versions.
Speaker C: We got stories out of a Greek mythology book.
Speaker C: And I always loved the story of theseus and of the gods.
Speaker C: I always liked to hear about Kearnies and the muses and Orpheus and all of that all of those fun things.
Speaker C: And I don’t know, I believe that those always stuck with me a lot more.
Speaker C: There were some ASAPS fables as well that I really liked probably when I was a little younger with the animals as the main characters, and I was a little brother, so the idea of a mouse saving a lion was just amazing to me.
Speaker B: And as you’re a kid, those are much shorter stories than, like, some of the Greek mythology ones.
Speaker B: I’ve done a couple of ASAPS fables on here, and those are just very it’s usually like one or two paragraphs, and that’s the entire story.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker B: When you’re a kid, easy to hold your attention for those short stories there.
Speaker C: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker C: And The Anthropomorphism of Animals is so fun and wild, and I think it just makes sense that yeah.
Speaker C: That’s something greater for the younger kids.
Speaker C: As you age up, you get, in my case, incredibly violent and sexual stories of.
Speaker B: All right, and so at what age did you start writing?
Speaker B: Even if it was just like, short stories in school, what age did you start writing stories of your own?
Speaker C: Probably like, middle school.
Speaker C: Because my mom was an English teacher, it was very important for her.
Speaker C: She instilled it was very important to journal and things like that.
Speaker C: And creative writing was a good way of self expression, so there was a lot of that always going on.
Speaker C: I remember in high school, what did I write?
Speaker C: I wrote a play, but it was a play about a TV show.
Speaker C: It was weird, but once I started writing, I was always writing.
Speaker C: I’ve always written plays or movie treatments or something.
Speaker C: Something.
Speaker C: And it took me a long time before I even started looking into writing novels.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker B: And so I saw you have one book published now, and then your other one comes out on the 14 February.
Speaker B: So how long did it take you?
Speaker B: Or do you have another book written under a different name?
Speaker B: And how long how long did it take you to write the first one?
Speaker C: Yeah, I do have another pinname.
Speaker C: I have z.
Speaker C: Jeffries.
Speaker C: I’ve been writing middle grade Sci-Fi for a while.
Speaker C: I rapidly released a series back in 2020.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker C: And then these books generally, my drafting process is like, three months and then another six months of fudging with it, but it took a long time to get it down to that much.
Speaker C: But yeah, I did not really start approaching writing a full novel until I was mid 30s.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker C: And before that, there was just a lot of theater, a lot of short stories.
Speaker C: I had in my head that novelists were men in their mid 50s who already lived lives or something, because that’s.
Speaker B: The ones you see on the news and stuff, like Stephen King and all those are all not old when they started, but older.
Speaker B: Now.
Speaker C: You have this in your mind that it’s all retired journalists or these hemmingway stories of people who’ve already lived, and that’s just not true.
Speaker C: I finally started doing it thanks to NaNoWriMo.
Speaker C: Really helped me buckle down and see that it was a possibility for myself.
Speaker B: Well, then you have authors like Christopher Paolini, who wrote in high school, I think middle school, he started the first book, so the ones you see more on the news.
Speaker B: But I remember seeing because him releasing those books was around the time I was in school.
Speaker B: And so seeing him and like, oh, my gosh, it’s so cool.
Speaker B: He’s like, close to my age as he’s releasing these and being made into terrible movies that definitely don’t follow the books.
Speaker B: I own all the books and I’ve read them multiple times now.
Speaker C: I have a friend in it might have been elementary school, where he told me he’s like, I’m writing a series of fantasy books.
Speaker C: And I was like, oh, I guess that’s a fun way to spend your time, but you’re not 50, so it’s not going anywhere.
Speaker C: I guess this is your new hobby with the Scouts, and now you’re going to write six fantasy novels.
Speaker B: So you said you rapid released in 2020.
Speaker B: Did your writing that first series have anything to do with the pandemic and downtime or that just so happened to be when you had them ready?
Speaker C: No, that’s when I had them ready.
Speaker C: What inspired me really got me to hunker down and and write through all of those was the the feeling of helplessness that I had around 2016 that I think some other Americans might have had.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker C: And so it really was trying to gain control and make sense of what was going on in this country and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker C: And I think the way that I dealt with it, my therapy was to have control in a fantasy world, I guess.
Speaker B: So kind of make up a fantasy goes one of two ways.
Speaker B: It’s either ideal world or it is incredibly messed up world.
Speaker B: Which way did you go?
Speaker C: Well, in this case, I’m using the term fantasy loosely, those were Sci-Fi books, but it was fighting a future of greed and corporate capitalism and all of these things that I was afraid of.
Speaker C: So it was definitely optimistic in the idea of kids banding together and using technology to make a better world kind of thing.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker B: And so you released those first books.
Speaker B: You said your mom was an English teacher how did you like, did you just release them?
Speaker B: Did you have them edited by someone other than you?
Speaker B: Did you have a really good self editing process?
Speaker B: How did you kind of go from first draft done to publishing?
Speaker C: Well, I have a trunk book that no one will ever see.
Speaker C: Ever.
Speaker C: Ever.
Speaker A: Okay.
Speaker C: And that’s the first book that I ever wrote.
Speaker C: And I learned a lot about editing doing it.
Speaker C: I learned a lot about drafting while I was drafting, and then I just edited it into nonsense until the bread dough was nothing.
Speaker C: And after that, once I was doing Nano Rhyme, I actually met a pretty good peer group.
Speaker C: And all of us are still online friends and help each other out and take a look at writing for each other.
Speaker C: And one person was an editor, and one person was a cover designer.
Speaker C: Another person became my critique partner.
Speaker C: And Charlie Knight is the editor that I still use.
Speaker C: And they are absolutely fantastic, and they edit absolutely every book and short story that I have sent out to anyone or published.
Speaker C: And then on top of that, I just bugged a lot of people to read it for me to beta read.
Speaker C: It’s so hard at first getting data readers.
Speaker C: And I feel as a new author, oftentimes I am an underwriter.
Speaker C: I will write too little where everyone has blank faces and is in an empty white room, and I will try to get people to read that before it’s ready.
Speaker C: There was a lot of really asking people to read books that weren’t really ready for readers, and then that, of course, leads to them saying, well, I’m definitely not going to read the next time he asked me to read something.
Speaker C: This is not ready for me.
Speaker B: Oh, no.
Speaker C: So I had a lot of people who read the first couple of chapters and very politely didn’t give me a ton of feedback.
Speaker C: And I think that they were just being super nice to me at the time.
Speaker C: But I had as many people read it as I could.
Speaker C: I had probably eight or ten beta readers.
Speaker C: I had my critique partner, I had my editor.
Speaker C: I should have hired a proof reader.
Speaker C: I didn’t do that.
Speaker C: I probably couldn’t afford it.
Speaker C: I prioritized the editor, a sensitivity reader, and someone to work on the cup.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I feel like for me, in writing my own stuff, it’s like you have to prioritize, one, what you can afford two.
Speaker B: I’ve talked to another author who she had her first editor, didn’t like her genre, and so making sure that you find people that fit what you’re doing and that enjoy what you’re doing.
Speaker B: But then also, I’ve had a couple of alpha readers, and I love them to death, but I’m the kind of person that I had this issue in college, I would write a paper in a I was taking like a medieval English class okay.
Speaker B: And so we’re reading, like, chaucer and stuff like that, and we would write a paper.
Speaker B: The professor would give us, like, this is the topic that you’re going to write on.
Speaker B: Write a paper, and then you’re going to critique each other’s stuff.
Speaker B: So you would switch with one person, and they would say, this is what’s wrong with it.
Speaker B: Fix it.
Speaker B: And then you’d switch it with another person the next time.
Speaker B: They never came back with anything wrong with my stuff.
Speaker B: So the professor ended up having to edit my stuff for me because the other students are like, we don’t know what to do.
Speaker B: And I’m like, this is not and so then, like, the first round, I just submitted it to the professor after they didn’t have any stuff, and she’s like, well, here’s all the stuff wrong with it.
Speaker B: I’m like, well, they didn’t say that.
Speaker B: Nobody like, no one told me.
Speaker B: So then it was like, I would go through with the other people and then have her do it at the end before I officially submitted it.
Speaker B: But like, that’s what I feel like.
Speaker B: My alpha readers up to this point, they’re like, the yes man.
Speaker B: Like, oh my gosh, this is so good.
Speaker B: But no critique.
Speaker B: And I’m like, it’s not perfect.
Speaker B: I know it’s not perfect.
Speaker B: I just have to find the person that’s going to critique it for me, not destroy it.
Speaker B: But here’s what’s wrong with it.
Speaker C: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker C: And I think once you gain a group of beta readers, I think it is important to have, like, the one cheerleader, the one person that can just be like, oh, this is fantastic.
Speaker C: This is great.
Speaker C: And then you can get out of them what they feel are the strongest points.
Speaker C: And often those are not writers.
Speaker C: Those are not people who are editors or writers.
Speaker C: And then when you do get all of your notes in from your beta readers or who might be writers, who might be editors, and might have different opinions on the approach and everything, you can be like, yeah, you said to change this thing, but I get such a good reaction out of my cheerleader.
Speaker C: If you’re just a layperson picking up this book that might really hit with you.
Speaker C: One of my big theories or approaches with editing is if anyone prescribes a solution, I almost never listen to it.
Speaker C: With the exception of something that’s problematic or something that I’m hiring a sensitivity reader for or an expert, if they are not a specific expert about that thing, if they’re just like, oh, I don’t like that this is happening.
Speaker C: Why don’t you do this instead?
Speaker C: I almost never listen to why don’t you do this instead?
Speaker C: I pretty much never listen to, we could use a scene with these people.
Speaker C: That’s not really ever what I’m going to do.
Speaker C: I’m going to be like, oh, that’s the problem point.
Speaker C: I understand right now.
Speaker B: My big thing, the people I’ve shared mine with, my prologue is, like, two paragraphs long.
Speaker B: It’s a snippet from, like, way later in the book, but it’s a big action.
Speaker B: Oh, my gosh, what the heck happened to get there?
Speaker B: Kind of scene.
Speaker B: And I’ve had a couple of authors say, either expand on it or take it out.
Speaker B: And I’m like, the point is, most people don’t read the prologue, so who cares?
Speaker B: And two, the point is to grip you, and I would probably use that as the blurb anyways.
Speaker C: Nice.
Speaker B: It’s just like a big gripping, like, stuff happens, and then she blacks out, and so it’s like, fade to black kind of thing.
Speaker B: And I’m like, the point is, it’s short.
Speaker B: Most people don’t read prologues anyways, so I don’t want it to be some huge if you didn’t read that, you’re screwed for the entire book.
Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with you on that, because the ones that have told me like, oh, you should totally change your prologue, I’m like, well, no, I’ll tell.
Speaker C: You, I’m a prologue skipper.
Speaker C: But if there were two, three paragraphs that just throw me into the middle of it and then right out of it, I would definitely read that.
Speaker B: Well, and seeing that, because I know I’ve read books where the prologue is, like, ridiculously long.
Speaker B: Like, my husband is also writing a book, and his prologue is basically the kind of call to action history of how we then get into chapter one for him.
Speaker B: And I told him when he started writing, just know that some people won’t read your prologue, so don’t make it.
Speaker B: If people then complain, like, well, I didn’t know the history of it.
Speaker B: You can be like, hey, you should have read the prologue.
Speaker B: So his is more like military type, and mine is more like Sci-Fi fantasy type.
Speaker B: His is still fantasy, technically, but it’s got more of a military feel than mine does.
Speaker C: He have history of battles and wars.
Speaker B: So we’re both superhero like, adult superhero books, which doesn’t happen often.
Speaker B: So his thing is like, the government’s call to order to make this thing that his whole book is about.
Speaker B: Where my prologue?
Speaker B: Like I said, it basically jumps you into chapter ten or something.
Speaker B: You see a snippet of that big high action scene before you get into the rest of how did we get here in the rest of the book, you wrote the middle grade series.
Speaker B: You rapid release that, and then you started writing this other series under a different name.
Speaker B: How long did it take you?
Speaker B: What did you learn with that first series?
Speaker B: And then how long did it take you to do the first in this new series?
Speaker C: Well, the first in the new series, I kind of cheated.
Speaker C: As a writer, you’re always asked, like, where do you get at your ideas, and where do you get your ideas?
Speaker C: And this for my last book called the unseen curse, it has my favorite answer that I’ve ever been able to get to say about how do I get my ideas.
Speaker C: And there’s a movie called Copland.
Speaker C: There’s this 90s movie and it’s this ensemble cast and it’s about a small town sheriff who under uncovers this giant, giant conspiracy for a bunch of New York cops that live in this New Jersey town and all this cover up and murder and all of this kind of stuff.
Speaker C: And I really love the movie.
Speaker C: I’ve watched it several times and I just finished it once and I thought, wouldn’t that be cooler with wizards from them?
Speaker C: I attempted to write it once or twice years ago.
Speaker C: Almost all of my books I had attempted to write once or twice often as like short stories or something that didn’t work out.
Speaker C: So I had put in 20,000 words once or twice attempting to do it, probably with an earlier NaNoWriMo.
Speaker C: And then, yeah, it took probably three months to draft.
Speaker C: It is a murder mystery.
Speaker C: So then it did take a little longer in rewrites because I did want to get the murder mystery elements correct because I feel like that genre has a lot of specific rules for good reason.
Speaker C: And we’re lucky enough that Agatha Christie literally has a rulebook, has a list of rules.
Speaker C: And so I wanted to go through those and make sure those were right and basically rewrite a lot into the book so that there was misdirection, so there were red herrings and everything and they were all plausible.
Speaker B: So it’s not obvious at the beginning who did it at the end.
Speaker C: Yeah, Copland is not a mystery in that way.
Speaker C: It’s more of a thriller in that way, so there aren’t extra suspects, there aren’t clues leading different ways and all of that.
Speaker C: So I had to go back in and kind of sprinkle those in here and there and smooth it out and smooth it out and smooth it out.
Speaker C: So that was a much longer rewrite process than usual.
Speaker C: That was like six or eight months rewriting.
Speaker C: But yeah, generally speaking, now I’m about two or three months for a first draft, for a rough draft.
Speaker B: Okay, and then what did you do to promote the first series versus what did you do to promote the first book in this new series?
Speaker B: Did you promote the first series at all?
Speaker C: I mean, I’ll tell you, the main thing that I learned is it is very difficult to promote middle grade because you are not promoting to the people that consume the media, you are promoting the people who buy for it.
Speaker C: So it really is framing it in such a way that it’s almost like vegetables.
Speaker C: You have to talk about how good they are for someone versus what you’re actually getting on the plate and how it tastes.
Speaker B: Right.
Speaker C: I definitely went into some difficulties there until this last year.
Speaker C: Once I started doing in person events, this was my first year doing library events and conventions and art walks and all that kind of stuff that’s much easier because I have fun Sci-Fi adventures that kids really get into once they selling it online was really a slog.
Speaker C: It was pretty tough and honestly led to some feelings of hopelessness as far as career choices and stuff like that.
Speaker C: And I think that probably was one of the things that kind of redirected me to write something that is not necessarily aimed at adults, but adults consume.
Speaker B: Right.
Speaker B: When I feel like there are adults that read middle grade but more adults you’re going to find reading Ya and up as opposed to middle grade, I would think.
Speaker B: I may be wrong.
Speaker C: Great.
Speaker B: I read middle grade, but I also have an eight year old.
Speaker C: Yeah, I love middle grade.
Speaker C: I think it’s mostly because I write it, but every year in the top books that I’ve read, I always have a middle grade book.
Speaker C: Let me just say the lion of Mars.
Speaker C: I read it last year.
Speaker C: Middle grade books, one of the best books I read all year, if not the best book.
Speaker C: Absolutely love it.
Speaker C: Highly recommend.
Speaker C: The lion of Mars by Jennifer L.
Speaker C: Holme, I believe.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker B: Every year for Christmas I had seen years ago, like when my daughter was a baby, a thing about like every year for Christmas, you should get them something to wear, something that they want.
Speaker A: And then something to read.
Speaker B: And so we’ve done that pretty much every year.
Speaker B: Age appropriate books as she grew up.
Speaker B: And so this year, one of the series that I got her was The Series of Unfortunate Events, kind of in that we haven’t started reading it yet, but that was this year’s.
Speaker B: I’m like, I had started watching the Netflix show, and I’m like, I thought she’d really like these books.
Speaker C: That’s great.
Speaker B: We did that one and then we just started reading the other one.
Speaker B: It’s like the School for Good and Evil or the School of Good and Evil or something like that.
Speaker B: I don’t know.
Speaker B: The back of the box has like, two girls, one’s in black and one’s in white.
Speaker B: And I thought she’d like it.
Speaker B: We’ve kind of ventured into Harry Potter and things like that.
Speaker B: We started another series.
Speaker B: Let me think of the name of it.
Speaker A: I don’t remember the name of it.
Speaker B: But it’s all about this essentially reserve of all these mythical creatures and really good.
Speaker B: But there’s like a witch house, and because I’m a narrator, I was doing creepy witch voices and I scared her.
Speaker B: We’re like, all right, we’re going to put that one on the back burner for a little while.
Speaker C: My kiddo is a bit younger, but I do often get told to stop doing voices as I’m reading, especially if something is on the scary side of.
Speaker B: I mean, I liked the voices, but when she’s like covering her head with a blanket, you’re like, Maybe.
Speaker B: No.
Speaker C: Yeah, I was going to say, I love your voice.
Speaker C: I love hearing the fairy tales at the end of each podcast episode, but I mean, yeah, I could imagine if the reading material were actually scarier and you’re making it scarier than that.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker B: So I do have to ask, now that we’re on Voices, I see you have Kindle versions and paperbacks available.
Speaker B: Are there any plans for audiobooks in the future for I didn’t know about your other name, but I did for the two that are new.
Speaker C: Yes, I do eventually have plans.
Speaker C: It really is just a matter of reinvesting and making the money in order to put that back in there.
Speaker C: I do understand that for a lot of people, it is an access situation where certain people with handicaps can’t even get to these books until I get audiobooks.
Speaker C: So it is a priority.
Speaker C: It’s just a matter of time and money.
Speaker C: But we’ll get there.
Speaker C: We’ll definitely be getting there.
Speaker B: Okay.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker B: That’s I’ve seen recently.
Speaker B: I just came across a video, like two days ago of a lady that was like, you know that you can get an audiobook made for nothing up front because you can do it was not deceptive.
Speaker B: She was totally honest.
Speaker B: You can get an audiobook made for royalty share where there is no money coming out of your immediate pocket.
Speaker B: It is all from your royalties.
Speaker B: But she makes the point of, like, you wouldn’t have an audiobook anyways, so, like, you’re just talking about splitting your royalties.
Speaker B: You’re not out anything at that point.
Speaker B: Now, there are some not very well done royalty share books and then there are some very well done.
Speaker B: So it all depends on how long you’re willing to wait for the right narrator.
Speaker B: Yeah, but yeah, at the end of the day, I got a message back on an audition yesterday and she was like, you’re just not the right fit for this book.
Speaker B: But I loved your voice.
Speaker B: Maybe later.
Speaker B: I’m like, dude, I totally get it.
Speaker B: You had a voice in your head while you were writing that book and you want the narrator that fits that voice.
Speaker B: That’s not me.
Speaker B: That’s okay as long as you’re not messaging me like, oh, my God, you’re the worst narrator I’ve ever heard, which is just rude.
Speaker B: Let’s see, including I have a daily fiction podcast where I do classic novels.
Speaker B: So including that, I think I did like 57 books last year, just narrow rating audiobooks, and most of those were royalty share.
Speaker B: So it can be done.
Speaker B: It’s just a matter of how many auditions do you want to listen to?
Speaker C: Right?
Speaker C: Yeah, no, we’ll get there.
Speaker C: As of right now, I am going bit by bit and reading my books for literally two minutes at a time, and those are posted on Instagram and YouTube shorts and TikTok.
Speaker C: But no, I do want to eventually hire somebody.
Speaker C: That is the plan for the second half of the year.
Speaker C: That is the big project.
Speaker B: Nice.
Speaker B: So you’re going to release the book in February.
Speaker B: How many books are going to be in this series?
Speaker B: What’s the plan right now?
Speaker C: I honestly don’t know.
Speaker C: I like to leave that in some way, shape or form up to the readers.
Speaker C: I have two series starters, or I will have two series starters under the name Zachary Jeffrey’s Unseen Curse could be a series of magical murder mysteries.
Speaker C: An angel of Fate is a love story between a Grim reaper and a Greek fate.
Speaker C: But there are other characters that could also have romances.
Speaker C: And then I would also love to do a couple of one of them is in peril and the other has to save them.
Speaker C: Or one of them is under some sort of nefarious control and it splits them up and then they get back together in the end kind of thing.
Speaker C: So I would love to keep playing in these sandboxes.
Speaker C: It really just depends on their reaction.
Speaker C: I will say ever since I did the middle grade series, which is currently four books, and I’m going to put the fifth and final book out, hopefully this year I no longer have a concrete overarching story in my head.
Speaker C: I want to make a sandbox that I enjoy playing in enough that I could keep putting out books if I wanted.
Speaker C: I would probably do like a planned trilogy and then if the interest is there, maybe layer another trilogy or spin off with some other characters and do another trilogy there.
Speaker C: But I’m not thinking past three books at a time, I would say.
Speaker B: Okay, yeah, I feel like Detective is a good space for those ongoing continual series just because same with romance, because you can always have new cases for the characters to research or solve or whatever.
Speaker B: Romances, typically you’ll spin off onto a side character is now the main character kind of situation.
Speaker B: I feel like fantasies tend to be more the here’s the set group of the novels.
Speaker B: And then you may have like, Shatter Me, which is a Ya series.
Speaker B: She has like it’ll be three novels and two novellas per cycle.
Speaker B: And then she has a secondary cycle with the same three novels.
Speaker B: It’s actually three novellas, but the third novella is basically a full length novel.
Speaker B: It’s big.
Speaker B: I feel like you can kind of go multiple ways, but fantasy tends to be more like here’s a trilogy or here’s a I don’t know what it’s called when you have four of them, but four books.
Speaker B: Or here’s a duology.
Speaker B: It’s more set.
Speaker B: Like, here’s our overarching story.
Speaker B: And now we’re done.
Speaker C: Yeah.
Speaker C: No one wants to see everyone hang out after the ring is destroyed.
Speaker B: No one’s, right, yeah.
Speaker C: Opens up a restaurant no one’s supposed to destroy.
Speaker B: So last year I read a guitar, okay.
Speaker B: And so I’m like, I’m reading it.
Speaker B: I read the first book.
Speaker B: I knew it was going to all come.
Speaker B: To a big battle that was going to be the last book, was going to be this big battle.
Speaker B: I’m like, okay.
Speaker B: And then in book three, the big battle happens.
Speaker B: And I’m like, why is there a book four?
Speaker B: What happens in book four?
Speaker B: And at the time, I was taking voice lessons to help with vocal health and breath control while narrating, and she was like, big into a Qatar, too.
Speaker B: So I’m like, what is book four if the big battle already happened?
Speaker B: Is there another big battle going to happen?
Speaker B: And she’s like, no.
Speaker B: They’re basically, like, cleaning up.
Speaker B: I’m like, I don’t want to read that.
Speaker B: I have not read book four.
Speaker B: And then book five kind of starts from another character’s perspective.
Speaker B: But I’m like, who wants to read the oh, we had to clean up the battlegrounds book.
Speaker C: Man.
Speaker C: I might eventually what just happened?
Speaker B: Book three, it should have ended there.
Speaker B: And I haven’t read book four.
Speaker B: So I don’t know.
Speaker B: It may be amazing.
Speaker B: That kind of turned me off because I’m like, I don’t want to read a clean up book.
Speaker C: There is something about a book series where you’re like, well, I no longer have any more questions.
Speaker C: This is not what you ever intended to be the last book, but thank you very much.
Speaker C: And I’m out.
Speaker B: Well, and I feel like that’s the same with for example, we’ll go old school wizard of Oz.
Speaker B: Okay?
Speaker B: So he had, like, his original plan for wizard of Oz, and then it did well, so he wrote another book and another book and another book and another book.
Speaker B: And then someone else started writing continuing the story after he had died.
Speaker B: And it’s like, at some point, you can’t be making that much money anymore.
Speaker B: At some point, you have to have a plan, and then you have to stop.
Speaker B: Because regardless of if it’s making money, at some point people are like, God, now you’re just dragging it on for no reason.
Speaker C: Yes.
Speaker B: Unless in the case of, like, detective ones where you can be an ongoing thing or whatever.
Speaker B: But yeah, it’s just I don’t understand theories that just keep doing that.
Speaker B: I’m like, Just stop.
Speaker C: No.
Speaker C: Agreed.
Speaker C: The same thing happened with Herbert’s Doom.
Speaker C: He had a story.
Speaker C: He had one story, and he wrote it.
Speaker C: And it’s absolutely fantastic.
Speaker C: And it did so well.
Speaker C: They asked him when the next book was, and he panicked and put more books together and then started these enormous, long plot lines that weren’t completed until after his death.
Speaker C: And they just kind of meander.
Speaker C: And by the end, you’re like, this has almost nothing to do with that first book that I absolutely fell in.
Speaker B: Love with or Ready Player One.
Speaker B: I haven’t read I own it.
Speaker B: I have not read it yet.
Speaker B: I have not read ready player two yet.
Speaker B: I read the first one.
Speaker B: My husband listened to the audio book and was like it was like, he made money, he made a movie, and then he just wanted to keep dragging it on.
Speaker B: Stop.
Speaker B: Make your plan.
Speaker B: Unless the plan was to eventually release more books in the series.
Speaker B: But if you have a and Jason Duro on TikTok is really big in like, planning the overarching series.
Speaker B: So he will plan out.
Speaker B: He has like the overarching storyline that he’s going to have over the entire series and then he plans down to in this book, there’s got to be this stuff happens and this book, this stuff has to happen.
Speaker B: But then once you get to the end of the overarching, you stop.
Speaker B: So you finish the big storyline you finished and you did it.
Speaker C: Congratulations.
Speaker B: Yeah, you finished it.
Speaker B: Now, whatever the next story idea was, you go with that.
Speaker B: Or maybe you in the middle, got bored and wanted to write another book in the middle there.
Speaker B: You keep on with that storyline or whatever, but I’ve come to learn not many authors stay with one storyline and then move on to the next one.
Speaker B: There’s usually multiple ones being written at the same time.
Speaker A: Zachary Jeffries liked ASAP’s fables growing up ASOPs Fables or the Asapica is a collection of fables credited to ASOP a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE.
Speaker A: Of diverse origins.
Speaker A: The stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media.
Speaker A: The fables originally belonged to oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after ESOP’s death.
Speaker A: By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere.
Speaker A: The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe.
Speaker A: The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the ASOP corpus, even when they are demonstrably.
Speaker A: More recent work and sometimes from known authors.
Speaker A: Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmission, although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another on the arrival of printing.
Speaker A: Collections of ASAPS fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages.
Speaker A: Through the means of later collections and translations or adaptations of them, asop’s reputation as a fablest was transmitted throughout the world.
Speaker A: Initially, the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social and political themes.
Speaker A: They were also put to use as ethical guides and from the Renaissance onwards were particularly used for the education of children.
Speaker A: Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world through depiction in sculpture, painting and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama and song.
Speaker A: In addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over time.
Speaker A: Today we’ll be reading The Lion and the Mouse by ASAP.
Speaker A: Don’t forget we’re reading Le Morte, DeArthur.
Speaker A: The story of King Arthur and of his noble knights of the Round Table on our Patreon.
Speaker A: You can find the link in the show notes.
Speaker A: The lion and the mouse.
Speaker A: A lion was awakened from sleep by a mouse running over his face, rising up angrily.
Speaker B: He caught him and was about to.
Speaker A: Kill him when the mouse piteously entreated, saying, if you would only spare my life, I would be sure to repay your kindness.
Speaker A: The lion laughed and let him go.
Speaker A: It happened shortly after this that the lion was caught by some hunters who bound him by strong ropes to the ground.
Speaker A: The mouse, recognizing his roar, came and nod the rope with his teeth and set him free.
Speaker A: Exclaiming.
Speaker A: You ridiculed the idea of my ever being able to help.
Speaker A: You not expecting to receive from me any repayment of your favor.
Speaker A: Now you know that it is possible for even a mouse to confer benefits on a lion.
Speaker A: Thank you for joining Freya’s fairy tales.
Speaker A: Be sure to come back next week for the conclusion of Zachary’s journey to holding his own fairy tale in his hands and to hear another of his favorite fairy tales.
