Rachel 00:00 Hey David. David 00:02 Yes Rachel. Rachel 00:03 Given the times we live in, I had to limit myself to making just one dad joke about the end of the world for this episode. David 00:09 Why? Rachel 00:10 Because otherwise I’d be making them like there’s no tomorrow. Welcome to Wizards & Spaceships, the podcast where we’re all about me this episode because I have a new book coming out. I’m Rachel A. Rosen. David 00:32 And I’m David L. Clink. Rachel 00:35 And we are now in season two of Wizards & Spaceships. This is actually airing on the anniversary of our very first official episode. How are you feeling? David 00:46 Looking back on the journey, I just can’t believe it, you know, because years pass. And one thing I was thinking of is that the amount of work it took to even get the thing started because on the earlier one I had a friend doing a lot of the stuff related to the podcasting and things, worked with him, worked with the company and did a whole bunch of stuff just to get this off the ground that my Two Old Farts Talk Sci-Fi. This one [Wizards & Spaceships], I was just on my own with you working together, trying to figure this stuff out and working with the site where it’s held. It took months and months trying to resolve every little issue and thing before we could get started. But I have to say it was worth it. Rachel 01:30 Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, I had to learn how to do audio editing, which as it turns out is pretty much like video editing, which I already knew how to do, except that you don’t have to worry about the video. So that was kind of cool. But yeah, we’ve got to talk to some really incredible people. We’ve covered some really spicy topics. I think it’s been really fun. And I am just really excited for some of the episodes that we have queued up for this season. I think it’s just going to get better from here. Okay, so today, as you can probably tell, it’s just the two of us. We don’t have a guest because we are talking about my new book, Blight. And one of the reasons why David and I started this podcast is because we’re both writers as well as readers and fans. And we thought that a podcast was a good way to introduce people to our work. So now we’re going to be talking about my work. So, Blight is the sequel to my first book, Cascade, and it’s dropping next month, exactly a month from now on June 15th. And pre-orders are available now. So, you can actually pre-order your own copy and have it probably delivered to your door for June 15th. David 02:43 Yeah, that’s definitely something that I will be doing [David has subsequently done this]. So, we should probably, I’m sure we’ll have that link and ordering details on the website when the episode drops. Rachel 02:53 Yeah, for sure. David 02:54 Yeah, I remember when we met and we were just talking about the whole idea of doing a podcast was that we did a book exchange. So, I was able to then get Cascade from you and also an anthology or two where you had a piece of fiction and I gave you all my book collections. And then we got to read each other’s work and got a sense of who we are. And at that point we thought, why not? And I think the original idea of this was just our backyard chats. This podcast was going to be called Backyard Chats at some point before we changed that. It’s the idea of just two people who are friends just talking about science fiction, fantasy, and horror, maybe having a beer in the summer on the patio and just enjoying the evening. Rachel 03:42 Yeah, well, we still do that, or at least we will still do that once it’s patio weather, which it probably is by the time this episode airs. David 03:52 Well, it’s patio weather somewhere, which is a great answer to everything. As you can also say, it’s almost five o’clock everywhere. But we’re recording this towards the end of January. So, let’s just say it’s a bit cold and I look forward to the weather when this episode drops May 15th. Rachel 04:06 Yeah, well, I’m about as Canadian as my book series. So, I feel like if it’s above zero, it’s patio weather. David 04:14 Yeah, and actually someone who lives across the street, someone else who lives across the street from me, who lives next door or very close to you, barbecues all year round. Rachel 04:24 I respect that. You’ve got to commit to the bit. David 04:30 Yeah, if you’re going to do it, do it. I want to just congratulate first on the launch of your second book, Blight. I know that it’s not quite dropped yet because we’re recording this in January, but when people hear this episode, they can actually get the book [Correction: the book is available June 15, 2025]. So, congratulations. Rachel 04:44 Thank you. It’s been a really long journey getting here. I started this series about a decade ago. Yeah, the first one took seven years to write. This one was a lot faster. It’s three years after Cascade dropped, which in the publishing world is an eternity. So, I’m really hoping that people haven’t forgotten about Cascade. But yeah, it is definitely a long time coming. And this is the one that I’m so excited for people to read. David 05:16 Well, I can’t wait to read it. And it is a follow-up, as you said, to Cascade. Now the series is called The Sleep of Reason. So, Blight would be the second book of The Sleep of Reason. Can you just tell me a bit about the series? Rachel 05:30 Yeah, so it is an epic urban fantasy novel set in an alternate version of Canada where magic has returned to the world. So, Cascade takes place about 20 years after a climate change related event returned magic. So, you know, as the ice caps melt and the sea levels rise, some of the ancient forces that used to exist in the world are kind of revived. The world adapts, often in kind of chaotic and unpredictable ways. So, you have a handful of people who can actually control magic. And then you have magic taking over the physical environment itself. So, you have these sort of tentacled ancient gods arising in the ocean. And you have an invasive plant called “shriekgrass” that’s sort of taking over the forests. And you have wellsprings where magic kind of comes to the surface and transforms everything around it. So, the story of Cascade is mostly centered in Ottawa. And it’s the extremely magical and arcane world of Canadian federal politics. You know, I tell people that and I can just feel the brain shutting off. But honestly, one of the things that inspired it is that we used to have laws in this country against witchcraft. And when I found that out, I’m like, you know what, federal politics is just so weird and interesting. It follows a group of people around the currently ruling party in power, which is never named. It’s just sort of like a soft social democrat trying their best kind of government. And one of them is a precognitive magic user. So, he can see the future. But you can only see the future four years in advance. And he predicts a second disaster is going to happen. It gets eventually named “The Blight.” And this is, again, as a result of us making poor decisions with our environment. And so, he knows it’s going to come. He knows that there’s not a lot that anybody can do to prevent it. And he’s sort of steering the government to try and slow or stop this disaster from coming. Yeah, so there’s sort of a group of characters who are on various ends of the political spectrum, some very much against the role that magic is playing in the administration and some who are part of that, others who are kind of outside of the political system altogether, whether they’re in academia or activism and looking at ways that we can try and, if not save the world, then stop the world from getting worse. And so, I guess this is spoilers, but as the first book in a trilogy, it does not go well, and everything falls apart at the end. So, Blight kind of follows from that three years later after the disaster has struck and once again radically altered the national landscape. David 08:38 Wow, that’s a lot to pack into a novel in this series. I mean, certainly you’ve got your characters that we’re all rooting for, but there’s always those that are working against the interests of the main characters. So, you’ve got, and some of those, I assume, because it’s been a while, it’s been a couple of years since I read Cascade, but there’s always someone out there who’s trying to make any kind of disaster, any kind of issue somehow work out well for them, isn’t there? Rachel 09:12 Yeah, I mean, and that’s one of the big plot points that ends Cascade and begins Blight is that there’s obviously, there’s always somebody taking advantage of disaster. And, you know, I was really inspired when I was writing this by writers like Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Klein, who would really argue that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster any more than there’s any such thing as a magical disaster. What makes it a disaster is how human beings and institutions manage or don’t manage it. But one of the things that I wanted to do with both books is always have everybody as a hero of their own story. So, with Cascade, the first point of view character that you meet, the guy who’s positioned to be the hero, is actually the guy working against our main characters. This is Tobias. So, he’s a character who really believes in the individual and individual self-determination. And the idea that there is a wizard in government who can see the future is horribly offensive to him because he believes that we write our own destinies. And so, even though he’s kind of in an antagonist position, I think that for a lot of us, we can sympathize with that kind of a worldview. There’s definitely some mustache twirling villains in both books. And I love them and I love writing them. But there’s also just people who are at crossroads because they fundamentally have different beliefs about ideology and about magic. David 10:57 Yeah. And part of that is a character’s growth. Like they already have their mindset at the beginning. But then as they experience things, they may change or their worldview may change because they’ve learned more about the situation. Rachel 11:11 I write political fiction. I think that the one thing that everything that I’ve written shares, including the cookbook that I co-wrote, it’s all political, but I don’t write didactic fiction. So, it was really important to me that not every character starts out believing the things that I believe. And some have kind of shared beliefs, but I made sure that at least one thing that everybody believes is fundamentally untrue. That’s where growth comes from, right? Being confronted by the limits of your own beliefs. David 11:43 Yes. And being able to see that and be able to maybe grow or change, because part of that is, of course, how the characters change. And it’s kind of cool. This is almost a perfectly timed because of all of the political turmoil that’s happening in the world. This is being recorded at the end of January. Recently, Justin Trudeau resigned or said he wouldn’t be running again. And then we have a new person in power in the United States. And I guess it’s really hard to get away from politics, isn’t it? Rachel 12:15 Yes. But the politics, I think, in the Sleep of Reason trilogy, this is a trilogy that wears its politics on its sleeve. It was started because in 2014, 2015, when I began writing it, there was a proposed law in Quebec, the Quebec Charter of Values. And my family’s from Quebec. We left in part because of the politics of that province. But it was their first attempt at restricting the religious freedom of public servants. You know, if you want to be a teacher, and they eventually passed some version of that. So, if you want to be a teacher in a public school in Quebec, you can wear a little cross, you can wear a crucifix, but you can’t wear a hijab, you can’t wear a kippah. And to me, that was one of the first signs that Canada is not that different from the States. We look at a figure like Trump and think that, oh, you know, this could never happen here. Somebody like Poilievre could never be the kind of fascist that Trump is. But I think that in our own kind of polite and subtle way, we have all of those same authoritarian tendencies. And so, I started writing this as a straight up political thriller. That was like the first draft. And then it sort of morphed into this fantasy because I apparently can’t write anything without genre elements creeping in. But it’s very, especially Blight, it’s very much about, all right, well, the fascist is in power now. What do you do? Where do you go from there? What are other ways of fighting back when voting the bastards out isn’t an option anymore? David 14:18 Yeah, there have been a number of stories in the past that deal with fascism. Even the Bradbury one, I think, that had “Thunder” in the title [note: “A Sound of Thunder” is a science fiction short story by American writer Ray Bradbury, first published in Collier's magazine on June 28, 1952] where someone steps on a butterfly hunting a dinosaur or something. It turns out you come back to a totalitarian regime. This is a slightly different novel because it takes a moment. It’s basically our world, but something happens, which you’re mentioning is climate change. And with that, you’ve brought the magic in. Rachel 14:58 So, I think a lot of it is that I don’t write, even though I write fantasy, I don’t really write things that couldn’t happen in some ways. I mean, some of the things that happen are things that might only happen metaphorically, but they’re still things that can happen. So, I curse myself a lot of the time for having the same kind of precognitive ability that my main character Ian does. Because when I started the first draft in 2014, I had this throwaway line, and you’re going to hate this. David 15:39 OK! Rachel 15:40 So, this is a story that centers around Canada. So, I was like, well, why does anybody want to read a story about Canada? Even Canadians don’t want to read a story about Canada. And I throw away what is happening with the United States. And in this, one of the characters is talking about just how the world has gone crazy. And you know it’s happening in the US. Well, they fell apart because they elected a reality show host as president, which in 2014 seemed absolutely laughable, of course. And then it happened. And then there’s another segment towards the end of Cascade where the government passes the Emergency Act, which used to be known as the War Measures Act. And again, this was something that when I was writing the book, nobody had heard of the Emergency Act. People had heard of or maybe they studied the War Measures Act in high school, and that was kind of why it stuck in my brain is, you know, one of those loopholes in Canadian law where you can just ignore the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There’s a couple of those. And this horrified me as a kid. It stuck with me. And I’m like, you know, this still exists. There’s still a version of this that they can bring in. And so, I wrote this whole climax where the Emergency Act is brought in to deal with some of the fallout of the magical disaster that has happened. And then, of course, wouldn’t you know it, as the book was in publication, we had the attempted coup in Ottawa, and the federal government used the Emergency Act because the authorities there couldn’t deal with the trucker convoy. So, I kind of feel like some of the stuff that I write is to blame for the current state of the world. And I don’t know how to just stop that other than by making my next work a little bit happier. David 17:32 One thing I just wanted to get into, because we’ll definitely talk more about the book and Blight and maybe, because planning out this kind of thing, you know, I always think back to George Lucas and you had episode four, five, six, then you eventually had one, two, three, and seven, eight, nine, this general sense of how you’re going to plot out a trilogy, a fantasy trilogy. Because, you know, like with Dune, Dune originally was, I guess it was a standalone book, then it became a trilogy, and then eventually it became a lot. Rachel 18:06 Well, a lot of things. Rachel 18:07 I finally did read the first one, though. David 18:10 Oh, you did? Oh, very good. That is one of my favourites. Rachel 18:11 I did. I got shamed on this very podcast for not having ever read the whole thing. So, I have now read Dune, so. David 18:19 Well, I hope I wasn’t the one shaming you, because if I was, I do apologize. Rachel 18:24 You can stop making fun of me now. David 18:26 Okay. Rachel 18:27 At least for that. David 18:29 Yeah, but for planning it out, did you have originally, when you just came up with this idea way back 10, 12 years ago or whenever, did you have on the outset a trilogy, and did you already have an idea that, yes, I want these kinds of big things to happen in book one, then book two would be an extension, and book three, did you think of that that way? Rachel 18:53 Oh, God, no. I don’t plan like that. So, initially I had planned one book, and it was Blight. It was the story that I tell in Blight. You know, I had a couple central images, you know, to give a little bit of spoilers. From the beginning of planning this trilogy, I had three images that were stuck in my head that I couldn’t get rid of. One of them was this monstrous child, kind of confined to a room and if she got out, she was going to kill everybody. The second one was a woman in the middle of the night in a beautiful dress fleeing across the city, and the third was a man in prison. And I kind of had these ideas and I sort of knew a little bit about who those characters were and how they fit together. But when I started writing the story, I realized that nothing in it made sense without going a little bit further. This isn’t where the story begins. This is the midpoint of the story. And so, I kind of wrote most of Blight first and then I went back and I wrote Cascade to lead up to that to show the kind of fall that landed all of these characters in their current predicaments. So, it was going to initially be one book and I started it four or five times before I got a handle on even things like who are the viewpoint characters. There’s one draft where I had even started it further back as a mystery novel that started with the death of a character who doesn’t even appear alive in the main story. So, I kind of fumbled around with it quite a bit before I landed on the structure. So, most of one draft of Blight had been written before I started Cascade. Then I wrote Cascade and rewrote it and rewrote it. As for the last one, by that point, I do have it all plotted out. So, it’s definitely has a definitive end that will feel like an ending. I’m not going to George R.R. Martin this or anything like that. It is more or less planned out, although the way I write, events can always surprise me. There’s quite a lot that I had planned in both books. And then when I got to writing it, somebody would read a draft and say, well, what if this thing happened? And that was a really cool idea. And so, I went with that instead. And like really, really big things. So, the kind of big bad major villain in the series was not a character that I had planned to be the villain. So, I kind of knew that there was within the opposition. So, the kind of right-wing party in the first book, their official platform is very anti-magic. They don’t like the idea that there is magic influence in the government. And that’s kind of the popular thing that they’re campaigning on. And I knew that of these characters, one of them was secretly also a magician. And I’d sort of had this kind of vague idea of a villain in mind of who it was going to be. And that person was going to kind of turn up later. And one of my early beta readers, who’s actually my co-author, Zilla, for the cookbook, said, I think it’s this person. And I had not considered that person. I’m like, oh, no, that would be really cool if it was that person. And that was how my big bad ended up being my big bad. It was just a name suggested. And when she suggested it, it absolutely made sense. It couldn’t be anybody else. So, I plan. But you know what they say about God’s laughter when you try and make plans. David 22:57 Yeah. So, is there beyond just the actual characters and the plot and what happens, bringing a book to fruition includes things like book design, the cover, editing, if there’s an actual editor for the publisher, the publisher itself, marketing, all this. There’s just so much that goes into a book to come out. And can you just talk about even the back cover copy and everything else? Is there anything that you want to talk about the actual physical book? Rachel 23:32 I’ll always say that writing the book is the easy part. Writing the book is really easy. I might occasionally have writer’s block, but I always want to be telling this story. I’ve been telling this story for a decade now, and I want to keep telling this story. Actually, getting it into the hands of readers is the part that’s a struggle. So, I can write, you know, a 400+ page book with a cast of thousands and intricate worldbuilding and all of that. Can I write a two-paragraph summary of the book to put on the back? Absolutely not! No, that’s the worst thing. I hate doing it. So even the little things like that, those marketing pieces just absolutely stress me out to no end. So, I do have a publisher. I published this series with Bumblepuppy Press, which is a very tiny press based out of Ottawa. And when they acquired the first book, one of my big questions was like, OK, well, this is a trilogy. What’s going to happen with the other two? And so, I have a three-book contract with them, so to speak. And so, there’s a lot of things that we learned with the first book that we’re hopefully going to improve on for the second in terms of marketing. But it’s a whole process. It took me, you know, when I say I worked on the first book for seven years, most of that wasn’t really writing the thing. It took me a couple of years to write, but there was the structural editing. There was the copy editing. There was the layout. There was the book design. There was the marketing plan. There was the crowdfunding campaign. So, there’s a whole bunch of behind the scenes work that goes into it. I have a slight advantage in that I have a background in publishing. So, before I became a high school teacher, I worked in publishing for about seven years and in various different roles in that. So, I’ve worked as a copy editor, doing a little bit of ghostwriting, a book designer, layout designer. So, I have that experience of what needs to get done. But that doesn’t mean that I should be the one doing it for my own book. So, I have a developmental editor for all of my books. I have a team of beta readers. I have copy editors. The publisher has an editing background. And so, he goes over it. And I have a sensitivity reader. So, one thing that I didn’t mention is that one of the characters shares my ethnic background, but the others do not. And like I said, it’s a cast of thousands. So, I have somebody who looks over it to make sure that I’ve represented people who have different cultural backgrounds than I do in a way that’s respectful and authentic. And in particular, the Indigenous characters in it. So, there was quite a process to get the manuscript from the thing that I blurted out into a final stage. And then there’s the marketing end of it. So, there’s the book design. There’s the publicity. And then there’s the distribution. So, my freelance job is as a book designer. So, I design, you know, maybe 10 to 20 books a year for other people. Again, can I design my own book? I mean, yes, I did do the design for Cascade. And I have never really been fully happy with it. I had what I thought was a really cool design. And then I saw a book by one of my favorite authors that was like the UK edition had the same kind of cover. And then I had to rework the design. So, I’ve never been totally, totally happy with the cover for Cascade. And so, for Blight, I actually got my friend, Marten Norr, who’s an illustrator, who was the illustrator on The Sad Bastard Cookbook, which I co-wrote. So, he did the illustration and then I did the design art direction elements of it. And then with marketing and distribution, I would say that’s the biggest challenge. Because when you’re putting a book out, you know, unless you’re publishing with a big four publishing company, and even then, if you’re not an A-list author, you end up having to do a lot of your own marketing. And small press does not have the distribution reach that the larger presses do. So, if you want to see your book in a bookstore or library, you’re often just approaching them one-on-one, which is tons and tons of work. I’m hoping that some of this is going to snowball into a higher profile so that eventually it markets itself. But that’s definitely the bigger challenge than writing it is getting people to hear about it so that they might consider reading it. David 28:50 Yeah, and there’s limits on that, especially with a smaller press, because there aren’t as many conventions as there used to be. You know, we used to in Toronto have Ad Astra and Toronto Trek, which became Polaris and a number of others that have come and gone. And at some point you could just do the convention circuit or go to various conventions and have your book get onto panels and try and get it in a dealer’s room and just try to. That was one of the things I think Rob, my brother-in-law Rob Sawyer mentioned to me was that if you’re doing a reading at a convention, always read from something that they can actually get in the dealer’s room. [Note: this was also something that Mike Resnick did] Rachel 29:31 Oh, for sure. Yeah. And conventions have been great. I haven’t gone to tons. I mean, Cascade came out in 2022. We were still basically in lockdown then. My entire published writing career has been post-2020 and times have really changed, and it’s gotten a lot harder to do the in-person events. But I love doing in-person events. I love doing panels. I love doing podcast appearances. And that’s really what has given the book a higher profile. Hopefully it will be the same with this second book as well. David 30:06 Yeah. And we’re planning on being at the WorldCon in Seattle [August 2025], which will be very cool because we also went to the one [a convention] in Ottawa, the Can*Con, and were able to record The Dance launch and had an episode on that. So, it’s nice to be at conventions. You connect with other creatives and people who care about the same things that we do. It’s great to have a group of people that all love science fiction, fantasy, and horror and can come together and just connect. It’s just such a powerful thing. Rachel 30:45 And I think that’s our past as a sci-fi, fantasy and horror community. But it’s also our future. You know, one of the things about online distribution is that Amazon has a virtual monopoly. And Amazon doesn’t exist to sell you books. Amazon exists to be a barrier between the reader and the writer. Their entire profit structure is to kind of slide in there, you know, and grab a cut of that process. And so, if the great Eldritch god of the algorithm is not interested in your work, nobody is ever going to see it. And with more and more AI slop out there, big books, things like that, it gets harder and harder for people to see real books by human authors, designed by human designers. And you can’t fake that at a convention, you know. You can’t fake that in a real-life community. So, I think that those conventions that do exist are going to be increasingly a filtering role to actually show who’s serious, whose book is a real thing. And to make those, you know, fan and friendship connections. I mean, it’s through that real-life community that I’ve met other authors that I’ve worked with and connected with and who’ve opened doors for me. Rob Sawyer being, you know, somebody who’s absolutely been a huge help in the start of my career. So, I really think that those live spaces are fantastic. David 32:29 Now, I think you’ve already talked about some of the obstacles or issues with getting the book to print. Is there anything that you can think of that you haven’t mentioned already about just that whole process? Rachel 32:43 I mean, so I mentioned that there was like a little coup or attempted coup in Ottawa when the book was going to print. So, I actually had an email exchange with my publisher because he was in Ottawa. So, he was in the neighborhood that the convoy was sort of barricading. I just remember emailing him saying like, so, if the government is overthrown, do we still put the book out? That was Cascade. So, we’ll see what kind of obstacles happen with Blight this time around. There’s really issues in terms of getting it seen by readers. There are certain genres that sell really well online. Up until the TikTok ban, not being a TikTok ban, now there’s a TikTok ban again. Who knows, it’s going back and forth a whole bunch. The place where you were supposed to sell your books was TikTok, which means that you need a video presence and you need to be able to explain the appeal of your book in a soundbite. And for me, I have a decent podcasting voice, I think. I don’t really have a strong video presence. I’m not writing, you know, romantasy, which is kind of the hot, at least when I started writing this series or when I started publishing this series, the hot thing was romantasy. And you would see these books and they’d have like squiggly little arrow graphics and they’re like, you know, this book features enemies to lovers, only one bed, werewolves. And that’s not the kind of fantasy that I write. Trying to sell readers on kind of a grim political fantasy, you know, trying to get people to take a risk on a weird cross-genre book has definitely been a challenge, which is also why I prefer in-person events, is you can have a discussion with somebody rather than try and sell it to them in a soundbite. David 34:53 Can you give a bit of a spoiler? Like, for example, what can we even expect in the third book versus Cascade then Blight? First of all, I don’t know if you mentioned the name of what the third book might be called. Rachel 35:13 Oh, yeah, I haven’t done that, have I? So, the working title is Braid. There were a couple other titles that I’ve been throwing around kind of quietly to my friends to see whether any of them stick. But I guess the Scrivener file is called Braid, and that’s probably what it’s going to be. You know, in terms of spoilers for the second book, you can expect things to get a lot more metal: We’ve got Fascists marching in the streets, we’ve got giant bone tentacles, we have a demon moose, we have somebody kicking back grenades with a hockey stick. It is a very Canada on psychedelic mushrooms kind of a book. I think it’s a lot more fun than Cascade. There’s a lot fewer meetings, a lot more things in the wilderness trying to kill you. In terms of the third book, one of the big things that you’ll get to see in the third book is how we can really envision a different world. The reason why this is fantasy is because fantasy allows for more imaginative possibilities. And in our current world, we seem to be stuck in this rut. So, we either have kind of a slightly progressive government that is going to pay for a few more social programs, and it’s going to make all of the right noises, and it maybe it’s going to respect the diversity of identity as long as that doesn’t interfere with corporate profits. And then we’ve got the far right that wants to send trans people and migrants and homeless people into death camps. And those shouldn’t be the two options. We can do better, and we need to do better because neither of those political tendencies addresses the elephant in the room, which is climate change. So, I guess in the third book, you’re going to get to see how I think we should deal with climate change. David 37:21 Wow, that sounds like something to look forward to. Rachel 37:25 Yeah. David 37:26 Hopefully you’ll have a bit of the idea… Rachel 37:29 Yeah, well, and I think fantasy really lends itself well to exploring those possibilities. I think we’ve been in this moment before. We’ve seen this history unfold. Fantasy exists because it allows us to imagine different possibilities. It allows us to imagine breaking the historical cycles that we’ve been in before. David 37:52 I think that’s maybe where we’re at right now. And I think we’ve gotten into a lot about Blight and the fact that it’s out and available now [Correction: the book is available June 15, 2025], and hopefully people will be able to pick it up. So, is there anything that you can say beyond just upcoming and other things you’re working on, maybe just mention where they should be able to find Blight so they can actually order or pick up a copy? Rachel 38:16 Yeah, so you have choices. There’s, you know, Amazon’s evil. Amazon is the scourge of the publishing industry. That said, if you want to help an independent author or a small press author out, buying it from Amazon helps a lot more than buying it directly. I hate that this is true, but every purchase on Amazon boosts you in the algorithm. And so that’s, I tell people to do it even though I hate them. You can also, you know, buy it through like Chapters Indigo, also evil for a number of reasons. You know, you can buy it on Kobo or Apple Books or, you know, Barnes & Noble if you’re in the States. I think Bookshop.org if you’re overseas. So, there’s a lot of online options. If you want to avoid the evil, you can buy it through the press. So, BumblePuppy Press, bppress.ca. You can buy it direct from the publisher. I actually get more money that way, but it does nothing for the algorithm. So, it’s always a little balanced there. I hate it. I’m hoping that it will end up being in some bookstores. And, I really encourage people to buy them through independent bookstores. So, if you are in a city, you know, an indie bookstore, you can ask them to buy it for you, to order it for you, and they will. And then you can not only support my book, you can support that bookstore. Independent bookstores are our future. Independent bookstores are so, so important for writers, for readers, for general societal literacy. So, I really encourage people to go to their local indie bookstore and do that. And you can also go to your local library and get them to order it. And again, this helps everybody. It helps me. It helps the library. It helps readers who wouldn’t ordinarily get to read it. And you get to read it for free. It costs nothing. So yeah, so those are some of the many ways that you can get Blight. The other thing is that this episode drops May 15th. By the way, it’s my birthday tomorrow. So, if you want to get me a birthday present, you can buy my book. But also pre-orders and reviews really, really help out book sales. So, this is so, so important that once you read them, review them where you bought them, it helps books get seen. David 41:01 Yeah, I was going to suggest, because that’s funny that hopefully everyone’s aware, but maybe not everyone is, that if it isn’t in your independent, your local independent books are the one you might go to every few weeks or every month or so just to see what’s there. Just ask them. One thing I wanted to ask you about is audio or e-books or Kindle or whatever those things are. Are these things possibly available that way too? Rachel 41:25 So, e-books, absolutely. E-books are available of both Cascade and Blight wherever e-books are sold. You can also get your libraries to order e-books. It’s funny because I’m a book designer. I design covers. And practically everything that I read or buy is in e-book form now. So, I’m a rank hypocrite, but e-books are easier to carry around and take up no space on my bookshelf. So yeah, in terms of the audio book, we’re working on it. We’ve been working on it for a while. It’s surprisingly complex to do an audiobook. And especially, I have not made life easy for anybody trying to do an audiobook of this. There’s so many different point of views and there’s words that I don’t know how to pronounce, but I know how to spell, so I put them in there. So, it’s a challenge, but we are working on an audio book of Cascade now, as well as some translations into other languages, I hope. Should hopefully get more accessible as time goes on. David 42:37 So, is there just something else that’s sort of upcoming? I know we’ve got the Seattle WorldCon or other things that you’re working. I think you also mentioned that you had another story that was either accepted, like your short story that’s either accepted or had come out. Do you want to mention that? Rachel 42:53 Yeah, I’m actually working on a lot now. So, my big project is obviously the third book and that takes up most of my time and I’m always marketing the last book while I’m working on the next book, but other things that I have out… So, in, I believe, March [2025], this would be a couple months ago when this episode drops, I’ll have a short story that’s a reprint in Trollbreath. So, this is an online magazine. It has subscriptions and then they do pre-fiction Fridays where they’ll slowly release everything that they have that’s subscriber locked. So, my short story, “Do You Love the Color of the Sky,” which, if you listen to the Can*Con episode, you got to hear me read part of it. So, that’s going to be in Trollbreath Magazine. [Note: https://magazine.trollbreath.com/] And then, but again, by the time that this episode airs, we will have also officially announced that there are not one but two sequels to The Sad Bastard Cookbook coming out. So, this is my other project that I worked on with my co-author, Zilla Novikov, and our illustrator, Marten Norr. And it was a huge viral sensation and it’s way more popular than any fiction that I have ever written, which is kind of funny because we wrote it by accident. But it was a huge hit and people kept on asking us for more and different. And so, we’re going to have a sequel that Zilla and I are working on. And we’re also going to have one for parents. Our friend Rohan O’Duill, who is also a wonderful, wonderful sci-fi author and is a chef and had to suffer through testing out the recipes in the first Sad Bastard Cookbook. He’s the parent of a toddler. And so, he’s working on a Sad Bastard Cookbook for parents and families. So that’s going to be coming out pretty soon, too. David 44:52 That sounds great. I mean, for myself, I’ve just got the Seattle Worldcon and continued to work on other things. I’m hoping this year is the year that I actually send out my fiction, my science fiction, fantasy, horror stuff for the first time. So, I’m just a budding genre fiction writer. Rachel 45:14 You can do it. You can do it. I was going to say, it was about 25 years between the last thing that I published or publicly performed and the publication of Cascade. So, it’s never too late. David, where can people find you online? David 45:33 Oh, I’m at davidlivingstoneclink.com. Where else am I? I’m on all sorts of places, probably places I’m not supposed to be at. I think I have to add a Bluesky account [DONE! @davidclink.bsky.social] at some point and stop the whole X fiasco. But yeah, mainly my website would take you to other places. So, as long as people get to davidlivingstoneclink.com, they should be okay. Oh, I’m also at Two Old Farts Talk Sci-Fi. That’s the other podcast that I do, that one with Troy Harkin. Rachel 46:05 Yeah, and you can find me at rachelrosen.ca. I’m most active on Bluesky, so I’m @darkerthanvanta at bluesky. I’m also on Mastodon as youseeatortoise at Wandering Shop. And you can find my writing collective. I didn’t talk a lot about my writing collective, but I have a writing collective called Night Beats. We’re at nightbeats.eu.ca. And these are the people who really helped all of my writing come into being. We have a newsletter. And so, we have a regular newsletter that comes out with information about our upcoming books, interviews with other authors. I do fake covers for real books in the wrong genre. We sometimes have roundtables, pictures of our cats, all kinds of good stuff. So, if you want to follow my writing, you can subscribe there. And if you happen to be an author and you have a new book coming out, we’ll happily do an interview with you. There’s a section for author interviews. At the moment of recording, I’m still on Meta as rachelashrosen in most places. So, you can find me there, but I’m way less active because the algorithm hates me. And of course, you can find us both at wizardsandspaceships.ca. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. Listen to it wherever you listen to your podcasts. David 47:29 Thanks a lot, Rachel. Rachel 47:30 Awesome. Rachel 47:31 Wizards & Spaceships is a Night Beats production. It’s written and produced by David L. Clink and Rachel A. Rosen. Our theme music is by Rick Innis. You can find more of his music at anythingthatgrooves on SoundCloud. Our logo is by Marten Norr. See more of his work at flowerprincedraws on Instagram. Our soundbites are from Pixabay. At least half of our dad jokes are by Rohan O’Duill. You can find show notes, other episodes, and links to our other projects at wizardsandspaceships.ca.