Hi Austin! I'm curious about a number of things, really. First off - your brother writes scifi and fantasy and you write about comic books and video games. Do you think this says anything about how twins identify, or is mainly just what you're each passionate about? I ask as a twin myself. Second, it's obvious that you wrote YOU because of your career in video game design, but what was the genesis of Soon You Will Be Invincible Too? Third, having not read Crooked, can you tell me a little about how it fits into your scope of work and what the process was behind it?
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@jeffumbro I'm on my third book, and each time the topic is different - superheroes, video games, and now an alternate history of Nixon. I'm still jumping around. I think if there's a different, it's that Lev found a fantasy series he could dig into and stay with for a whole trilogy.
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@austin_grossman@jeffumbro But I don't think there's a basic difference in how we define ourselves. I could totally write a fantasy novel...probably I will at some point.
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@austin_grossman@jeffumbro Where did Soon I Will Be Invincible come from? I was working on my PhD in English Literature, and suddenly this supervillain voice just started...occurring, and I'd scribble sentences in the margins of my lecture notes. It seemed so funny but weirdly truthful and inspiring at the same time. The way a supervillain stands up against the world world. And then I started building this world around it, and I realized I had to write this whole thing.
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@austin_grossman@jeffumbro CROOKED is the untold story of Richard Nixon, who was a bit of an American supervillain himself. I was born in 1969 so I grew up with Nixon as the first president I knew about...but why was he such a joke? Who was this guy? And still no one quite knows, why he did the things he did. And so with a question like that, I had to write the answer.
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@austin_grossman@jeffumbro And I think I'm drawn to the unlikely hero. I wanted to find a version of the story where Nixon is somehow secretly noble - his whole life, he's fighting a lonely battle against darker forces than anyone knows about, the elder gods of Cthulhu, weaponized in the Cold War.
But he can never reveal it. He goes down in history as a villain and a laughingstock. But at last, we learn the true story.
Thanks so much for joining us! I would love to hear what Austin's writing process is like? How do you deal with writers block and what was the most challenging aspect of the entire experience of book writing?
Harry
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@harrystebbings In the first stages, my writing process is just about the farthest thing from professional! I'll have an idea or question that keeps coming back to me...I'll write sentences or dialogue about it on scraps of paper, then at the end of the day I'll type up what was on the scraps! Of course later in the process I get more disciplined.
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@harrystebbings Writer's block is a tough one. The best thing I've found is to try to listen to what it's saying. It's a signal that you're not connecting with why you want to write...that's why everything you come up with suddenly with feels boring and pointless. I try to find a new idea or angle on the subject, just play around until it comes. But it's just about the hardest thing.
Outstanding and hilarious book that holds a special place in my dark heart. I read it at a time when I was a bit depressed and had given up all hope in the love realm. This book made me laugh and inspired me to create a profile on a dating site as if I was an inept supervillain like the main character. I had so much fun pretending to be ridiculous and through this absurd profile. Because of that I actually met an amazing woman and fell hopelessly in love. We've been plotting world domination together ever since. We got married just over a year ago.
Thank you, Austin!
Please do yourself a favor and read the book if you haven't. Everyone just wants to be loved.
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