TRANSCRIPT – Bonus: Absolute Psychedelic Nonsense with Carl Engle-Laird

Hosts: Baily and Kabriya

Guest: Carl Engle-Laird

(Upbeat, driving electronic music)

00:18 BAILY: Hello, fellow boneheads! Welcome to the first bonus episode of One Flesh, One End, a Locked Tomb reread podcast. I'm Baily,

00:28 KABRIYA: and I'm Kabriya. And we're going to be stepping away from our reread to do something a little bit different with this episode. We were lucky enough to get to interview someone quite close to the books recently, and now you get to hear that conversation.

B: We didn't try to drag too many Nona spoilers out of our source, but we did manage to get some tiny, no context clues to ponder while we wait for the book to arrive.

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00:57 K: So, before we get into today's special interview, we just wanted to let you know that we're going to be talking about a Nona the Ninth poem. And if you're not familiar with it, this is a poem from Nona the Ninth that has been released already by Tor.com Publishing. It was sent out in their email newsletter.

We published an annotated version of this poem on our Twitter and Tumblr pages, both of which are at One Flesh, One Pod. We'll be linking to these in the show notes if you want to check it out, but if you haven't had a chance to read the poem yet, this is how it goes.

You told me, Sleep, I’ll wake you in the morning,
I asked, What is morning? and you said,
When everyone who fucked with me is dead.

When everyone we loved has gone or fled,
That’s morning. Empty’s the same as clean.
Let’s put this first-draft dream of mine to bed.

In that appointed hour,
I’ll turn down your sheets. I’ll kill the light,
Lie down beside you; die; and sleep the night.

This time will be the time we get it right:
Forgiveness not so hard, nor anger long;
Our graves will be less deep, our lies less true.

You held aloft the sword.
I still love y–

And it ends on the final word cut off at just the letter y. So, let's get into it.

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02:20 K: Today, we're thrilled to be joined by a very special guest for our bonus episode! Carl Engle-Laird is the editor of the Locked Tomb series, among many other books at Tor.com Publishing.

And while we promise not to try to wring any Nona spoilers out of him today, we're really excited to chat about some of the glimpses that Tor.com has already shared from this book, as well as his overall experience working on the series so far.

So, hi, Carl. Thank you for being with us today!

02:44 CARL: Hello. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

02:46 B: So happy to have you here.

02:48 K: We thought it would be fitting to start out by talking about the Nona the Ninth poem that was released, because that was actually how we all got into contact with each other and started talking about you coming on this podcast here.

Baily was the one who did an annotation of the poem and released that on Twitter, and that caught your eye and started some really fun discussion with some other fans as well.

But before we start talking more specifically about that annotation, we thought we'd ask, how did this poem come to you at first? And what was it like for you working on it with Tamsyn? As in, working on a poem instead of the usual prose and books you might do.

03:21 C: Of course. So this poem showed up just at the front of the first draft of Nona the Ninth when I got it, and it really knocked me away, really like, bowled me over because of how different it is from the poetry that has been in the series so far.

The first two books have an expanding poem about the houses and what they represent in relation to the Emperor, and are propaganda poetry. They exist to serve a purpose for that society, which is to tell the houses who they are and who they belong to. And those are always fun. I'm really happy to have them.

In fact, I didn't know they existed, and I asked Tamsyn, hey, do you have like, a Sorting Hat poem? With the – you know. We all hope the Tamsyn will not become like J. K. Rowling and I don't think there's any danger of that…

B: [Laughs]

04:19 K: Little asterisk beside all Harry Potter references. It's all good.

B: [Laughs]

04:21 C: You can cut that out if you want to, but, you know, there's houses, you want to be sorted into them.

K: Yeah.

C: And she already had it written. She immediately turned it around. She also turned around the first draft of the skull ornaments, so that world building always existed.

And I love that poem, but it is a piece of propaganda. It is like, intentionally sort of artistically compromised. And this isn't. It really impressed me with just like how good it was, how vibrant and compelling and rich it was.

It was really great to see you annotate it because we've seen all kinds of wonderful fan art and fan work and cosplay and all kinds of stuff. This is the first poetry annotation to happen for the series and the first poetry annotation I've read since graduating college [laughs].

05:16 K: Big milestone for the pod.

05:18 B: Yeah. I mean, I hadn't annotated a poem since AP English back – ah, jeez – ten years ago now, but I was working on it late at night trying to procrastinate grading [laughs], and it sort of sprung out of me. I took a screenshot from the newsletter and opened up Photoshop and sort of started typing.

I'm curious – so, you know, I had structural annotations as well as content annotations. I'm curious if you knew whether or not it was intended to be a sonnet. Did you get any indication from Tamsyn about that? Because the final line is so ambiguous! You know, is it 13 or 14 lines?

05:54 C: I didn't get any indication of that from Tamsyn up ahead. She sort of just presented the book and said, “Here it is. Start editing!” Well – “Here's 60% of it. Start reading.” We'll talk about that later [laughs].

I was thinking of it as like – it felt like a very familiar format, but I'm not actually a poetry guy almost at all. I was an English major in college, and I took classes on poetry, but never on purpose.

06:21 B: Right.

06:21 C: It's the form I avoided more than anything else.

06:24 B: Yes, I know the feeling. It's required, but you don't want to take it.

06:30 C: Yeah. So it felt like a sonnet to me at first, but I wasn't sort of thinking that consciously. One step I took, however, was to have my dad read it, who's both a Locked Tomb fan and an English professor [laughs].

06:44 B: That's fantastic.

06:45 C: He's an early modern scholar specializing in the connection between Shakespeare and Montaigne.

06:50 K: Oh, very cool!

06:52 C: So he sort of identified it as mostly a sonnet. I think it is – the last two lines, although they are half lines, are meant to be read as a couplet.

07:02 B: That makes sense. Yeah. I guess the ambiguity comes from almost all the other lines in the poem being a full unit of iambic pentameter. And then the final two lines, even though there is that line break… the meter of the rest of the poem would suggest that they’re supposed to be one line.

So I was like, oh, there's no way it's a sonnet; it's only 13 lines! But we got some really interesting feedback from someone who saw it on Tumblr [nrivanwrites] who argued that technically, yes, it does have 14 lines, and it also does have – I was sort of ambiguous about this, like arguing with myself in my interpretation – but it does have a volta, where that image turns from sleeping to more macabre subjects like death. And I think rereading it now, yeah, I do have to agree. I like thinking about it as a sonnet as well.

07:47 C: Speaking of the volta and the early modern period, my favourite reading of that line, Lie down beside you, die; and sleep the night, was not actually in your annotation, which is, die has another reading in the early modern context, which is to orgasm.

08:02 B [crowing with laughter]: Oh, yeah!

08:02 C: And Shakespeare makes so much hay out of this connection.

08:07 B: I remember that from high school. Many laughs were had.

K: Very French [laughs].

08:12 C: Whoever is speaking in this poem… I asked Tamsyn about this. She said, “I hadn't been thinking about that, but it's clearly true.” [All laugh].

08:21 B: That works well. Yeah! Because a sonnet is generally a love poem as well, so that definitely fits with the structural format as well as that potential play on words there. That's fantastic.

08:33 C: And this is definitely a love poem. It's an angry love poem, it's a vengeful love poem, and it's a selfish love poem. But that's what love is like in this setting. It's… angry and it's possessive, and it's so often tied to destruction and – both self-destruction and the destruction of your loved one.

B: Yeah.

C: So I think it's the right love poem for where it's coming from.

09:03 K: I think that's one thing that really struck me reading this – sort of just how deeply personal it feels. Everyone's trying to figure out exactly who's speaking, who are they speaking to, but it's so obvious it's a very kind of intimate relationship that's being alluded to in the sonnet.

Compared to – like you were saying, Carl, the other kind of poems or similar structures that we've seen so far have been like the propaganda poem with the houses or – we talked a bit about the prayer of the Ninth House, and we looked at religion in the world of the Locked Tomb, and everything else that we've seen that's sort of been more of a poetic kind of structure before has been very impersonal or propaganda-ish. And so to get something like this, which is very intensely personal, I think also is really intriguing to a lot of fans.

09:41 B: But it does, I think, reflect the ways in which even interpersonal relationships have been shaped by imperialism in this series – and I think we'll touch on that more in a later episode – but the fact that cavalier-necromancer relationships have been so twisted by their purpose within the empire, you know, even this poem that's very personal seems to have that – yeah, that sort of the violence inherent in a lot of these interpersonal relationships in the series.

10:08 C: Yeah.

10:09 K: Mhm. The sword is very interpersonal in all these relationships [laughs].

10:13 B: Wow. I don't like that [laughs]. The interpersonal sword.

10:18 K: One thing that we were wondering as well was also about this poem in the larger kind of release strategy for teasing up to Nona the Ninth. Right now we've seen kind of different bits and pieces from the excerpt as well, but we're wondering if you had any kind of insight on that kind of decision-making of why this was released to give fans something to gnash their teeth about for the next few months.

10:39 C: I think that it's a good forerunner for the content of the book, because one thing I'll say about this poem is you can make a lot of guesses, but I didn't understand it until I’d read the book and started over and knew what… by the end of the book you'll understand this poem. Or, you can reread the book and then you'll understand the poem [all laugh].

I don't think you could ever really feel complete on any of these books in your understanding until you’ve reread it a couple of times, and then also –

11:07 K: No, I mean here we are, podcasting, trying to figure it all out as we go back through.

11:12 C: I don't think it can spoil things? So it's a good sort of opener. I think it's a beautiful piece of poetry, so I'm happy to have it out there and get people excited again about reading new words from Tamsyn. And I think there's a lot to speculate about in it.

So our hope is that we can give y’all stuff to chew on and stuff to speculate about without spoiling the fun.

11:36 B: Oh my goodness. Well, and part of the fun is the mystery, too. It's been part of this larger strategy of teasers leading up to the Nona release where it seems like the strategy has just been to make everything as [laughs] confusing and opaque as possible. As mysterious as possible.

And I'm curious to what extent was that a decision from the marketing team versus Tamsyn intentionally wanting to make her books a puzzle box.

12:03 C: So those two ideas, it coming from marketing or it coming from Tamsyn – it’s very interwoven. Most of the marketing initiatives come from our side. We suggest ideas, we present them to Tamsyn, and she mostly just gives her okay, and sometimes provide some material for us to work with.

I think that a good marketing campaign should reflect the shape of the book it's marketing. And I think that these books – our marketing is mysterious because these books are metaphysical mysteries, and these books succeed because they are these mystery boxes that people want to engage with and re-engage with, which is the basis of a fantasy series in particular becoming immortal.

I grew up in the Wheel of Time reading trenches, and while I wasn't fully in the fandom, anytime I dipped my toes in online, I was like, oh, there are thousands and thousands of people having the kinds of conversations that I have with my father about what might happen and what my evidence is for what might happen.

13:09 B: Ahhh! That's fantastic! We're about to read the first Wheel of Time book for our book club! I’m looking forward to it.

13:13 C: Yes. A little Carl fact is that my objective in everything I drove for in the Locked Tomb series was to make it look as much like a Wheel of Time book as I could, despite it being nothing like a Wheel of Time book.

13:29 B [laughing]: Oh my god.

13:30 C: Which is why there's a glossary now, which is why there are chapter ornaments that mean things

13:35 B: Yes.

13:36 C: I was always trying to piece together… I would see an ornament in a Wheel of Time book and be like, oh, no, I recognize that. That means it's going to be this in this chapter or, oh, this represents a character I'm very tired of reading about [laughs].

13:50 B: Oh, my goodness, that's fantastic. Yeah. Because I think there is so much to glean from the chapter ornaments, specifically in Harrow the Ninth. You know, “Is this part of the dream bubble? Is this real life?” Yeah. There's definitely lots to grapple with there. I love that.

14:04 C: Yeah.

14:04 K: Yeah. I think the more that you can kind of give fans something to speculate about or question, like the kind of mystery box – I really like that as a way of framing it – you're creating fandom when fans have something to go and reach out and try to talk to each other about online or in their own lives or whatever, because they have these questions that they want answered.

And I do think with what's come out so far about Nona the Ninth, I think I've said to Baily before, but it's probably the most – the least I've ever known or understood about something I was reading from a book that was like not the first book in a series [Baily laughs]. Like, where I've read two books already, I should kind of know what's going on or what to expect in the next book, and every time Tor releases anything, whether it was the synopsis, there's a girl you've never heard of before, there's a birthday party, there's dogs – like all these little things that just mean nothing, but it's been so fun in a way.

And I think that personally, I just sort of leaned into embracing that aspect of not having a clue of what it means and loving that. But it does obviously create such a frenzy of fans online wanting to figure it out. And obviously with this book in particular, I think a lot of that mystery comes from the fact that fans thought they sort of knew what to expect, which was, it was going to be Alecto the Ninth, that was the name that we’d heard…

15:13 B: Even though we don't know who Alecto is! So like, there’s – [dissolves into laughter]

15:16 K: But we had a little bit of an idea what was coming. And then all of a sudden, in a very frenzied sort of way, there was this discovery online on Twitter looking at the Harrow paperback that actually there's something called Nona the Ninth. It's a series.

B [gasps]: Yes.

K: So one thing we wanted to ask was both, what was that process like – both the decision to separate those books on your end and that – but also, I don't know how involved you were or if you can speak to the Tor.com side of things when it was put out online already that people had started to piece together that decision had been made.

B: That blew my mind.

15:47 C: Yeah, there was – that’s a whole saga.

15:51 B: You don't need to go too into it if you don't want to!

15:53 C: No, I'd love to. The decision to separate the books started with fear and panic, because it took a long time to get to the point where I got to read any of Nona.

After Harrow came out, Tamsyn was working on this book and working on this book and working on this book. And, you know, I think we all struggled a lot during the beginning of the pandemic. Also, that coincided with the beginning of Tamsyn’s life as a public figure, which is a very stressful time for authors.

I would urge all your fans – I mean, Tamsyn is doing great – but I would urge all your fans to consider that the most stressful time in any author's life is when they finish their first book and have to write a second, because they have to do something that, the first time they did it took their entire lives, in about nine months to a year, while doing publicity and marketing stuff [laughs].

K: Yeah.

C: It really sucks!

16:50 K: No, I can imagine.

16:52 C: And it sucks in different ways depending on how the book is going. And success can weigh quite heavily as well. So we're like a year out from when I had hoped to have seen a little bit of Alecto, and I got a call with Tamsyn and she said, “Well, I think I could have something for you soon. About… two-thirds of the way through the first act. Problem is, those two-thirds are 90,000 words long.”

B [laughing]: Ah, jeez.

K: Slight hiccup.

C: And so I asked her, “How many acts are there going to be?” She said, “Three or four?” I said, “Well, that math doesn't work out, Tamsyn, because your last book was 160,000 words, and what you're talking about is 300,000 words.” And that book just – we can't print that.

I mean, you can print a book that long, but we’re – to get really technical and really boring, this is published in the group format, which is 5 ⅜” by 8 ½”.

17:57 B: For the dimensions of the book?

17:59 C: Yeah. And when you're approaching that, you want to switch over into the larger scale format, 6” by 9”. When it crosses a certain page length. Because it's just economical at that point, which is why you tend to see huge fantasy doorstoppers. They are taller and wider than shorter books as well.

So, this 320,000 word book would be… a very deep book, and would look twice as big [all laugh] as the previous book on the shelves.

K: Fans love a series that looks the same.

C: And Tamsyn is not writing these books in a way where you are just like blasting through them the way you do for a 300,000 word book. So I said, basically, “Tamsyn, could you just send me what you have, and we'll see if maybe that could be its own book?” And fortunately, it can. I promise you, this is a book that feels like one book, not a book that feels like it's lopped off of something else.

19:02 B: Perfect.

19:03 C: I got to read 60% of it at that point. And by the end of it, I didn't know what was going to happen to Nona or where her story was going, but I was 100% confident that it was going to be its own book.

19:15 K: Okay.

19:15 C: This is the book about Nona, and the next book is the book that will conclude the series.

19:23 B: Perfect.

19:25 C: It really – it couldn't have been the first act of Alecto because Nona is such a vibrant character. She deserves her own book and she deserves to be the viewpoint in her book.

19:35 K: And I think that sounds fair based on how the other books have been as well. Obviously, kind of as the titles go, we were very much with Gideon in the first book, very much with Harrow in the next book.

So even though we don't know anything about Nona now, I think from what we have read, it makes sense that she'll get her own book, too, and we'll really get to be as enmeshed with her as we were with those characters.

19:53 B: That's true. Well, structurally, like, there are little snippets of other POVs in Gideon and Harrow. But yeah, it's not like a shift halfway through or anything like that.

When you were describing the dimensions of a 300,000 word book, I was picturing that piece of art where somebody printed out all of Wikipedia, like in 8 ½” by 11”. It was like 5 feet tall or something like that [laughs] (note from Baily: this is false; it filled an entire room and they didn’t even print the whole thing out!).

I’d love to have that on my shelf.

20:14: C: Yeah. It would be cumbersome to open. The spine would be under considerable pressure.

K [laughing]: Everyone just going around getting real buff from lugging around their Alecto the Ninth tome everywhere they go.

C: A bunch of totes just bulging out in the middle.

20:31 K: Yeah, love that. And then, yeah, we sort of hinted at this earlier, but the fact that that decision was kind of revealed on Twitter and that, with the fan kind of pulling it together, was that a stressful time on your end?

B [jokingly]: Or was it exciting?

K: Did it affect the rollout in any way? [laughs]

20:50 C: To speak politely? That was a stressful time.

B: Ooh, jeez.

C: I was on paternity leave when that happened, and I was like the caretaker for my newborn at that time. And those were a few days where I was in quite a few meetings with a three-month-old baby on my chest [laughs].

21:10 B: Oh my goodness.

21:13 C: It was – it worked out fine, we're very happy you’re all so enthusiastic. I'm a little annoyed at the Amazon “Look Inside” function, but I can't talk any more about that.

21:22 B: Yeah, no, I know what you mean [laughs].

K: Totally.

21:25 C: But it was also, like, to be fair, it was like a couple of months before we knew it was going to be revealed by people opening the trade paperback anyway. We put it in there for people to find it. Not to find it in that way, but to find it and see…

What people found was a list of books by Tamsyn which showed the Locked Tomb in a new order with a new book that said Nona, and then the Ninth with a strikethrough, and we knew that people would freak out about it. We just expected to be able to have people freak out about it in a way that we were prepared for [laughs].

21:59 B: Exactly, yeah.

22:00 K: Right. Always intended to cause panic, just… slightly premature panic the way that it came out [Baily laughs]. Okay.

22:06 C: And, you know, we managed to maneuver things such that the description of the book fed out at a point that we expected it to. Like, we were pretty sure that y’all would find that about when you did and taken a bunch of steps to hide everything about the book until that was ready.

22:24 B: Yes. I mean, there were definitely – based on the reactions I saw, like, people would completely have believed if Nona had just been like a short story that was being added into the middle. Like, you could have said anything! Honestly [laughs], it was just the title that had people in a frenzy!

22:40 C: Yeah. My policy is when I'm tweeting, I don't lie. When I'm retweeting other people, those are deceptions, or just things I found very funny.

And, also I was told going into this that, if pushed for Nona spoilers, I should just lie. That was Tamsyn’s directive. I think that would be too transparent a strategy.

23:03 B: Oh my goodness.

23:04 K: We've been warned though, and we know now with the retweets, we know what to expect. They're not endorsements. They are lies.

23:11 C [laughing]: I am often hitting retweet thinking “They're going to be really upset about this!”

B [laughing]: Oh my gosh.

23:17 K: That is funny. I mean, with a fandom that's so involved in following everything I think I have seen discussion of, you know, “The editor liked this tweet! What does it mean? Does it mean that that's going to happen?” And my instinct is always probably… not necessarily. That seems like it would be a pretty spoiler-y thing to do if you were going out and only liking all the correct things.

But I can imagine how fun it must be to see the theories and wild conspiracies that people are coming up with now. And to encourage that a little bit.

23:42 B: I like to be toyed with. One of my favourite moments with the Nona reveal was when the cover was coming out and there was a tweet that was like two truths and a lie about what's going to be on the cover. And it was like sword, gas mask, hamburger. And I was like [derisive voice], “There's no way there's going to be a hamburger.” [laughs] I was fooled!

23:58 C: We were very proud of that particular directive. We had a lot of fun putting that one together.

B: It was fantastic.

C: I like that picture of my mind that is just a person who goes through and likes all the things that people write about. Isn't that an interesting person to be?

24:14 K: Exactly, exactly.

24:16 C: I want to warn your fandom that I'm much more chaotic than that.

24:20 K: Okay.

24:23 B [laughing]: Got it. So we should take the opposite away from everything that you like on Twitter. That's my new policy.

24:29 C: Much more chaotic than that. Still.

24:31 B: Got it.

24:32 K: You were saying that today that if you came on and just said a bunch of lies about Nona the Ninth, that that's still something people could pick their way through and by processing, “Okay, if that's not going to happen, then it must be this instead,” or something like that.

24:46 C: That would be way too easy. Like, the thing that everyone needs to remember, I am the editor who connected with this book [all laugh].

24:52 K: Exactly. Well, that is a brilliant segue, actually, because the next thing I was about to ask you was to take a step back from Nona the Ninth and kind of to the origins of this series, I was doing my research before this chat, and I know that you've been with Tor.com Publishing right from the start of the imprint really early on.

And so, I was wondering, when Gideon the Ninth first came across your desk, what your first impression was of that and what it was specifically that made you think it would be a good fit with Tor.com.

25:18 C: Yeah, I remember that day really clearly. It was the beginning – I remember very clearly, but I'm never quite confident about what year my memories are from.

B: The last two years have been fake.

C: Yeah. It was the beginning of 2018, the first week of 2018. My parents were in town, and also we were all snowed in, because there’d been like a really heavy snowstorm in New York. And I got an email from Tamsyn, who I'd been in correspondence with for a few months.

I originally read one of her short stories, “The Magician's Apprentice,” I believe it's called.

25:58 B: Ah, okay.

25:58 C: And I read it and it was very dark, very messed up, very provocative. And I thought, this is an author who could produce some really dark award-baity things that, like, a few thousand people will enjoy, I should reach out to her for a novella. Which is something I do sometimes; sometimes I find short fiction authors and think, “You can write! Try writing for me.”

26:19 B: Yeah. Or – “write more.”

26:20 C: Yeah. So I reached out to Tamsyn. She said she had some ideas for novella, but she was working on a novel, and could she get back to me when she was done with that? And I said, “Yes, sure.”

And then about a month later, she said, “Another one of your authors who I went to Clarion with said I should stop being silly and just send you my novel. So can I do that? It’s a…” She described it as a necromantic monastery thriller.

26:47 B: Wow.

K: That's my favourite niche.

26:49 C: Tamsyn has gotten better describing her books since then.

26:52 B [laughing]: Monastery thriller.

26:53 C: But I said, “Yeah, sure, send it my way.” I opened it and I got to the Dramatis Personae and I went “Oho!” I read for a little bit, I basically got through the first two chapters sitting in my room, like, with my parents in the front room of the apartment.

And after the first two chapters, I went out and said to them, “I'm going to have to vanish for the rest of the day. I have to read this book with no distractions until it's done.”

27:18 K: Oh my god.

B: Oh my goodness.

27:19 C: I think the line that tipped me over was – oh, I wish I had it off the top of my head. “Marshall Crux advanced like an avalanche with an agenda?” It's something like that. Something very close to that.

27:34 B: Let me find it, let me find it!

27:35 K: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Those early chapters are so good. We talked a bit as well about the moments that really jumped out at us.

27:41 B: “A glacier with an agenda!”

27:43 C: “A glacier with an agenda.” Yeah. I read that and I was like, I will buy this book one way or another.

27:48 B: She just has such a way with words.

27:50 C: She does. And I blitzed through it and sent it to my colleagues as soon as I could, and I had the clearest vision I'd ever had of a book that I'd received. That it was both perfectly suited to me, and a potential bestseller.

Nothing I'd worked on had ever lined up like that in my head. I just read it and knew, this will work for so many people, without compromising my sense of writing at all.

28:18 B: Ah! Amazing.

28:19 C: It felt perfect. And also it was because I had the brainwave: there are a whole bunch of goths and there's a whole bunch of lesbians, and there's a significant overlap in that market. And no one's ever catered to them [laughs] in my entire genre. So we will, and they will do everything for us.

K: Now that’s marketing.

28:41 B: Yeah. Corner that market. It’s so true.

28:45 K: I love to be catered to. But I think that also speaks as well to – you know, joking about kind of the funny combination of necromancy and monastery and the pitch for it – it really does read like a book where I think you can tell sometimes as a reader when an author has put in sort of a bunch of their own different interests or things that appeal to them and it's not necessarily a cross section that you've seen before or you would normally see, but it's clear that they're just having so much fun with those different things.

And I think when that lines up with your own interests as a reader, it's just the most delightful feeling in the world, where it's like, I love swords, I love dark magic and haunted houses and also there’s space! I've never seen all these things thrown together before! And I'm having so much fun with it in a way where I feel like the author was as well.

So, you know, you're saying how it lined up for your own reading taste and also what you could imagine doing really well. I think there is just that feeling you get sometimes when it's a really unique combination of really fun things like that.

29:36 C: This is a wonderful moment for that in speculative fiction, because the boundaries between genres haven't been this thin for decades. The success of the fantasy genre coming out of the 80s and 90s – I mean, really Tolkien, like, crystallized the fantasy genre into being a specific way, and people were just spinning off different versions of that for a long time.

And then we started getting these new mega-blockbuster hits. Your Robert Jordans, your George R. R. Martins, who made these very clear paths. And then for a decade, fantasy was about trying to make the next Game of Thrones.

B: Right.

C: And none of them totally coalesced or came together. And by the time I started working on this stuff in 2012, people were ready for something different. And instead of it being one different thing, the doors just got blown off.

Like, science fiction can be fantasy, fantasy can be science fiction; they're all blending with horror, they're all blending with dark fantasy. The necessity that something either be – like, it doesn't have to be on Earth to be like modern fantasy anymore. That was like a requirement that was hammered up by the power and success of urban fantasy coming out of Gaiman’s influence. All of that is falling away.

And so there's so many people who are writing the books just the way they want to, and being able to sell that, and that's great! The books I want to do are always the books where the authors are having the most fun and thinking the least about how it fits into what other people have done.

31:13 B: I would also like to add that, I think, beyond the boundaries between scifi and fantasy blurring a bit, also the boundaries with the romance genre. Like, I think there's been a big trend with scifi and fantasy romance exploding over the last while.

But also, even contemporary fiction has – I mean, I guess there's always been a little bit… there's always been the occasional book that I personally would see as speculative fiction that has really mainstream appeal because of its writing style or whatnot. I'm thinking about, like, Haruki Murakami. But, yeah, I mean, I would completely agree that over the last ten years that's been a big trend.

31:49 C: And I think that there's a lot of people who have been pushing on that boundary between the literary and the speculative. Mostly coming from the other direction, from the literary side, and now there are people pushing back from the speculative side. It's great. The cross-pollination can only make both genres – all the genres stronger.

Because when you talk about blending in romance, it's wonderful because it comes in and it has this huge vitalizing effect on whatever genre it's mingling with. And then you don't know whose rules are in place, which can be a downside if what you want is the romance reader experience. But I think that figuring out what rules are in place that are governing a fiction is one of the greatest pleasures of reading.

32:32 B: That's very true. I was going to follow up… I guess it's not like a perfect segue, but I'm very curious, so I'm just going to ask! I saw that you also edited Dr. Malka Older’s Infomocracy trilogy [The Centenal Cycle], which I loved.

C: I did!

B: Yeah! Well, for our listeners who maybe haven't read those books, both Infomocracy and The Locked Tomb are set in, like, a future Earth, but very different focuses. Dr. Older is very interested in the political intricacies of this world. The books are more, I would say, like thrillers, less of a puzzle box, and they handle multiple POV characters very differently.

But, like, they're both this kind of sweeping scifi with big stakes. I'm curious if you could speak to any similarities or differences with the editing process for those series.

33:11 C: Well, I was a very different person, for the main reason that Infomocracy was the first novel I edited.

33:19 B: Really? Oh my goodness!

33:20 C: Yeah. Infomocracy is the first novel that Tor.com Publishing ever did.

33:24 B: I didn’t know that!

33:26 C: And before we got it, we didn't know whether we would be allowed to edit novels [laughs], so we had to bust open that door from our novella-focused beginnings. So that is the biggest thing, just like a tremendous difference in experience.

B: Right!

C: But also those books were much more plastic before when they came to me, they had much more malleability. We changed the plot of Infomocracy a whole lot.

Whereas, when I got Gideon the Ninth, any time I tried to make a change… Tamsyn, if you listen to this, this is said with the deepest respect [Baily and Kabriya laugh], but also you keep lying about me threatening you with a crossbow, so I'm going to air some laundry. Every time I was like, “Can you make Harrow be, like, 10% nicer to Gideon?” She'd be like, “Everywhere you suggested I make that change, if I did that, it would destroy the plot for the next three books.” It’s like, okay! [laughs].

B: Oh my god!

C: It was just a clock. And every time I tried to move, like, a wheel or gear, she was like, “No, no no! You're going to make a clock stop!” But also, every book is very, very different. You meet it where it is, and where you are, and you try to make a merger of the two. They have also totally different aims, Infomocracy and Gideon the Ninth.

34:45 B: Of course. Yeah, I'd say that Infomocracy, like, it's trying to collectively imagine a utopia. Whereas, like, if The Locked Tomb is a utopia, it only exists in John's head [laughs].

34:54 C [laughs]: Yeah. And the further it gets in, the more it aims to complicate that utopia. Like, The Centenal Cycle represents a future that is better than we are going to get.

B: Yeah [laughing]. Almost certainly.

C: For a little more context, these books are post-cyberpunk political thrillers. They're like 60 years in the future – 80 years in the future from when they were published, and they're about a globally dispersed democracy that people are trying to subvert and sabotage.

But, like, this is a future where the UN buys out Google and merges. There are better futures than that available [all laugh]. We're just not likely to get any of them.

35:42 B [dejectedly]: Yeah, I know.

35:43 C: We're more likely to end up with a horrifying necromantic empire where any spark of vitality was reached away long ago [all laugh].

35:53 B: Yikes. Oh my goodness.

35:56 K: Well, it's funny you're speaking to your sort of editing process with Tamsyn and can Harrow be nicer and this and that. We were obviously curious as well just to hear a bit of what your editorial process with Tamsyn has really been like and how that's evolved.

I think when you're working on a series like this, I imagine obviously it's different than doing a standalone project with an author where you get to develop both the relationship with the author and also get more of an idea of where the series is going.

So we were wondering if that was something that you could speak to, moving from Gideon to Harrow – even if you can't get into Nona too much – sort of what that relationship has been like.

36:28 C: Yeah, we changed the structure of Harrow a lot more than we changed the structure of Gideon. Harrow is a less clockwork book. Like, there is definitely stuff that couldn't get changed because it would make the whole thing fall apart, and also Tamsyn’s looking forward to future books that she needs to get right. And sometimes things have changed as she’s figured out things that will happen in future books that we try to catch in time.

But in Gideon, the biggest changes I made were to the prose. To how we could find a balance between the arcane language and the, like, memelord language and make it all run smooth. And that was harder in that book than in any subsequent book, because Tamsyn and I figured each other out after that. Like, we found a balance between where I want the book to be and where she wants the book to be.

And also, I should say, as an editor, your goals is always to land where the author wants the book to be. But that gets easier year after year as you work together. And that was the book where I developed my reputation with her as, like, a meme hater.

B [laughing]: No!

C: I love the memes in this book! I think they're fantastic. Tamsyn and I have exactly – our humours were formed in the same, like, five years of Tumblr culture.

B: The crucible, yeah.

K: Yeah.

C: We have some different touch points now. We are now drinking from different wells of internet poison.

38:02 B: She's not on Twitter, yeah [laughs].

38:04 C: No, she's not, and no one should be. But I think I've removed far fewer memes than they think. Is the Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride meme in there anymore? Does that sound completely unfamiliar?

38:19 B: Mm – I don’t – It does not ring a bell.

38:21 K: I don't think so. That was what we were actually wondering about, if there were any memes that you remember that didn't survive the cut [laughs].

38:27 B: Well, because, yeah, she said in one interview she's in an exchange of hostages with you! [laughing] That made me laugh.

38:34 C [laughing]: It was like, “Can I have this?” There were, like, three things. She was like, “I need this one.” I was like, “I'm taking this one.” And we just sort of saw who would blink first.

Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride… I was like, “Okay, Tamsyn, I get this reference, to… a Something Awful Let's Play of Roller Coaster Tycoon, from 2007 or whatever. But it is twelve years out of date now, and this book is 10,000 years in the future. And also, why would Harrow say this?”

39:04 B [laughing]: Yeah. Oh my goodness.

39:05 K: Drawing on her deep well of Roller Coaster Tycoon experience.

39:10 B: I feel like Harrow would be – she would love Roller Coaster Tycoon.

39:14 C: Yeah, she would have a level of control… I have a great friend – shout out to you, Suzanne – who named her cats that she adopted – she adopted two black cats, she named them Harrowhark and Gideon. And she was describing the way she played Roller Coaster Tycoon, which was to build a roller coaster that intentionally threw its cars into the neighbouring park because the deaths counted on their ledger [all laugh], and it's the most sinister thing I've ever heard her do in any context.

She's a wonderful person, who normally treats even virtual people quite humanely! Something about Roller Coaster Tycoon really unlocks the horror inside a soul.

39:54 K: Brings out the worst, apparently!

B: You can do so much! Everyone in the park can die... Yeah. Absolutely fascinating game.

40:02 C: At this point, I think Tamsyn’s mission is to make her references sufficiently subtle that I find out about them when it's too late.

B: Oh no.

C: Alix Harrow pointed out something in Nona to me that I had completely missed. And when she pointed out to me, I went like, red with fury.

B: Oh my goodness.

C: I’d missed it! It was too late.

K: It survived! It’s in there somewhere!

C: She got it past me! It gets to live. I couldn’t change it at that point. It gets to live! She won.

40:30 B: I'm very excited to see what that is when we read Nona.

40:33 K: We'll be reading now to try to figure out what is the meme that slipped through the cracks.

B: Under the radar.

40:38 C: There's also a line of dialogue that Harrow spoke in the pool scene that another editor – Ruoxi Chen and I were, like looking at the book to get like – Ruoxi had just been hired at that point. Ruoxi is a great editor. She's done, like, The Chosen and The Beautiful, she's done A Marvellous Light. Great books.

But we both agreed that there was this line, “You are the sole fruitful thing in my salted field,” that we were both like, “This is disgusting.” [All laugh]. “This is weird, and horny, and – and, just, this doesn't really fit.” And we went back about it, like, seven times, because, it's the pool scene. We were also trying to see how much tenderness we could get into that moment.

And so, eventually Tamsyn took it out and then had Ianthe say it in Harrow.

B: [gasps]

C: I was like, okay, that's fine. Ianthe’s a horny psychopath.

41:34 B: Yeah, yeah, exactly! Oh, that's perfect.

41:38 K: Too weird and horny for the tender moment, perfect for Ianthe.

41:42 C: That's the kind of thing that Ianthe would say to hit on Harrow.

41:50 B: “In my salted field!” Okay. That's amazing.

41:51 K: That is incredible. Speaking of sort of the memes that flip through the cracks –

41:56 B: And that – yeah, that fans pick up on –

41:58 K: Fans pick up on. Exactly. I actually say – we talked about memes previously, and I saw the “none house with left grief” one, for example, I saw a screenshot of that going on Twitter, and people kind of losing their minds over that.

And I think that's kind of what you end up seeing with these books sometimes is people will pull out these references and find them. So from that angle, what has that been like for you?

Seeing that – not even just with memes specifically – but just the kind of attentiveness to detail from the fans as it's grown into such a huge fandom, and especially with the mystery element of these books… how does it feel to know that people are really digging their teeth into every line and word of these books [laughs] that you're working on?

42:36 C: It is scary, and I love it.

42:38 K: Okay!

42:40 C: There's people who have pulled out... I saw a wonderful piece of meta the other day that changed how I understood the core relationship of the series.

There was a piece of meta – I forget who wrote it, but it was about Gideon's culpability in the toxic codependency of her relationship with Harrow, describing how, like – the thing you see immediately in the relationship is that Harrow is a monster.

I've had people very close to me, who want to read stuff that I'm working on, not be able to read the book because Harrow is a bad person who owns Gideon.

43:16 B: Exactly.

43:16 C: It’s bad!

43:17 K: Yeah.

43:18 C: And, you know, when people like that ask me, is there vengeance in this relationship? The answer is no, not really. But this meta was pointing out that, yes, Harrow is obsessive, possessive, controlling. She's all the bad things that you say.

And Gideon meets her with this energy of martyrdom. Like, Gideon's fondest wish, her fantasy, is to run away and join the Cohort so that she can bring back so much treasure and glory that Harrow has to acknowledge that she needs her.

43:51 B: Yes.

43:51 C: And that's fucked up! Obviously, Gideon is the victim in their relationship, mostly, but she's leaning into that victimhood. She's savouring that victimhood in a way that's really toxic. So I hadn't ever phrased that to myself that way.

44:12 B: Yeah. Well, and of course, it's Gideon’s decision that ultimately leads to her own death, because of – I mean, I don't know if I necessarily call it a martyrdom complex, but those feelings have definitely come to the fore for her.

44:23 C: Yeah. Her refrain to Harrow is “Shut up and use me. Like, use me, Harrow, consume me, burn me as fuel. That's what I'm here for.” [Laughs] And that's not a healthy way… like, they're not goals. Don't try to be like them. Tamsyn knows they're not goals. [All laugh].

44:46 K: That is a really interesting way to look at it, because even though the story is presented right from the start as something that Gideon wants to get away from and obviously ends up getting sucked in along this journey, what she's thinking of is what Harrow’s reaction is going to be if she does get away, if she does achieve glory.

Like, I think that they're so connected by virtue of growing up as the two only people of their age in this really hostile environment as well, even though it's not a balanced relationship at all, because Harrow has all the power, they're the only sort of reference point that each other have in a certain way. And so I think that is a really interesting way to frame it. How it's a dynamic that they both encourage in different ways.

45:24 C: Yeah. They are just two trees that have intertwined. They've grown around each other. Neither means anything without the other.

45:31 B: Yeah. Well, I was going to say, like, calling back to how you were mentioning how Tamsyn didn't want to change anything about Harrow's behaviour in Gideon the Ninth, it didn't escape my notice that a lot of what Harrow goes through on the Mithraeum in Harrow the Ninth really parallels Gideon's childhood in the Ninth.

And I wonder if that's kind of – those were the dots she was connecting in her head. Right? Like, it's a shitty, cold place she doesn't want to be, although obviously more – probably a bit nicer than Gideon’s childhood in the Ninth. There's a constant physical discomfort with the headaches and the carrying around the sword, psychological pain, mentor figures and adults who don't care about you. One of them is trying to actively kill her at all times! More capable peer, Ianthe, treating her like shit, alienated from her religion...

Anyway. Yeah, it's like a sort of a step towards putting them on the same playing field, I think, towards the end of the series. I hope, anyway.

46:16 C: Yeah, I think – I mean, we'll see. The big secret of me in relation to this series is that right now I know a lot more than the fan base. Once Nona the Ninth comes out, I will know maybe 10% more than the fan base. Unless Alecto has been delivered. Because Tamsyn does not tell me what's going to happen.

46:34 B: Oh my goodness.

46:35 C: I edited all of Gideon with no knowledge of – I don't know how the series ends. I'll just say that straight up. No idea. I know that Tamsyn knows how the series ends and she's had the whole idea in her head the whole time, and it's gone through changes, but I don't know!

When Tamsyn was writing Harrow, she came to me and said, “Carl, I basically had these two options for how this book could be written. One is fairly straightforward, the other – and I've been writing both drafts, which is really slowing me down – one is pretty straightforward, and the other is absolute psychedelic nonsense. It's a draft I like better, but I'm worried it's going to be too alienating.” And I basically said, “Well, lean in!”

B: Yeah!

C: “If it's really broken, we'll fix it later.” But I made that choice having read zero words of Harrow the Ninth.

47:28 B: Oh my goodness. Well, it was the right choice, I think.

C: Yeah.

47:31 K: I agree. So when you first read Harrow the Ninth, the draft that you first got of it from her, did you know anything about that psychedelic decision-making or did you have a similar experience of trying to figure out what the hell was going on? [Laughs]

47:44 C: She had basically told me that Harrow's mind had been fragmented by grief. But I did not know that she had been lobotomized when I started reading it. I didn't know Ianthe’s role in it and I didn't know what the dream bubbles were. Like, I didn't know why this thing was playing out in parallel, until I finished reading.

B: The same experience!

C: Basically. Basically. There were times when I checked in with her, and I think that I'm quite good at reading this series because I have had so many conversations with Tamsyn, I have, like, a leg up.

But the moment in Harrow when the second person becomes first person caught me completely unawares, and I was like, “Oh, this will be the thing that anyone who has read this book properly wants to yell about.”

48:39 K: Yeah.

B: Oooh, boy! Yeah, I think I figured it out in that scene with Palamedes in his own bubble when he says that “He saw me,” and I thought, “Oh my god.”

48:47 C: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the sentence that I’m talking about.

B: That was the sentence? Yeah!

48:51 K: It starts to come together and then that’s just like – it's like a cold douse of water all over you, and it really is so jarring. And it's such a good payoff, too.

I think that's the thing. If you're going to have a book where people are so… not really understanding what's going on for such a long time, then to get, like, a sudden jolt like that when you've kind of gotten used to the confusing second person was just so, so good.

49:12 C: Yeah. I mean, the flip side of that is like, when I finished reading Gideon and, like, you know, Gideon, the reason to read Gideon the Ninth, is dead on a spike, and I'm left with, oh, uh, Harrow. She's… not nice! She doesn't seem like she'd be fun to read a whole book about!

I was like, “Tamsyn… she got to die?” Tamsyn was like, “Yeah, she got to die.” I was like, “I mean, is Harrow going to eat her in a way where we can still hear from her?” And she was like, “Eeeeehhh.” [All laugh]. But, like, I hadn’t been given any kind of reassurances there whatsoever.

49:45 B [gasps]: Oh nooooo.

K: Oh my god.

49:45 C: Besides sort of knowing that – one of my rules as a reader of epic fantasy is, if you know something for sure about a magic system in book one, it should be proven false by the last book. It's not an interesting magic system if the rules you think are fundamentally true go unchallenged, because that's not – that’s static.

So I was like, you know, this is a book about necromancy. Even if the book tells me it's impossible for Gideon to come back, that doesn't make any sense. Like, we will see characters who have died again in some format because it’s a book about necromancy. Why would you make it about necromancy if you weren't going to exploit that?

50:26 B: Yeah, exactly.

50:27 C: So my favourite tease going into Harrow the Ninth, telling people who had no context whatsoever, is there are only two or three characters from Gideon that don't appear in Harrow.

50:42 B: That's true! It is true!

50:46 K [laughing]: Everyone’s dead. But don't worry, they're all coming back!

50:49 C: But a lot of them are there as characters.

50:51 B: Yeah, exactly.

50:53 C: It's wild. It's a great magic trick. And I think the ones who don't come back are like, Sisters Aisamorta and Lachrymorta.

51:01 B: We don't see much of Silas, yeah…

51:03 C: Yeah, we don't see much of Silas. The teens are there!

B: Briefly!

K: True, true.

C: They're there for a moment, and they are having the best time of any of them. They're like, “We understand this joke! We don't know why participating in it, but you're more upset than we are about this.”

K: Oh my gosh.

C: I love them.

51:21 K: I think that's one… We haven't got there in our recap yet, but doing different reads through, everything with the teens, I think that was one of the harder things for me, for sure.

51:31 C: They are perfect angels made of trash.

K: R.I.P.

C: R.I.P.

51:35 K: We love those trash angels.

51:37 C: I think the funniest thing in that series… Like, we went back and forth about how much Gideon was going to dump on them, and what we ended up doing was, like, making it more diverse, how she dumped on them.

They were originally called shitty teens, like, six times as often, or whatever. And we changed out the verbiage. But… that is the contempt of an 18-year-old for a 15-year-old, one of the hottest flames in the galaxy. And, you know, they don't know yet that they are also shitty teens! [All laugh].

52:07 B: Yeah. Like when you're a senior in high school and you're looking down at all the grade nine kids coming in and you're like, “I'm so much better than them.”

K: Yes.

52:15 C: Now I look at college students and I'm like, oh, those are also babies.

K: Yeah.

52:16 B: Yes, exactly! Like, I'm a TA for a biology class, and all these – they look like children to me. It's unreal!

52:25 K: Okay, moving back to these books, we talked a little bit about this earlier, but you did mention that Tamsyn suggested you use this interview to tell a bunch of lies about Nona the Ninth and how that might be a challenging thing to do. Is there one lie that you can give us? One falsehood that does not happen?

B: Off the dome?

K: Not to put you on the spot.

52:50 C: I don't have a lie prepared. But what I have prepared in my mind is what – you know those Tumblr posts that are like X spoilers with no context? I don't have it in my head right now, but a couple of months ago, I was like, oh, I know exactly what the four images on there will be. [All laugh.]

B [high-pitched, dying]: Give us one of the images!

C: Uh, a tube of hot sauce, next to a glock [laughs]. I don't know if that stock image exists. The thing about this is like – the last time I had this in my head, I was like, I know some of the pre-filtered images that show up, but that to me is equivalent to the, like, this is a big pot of soup!

53:38 B: Hot sauce. I feel like Casey McQuiston got an ARC and posted something about hot sauce. Anyway, not going to pressure you any more! I will go back and look at it myself!

53:48 Carl: Yeah.

53:49 B: Well, we should wrap up by moving into Bone of the Week!

K: Yes. All right.

B [laughs]: I'm ready.

53:55 K: Yes, so thank you for agreeing to do a Bone of the Week with us! This is a silly little segment that we've been doing where every week we quiz each other on bones that come up in this book, because there sure are a lot of them, and I certainly didn't take the time to look up every bone that came across my pages when I was reading.

And then we've been ranking them on sexiness on a scale of one to ten. Whatever your qualifications for what makes a sexy bone are entirely up to you! You can explain or not explain, but that is the process we've been going with [laughs]. So the Bone of the Week that we've been chosen for you to take a guess at where this is in the human anatomy is the ulna. U-L-N-A.

C: Oh.

54:36 B [gasps]: He knows it right away!

54:36 C: Yeah. The ulna is easy. The ulna is one of the two bones in the – the ulna is opposite the radius. It's one of the twisty bones, I think, in the forearm.

54:47 B: Yes.

54:48 C: It was either that or like, the bone in the upper arm. There are some very obscure bones. I was sweating coming into this one. [Baily and Kabriya laugh.]

54:59 B: We didn't want to make it too hard!

55:01 C: But ulna… has got a really nice mouthfeel, which I think is worth a few points on itself. Forearms are really good. Um, it's involved in a twisting process and also is basically essential for any kind of hand stuff.

55:14 B: Oh, that’s true!

55:15 C: So I'm going to give it a really strong 8.5 sexy bone.

B: Eight point five! Okay!

55:21 K: Oooh. All right. A thorough defense of the ulna.

55:22 C: I'd say the point five is that on its own, I don't think it would be particularly sexy. It's just some, like, straight bone with a slight bend to it. But. You know.

K: Yeah. For utilitarian purposes, it’s a good one [laughs].

55:31 B: When you have your palm up and your thumb facing laterally, like, to the outside, it's the bone that's on the, like, towards your body. Wow. I love that.

K: Amazing.

B: 8.5. I think that's our first .5 ranking.

55:49 C: I – At first I was thinking, like, oh, ten point scale there’s always too much variability. But then, of course, I had to make it more decimal.

55:56 B: No, we want – we want all the bone thoughts.

55:59 C: Learning about bones is a great joy of editing. I've even come across new bones in other books, like, I have a book coming up in fall called Leech, which y’all would love. It's a post-apocalyptic body horror, medical horror thing about a doctor who is one part of a hive mind that is all doctors.

56:24 B: Oooh! Okay!

56:24 C: Trying to figure out why they lost track of the body. It's great.

K: Oh my gosh.

C: But there was this wonderful bone word that I think is like, part of the skull close to the forehead that I need to look up again. They just keep dropping all these bones on me!

56:40 B: That’s fantastic.

56:41 K: This is your brand now. They're like, we got a bone book, we gotta take it to Carl [laughs].

56:47 C: Oh! I thought of something I can say about Nona the Ninth that will help nobody.

56:52 K: We love it.

56:53 C: But it is related to this. I figured out a core metaphysical thing by looking up a term in, like, cellular biology.

57:04 B [losing her shit]: Oh my god!

K: Cellular biology.

B: That’s fantastic – I'm not a cell biologist, I'm an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, but now I'm like, I’m gonna be on the hunt. I’m ready.

57:15 C: Yeah. Well, DM me once the book is out, if you don't catch it, and I will let you know what I was thinking.

57:22 B: Yes, please! All right, perfect.

57:25 K: That sounds great. Well, thank you so much for the little Nona clue there at the end, some cellular biology for us to dig into! And thank you, obviously, for coming on the podcast and having this chat with us. It's been so, so much fun to get to talk about these books with you. And yeah, we're so appreciative.

57:41 C: It's been my pleasure. Thank you again for having me on.

57:43 B: Yes. Thanks so much, Carl! Bye!

(Slow, groovy rock music)

57:56 K: Thanks so much again to Carl for taking the time to join us and share his insights about the series! We had so much fun with the week and we hope that you all had fun listening to it as well.

You can find us at onefleshonepod on Twitter, TikTok and Tumblr, or drop us an email at onefleshonepod@gmail.com. Feel free to send us questions, send us conspiracy theories that you've just discovered online and want to get some thoughts on, or send us your best tips on how you are going to pass the time between now and when Nona the Ninth will finally be in our hands.

B: And we'll see you next week on One Flesh, One End!

(Slow, groovy rock music fades out)