TIH 166: Joe R. Lansdale on Hap and Leonard, Growing Up in East Texas, and Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers

Michael David Wilson 0:10
Welcome to the this is horror podcast. I'm your host, Michael David Wilson, and I'm joined, as always, by my co host, Bob pastorella, how are you day? Bob, I

Bob Pastorella 0:22
am doing great. Michael, how are you doing?

Michael David Wilson 0:24
Fantastic. Thank you. We just got off the call with Joe Lansdale. It is over two hours of conversation, and we're gonna bring you all of it right now in its entirety. So no Part One and Part Two today, you're getting the lot Joe Lansdale on. This is horror.

Bob Pastorella 0:45
Yes, this is a marathon episode, and it makes sense. It's it chock full of writing, advice, life advice. I mean, shit. It's just pure fucking Joe Lansdale. I think everyone's just gonna love it, that's

Michael David Wilson 0:59
right. And rather than us talk about what is in the episode, I just want to bring you that episode ASAP. So before we do that, let's have a quick word from our sponsors. Do

PMMP 1:11
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Bob Pastorella 1:42
Do you let 11 stories in Todd kaisen's Ugly Little Things explore the depths of human suffering and ugliness, charting a course to the dark, horrific heart of the human condition. John Langan says, Todd kaisen is a born storyteller, drawing the reader and artfully constructive narratives that scout the darker end of the literary spectrum with skill and bravado. Brian Kirk says, In ugly little things. Todd kaisen ventures deep into the dark abyss of cosmic horror. What he finds there, or what's found him will terrify you. This is gonna hurt and you're going to like it. That's Todd kissing's Ugly Little things out September 15 from Crystal Lake, publishing Tales from the darkest

Michael David Wilson 2:14
depths. And we're back. And I believe Bob that you have Joe Lansdale, bio, yes,

Bob Pastorella 2:21
I do champion Mojo. Storyteller, Joe R Lansdale is the author of over 40 novels and numerous short stories. He's received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and a British Fantasy Award, among others, his novella Bubba Hotep was adapted to film by Dom Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. He's currently co producing several films, including the drive in with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer in Residence at Stephen F Austin State University, and the founder of the martial arts system, Xin Quan martial science and its affiliate, xinchuan family system. He's a member of both the United States and international martial arts Hall of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog and two cats, and that is the legendary Joe Lansdale.

Michael David Wilson 3:12
All right, well, with that said, let's do it. Let's get Joe our Lansdale under this is horror podcast.

Bob Pastorella 3:19
Let's do it. Horror. For

Michael David Wilson 3:21
horror, Joe, welcome to the this is horror podcast.

Joe R. Lansdale 3:31
Well, thank you. Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, it's

Michael David Wilson 3:35
a tremendous honor. And I know to begin with, if we could talk about your life growing up in Texas, and what some of the important life lessons were that you learned?

Joe R. Lansdale 3:49
Well, you know, when I grew up, I was born in 1951 so I grew up in the 50s and the 60s to manhood, so to speak. So though I've certainly lived in Texas. The rest of that the time. I lived outside of Texas briefly back in the early 70s, but I've always lived in Texas. I've always lived in East Texas, except for a period where I lived in Austin. But when I grew up in East Texas at that time, was very different than it was now, though there are certain remnants that remain. It's almost like a Philip K Dick novel, where it's painted over with the future, but the past still seems to stick through. And I was raised in I was born in Gladewater, and I was raised in Mount enterprise, Texas, then moved back to Gladewater, and so that's where I grew up. And my family was poor. But of course, then a whole lot of families were poor, so I never really felt like I was particularly different from most people, and I never, at least not in that sense, in another sense, I did. I seem to have a lot of interest that they didn't. I was influenced early on by Kyle. Make book they made me want to read, and I loved TV was relatively new then, as creepy as that sounds, and it had only been around a short time, and they were trying to find things to fill the airways. So they were always showing these old movies, like the old Tarzan movies and the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials and, you know, all kinds of universal monster films and things like that, which, you know, those things seem maybe old hat these days, but for me at that time, you know, they were powerful, and they had a whole lot to do with my interest. And my father couldn't read or write, but he had been a boxer and a wrestler during the Great Depression, he was 42 when I was born. And so he had some life experiences there, and he got me interested in in boxing and wrestling, which led to martial arts. And I became a martial artist. And I became, oh, my mother was, you know, always encouraged me to read, as did my father, because he knew how hard it was for somebody who couldn't write, and so I was encouraged by both of them, but I've always felt that my father gave me that foundation for my interest in martial arts, and my mother gave me that foundation for my interest in reading and writing, because she repaired writers. And where I grew up was really often on the outskirts of gladwater. But Gladewater was a place where Elvis Presley originally came through when he was starting. Now, he used to visit and stay with people in their homes. There. Johnny Cash wrote, I walked the line there. You know, there was Bob lumen, there was Hank Thompson, Jim Reese, all of these walkability and early country stars were there, and so it there was a different kind of atmosphere. And prior to that, it had been a oil boom town, and that meant that all of a sudden, overnight, people had filled it back in the 1930s and by the time I was born, the town had diminished dramatically, and it had left a lot of tough customers there. And so it was a little bit of a tough town under the surface, especially, you know, the more money you had, the more you were insulated from that. And like I said, not every buddy in town had a lot of money. A lot of them were like me, or worse. You know, we thought of ourselves as broke, and because we saw other people who we thought were poor. But growing up there, we know I had a lot of experiences on the Sabine River. I met a lot of tough customers. I had some interesting events in my life, which I have turned into a number of happen Leonard novels and stories. I mean, obviously the books or fiction, but I've used a lot of real events in my life and experiences in my life to make those characters, as well as others and other fictions that I've written, you know, feel a little bit more real. And so, you know, that has a lot to do with with my background, growing up in that town, and later I moved out of that town, and, you know, have lived over in different places in East Texas, the time I was in Austin when I went to the University of Texas briefly. So between Tyler Junior College and University of Texas, I ended up with about 60 hours. And anthropology and archeology was my interest. Though. I think I had to major in geology and history in Tyler Junior College because they didn't have archeology. And when I went to university at Texas, I majored in archeology. I came back to Stephen F Austin, and it became anthropology, and then it became humanities. And then I dropped out because I started selling. I was already selling all that time, but I finally started selling to the point to where I just decided to work and write, and then one day I was writing full time. So I know that's kind of an encapsulation of a lot of that. But, and I also should add that label. Her has become a kind of antique town now. It's got all these antique stores. It has a giant one. The entire block is all is a bookstore, used bookstore. It has a brewery. It has a museum for the rockabilly characters. And I think they're going to put in a little section on me there. And so, you know, it's a it's different than it was. But once again, as I started this, it's like a Philip K Dick novel. There's the veneer over it, but there's still some of that old world, some of it both good and negative, that still protrudes. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 9:34
and you said that in in your non fiction book, miracles ain't what they used to be. You said, for a poor kid, I was what they called spoiled. Spoiled was going to work at 15 instead of eight, yeah.

Joe R. Lansdale 9:54
And, you know? And then when I did go to work at 15, it was just part time stuff and but I. Grew up with a lot of kids that were, you know, when they were young, they were doing all kinds of farm work and, you know, adult work. And I didn't, I didn't have that so because my parents wanted me to have as long a childhood as I could, they wanted me to spend time reading and writing and pursuing the things I was interested in as much as I could in, you know, with what resources we had.

Bob Pastorella 10:25
Kind of sounds like growing up, you know, because I've spent my whole life in Texas as well. And you know, we weren't, we weren't well to do. My dad was refinery worker. My mom, you know, she, she, she worked for my uncle's dealership, you know, but, uh, yeah, it's, you know, it, I think growing up that way, it, you get to, you experience things in such a way that, if you write that you can use it, you can, you can pull it in.

Joe R. Lansdale 10:57
Yeah, I agree. You know, my father was a mechanic and my mother, when they got married, he had been a sharecropper family and had done a lot of different jobs and stuff, but she asked him what he really wanted to do, and he wanted to be a mechanic, so she bought him an old car and told him to take it apart and put it back together with flying forward. And that's how he became a mechanic. And my mother did sales from time to time. She was home a lot. She was a painter. She painted and sold all her pains. Only one painting that I know of hers exists, and my brother has it. So, yeah. I mean, you know, they did what they could to make ends meet. It was pretty much paycheck to paycheck,

Bob Pastorella 11:37
right? Yeah, I know exactly where you come from. It's uh, but at least, at least you had somebody, you know, it seems like that. You had somebody artistic in your family. I did too my my father, even though he worked in refinery, he was an artist. Yeah, it's just that you don't, you don't find too many people who are, were, I don't know, I guess, affluent to get into the arts you do. But I mean to me, yeah, especially, most of, most of the writers I know, most of contemporary writers I know, are just, are just like me. It's like, you know we're not, we're not, maybe not struggling to make ends meet, but, man, some some more money sure would be nice.

Joe R. Lansdale 12:17
Well, I remember those days. Certainly, I've been fortunate enough over the years for that to improve dramatically. But, you know, my parents, though, were so encouraging, and I had such a great family life. I mean, I had a great childhood. I went through the usual things that we do in high school, but in high school, I wasn't an unpopular kid at all. You know, I wasn't one of those artistic kids on the corner. I you know, I could hang with just about anybody I was. I was a tough kid when I needed to be, and I was a sensitive one what I needed to be. And I had friends of all stripes, you know, but there was always something a little bit uniquely different in the way I saw things, and the way most of the people I knew saw things, I can't speak for everybody that was went to Gladewater. There are people who came out of there and went into doing artistic things, photographers and artists and and, and I'm I'm sure there were, there are other things. Are people that I don't even know of or unaware of, although a large percentage of them, I think, when they were recognized, it was for football. And I was not interested in football. I wasn't interested in in sports in general, except martial laws, of which I've reasonably excelled.

Michael David Wilson 13:32
Yeah, I think reasonably excelled is probably downplaying it a little bit, given that you went on to form your own martial arts.

Joe R. Lansdale 13:42
Well, let's just say that. You know, modesty is always good, right, right?

Michael David Wilson 13:48
But what were your first experiences with storytelling and hearing stories for the first time?

Joe R. Lansdale 13:56
Well, I mean, you know, I touched on some of it while ago, when I said the comic book introduced me to reading it, and then and TV introduced me to stories. But then what happened was I also grew up with storytellers. You know, my father wasn't a big talker, but when he got into storytelling mood, he was fantastic. And my uncles and and family were told stories. And my mother had, I wouldn't call her a great storyteller, but between me and her, she was telling me stories about our past, about our relatives, and my dad would tell stories about things that he had done, and my mom told stories about things that they had done, and how he used to ride the rails from town to town and wrestle in fairs and box in fairs to make money during the Great Depression. Rest of time. He worked in a cannery all that before he became a mechanic. So I grew up with all those stories. And I also my grandmother had when she was a child. She was born in the 1880s she, as a child, saw the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. And her people came to like she came to a Texas in. Covered wagon, and her people, people were in the Oklahoma land rush, you know. And she may have even been like a baby then. I don't know if she was born quite then or not, but certainly, you know her, her folks were. And so I had all of these stories, and some of them were, you know, stories that were family history. Some of them were family legends, and some of them were fables. Some of them were stories about Billy the Kid and Jesse James and all of the stuff Bonnie and Clyde, who my father knew Bonnie just a little bit because she worked at a cafe just outside of Gladewater, Texas before I was born. And he knew her through in passing, because a lot of people knew that she worked there, and she worked at a variety of other different places and similar jobs before she went into the full fledged gangster life. So I heard all of these stories. I heard stories from my grandmother, my uncles, and some of them were excellent storytellers, and some of them, though they might not, have been excellent storytellers. They had stories to tell, and all of that went into the pot, along with the comics and along with the TV, and then along with movies, which I became a fanatic for, I read diligently classics, illustrated comics. The original ones were very accurate to the novels. They weren't somebody trying to show their side of it, and I read those, which led me to read the novels, the short stories they represented. So that is where a lot of my education as a reader came in. And I started trying to write and draw my own comics when I was four. I discovered that when I was four years old, I was an amazing artist, and by the time I was a six, I was not that good, because I didn't improve. I was good at four, but not at six, and not at eight, and but my storytelling got better and better, and I knew that's what I wanted to do. And I started, you know, writing up a little bit of this and that here and there, never finishing anything. And then I wrote a novel between 11 and 13 without an end on it, and some years later, I spruced it up a little, put an end on it, and actually it was placed. But, you know, I was always doing this and always willing to do it. But I also worked a variety of different jobs and considered a variety of different careers, which I always saw is temporary. My wife and I had a, what we called a truck farm. And you guys in the country might know that that's an old doesn't mean you raise trucks. It means you use the truck to carry vegetables to market. And so we did some truck cropping, and I had a mule, and we plowed with a mule. We had a goat dairy. We raised our own meat, all our own vegetables. And we did that for two years or more, and then I moved into being public relations for Goodwill, and then I became a janitor, and that was in Tyler, and I became a janitor in acodosis, where I now live. And from time to time, I teach creative writing at that same university where I was a janitor, so I think that's kind of interesting, but, but to me, it was all of these things compounded all of these experiences and doing all the different things I did. You know, in Austin when I was there, I sold flowers on the street corner and went to school part time. So, you know, I had a lot of experiences in my life, and therefore met a lot of different people, because when you're doing those sort of jobs where you kind of drift from one to the other, because they certainly are not careers, you tend to meet people on their way up and people on their way down, and people stuck in the middle. And you meet a lot of that. And you meet interesting people, you meet dangerous people, you make good people. And then for that period of time that I was telling you I didn't live in Texas, I lived in Berkeley, California. I lived with a friend of mine who was going to the University of Berkeley there, and I worked there as a, believe it or not, a bodyguard for a used clothes. That's a long story. And I did odd jobs, like I went to San Francisco, I I'd do these little pickup kind of like manpower jobs where you waited and people would come and pick you up to haul garbage or or to, you know, get rid of leaves or whatever it was that they wanted. And so to me, all the time, I was doing that, even during periods where I was not writing regularly, I was also reading regularly when I could get books or and I certainly libraries when I could use them, and I was certainly thinking about writing. And all of the writing I had done as a kid was in my head. And then at some point, I just said, You know what I need to do. This first thing I ever wrote and out sold. I wrote my mother an article, and that caught on fire, and I was 21 when I sold it. I think I was 22 when it appeared. And then I wrote several nonfiction articles after that, all of them on farming are related to that, and they all sold. And I thought. Am, this is easy, although I was making about $25 $10 a year, that kind of stuff. So I started trying to be a fiction writer, and I did that off and on it and trying to that wasn't so easy. Two and a half years or so, I still had bold fiction, and then I went through this period where I was trying to figure it all out, and I was working in the rosefield, just like my characters happened Leonard in savage season. And

when I was working in the Roseville, we had a winner that was really, really terrible. And my boss that I worked for told me, Look, I'll pick you up in the morning and we'll, we'll go out and go to work. And what we were doing is they were digging roses. They had a machine that would pull them up, and then we would all take them and throw them in the back of this refrigerated truck where they were hauled off to be sold. Because at that time, Tyler Texas, which we were working on the outskirts of at starville, Texas, was the rose capital of the world. And so that was my job. I was doing that. And then one day, the weather just got worse and worse. And my boss, look, I'll pick you up in the morning. So I went home, and the rain came, and it was like, I mean, it came down like a cat of nine tails beating on the roof. And I remember going out on the porch on we lived around the country, no country porch, you know. And I stand out there, walking out in the porch light, going out there on the yard, and it looked like what Noah had probably seen from the poop debt of the Ark or something, you know. And it just got worse and worse. And then in the morning, when I woke up, the water had receded, but it had iced over, and it was sleety, and my boss showed up. I thought, oh, hell, I'm going to have to go to work anyway. So even I, who was a, you know, I've always been a worker, I thought, Damn, this is terrible weather. So I, you know, I was all wrapped up, and we were on our way to work, and we were crossing this bridge very, very carefully, because they were still up to near of ice over it. And my boss looks out, he's driving the truck. He looks at, what is that on the other side of the bridge there? And I work, and I said, I don't know. He said, No, I think it looks like a toolbox. So he kind of turned around, and we parked on that opposite side, and we walked down there, and sure enough, it was a toolbox, and the water that was in that creek had receded dramatically because it had risen the night before due to all the storm. And you know, you could see where it had risen because of dirt and leaves and all of debris that had been carried by the water. And then we looked under the bridge, and on the other side, we saw a truck with the front of it stuck down in the creek, and we went over there, and there was a man behind the wheel, and he looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He had swollen up so much from the, you know, being underwater all night. He had probably driven off that bridge in the dark, or been washed off that bridge, iced off that bridge, whatever his unfortunate fate was. He was there and he was dead, and he was, you know, this body in such a way it wasn't like in the movies or anything. I mean, this was a terrible to behold, and you need to see. And it really, you know, hit me hard. And I went to work that night, and when I came home, I realized something. I said, you know, I've been kind of riding. I've been trying to do this, but I haven't really dedicated myself to it. And life is way damn short. Something can happen to you at any time. And I was probably 23 at that time, or 24 when I had that revelation, which you know, when you're that young, you generally think of yourself as 10 feet tall, bulletproof. And but when I had that revelation, I begin to work very steadily, not just. And I began to realize, you know, you don't work, when you get the inspiration, you work to develop the inspiration for to because you are it there. You know, I don't believe in the outside inspiration. You know, I believe that it is you. So if you don't work, it does not arrive. And I started working, and my wife said, look, it got so bad the weather we couldn't work, work in the rosefield eventually, at least for a while. And my wife said, Look, why don't you, you've got three months, I think it was the first of October. And she said, why don't you just take the rest of the year off and you stay home and you write because I she had just got a job. She'd worked in the rosefield stew. We'd hold hay, all that stuff together. But she got a job working in a refrigerator car where they loaded lunch meats for a place called Southland. And that lunch meat was delivered to like seven elevens and different stores of that ilk across Texas and maybe elsewhere? I don't, I don't know, but she had to wear like a little snow suit to go in there and load that lunch meat and stuff. So she said, Look, I got this job. We're making it Okay. Why don't we just go take care of the livestock and I'll do this job. And you right, but when I come home. You need to have written every day. I mean, I don't want, you know, come on couch in your underwear with your feet up, which, you know, I wouldn't have done anyway. But she said, you know, you got to have something. So I didn't know any better. So I wrote a short story every day. For 90 days, I had 90 short stories, and I started sending them out and back then, you know, you had markets and magazines, all kinds of magazines bought fiction. And so you could send out one story to 1015, markets at least, and sometimes a little fewer, sometimes a little more, but on the average, something like that. So I started sending them out. And boy, did they start coming back and and the reason they came back is they were terrible, but I was learning. I was I was getting all the crap out of my system by running it through me like, you know, like crap through a goose. And I was imitating all of the things I had grown up reading, all of the Twilight zones. I had seen all the old thriller episodes. I had seen all of the Alfred Hitchcock, all of those influences, not necessarily copying them, but certainly things that were familiar, though I didn't know how familiar at that time, and I sent stories to the wrong place. I went in the story to dog digest, which didn't have a dog in it, or had nothing to do with it, because I didn't know markets I just sent, I got, I bought a book called Writer's Market, and I just marketed those stories well. Anyway, I continued writing, but those 90 stories, over a period of about four years, went to all these different places, and I got about 1000 rejects, literally. And when we moved to Nacogdoches and I went to work suggest where I stacked those up and burned them. But there were a handful of stories left and a handful of rejections left. So that when we did a limited edition of a certain book at one point in the future, we put one of those rejections in every one of those those books, and three or four of those stories, it fell later, and you know, they were moderately okay stories, but that was by the apprenticeship. So, you know, a long winded way of telling you, you know, what influenced me and how I became, you know, so dedicated to doing it. That's why, and that's how.

Michael David Wilson 27:16
Wow. I mean, that's really remarkable, 90 stories in 90 days.

Joe R. Lansdale 27:25
Yeah, and some of them were like, you know, two or three pages long, but some of them were like, 510, and, you know, there were a few little longer than that. But I would, I would get up in the morning, just like I was going to the factory, and I would write, and I'd write all day. Now, later, I learned that I actually write better if I only write three hours a day, and I write in a relaxed pace, and I have three to five pages to do, and if I get more than that, then great, I'm even a bigger hero than I expected, because I only expected three to five but when I get up now, because I've been doing it so long, inspiration turns on like a switch. It's a rare day when I don't have the impetus or the drive or the inspiration to write or to create, because you teach it. You teach yourself, if you take five to six days off and then go and write in this big flurry that you think of as inspiration, and then take three or four more days off, all you're really doing is just cooling that inspiration down, because you are that inspiration. And you'll often find that when you feel this incredible, inspirational high, and you write and you check the days you don't feel it, the fiction is just as good. It's just because you feel excited about it. That day doesn't necessarily, and I say necessarily mean that it's any better. However, I do believe this and certainly true for me. I can't speak for everyone else, but by going in and doing it, I write five to seven days a week, and I ride in the morning that short time when I sit down, it's there. I ride it. I get through. I feel bright. I know that tomorrow, when I go to sleep that night, I'll it'll refill, and I get up the next morning and do it again, and it's and it feels like inspirational, like an inspirational high all the time, or 99.9% of the time. And that's because I've taught myself to turn that switch on by repetition and dedication. That's

Bob Pastorella 29:17
like some of the best damn advice I've heard in a long time.

Joe R. Lansdale 29:22
Well, it's advised, it worked for me. You know, I don't claim that it is what everyone else needs to do, but what I do believe, and this is what I thought, is that when I first started out writing, I had this delusion that you only wrote when you know the Muse hit you, but there is no muse. You're your own muse, and so you have to have those bad periods when, when I started those 90 stories a day, those were hard to do, and I worked all day, and I was exhausted at the end of the day, and I think that was necessary for me to get all the crap out of my system and also learn this methodology was not the best for me, but maybe I couldn't have arrived. Life there without having done that and getting all these, all these influences, at least out of the way, you never lose your influences, but just these sort of easy grabs that stories out of my system was important. But after that, what was important to me was to lessen the amount of hours and to spend other time, more time reading, exercising, doing the other things that you do in life. You know, being a husband, a father, whatever you know that you have, if you're able to make a living just writing, then that's what you should do. Spend extra hours doing that, and if you can, like I used to work at 230 in the afternoon until, I think, 1030 at night, if I remember correctly, five days a week at the university as a janitor, which meant then in the morning, I got up, I worked till about noon, had lunch, showered, went to work, and I learned that by if I had three to five pages in my mind to do, I nearly always got it. So every day I felt like a hero. I was satisfied. I didn't feel like, Oh, I didn't get as many pages today. Because those days when I would do 20 or 30 pages the next day, I would just go dead, because I had really done a week's work maybe. But if I did 20 pages on a day, that all I expected was three to five. And I got up the next day, and I was fine. I only did three or five that day. I had a lot of pages. But at my worst, I had, you know, if I was working five, six days a week, then I had 1518, pages. You know, if I had a really good week, 25 pages, and if I had an even better week, and I frequently did, I might get 1012, pages on three or four days, maybe all those days. So it, it got to where I was able to write quickly, and I didn't do multiple drafts. I did that originally, and it made me crazy. So I said, That's it. I'm not doing that anymore. I'm going to write it my draft every day of three to five pages, and I'm going to clean it up right now and then in the morning, I'm going to start by rereading it, and I'm just going to change anything that needs to be changed right then and then, when I get about halfway through, I'm going to start back at the front, reading it all the way through, make changes that I see, and then continue off of that momentum. So I didn't have all these multiple drafts and and all this crap to do. I was trying to do it right the first time, though. Ultimately, I probably did do a lot of drafts, but I did them within each day, and then that period where I stopped and went halfway, and then when I got finished, I gave myself a Polish, not another draft, and that worked for me. Now, does that work for everybody? I don't know, and I don't plot. I don't I don't sit down and make plots. I'll sometimes jot notes here and there, but remember, this person's eyes are blue. Oh, I know I'd be a good idea. How about stick this in here somewhere? And that's, that's what I do. And I do that as I write. I just make that note if I need it. But if I try to plot it, by the time I get through plot and I'm no longer interested in writing it, the exception to that is if you're working collaboratively with somebody, which I don't do well, I'd have done it and doing it currently, but I don't really love it, and I never think that the story you've written is as good as either one of you could have done alone. And if you do it right, though, it just leaks, it's at least interesting, because it's a separate entity that is neither one of you, but is this third invisible person's so to speak. But to me, the best thing to do is show up like your three to five pages. You have those great days, wonderful polish as you go. You have one more draft. And of course, if you send it to a publisher, they may have some suggestions. They you know, proofreaders. I'm not a great proof reader, and I'll be the first to admit it, which is why some of the small press stuff is not as well proofread as it should be, because a lot of times they leave it up to the rider. Generally a bad idea, because we've seen it hundreds of times just within the day. You know, I might look over that same sentence whatever. They'll tell how many times during that roughly three hours that I write. And then another thing I do that works for me is that if I get up in the morning and in 30 minutes, I get three to five pages and I want to quit, I quit. And if I don't want to quit, I just keep going until I've done about three hours, because after that, I get diminishing returns. I start hot and go downhill. I remember Dean coons once told me he starts slow and build and he works all day, 1214, hour days or dead. I don't know if he does these days, but that didn't work for me. And because that's what I tried, I had early on, and I found that just depressed me, made me feel like I wasn't getting anywhere. More hours did not have greater results for me. But anyway, that's probably more than you ever know about that. I

Bob Pastorella 34:40
remember reading the Dean Koontz write. Used to write 20 to 30 drafts of the same novel, yeah, and he wrote, he, and he wrote that in, like, his, uh, in his, his book, I can't remember, I think it's out of print now, like, how, you know how to write. He wrote a, you know, a book about, right? Be,

Joe R. Lansdale 35:00
he wrote a book on how to write bestsellers, and he wrote one before that, called Writing popular fiction,

Bob Pastorella 35:05
right? And I think that's the one I read. And I'm telling you, if I could find that book, it would be, that'd be pretty good book, because I remember reading had that book, oh, man, mine was a library copy

Joe R. Lansdale 35:21
called Writing popular fiction. And it really wasn't about how to write, but it was just at that time there were so many different markets, like westerns and science fiction. And I mean, these things still exist, but they were much more solidified as markets. And what he did is he touched on every one of these gothic romance, which was very popular in the 70s, and he had written in all of these, some of them under other names. And what he did is he had a section on each one books you should read and all that. And I found that one helpful because it wasn't about writing advice, because, frankly, I never found a single book on writing about writing advice helpful to me. I read two or three when I was already a writer that I thought would have been of interest to me, had they existed when I was younger. But the only one that I read was babbling, which was, again, not really about writing so much. It's just that these are the markets. This is the kind of stuff these markets expect. And what I learned from that was how to look at the markets. And then I later learned that I can't write to the market. I can write generally to the markets. If somebody says, I want a horror story, okay, well, I need a story has a mummy, okay? That becomes above a hotel, you know. So to me, it depends on I have to have a lot of latitude, and once in a while, I can write something more traditional. But I really do have a hard time writing an extremely focused kind of story. But that book, in the same way that writing all of those stories in 90 days was an aid to me, because it was during that, that time when I was developing as a writer, I don't think it would do anything for me now, because most of it's obsolete, because those markets are gone. And the book, the one writing book that helped me more than any was a thing called one way to write your novel. And they only helped me because that one piece of advice in it, if you wrote one page a day at the end of a year, you would have 365 pages. You would have a novel. And then that gradually became, for me, the three to five pages day. And when I used to work other jobs before I worked at 230 to 1030 when I come home at night, I had a rule that by 1030 my wife went to bed because she had to get it up, and I wrote either so I got three pages, or it was midnight, and then I would go to bed at midnight, no matter what I had done. So I learned that, and I knew that I was going to do this. I couldn't hope that that day would come or when I would have time, when people say I'm just waiting for what I have time to read or write, you're never going to have that time. You have to make it. You have to teach yourself to do it, and you have to have what I call loose discipline. If you try to make it like a military, you know, arrangement, then you just get bored, or you feel like you're forcing yourself, but if you're relaxed about it and enjoy doing it, and you can get a lot done, and you can do a lot of reading, you do a lot of writing, and as you become a full time writer, for example, you got more time you can spend also watching movies and watching the TV you own, reading tons of books, Reading interviews, reading scripts and reading stage plays, poetry, whatever it is that you're interested in reading, as well as doing your writing, or, in my case, also doing my martial art.

Michael David Wilson 38:30
Yeah, I think that's great advice to keep the arrangement loose, rather than military, because I think that could be right. A lot of people fall down. It's

Joe R. Lansdale 38:40
also why people begin to hate what they do. And I meet writers that just hate what they do. And I've met writers who have been very successful because they did what I refused to do, and that was lock into one particular genre and stick with it. And they became very successful. Some of them are very happy with that. They love going to work and writing that. But a lot of them I know say, you know, I feel trapped, or I no longer enjoy it. Well, they no longer enjoy it because the publisher gradually, and they themselves begin to write the same book over and over. We all have themes that we return to. And if you write a series like I have the happen Leonard series, you have things that reoccur, things that happen over and over. But I'm not trapped by that series, that series I do when I want to do it, or what I feel like it's it's something I'm excited about or driven about, and then the rest of the time I switch, and I write different kinds of books, and sometimes totally different genres, sometimes just within the genre, but a different approach to that same genre. So for me that's important is that for me to get up every morning excited, so that when my feet hit the floor I'm ready to go. Because to me, I never got jaded, and I think it shows in the best of my work, which I like to think so a reasonable amount.

Michael David Wilson 39:56
Yeah, definitely. And one thing I particularly. You like about your stories are characters often tell stories within the story via dialog. So, I mean, I'm guessing that's because it's such a part of this East text and storytelling tradition, which you did on earlier.

Joe R. Lansdale 40:18
No, it certainly is. And I I've always found that, you know, when I first started to that, I tried to understand plot, and I would say, Well, you got to have this happen here so that it embraces the and again, I need to go back and say that learning these things aren't necessarily bad things. It's like you've learned the rules and then you can break them. But for me to do the sort of plot where everything ties together. Now and again, I've done short stories like that, and had fun doing it. But in general, I like stories that develop out of the characters, that develop out of situations. It's where you got a simple situation and things go wrong. You know, I wrote a novel. It's one of the few novels I said, I don't want it, one of the few novels I dreamed the entire novel. I mean, I certainly, when I started writing it, I changed certain things. Had certain things, new things came to mind. But one day, my wife and I went out to look at a house we were thinking about buying, and it was out by the lake, and it had a little sliding door, and everything went in. And I listened, there was a bullet hole in the ceiling, and I asked the middle person, how did that get there? She didn't know. And for whatever reason, my wife and I wish I'd got to buy that house, not because of the bullet hole, but for other reasons. And so that night, when I went back home, I started dreaming. And the dream I had was that somebody was in the house, and I got up and I shot him, which is weird because I didn't own a gun, but in the dream, that's what happened, and I shot him by accident, and just was kind of like surprise, startled. And so I went, I got up, wash my face. I laughed, what a weird dream. And I went back to bed. And the dream continued. And then these characters started showing up, you know, and the husband and the wife and the son were all based on my family, my son, Keith, my wife, Karen, and the house was similar to the one we lived in, or the one we had looked at. It was a combination of those two, the ones we had, the one we lived in, and what we had looked at that day with a bullet hole. And I kind of sort of put those together and that every time I go back to bed, because I'd wake up every few hours and just sweat and ask, go ahead and wash my face. And I think, Damn, that's weird. And I got up the next morning, I told my wife, I said, Boy, I had the weirdest damn dream, and I told it to her, and she said, wow, that's interesting. And then, strangely enough, there was an editor from Bantam that was coming to visit with us because I was doing a non fiction book that I was editing for them. And He came to the house of state a few days, and my wife said, Tell Greg about your dream, Joe. So I told him, and when I got through, he said, sold. And so when he went back, I was I had just was about to write the drive in which I wrote really quickly, and then as soon as I finished that, I pretty much just put another page in the typewriter and started cold in July. And that was because I had an interest already, and I wrote cold in July, right after the driving. I mean, within a, you know, a short time, it was either the next day or the day after, almost immediately. And it came quickly, and I had great fun writing it, and when I got through it, I thought, well, this is pretty good. And it again, it was published. It's been republished. It's been filmed. It continues to be in print. But that was a dream in one night that stuck with me. So in a way, that was a plot, but it wasn't a plot I wrote down when I started writing the novel just came out of my my dream, and that's probably the only time that a complete novel has ever been handed to me in a dream. I've had short stories many times do that, but it was handed to me in a dream, and it's also partly because I had started teaching myself to quit thinking about the conscious mind and being aware of things consciously, because I never couldn't rest. I was constantly thinking of stories, seeing stories, and it was just driving me crazy. And so I said, Look, I've got to learn how to relax here. And I'm it's going to use kind of martial arts to look at this differently, and I begin to let my subconscious tell me the stories. There's a lot of times now when I'm writing a story, I have no idea what's going to happen the next day. I go to bed, I go to sleep, the story fills up in my subconscious. I get up the next morning and I'll let it loose

Bob Pastorella 44:54
and all of that because you saw a bullet hole in a ceiling. Why?

Joe R. Lansdale 45:00
Another thing you do is I would write short stories, and they were really short. I started out doing a lot of flash fiction when I was early in my career. I wrote for like Twilight Zone magazine and a bunch of other little magazines, most of none does much exist anymore. None of them exist anymore. And I was doing these one and two and three page stories. And the reason I was doing that is I thought, well, it's hard to break in when you're starting, but, you know, a lot of times they might give a really short piece of break because they would maybe have a slot, and they, some of them had were kind of plotted, but a lot of them were just an idea. And I wouldn't have that idea, but my wife would fix this popcorn. She made popcorn. It was so greasy, unbelievably greasy, you could have lubed a transmission with that stuff. And so I would eat that, and I tended to overeat because we were having, we'd have a big movie night, and I would go to bed, and I'd have horrible, weird dreams. I'd get up the next morning. I wrote choppers, and I would write fish night, and, you know, and fish. And I was also influenced by seeing a fish mobile that my wife had silver fish mobile and chalkers was influenced by I saw Gandhi on TV, and I thought, Well, I gotta eat some meat and some teeth. I didn't realize that. And I had the popcorn and went to bed. These stories just popped out like popcorn. And so I could always tell when the bank account was getting low, because my wife would be in I hear that popcorn thing shaking, you know? And so I would get up the next morning after eating and write that story. And I sold every story I wrote like that. But as I grow older, I had to quit doing that, because I couldn't keep myself in shape. And also I abandoned the grease and things, you know, that was when I was a young man. But it's funny, because a lot of those stories were indigestion. And always think of the Christmas carol where they talk about, you know, undigested meat or cheese. I forget the exact line I thought, yeah, give us something to that

Bob Pastorella 46:57
indigestion, flash fiction. Yeah,

Joe R. Lansdale 47:00
and I still like flash picture now, but I think that a lot of the times what happened is that that turned on something that was there that I learned to turn on, you know, without that, but I'm there's no doubt in my mind that that was the catalyst, you know, that the story may have been there, but that that was a catalyst because I couldn't sleep well, and Therefore I remembered my dreams better.

Michael David Wilson 47:22
If you write flash fiction. Now, I mean, what kind of markets do you submit to?

Joe R. Lansdale 47:28
Well, you know, I have to say that I'm very fortunate. I've been around long enough that I don't really have to hunt up much, right? They tend to come to me and and I can also write fiction and just lay it aside. I don't have much like that. In fact, most everything I write is sold. But I'll sometimes just decide, well, I'll stick that in my next collection, you know. But nearly everything that's in the collection, 95% of it is pre sold. You know, I have somebody wrote me not long ago and said, Look, I got this new market, and are you interested in writing for it? And within a month, or a little longer than I wrote, a few stories popped up. My thought, well, you know, these might be right for that Martin, because it's a very wide market. It has no genre concept unto itself. It's just a place for stories and discussions of comics and things like, I can't really mention it right after that come out yet, and I don't want people to flood that market, because I don't think that they're it's an open market, but that's what I mean. I just I finally, at that point, when I started, there were a lot of markets, and so there were a lot of places to sell those things. And to tell you the truth, there are a lot more markets now than writers know, but writers don't research that very well on the internet. You should be able to look at that stuff and check it out without, you know, that much trouble. But people don't go to that trouble. They immediately post themselves, which is a terrible idea. That's something that you should be able to do. It's something that I've chosen to do with reprints. It's something that I could do in the original book. Now, I've sort of vetted myself, but publishing yourself without trying to go out and find that market keeps you from learning. You kind of stay in the same place spinning, because it's that competition against the market that makes you get better and better, and as you go now, in time you get to where you you kind of understand what you're doing. You never learn it. You're always constantly learning and trying to get better. But I finally got to that point where the markets came to me more than I had to go to them.

Bob Pastorella 49:33
Yeah, I would agree that there's more markets now than there were back when I, when I started, it was, you know, the late 80s, early 90s, we get the Writer's Market. We had magazines like you still had, you still had the Twilight Zone, but they were basically, you know, kind of going downhill.

Joe R. Lansdale 49:51
I wrote for them. I did energy. I wrote station for a moment, for whatever reason, anybody fixed for me after that, but I did a bunch of interviews for. Them,

Bob Pastorella 50:00
yeah, and that was when, when climb was running it, or

Joe R. Lansdale 50:04
no, Ted was got all the stories from he ran it early. Oh, that was the word. I can't think of the editor's name at that time, his wife was also a fiction editor. And for some reason I'm having a blank but, and then, I think it was Michael. Blue Line was the enter there for about 30 seconds, and then I don't know if there was ever an issue that he actually bought stories for. Maybe there was and I but I don't know if there was or not. But Te Klein, or CAD Klein was the one who bought all the original stories from me, and probably bought most of this, not all of the fiction I sold out. But you're right by the by the end of the 80s, the early 90s, you still had nightcry in there somewhere, right 2am magazine, so I never sold to them. Yeah, and you got a lot of small press magazines, many of which I can't even think of at the moment, but there were a bunch of them and but all of a sudden those markets begin to dry up. But there were still a lot of novel markets, and there were anthology markets, and that's where I sold a ton of my stories was to original anthologies and also reprint anthologies. But a lot of original anthologies, number of them now, but that period was a heyday from that and that's where a lot of the short stories I wrote went I sold more to those kind of things than I did magazines. You know, like a lot of the science fiction magazines and mystery magazines and horror magazines, I never sold anything. And sometimes it's because they just didn't like what I did. They didn't know what it was. And some of the stories that they didn't buy have gone on to be, you know, at least in the eyes of some others, as classics that have been reprinted over and over have been optioned by repeatedly, if never made in some cases, like the beholders have made. But you know, it is a different thing now. But if you go online because of the internet going through the 90s and finally into the 2000s there really are a lot of markets out there, especially if you're not someone that writes one kind of fiction.

Michael David Wilson 52:07
Yeah, definitely. Oh

Bob Pastorella 52:09
yeah, I would agree. Yeah. I have one of your reprint stories in a creature, what is it? Godzilla, Trump's death program, and creatures that crack me up, man, so damn funny. Yeah,

Joe R. Lansdale 52:22
I told that story. I sold that story repeatedly over the years. And night they missed the horror show has been in, I don't know, a lot of things, and the Bible's our hands, and a lot of things. Night they missed the hose, known story and title stitches in a dead man's back on the far side of the Cadillac desert with dead folks. You know, all of these, these, these stories that you write, which you just get this amount of money for upfront, if you continue then, and your stories seem to be things that you know are pretty good and have some impact. They just keep giving you money. Yeah, keep right on giving you know, and novels are the same, definitely. And you know, that's another thing to I was just going to say this is that everybody also gave me the advice only write Bibles. There's no future in short stories. I thought I didn't get into this just for the future. I got into this for me. I'm going to take care of my family. I'm going to I'll pick with the chickens if I have to make sure my family doesn't go without. But I found I could make a living doing what I wanted to do in writing, the kind of things I wanted to write. And I did some ghost work early in my career, and I loved it. I did some where I would get up in the morning and actually puke in the toilet, and then write that stuff. I'd write a novel in 20 days. I did three of them like that under a pen name, and that just went, you know, that wasn't for me. And I always feel like, hell, I'll go back to work before I'll do that, and before it gets to the point where I get up in the morning and looking at my typewriter makes me sad. Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 53:48
you don't ever want to be at the point where you where you look at your your typewriter, your keyboard, and you get sad. That's right,

Joe R. Lansdale 53:54
we got, yeah, obviously, I don't use a typewriter anymore, but back then, that that's what we had. Yeah, I

Bob Pastorella 54:00
use a typewriter for a short period of time. Hated that some bitch.

Joe R. Lansdale 54:04
I love that typewriter, but when I went to the word processor, I couldn't go back and have no interest in going back. You know, I hear people. I once heard a writer who should have known better say the idiotic thing about well, you know, if you the word processor is just processor, just one more stage removes you from the work. And I remember, I was sitting on the table at a world fantasy convention. I said, That's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. It just came out of my mouth before I knew what was going on. Because I said, You know what, if you people wrote with a quill, oh, my god, they've got typewriters that just another separation between you and the page, and those people would, you know, they had a hammer and a chisel that were writing this stuff out or writing in Papyrus, or papyrus or wax tablets. You know, you did the technology of the time. You either tell a story or you don't. And one of the things about the word processor, it actually cleaned up my work. It made my work better. It made me faster, not because I actually wrote stories faster, but because I corrected faster. I didn't have white out, I didn't have slipping carbon paper, you know, I didn't have to send a story out a few times and then have to retype it. And because the original xeroxing, you know, you couldn't, you weren't allowed to send those out, because they weren't that good. You had to send the original. You come back with a few rings on it, and you know, all kinds of things. Well, now I write a story. It's on my machine. I put the address of the email for the editor that I'm sending it to zip it's gone. There's no paper. There's no white out, because I correct it on the machine. And then if they need corrections, I can make those so much more easy, easily. And I do tend to have them mail me the manuscript so that I can look at the manuscript and do the corrections on the machine, because it keeps me from feeling like I'm always just looking at the machine itself. But you know that whole idea to me, though, is just you either write well or you write poorly.

Bob Pastorella 56:01
Exactly It reminds me of an early conference I went to years and years ago where somebody was talking about, you know, technology. And this is probably, you know, right around the time of, you know, the where, instead of people having websites, they had web pages. So the internet was, yeah, I remember that, yeah. And, you know, and the Internet was, was, was relatively new for, you know, the general population. And this one editor, New York editor, he said, There will never be a time that someone's gonna email us a piece of fiction. It's just not gonna happen. And I'm sitting here taking myself going, this is a guy who literally doesn't want his job anymore. He's probably, yeah, and he does,

Joe R. Lansdale 56:47
he doesn't see the future. Like pension science fiction wouldn't take books by email for a long time, and then now it is and and I've heard editors and Pastor you know, we're just not going to do that. We're going to stick to this. And obviously you can't, technology moves, even if you don't. And I've heard a bunch of writers that just stick to the typewriter because, you know, that's what I do, and that's what a writer does. And I think, you know, a writer writes, and I've always thought a word processor is just a very convenient typewriter. You know, that's, that's what I'm doing. I'm, I'm lighting on that thing the same way I'd accept the keyboard is lighter to the touch is easier to use, the corrections are quicker. I don't have tons of paper, you know, I do all, like I was telling you earlier. I do all these corrections as I go, but when I used to do those, I would have a trash can full of lots of paper at the end of every day. Well, I have just saved an entire forest by moving to, you know, the word processor, I don't have that. I had no idea how many things I would discard now, because I do them on the machine itself. And so where before I'd have to rewrite a couple of sentences, I might have to throw the whole page away to keep it from looking messy. Now, I

Bob Pastorella 57:57
don't. And plus, you know, back in the day too, when you started, like, people started buying their own printers and stuff like that. And it's like, you go to, you know, the store, and you're, you know, you're about to spend like, three, 400 bucks on this gigantic monstrosity you're gonna put next to the computer, you know. And a guy's asking you, you know, what are you going to be using it for? And you're like, Well, I'm gonna be printing pages, you know, from for, you know, manuscripts to mail out to, you know. And they actually, you know, you so do you want, uh, NLQ, you know? And I was like, you know, cute. What do you mean? What is that? What do you mean, you know? What is that, you know? And they're like, near letter quality, those are a little bit more expensive. So you're like, going, damn well, I don't know. Let me think about it. You go back to the, you know, the Writer's Market. You start looking at requirements, near letter quality. You're like, Oh, Jesus Christ, I gotta spend well,

Joe R. Lansdale 58:40
you know, but yeah, and before, when they first started making you do copies, the copies weren't that good enough, and then the copies got good enough, but then they had the dot matrix printer, but those things weren't exactly wonderful either. And then, of course, it got to be laser printer, and so on and so on. And printing just got to be better. So for much better knowledge right now? Yeah, the only problem with the technology now is that, again, you can print your own books and do all that, and that's not a and I don't want to misunderstood here. I'm not saying people shouldn't do that if they don't want to, and I'm not saying some great books aren't done that way, but I do believe that there was something about that whole process of fighting the marketplace and and, you know, staying up and being, you know, looking at that rejection slip and all that that helped you get better, because you couldn't just print it out, and, you know, make 100 copies and put them in the trunk of your car and take them to conventions, which, unto itself, is not a bad thing, but it allowed you to get better. Now, obviously there aren't as many book markets as there were, so I understand that impulse, but there's still a lot of book markets out there, and that's still the way to go for all those people that went on the internet and made a million dollars. There's tons of them that didn't, and it's the same way of publishing. So. Do, but it's even more so if you're self publishing, you know, and ebooks are another way to go, but, but, you know, some people like I read some ebooks when I travel, but I prefer hold a book with my hand. That's just my choice. But I don't think, Oh, my God, ebooks are evil. I know Ray Bradbury and I think Carl and Ellison, they wouldn't allow their stuff to be done in ebooks, or at least they didn't in the past. I don't know if that changed before Ray died or and I know what Harlan position is on that now, but I always thought, Why do you fight the technology? Because we still got books. Books aren't going to disappear for a while. I thought they might become more of a luxury item, and I didn't like the idea of them being on something like that, where they were so disposable and so easily lost and you couldn't handle but now what's happened is the E market sort of corrected itself. So you have the E market, you have the book market, the paper market. So you you know, I give royalties from a lot of ebook stuff, so as people are reading it, whether they're reading it online or whether they're reading it in paper, or some future methodology for, you know, consuming a book, it's a good thing.

Michael David Wilson 1:01:11
The great thing about technology at the moment as well is the rise in audio books. I mean, I remember when, yes, you'd have like, about 20 cassettes to listen to a novel, and now you can, yeah,

Joe R. Lansdale 1:01:25
I have, I have some like that from my own book. You don't know that there's like, a stack of cassettes, but

Michael David Wilson 1:01:31
I know, like, my

Joe R. Lansdale 1:01:33
Yeah, I'm sorry I was going

Michael David Wilson 1:01:35
to say, like, I know a huge number of your stories are available now in audio form. I mean, as a Yeah,

Joe R. Lansdale 1:01:43
yeah. Well, you know, all of the happenrunner novels, I think, except one, strangely enough, Devil red, fell through the cracks, and they've never corrected that, but all of the rest of them are on ebooks. Also, my daughter just did the reading for fender lizards, for Sky horse, one of the DVD things, and then, of course, there's audible, and there's all these other things, but a lot of my books are in audio. And for those people who like to listen audio while they drive or they're traveling, or they just like to sit in their house with earphones on, they're now available in that method too. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:02:18
and I know that the magic wagon that's actually narrated by cat Williamson, and that's fantastic reading. Oh,

Joe R. Lansdale 1:02:27
yeah, well, chet's a great reader. He's also a really dear friend of mine. I've known him for years and years.

Michael David Wilson 1:02:33
When did your friendship with cat begin?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:02:38
Probably the Yeah, I want to say the mid 80s. It might have been a little later than that, but he was certainly in the 80s, I think probably around the 86 somewhere between 8688 and I saw Chad just recently at scares that care him, his wife, Lori, and we have my wife Karen, and we had just the greatest time. Every time we see each other, it's just like we just pick up, like we just left off. He also played a part in a film based on a short story of mine called Christmas with the dead that my son was the screenplay for. And that's also an actor, so he plays a part in that. So, you know, our our lives have been intertwined for a long time the same way with George Martin, yeah, and all these different people I've known over the years. You know,

Michael David Wilson 1:03:22
we're talking of Christmas with the dead. I mean, we've spoken about a number of film adaptations. And right a lot of people, even people who aren't familiar with your fiction, necessarily like people. I guess outside of our audience, they're probably going to know Bubba Hotep or cold in July, or, of course, now the Sundance series of hap and Leonard. I know that often you spend some time on set. So I'm wondering, what kind of involvement do you have in these film adaptations? It

Joe R. Lansdale 1:04:00
depends when they did, when they did Bubba hotel. I really didn't have any involvement, but being there, but, you know, Don was really good about asking me questions and, you know, sort of saying, Well, you know, what do you think about this? But, and then cold in July, I pretty much said, you know, guys, go for it. And they sent me all the scripts and stuff the last one, which I think is a reason, because it changed more, but, but I like the film a lot. There are certainly things that I miss from the books, and I'd like to be there, but I think it's a marvelous film adaptation. I think Bubba Hotep is an incredible film adaptation. I love the happen Leonard series, you know. And in that one, I had a little more say the first season especially, and because Sundance became, you know, they got their own showrunners then, and a very good guy, very good showrunner that John worth, but before that, it was me and Jim and Nick, and we were, we were friends as well, as, you know, putting this together. So I have, I had a little more involvement. I wrote a script for the second season of. And you know, I was out in the writer's room for the third season recently where we just kind of talked about the next book to bear Mambo, and what they wanted to do and what I thought might be a good idea. Of course, they'll make their own final decisions, but I at least have some input. And I'm thinking in the future for other series or other movies, I may have a little more input, and I plan on directing a film myself early next year, if nothing blows between now and

Michael David Wilson 1:05:27
then, it's just such good news that it's been renewed for a third season because, oh

Joe R. Lansdale 1:05:34
yeah, yeah, it's their number one show.

Michael David Wilson 1:05:37
Yeah, I found before like shows that I seem to love, like Hannibal, unfortunately, just didn't get the ratings, like, kind of mainstream, so then they're canceled. And it's like, this is one of the best things you've got on television.

Joe R. Lansdale 1:05:54
The worst thing is to watch a season of something that leaves you hanging and it didn't get picked up. Yeah, I've always thought that there ought to be some rule that if it doesn't get picked up, they still get an episode or two to wrap it up. And I'd always hate that when I'd get into something. And so now I'm very reluctant to get into something unless I know it's it's had, you know, legs, so to speak, for a while. And then I'll my wife or and I or I will, depending on what it is. Sometimes I like things, she doesn't, back and forth, and then I'll just cram on a series, and I can watch an entire series in two or three days, and that's great. Now I've got freedom to go and do other things. What I love about the DVR or Netflix, you know, I can, I can sort of indulge, but I don't have to wait once every week to go in and see that one. Because what if I had five or six shows I was interested in and then I was waiting? Now it would take up my time. This way, I can go into the weekend, I can watch an entire series. I can let that rest for a while and come in and do that with a negative. You know, when I was growing up in TV was on, it was so new, we watched everything. And then by the time the late 60s, the key to get to where it's all man, this is crap. Most of this stuff is terrible. There's a few exceptions, but most of it's pretty bad. So I didn't watch much TV, but now I think is the second golden age of TV, and I think it's a far greater Golden Age in many ways, than the original, you know, in the 50s, early 60s, that they called the Golden Age there. And there were some great shows then, but most of them were not that good. But right now, with so many channels and more money, and the fact that films are really not doing that well comparatively, unless they're of a certain narrow focus, the real character driven stuff, and the novelistic kind of stuff has gone to TV so you can watch something that's like Breaking Bad, that feels like a novel. Starts out slow. It develops characters. It develops a situation. It cares about dialog. Because used to when you watch an episode of a show, if you saw that show, say it was a sitcom, or say it was a cop show, or whatever, once you saw the first episode nine times out of 10, you had seen the template for every episode thereafter, also true of westerns, you would have the situation set up, you would have the problem increase. You would have the problem solved. And all of that within 30 minutes to an hour, minus commercial time. Well, now they don't have to do that. So if you see one episode of something, it doesn't necessarily dictate how that's going to be, because you could look at your watch and go, Okay, now it's time for this. Well, in the good shows now, and there's far more of them, which is not to say there are plenty of bad ones as well, but there are more good ones you can do more novelistic stuff, meaning that you don't have to have that sort of concrete template for an episode. I mean, that still exists some, but not like it did in the past.

Bob Pastorella 1:08:54
Yeah, there. There's too many good shows. And I know exactly what you're talking about too. It's like watching cop shows like in the 80s and 90s on TV in it's, you know, you've seen one episode. You've seen them. I was like, listen to a nickel back out if you have the first one you have every nickel

Joe R. Lansdale 1:09:14
Absolutely you only need one. And the the thing is, is that with those shows like that, ABC, CBS, NBC, ruled the roost. And then when they started having these, you know, the cable channels, and some of them were pretty terrible when they first started, but they just kept building. And some of them started out, I think it was FX, I may misremember this. I think it showed old movies, not old movies, but kind of action adventure movies, or it's certainly one of those channels they show that, then all of a sudden they start a little original programming. Yes, American movie classic, where you go, there's an example, right? Yeah, AMC did that. That's right.

Bob Pastorella 1:09:56
Remember what AMC?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:09:58
Yeah. AMC always. Sundance originally, AMC, I think, didn't have commercials. Then it added commercials, and then it just decided, look, instead of us just showing old movies, because we can't beat Ted Turner, you know, that's the greatest. That's my favorite channel. I watched that thing all the time. You know, I'll take them movies and go, Okay, I'm gonna watch that. And I'd have like, 10 movies, and I'll spend two or three months to get to the model. But what they did, they started having original shows. I mean, The Walking Dead, for example. You know, they are, they own. They own, yeah, Breaking Bad. They own. Sundance. So happen, Leonard is, by proxy, part of that, too. And so you, you've got, you've got these new shows. And you think you know, you're going to know what's happening. Every episode, and it didn't that way. Now, show's been on long enough, like walking dead, I kind of do know, and I quit watching it, even though I'm so proud of the fact that Polly McIntosh is on that show, because she came from Anthony Leonard, and she is a great person and a very good actress.

Bob Pastorella 1:10:55
Yeah, I was recognized her as soon as I saw that when she was on The Walking Dead, and I was like, Oh, she's good. She's gonna play so

Joe R. Lansdale 1:11:04
good. Yeah, I'm gonna watch, I'm gonna watch all of our other episodes she's in, though, I'm gonna break down and go back and watch it. But, but anything, if it's owned long enough, becomes repetitious. And the other example too is that those, those are good, and TV in general is better. Problematically, those channels that have to deal with commercials, and that includes Sundance and whatever, are also driven by those commercials, and they're also built around those commercials, others like HBO Showtime, you know they have to have their way of making their revenue, but they don't break their shows up with commercials. Or you can go and watch all the great classics on Turner Classic Movies, everything from the real early stuff to the stuff that I didn't think of as necessarily classic, because it wasn't that old to me. But I look at it now and I realize, Oh my God, this stuff is 40 and 50 years old, and it seemed like I saw it yesterday, you know, like Bonnie and Clyde taxi driver. I didn't realize those I need to have classics, but I didn't Cool Hand Luke, one of my old times favorites. Butch, Cassie, the Sundance Kid, my absolute, you know, favorite among things. And you can watch all of those, and then you look over and go to HBO and see George's Game of Thrones, or something, you know, on stars. That is kind of a mixed bag, but, you know, it's just, it's a, it's a wild, wild west out there. And what'll happen, though, and this, this will happen, I think, sadly, is eventually all of these shows will start to have their own templates, and then it will become somewhat monotonous in some ways, and then somebody will have to come along and revolutionize to shake it out. It's the same way with novels, yeah, shake it up. You got to shake it up. You know, like novels, I've certainly done things that had some conventional structure, but I've always tried to have different characters, different dialog or make the style interesting. There's also a thing that you can do with novels that's harder to do than some people think, is that the novel itself is the character. And I always thought that the drive in it has a narrator, and I like the narrator, but it is dealing with these B movie characters, so that you eventually the way the what novel is written, The novel itself becomes the character. It's the biggest character in the whole thing is the novel is the way it's structured, the way it comes off, the way it defies rules. And you know, whether it's good or bad is up to the individual to decide. But That album was my attempt to write a novel where I certainly had characters, but where the novel itself was the premier character, the world that was created, the style in which it was written, the thematic aspects of it. I think another writer is like Kurt Vonnegut. He does that almost all of his novels, especially the later one. And you know, they may be a mixed bag. Some may be better than others, but he really creates not so much characters, but characters that are within, contained within this universe, this novelistic universe, which is a character unto itself, due to his style and due to the somatic thing he touches on. Well, you

Bob Pastorella 1:14:19
see a lot of the, you know, third person narration now, probably within the last 1015, years, that has a personality of its own. It's its own character. Yeah? And I Yeah, no, I agree. And I think that, you know, and you know, I think younger writers need to realize that this, this thing that's going on. People, you know, publishers are buying that because they like it. Don't know how long it's going to last. So you need, you need to know you can't get

Joe R. Lansdale 1:14:49
latched up into, I mean, for example, you have creative schools of writing. For a while, there was this whole phrase about, I am driving and I see, you know, and it was this whole tense that people were usable. So. Some great novels and great short stories were written through that methodology. But you could see that they were cranking those out from people copying them, or people from in Creative Writing schools and said, you know this, this immediate third or first person where you're you know, it's happening within the moment, instead of, you know in the past, like in the past would be, you know, like a lot of crime fiction or private eye fiction, or this written in first person fiction. I write it. It happens just after, you know, hey, you know, on Tuesday I went down here, this happened to me. Blah, blah, blah. Instead of Tuesday, I am driving, and I go here, and I do and, you know, that happens in that immediate sense. But the reason that that, I think that becomes merely faddish, and the reason that I think that in one way, that traditional aspect works better is simple and it's obvious, and that's when I tell you a story about what happened to me. I tell it to you in the past. I tell you, you know, the other day I went over here and this happened to me. I don't say I am in the immediate sense to me, that makes it it makes it seem more gimmick. Now there are exceptions that I just read a great novel by called the dime, by Catholic, Catholic 10th, and it's just terrific. And you break any law, and you can repeat anything in the past, if you're good at but I've always liked a story that, especially if it's first person, that it's past, you know, it's a story in the past that you're referring to, that you're that you're talking about, like a lot of private ice fiction, or, uh, Raymond Chandler's fiction, or, you know, a modern fiction in a first person that refers to something having happened in the past works for me better, because it's like somebody sitting there talking to me. The other is an artificial artifice. You know, I'm listening to that, and I'm going, Who talks like that? And if they don't talk like that, why am I constantly being pulled out of it? Now, like I said, there are exceptions to every rule, but and you should never let any rule rule with you, which is the main rule of writing. But for me, I think that you also, especially if you're doing first person, you try to look what is the key to storytelling? What makes storytelling work? What makes storytelling engaging? And also, when we talk, I see people that say and, and he replied excitedly, well, that's ridiculous, you know, you say said or you don't say anything. You might say. That's been a rare chance. But also people to question mark after something, you know, it's asked. Now I've done, I've done all those things when I first started out. Keep that in mind. And recently I get this, I really realized I got a question mark, and I said, he asked, Why do I do that? You know, it's obvious, and they're asking, as I'm saying, ask twice, or if I say said, it kind of goes away as a reader, unless I'm doing it every line. But if I can set somebody up and find a way to they talk. I don't have to say that every time. I can pick up on it from time to time, because if I'm telling you a story, think about this too. And this goes back to the basics of storytelling, not only that fact that it's happened in the past to me, but when I tell you a story, and I don't say I was talking to Jack, and I said, Jack, I'm going to go out in the woods here, and I'm gonna get me an ax and I'm gonna build me a cabin. And he doesn't say, Oh, are you? He replied, expectantly, you don't do that when you tell the story, saying, and then Jack said to me, he said, a cabin. You don't. You couldn't. You couldn't build a front porch. Remember that porch you built that? That fell down. We had to tie it up with change. And so you don't and then you don't return. It says change. You say why I did not I replied. You know, you know. And when you refer to somebody, you don't say that they that they responded, or they replied, at least not in natural conversation. You said, they said, or he asked me this, or he called out to me, and maybe in rare cases, whisper, but even call whisper, scream, that doesn't work, and people do not his sentences, all you have to do. You had Jack set in, you know, he was so angry, he hissed at me. He said, I hate you. I hate you. He hissed. Well, try his thing. I hate you. I hate you. You may get away with that, but it sounds stupid and you know, and you don't, you don't bark. You know, you might make a barking sound, but especially the sentences is several words long. You don't hiss anything. You don't growl anything, you don't grunt anything. You know, those are tags that people use because they're insecure. They don't want to write the scene where the scene builds itself and that you know the attitude, or that you can build the attitude through how people respond or act. Now, I'm not saying I've always done those things perfectly or whatever, but I'm saying that that's the goal for me, and especially as you know I started out. Out, and I had those tags. And sometimes when I was first published, people would put those in, editors would put those in. I had, not long ago, I had somebody write, well, I think you should put in. He responded with excitement. I said, Well, he's obviously excited, you know, and he's obviously responding. So why do I Why would I put that? No, I'm not doing that, you know. So I always go back to the raw essence of storytelling. I was like, I'm sitting with you as I am now talking to you. And when I tell you that, you know, my dad told me the story, I might say he told me this. He said this, I don't say and you know, my dad, he responded with enthusiasm about, you know, it's just not a common way of speaking.

Bob Pastorella 1:20:44
Reminds me, as someone, someone said, and I'm probably going to get it wrong, but they were talking about Robert Ludlum and some of the stuff that that his later novels had, and they're like, man, you know, just like, How did this even get published? You know, because there's some line of dialog where the character says, I don't understand your retort. He exclaimed, you know,

Joe R. Lansdale 1:21:07
right, really, right, yeah. And you don't have to say, I hate. You don't have to say he exclaimed, I mean, self evident. And I always try to use a limited number of exclamation marks. I rarely ever use them, because the Senate should tell me. But, you know, I'm not saying that's bad, but even Ray Bradbury, who I loved and his earlier work knows quite a bit different. But when he got older, everything became he responded with excitement and exclamation marks and all that. And this is the writer I love, and a lot of writers I love do break that, that rule, but it's something I'm always aware of, because it stands up like a signpost, and it's like an elbow in the ribs, more like, see me right. See what I'm saying there. You get what I'm doing there. And I don't, I don't really like that. I mean, Elmore Leonard is someone who Ernest Hemingway, James Cain, was the master of that. And even some writers I love, like Raymond Chandler did it from time to time, and hammock did it, and they came out of that Pope tradition. So but it's one of those things that I think Hemingway wasn't the only person to do it, but he was one of those people that made it a way of looking at things, and probably the most important writer of the 20th century, at least, certainly the first half of it, because he changed the way everybody wrote, even if you didn't like his work, even if he didn't like how, you know, the subject matter, the way he wrote changed how 90% of everybody wrote. That doesn't mean they all copied him, but the idea that you don't have to over explain, and I'm talking about good writers, and that you can use dialog to move the story, that you don't have to tag the story constantly with saying, you know, the things we're talking about. The other thing is that, you know, Jack said with enthusiasm, you know, reaching into his pocket for his dick. You know, just none of that stuff is necessary. You just need to find a way to tell that story as simply as you can and then and make the descriptions powerful. You know, one of the things that that I do, that I probably overdo, and this is my is metaphors and similes. But the reason I do that is because I grew up in the South, and when I'm writing those kinds of stories. I tend to fall back when I was listening to storytellers, because they did do that. It's like, well, it was hot, or two rats stuck in an old sock that's pretty hot. And kind of got that in mind. Now, you know, you know what that means, right? And and you know he'd rather climb a tree and lie to stay on the ground tell the truth. Well, those kind of things I love because they are. They within themselves. Tell you a lot about the narrator. They tell you a lot about the universe in which they exist and how they see things, you know. And so to me, that's what writing is. It goes back to that pure storytelling. And that doesn't mean that I don't, from time to time like experimental writing, or things that you know defy that, but I'm just saying that the stuff that really seems to last, the stuff that people really want to read, not just the stuff that they buy and claim they read, is stuff that's that that storyteller driven, which is not necessarily the thing same thing. It's plot driven. Plot is another thing than story. They they certainly cross up their cousins. But storytelling is like when you take Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, there's just incident after incident, but there's very little plot except they're trying to get down the river and get to this certain place and trying to get Jim to freedom and and that's essentially that part of it. But also, you know, Huck's got other things going on with him, and there's events where they stop and have different adventures and and it also has insightful moments. And then stories within stories. Now, that story plot is like Agatha Christie, where everything clicks together. And I'm not knocking that, but I'm just saying that there is a different. Between storytelling and plot, although they certainly can overlap, but a storyteller can make you interested in the most banal things. They have a way of writing, which is essentially the same way, a way of talking, a way of intriguing you, a way of pulling you from one sentence to the next, from one moment to the next, from one character to the next and giving you these little revelations all through instead of like, well, I have this spot now where I have to put in the characterization, and every fifth page I need to do this. You know, you can't do that.

Michael David Wilson 1:25:32
Well, I love the similars and metaphors. I mean, even in your non fiction piece Apollo red, you've got his eyes rolled up in his head like Jerry's in a slot machine. I almost expected him to split coins, to spring,

Joe R. Lansdale 1:25:48
yeah, well, you know, it's, it's, it's, to me, is that? Because, again, that's, that's tied to the storytellers I grew up with and the way they express themselves. Some of that may have grown out of illiteracy and not being able to, you know, talk in a commonly literate method, and so they would explain things in such a way that it related to their lives, so you could see things as they felt them. And I think that was an important lesson for me.

Bob Pastorella 1:26:17
It works on multiple levels.

Joe R. Lansdale 1:26:19
Yes, absolutely. The thing about writing, storytelling and reading is that you can give it a lot of thought, and you can give it not enough thought, and you can give it too much thought. You know, when you start out, you're trying to understand it, but mostly I don't, I don't try to handle it too much because I'm afraid the paint will come off. You know, I can talk about these things, which I think are generalized things about writing. But I never tell somebody, oh, you know, I'm writing the story, and this is what it's about. I might say I'm writing new hap and Leonard story. It's called the elephant of surprise, and that's the end of it. I'm not going to sit around and tell you, Well, you know, this happens, and then I've got this because I don't know. I really don't know. And on top of that, if I talk it out, I lose interest in writing it,

Bob Pastorella 1:27:03
right? You can lose that fire if you spend too much time, right? Telling

Joe R. Lansdale 1:27:09
but they can also destroy Yeah, absolutely. And writing groups can be helpful, but they can also destroy you, because before you know it, you're writing for the people in the group instead of for yourself. And I have a motto is I write like everybody I know is dead, and I have another motto, and that's fucked the reader. And what I mean by that is that I can't sit there and try to figure out what the reader wants, because there are a lot of readers, and they all have different interests. They all have different things they like. So I only know one reader, and that's me, and then when I get through it's like, Oh, I love the reader. I hope the reader loves me. But when I'm writing it, I can't do that, because then it makes me think, what's my editor going to want? What's my agent going to what's my rope is going to think about that? You know? What's, you know, how is my son or my daughter going to look at that, or my wife or my my, you know, my best friend, or whatever the hell it is. You can't do that. You just have to, and you can't say, Well, what is the market wrong? Well, you know, obviously, and I'm writing a young adult novel, I know that the language is going to be a little, you know, less severe, but I don't really write it any different. I just try to write an engaging novel that I want to read and that when it's done, I like to think that if I liked it, there's an audience out there for it, although I have written some things that I knew I said, you know, this is for an audience of one, or maybe there's a handful of people out there that will enjoy this. But I don't worry about that. I write for me, and I just say, the hell with a reader until I'm done. I mean, and understand I'm talking about this is the institute going into the story. I mean, I hope to have 1000s of readers, and I love my readers, but I can't love them when I'm writing, because if I do, I start to try to figure out what they want. And how can I do that? If there are 1000s of readers and they all have different interests, if we knew that, we would all be writing that exact book every time out, and we don't know that, but we know what we like, and I'm not interested in trying to write and meet the expectations of millions of readers. If I do, I'll be happy as hell. But that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to write for me, and as long as it's selling enough Well, I'm making a good living and I'm able to enjoy getting up in the morning. That's what I wanted when I was a child. And now I have it.

Bob Pastorella 1:29:26
There you go. You have to always think of it as I write the stories that I would want to read, yes, and I don't care anyone else wants to read them and like but of course, you know, once you get done and you get it published, and you're, you know, like, the whole mindset changes, like, oh, they like

Joe R. Lansdale 1:29:48
they like it. But, you know, you can only carry that so far too, because once it's done, it's done, that's right, it's like reviews. And, you know, I love a good review, and I'll post them and use them to promote the work and but I don't. Necessarily believe in those reviews. Because I think if you believe the good ones, why don't you believe the bad ones, right? You know they're they're all reviews, and in one, in one sense, unless you know they're like a personal attack or something, they're all right, the people who hate it are right, and the people who love it alive, because that's their viewpoint about it. They they got something out of it that really appealed to them, or they didn't appeal to them. So when someone says, Oh, I hate this, and, you know, they're right, from their point of view, I've seen some that said, y'all, this is what Joe Lansdale does. So good one. And I think, you know, actually, I don't do that. So that good. I think it's something else I do well. And then I might have another review that says, oh, you know one thing, he can't write his dialog. I thought, I think I like pretty good dialog. So, I mean, you know, you analyze them, but ultimately, from those people's viewpoint, they're correct. And probably that guy says, I can't write good dialog. Wants it to say, exclaimed, he responded, he remarked, he ejaculated. And then his viewpoint, that's good writing. And you know what? If that's good writing to him, it is, but it's not to me. And so all you can do is do the best you can and understand that. And also there's this just as an aside. Sometimes I'll read a bad review and go, Yep, pretty much nailed it.

Michael David Wilson 1:31:15
I know that you said before that, 1986 was a pivotal year for you and your writing with the release of the magic wagon dead in the West, the World Fantasy Award nomination for tight little stitches. I'm wondering how did that impact both your life and your approach to writing, and what were you feeling around that time?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:31:39
Well, I'd already gone full time. And, you know, my first novel, act of love is a very except for the fact that it was very graphic. It's fairly conventional thriller. It's one of those where that that plot is there, and it was all worked out and all that. And that was exactly what I knew. I couldn't keep doing it. It was, it was fun to do that, but it's like it taught me everything I didn't want to do, and it had this popularity. It's still in print. People still buy it, or people who love it. It influenced a lot of writers at that time. So okay, cool. But when I wrote the magic wagon, I didn't know if it was any or not. I just thought, God, I don't know. And then I wrote, then the West, which my, you know, that was just sort of my love letter to the pulps, and my love letters to low budget movies and and certain kinds of comics. And I felt like I had sort of been okay with that. I did a serialized version of it, which was all right. And then I did a screenplay version which I wrote that screenplay in one day, option is 11 times. Eventually sold the rights for about a quarter million dollars, and they never made it. But I used that screenplay as my template for writing the novel version, which is different than the serialized version, which was kind of sloppy. I didn't know what I was doing, but at that point, the idea of style, the idea of other elements being there, came to me. And even though that novel is a it's certainly a pulp novel, I learned from it a lot. And so that when I wrote and I wrote the night runners at the same time, but nobody knew what the hell to do with that at that time, because it was especially in the era I wrote it. I wrote part of it at 80. I finished at 83 and it never got I couldn't sell it till 87 and but, but then I wrote the magic wagon, and I, I've never, not known if it was any good. But when I got through with it and I saw the galleys, I thought, You know what? This is. Closer to me, this is less plot driven and more storytelling driven, and more character driven, and more style driven and more dialog driven. And when I did the drive in, I did the same thing, except I tried, as I said earlier, to make the book structure the way it was written, the style, the attitude, make it the character in so many different ways. And so it was in that period and and the title of stitches in dead man's back, I hated it. When I wrote it, I thought, boy, I'm sending this in, they're going to hate it. And when I reread it, I said, you know, maybe this is better than I thought. And it was like I was doing something I hadn't been doing before. And so I wasn't sure if it was good or not, but I was also doing what I wanted to do, even though I had reservations, and then when I got done, it was some of the best stuff I'd ever done. And that was when I learned that lesson I've got to write for me. And that something that doesn't seem like it's all that good may not be, but frequently it's good better than you think, because you're breaking certain rules that you were trying to follow before. And so that was a big moment for me, not only in the fact that I think I wrote some pretty good material in but it was a realization about what I needed to do and and then the West gave me a small press creds that I have continued to keep up ever since. And it gave me mainstream creds, which I've you. To continue to keep up ever since, in fact, the magic wand was reviewed like it was a literary novel, which surprised me. And then the title of stitches in a dead man's back was a fusion of horror science fiction, but it also had a literary quality to it, and so I felt like I could swing back and forth and have these different markets and would help me survive during those times when maybe something else wasn't there. And later I added screenplays to that, and comic book scripts to that, and nonfiction to that. So I have a lot of strings to my bow, but they're strings I want. They're strings I like to pull.

Michael David Wilson 1:35:38
What do you think you can do in the small press that's trickier to get away with in mainstream publishing.

Joe R. Lansdale 1:35:47
Well, mainstream publishing, you know, there's some of the more quirky stuff. Let's say something like, I just did a book called Bubba and the cosmic blood suckers is not something that they're going to sell a ton of but I can sell it in the small press, and they're they know how to target their market, and in that small press, they're going to be interested in that. And also in the small press, I get paid pretty well, nowhere near I do in the other but what happens is that those books tend to have a rabid audience, because they know they're getting something that they're not going to get from the stream press. Because I can sell 3000 copies there, or 5000 or in some cases, more than that, and I'm not having to compete with the mainstream press, which has to sell 1000s of copies just to get their money back, and they have to appeal to, in their minds, a more general audience, which I don't actually think I do that particularly well there either, but it's more that way happened is more of a general audience than, say, Bubba and the cosmic blood suckers. So it gives me these outlets for fiction that I might never get the chance to write or might never get the chance to publish, and if I want to stay within that realm that I've mentioned before, writing the stories I want to write, telling the stories that I want to read, then that's a great outlet for

Michael David Wilson 1:37:12
Yeah, and for those who are interested in getting Bubba and the cosmic bloodsuckers, I believe that's coming out at Halloween from subterranean press, right?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:37:23
And you might want to order it now, because I think the limit is already sold. And I don't, I don't know about the other but they usually sell out pretty quick. So if you're interested in that, now is the time,

Michael David Wilson 1:37:34
right? Bob's probably getting his credit card out. That happens a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah,

Bob Pastorella 1:37:45
I've seen, I've seen it on there, and some it's in my wish list. But you're right on those particular especially subterranean press, you have to pull the trigger or you're not going to get the

Joe R. Lansdale 1:37:57
book. And you know, the thing is, is that some of them are more expensive. I've had people say, Well, you know, those are expensive. I can't afford them. Don't buy them. I'm not making you buy them. And the other thing too is, if you wait a while, they'll be in a cheaper edition, you know. And also, subterranean publishes an ebook edition, and, and those are cheaper, and, and, you know, I don't set those prices. And people go, Well, why is it that price? Well, I guess that's the price they set. And there are small presses that I have not agreed with and would not publish with again, or would not work with again because I thought they were sticking the reader. But you can't always know that when you start with one of those, because you haven't seen the product yet. But most of the time. I think every one of subterranean books are worth the price. For those people who love books, not just the story, but actually love the the construction of those books and the quality of those books, you know, there's a difference. If somebody just wants to read something, then, you know, throw it away or pass it off to the used bookstore or friend or whatever, then I can understand why somebody would want to spend 30 to $40 for a novel. But when you really look at it, some of their books, $30 is not that far off what they cost in a mainstream pass press, 25 $26 and you get this really nice book. And some of those, the limit is those are very expensive. And people say, well, those books are like 100 and some dollars. And I said, Yeah, but they're not designed for the regular reading audience. Those are collectibles, and that the story itself will eventually appear somewhere else in a more affordable edition,

Bob Pastorella 1:39:33
right? That's usually the case in those books that you spend, you know, the collectible price of 150 $200 or more, or typically, books that you're not going to open and read, you're that's yeah, for people who are biblical, they're book collectors.

Joe R. Lansdale 1:39:50
I have those, of course, as I write them, and I've gotten a few nice additions like that. They've been given to me, and I bought a few like that. But I'm a reader. I'm not really a collector. A lot. That means that I have a ton of books. I have 20 something 1000 books and these and I have, like, two houses to keep them in, and I have a warehouse, and I'm starting to get rid of some of them because I'm getting older. I know I'm not going to reread a lot of those things. I know some I have outgrown, what have you. I'm nostalgic about them. But the point is, most of those are reader copies. They're like I bought them in used at garage sales or used bookstores, and then have markings in them. That doesn't mean I don't have a lot of really nice I do, especially as I've gotten older and I had more money I could afford those, but I buy books to read, and I certainly take as good at care of them as I possibly can, but I'm not. And I have some collectibles, but that's not my big deal. It's just, I'm going to have all these books that are collectibles that you never open and you put in a plastic bag or something. I want to read them,

Bob Pastorella 1:40:55
right? And that's I, you know? I get me and Joe have some mutual friends, if our readers are listening, and I get them to order me books. I read those books. Yeah, you know, I want them in paperback. I just the reason why I want them in such good condition is because I don't want them to be crap when I get the book, you know, then it makes it difficult. The pages are falling out of it, you know. I'll

Joe R. Lansdale 1:41:20
buy limited and I'll read that limited, but I know that that book is well made, and that if I pass that on to someone else, whether it goes in the library, it goes to my my my kids, or someone else, I know that book's going to be around a while. We're something that otherwise not going to be. But I mean, I did dead aim and I did hyenas, which were both happen Leonard novellas, and I did those with subterranean and there was a limit edition, and then there was a regular edition. And I'll have people say, well, even a regular edition, I can't afford it. And I'll say, Well, you know what? It's in paperback. It's in hap and Leonard, which is out from Tachyon press, so you can get it there. And then they'll go, Yeah, but it's not that nice addition. That's why it's a nice addition. It took money to make it, so they're not just sticking you. They also had takes a lot to make those quality books exactly

Bob Pastorella 1:42:15
right.

Michael David Wilson 1:42:15
And the best publishers, I mean, it's not like the price structure was just a number that they picked out of thin air. There is supply and demand. There are costs involved. Well,

Joe R. Lansdale 1:42:26
you know when, when, when these small press books first became a thing? There were a number of publishers that were charging exorbitant prices, and they weren't making particularly good books, and they didn't have great art, and those are the ones I complained about, even though they published me, I just said, Look, you know, you're charging people 50 and $60 for this, collectors that edition, and it's falling apart, or it's got terrible art. Well, those kind of things I really write. I remember Rick mccannon and I both were just like, Man, this is terrible. I'm not going to do this. But once I found quality houses, I stuck with them, and of course, I experiment with some of the others because I've never tried them before. Sometimes I like what they do, sometimes I don't, and so you judge that way. And another thing too is that those people who are collectible, they're also paying for an autograph and and that's why those books are expensive. Now, what's different nowadays is that you can get to a writer much more easily than you could when they first started doing that. So you can get autographs from them with, you know, greater convenience than you once could. You can send them the book. They can send it back to you, and you can, you know, where people are, because they're on Facebook, or they're got an email, or they've got a website or whatever you have, you know,

Bob Pastorella 1:43:47
yeah, or in my case, I can just drive 10 minutes and buy all of my womb. There

Unknown Speaker 1:43:53
you go. There you go. Well,

Michael David Wilson 1:43:56
we've got a number of questions from our Patreon. The first The first one is from Max booth, and he says, If you could write the sequel to any book or movie you were not involved with, what would it be?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:44:15
Oh, God, I tend to think more that I like doing my own work. I've certainly worked in some other worlds, and say, comics and things like that. And, you know, the long range, etc, I don't necessarily think like that. You know, I, I know Philip hose, a farmer writer I like, wrote like a sequel to Moby Dick. But what it does, it just reminds you that, and as much as I love farmer and I and there's ideas in that beyond imagining, but as a book overall, it made me want to read Moby Dick again, you know? So, yeah, I don't know that that's a toughy for me, you know. I can't think of anything that comes directly to mine that I could do well enough off of a classic novel. Now. There might be some novels that are, I think, are kind of okay that I think had a great idea that I might like to spin off of. But even there, nothing potentially comes to mind.

Michael David Wilson 1:45:13
Well, Max has a second question. He says, I miss your Facebook writing advice. Post any chance of a craft book from you in the near future?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:45:25
Well, I haven't quit writing those posts. I just never wrote them constantly. I would have a period where I would write some and then I wouldn't. I did a few not long ago. And lately, I haven't been on Facebook as much because my Facebook got screwed up, and then somehow there was another Facebook page and blah, blah, blah, but my plans have been for quite some time to do that writing book. It's sort of like that sort of thing, that the more you do it, the more you think there really is nothing you can tell anybody. They just have to want to do it, and they have to find their own method. So I don't believe most writing books do you much good when they tell you how to write. So if I do the book, and I think I will, I will try to write it in such a way to encourage you or to give you ideas of how to approach your work and be excited about it and to maintain interest. So it's in the wings. If all goes well, it will get written, and I hope not too long for now.

Michael David Wilson 1:46:22
Alan Baxter would like to know who are your favorite writers of the moment, people publishing new work right now.

Joe R. Lansdale 1:46:32
That's a toughy one. Stephen Graham Jones is one of my favorites because he he's one of those writers that, like me, he likes a variety of different things. He does all kinds of novels and stories, and it's hard to pick out what he's doing, because he's him, and I love that and so. And he'll go from high literature to low literature, sometimes a mixture in between. And so for me, he's he's the writer that I recommend to you now. He's not a kid. He's been around for a while, but he's still, in many ways, a new writer, because he's more being discovered. He's still in the process of discovery by more and more readers. So I would highly recommend him to I think he's just magnificent.

Michael David Wilson 1:47:19
Oh yeah, and he's a great talker as well. We've had him on the podcast a number of times, and he has so many tales to tell.

Joe R. Lansdale 1:47:27
Oh yeah, I love him. He and our friends, you know. And I met him through his work, you know. And I thought, Wow, I like this guy's work. He reads my work, you know. He had read my stuff when he was becoming a writer as well as other writers. And so, you know, he's a guy that I just love what he does, because his experiences are his own experiences, and he brings those to the books. He's not trying to copy anybody else, you know, he's trying to be Stephen Graham Jones. And he succeeds quite well,

Bob Pastorella 1:47:58
right? Yes, he does

Michael David Wilson 1:48:02
well. Joanne Thorson says it's been said that one of the things writers can do to increase the quality of their writing is to increase the quality of their reading, ie, by reading only the very best that literature has to offer. This goes against what Stephen King and others recommend, which is pretty much to read everything you can get your hands on, treating trash and classics equally. What is your take?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:48:36
Pretty much the same thing. I don't necessarily say anything you can get your hands on. I think anything you can get your hands on that appeals to you, be it low or high, just like I was talking about Steven, you know, he goes from one range to the other. His work is influenced also, not just by fiction, but by films and by comics and things like that. But for me, reading is absolutely essential. I mean, I read about three books a week, and there are times when I was younger, even when I was working full time jobs, I was managing to read a book a day because I was reading a lot of these gold medal there were 120 140 pages, and I was, I'm naturally a fast reader, and I don't mean the speed reader, but I've always read a lot, and I believe in going to look into the classics. They're classics for a reason. But you know, you don't know if you like them or not before you try them. I've had people I would read anyway. Well, which one of you read? Well, I had read any of them. Well, then you don't know. You may not like them all. You may not like any of them, but there's a reason that they have endured in the same way that The Great Gatsby has endured, you know, and by Fitzgerald. So I do take in the, you know, consideration those things that have survived. But I also, you know, will read some of the lowest common denominator stuff, as long as it appeals to me. If I think it's badly written, and I can't, you know, stay interested in it, I don't read it. And a lot of things I can read when I was young, I can no longer read, because you learn more as you go. You. Know, you start seeing things that you didn't see before, or you start seeing what's missing that you didn't see before. You know that's it. It really just comes down to trying to just let your mind be open, let your interests be expanded, and to pick up something that you might not normally pick up and get outside your comfort zone. That's what wears you out. As a writer and a reader is trying to constantly repeat the same experience, you know, because it can't be done. It can be done for a while. But then, if you you know, 10 years I read nothing, but, you know, cozy mysteries. Nothing wrong with a cozy mystery. I've read a number of them that I've really enjoyed, and I used to read a lot of them. At some point, I'd had my fill level, but I read them, and I found many I like, but I was I like hard boiled fiction most, but I didn't just read it. I've jumped over to the cozies. I jumped over to other kinds. And when I was growing up, I read nothing but science fiction and comic books for a while. Then I started reading the classics, because the classics illustrated comics got me interested in them. And that went from everything from Dostoevsky to Mark Twain to Jack London to Richard Kipling. And, you know, even now, I usually have a nonfiction book or a biography going as well as a novel or, you know, short collection of short stories. Short Stories are my favorite thing to read. I read whatever interests me, as long as it can hold my attention. I don't give a damn if it's supposed to be the greatest book in the world. If it doesn't work for me, I you know, I'll give it up and go to something else. And I don't care if it's considered scum. If it keeps my interest, I'll read it. But you know, you're reading interest and patterns change as you have more experience with reading, but you should certainly be open to all kinds of things.

Michael David Wilson 1:51:48
What's a fiction and a non fiction book that you've read recently?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:51:55
Yeah, I I just finished a non fiction book called Dodge City, and it was about, wait for it, Dodge City, and it had to do with Wyatt Earp and and bad Masterson and all of the people of that era. And I just found it highly intriguing, you know. And I at this at the same time, I've also been reading in other nonfiction books, these collections that are called the last interview, and they dealt with Hemingway and dealt with Philip K Dick and Vonnegut and James Baldwin and tons of you know, other writers of that nature. And so I read the last fiction book. Was not the last one, but it's the last one I have finished, because sometimes I actually have two or three books going around the house, besides the two main ones. It's called what we reckon, by Eric Pruitt, and it takes place in East Texas, but it has a West Texas cover on it, which offends me. But anyway, it's a very, very good book I reread Philip Jose farmers, the Lord of the trees before that, which is just a hoot, and couldn't be farther from the other book I have on my desk right now, the complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway, which I dip in consistently, as well as the short stories of when Shaw it's called five decades. And then I read some just kind of basic crime novels that were written by ACE Atkins. So you know, that's, that's, that's pretty bearable, right there. And not to mention screenplays and a couple of plays I read a Sam Shepard play, some potty cuddle, which I've never read. And though I like a lot of Sam's plays, I didn't like that one at all. And but you know, if you read, read all kinds of things, and I have on my desk now too, at the earth's core in comic book form for your Edgar Rice Burroughs. So that's a pretty bearable group of things. And if it appeals to me, I read it and I try to learn. What I learned from Pulp was how to touch on the color and excitement that makes you stay young and draws readers to your work. And then from the some of the other literary writers, I learned how to have a better style, how to write better dialog, how to have character and systematic interest. And keep in mind that those things exist in genre fiction as well, but not always, and some literary fiction that's highly regarded, you know, doesn't hold your interest. So you read what, what works for you.

Michael David Wilson 1:54:29
And I know that you've said before that Edgar Rice Burris was a big influence growing up, yes,

Joe R. Lansdale 1:54:36
probably on a lot of people of my generation, and even generations prior to and perhaps a generation following. But Edgar Rice, Burroughs, you know a lot of it. You read it now. It's dated, it's, it's, it's very misogynistic, but not so much misogynistic, but it's certainly not, it certainly has, does not have a feminist point of view, although from time to time it suddenly will, and. It's racist, though. There are certain books of his which seem to step out of that and defy that, as if this was the real Burroughs. But he knew his market. That's what he did. He worked to market, which is what made his later books less interesting, because he just kept reviving the same old course where the original stuff had a vitality and an energy to it and an originality to it. And one reason a lot of it doesn't work now is because people have stolen from it over the years and written stories that based on a lot of the ideas that he came up with and had advanced beyond that, you know. But Burroughs, when I read him, was the writer. I already wanted to write, but when I read him, I had to write. I knew that the excitement and the energy in his work was valuable to me, and I still sort of take back to that when I'm working that idea that he just sat down and told a story, and those early ones, the ones that he would just start out with, I got this story from someone who should never have told me the story. That's not the exact words, but that's how Tarzan the ACE opened. At some point you realize that Narrator disappeared. It's now third person and but it was like it was being told by somebody, but you forget. And he did the same thing with the land of time for God. And when you read the John Carter of Mars, there's a part of you, especially when you're young, you believe this because it is set up in such a way and written with such conviction that you believe that maybe he can go another planet. I can tell you how many kids I've talked to that were kids. I mean, guys that were kids, when they were when I was a kid who went outside and looked up at Mars and spread their arms and tried to come there. So because that's how John Carter went, but I realized when I got older is I wouldn't last 15 minutes if I had been able to transport.

Michael David Wilson 1:56:51
Well, our next Patreon question is from Dino Parenti. And I know that we have spoken a little bit about this, but he says, having written over 40 novels in your life, how has your process changed or evolved in that time? Have you started every book the same way? In other words, do you have a ritual? Well,

Joe R. Lansdale 1:57:17
yeah, and I think I've already discussed that, so I don't want to wear that out. But just, you know, I write daily. I write about three hours a day. I show up, I don't make excuses. And why should I? Because I'm going to have one of the best times I'm ever going to have during the day by sitting down and writing. You know, I enjoy that, so I followed my enthusiasm, as Ray Bradbury used to say, and I jumped off the cliff and built my wings on the way down, as he used to say, those are things that I appeal to me. His excitement and energy always appealed to me because he was so akin to my own. And so the biggest thing is that I quit trying to write a ton of material in one day. I became a regular worker. And not wait for inspiration. And since that point is really not going to use the term work loosely, it's really just this wonderful vacation I'm over which I get paid.

Michael David Wilson 1:58:13
Well, finally, we've got a number of questions from Brian Asman. So the first one, both writing and martial arts involve a fair amount of self discipline. Are there lessons you've learned in one you found particularly applicable to the other?

Joe R. Lansdale 1:58:31
Absolutely, I think martial arts is one of the most valuable things that ever happened in my life, because without it, I don't know that I would have had the courage, the the discipline and the confidence that I have, and also, I think over time, I begin to understand the lessons of martial arts better in the writing. I don't think I started out that way, but you know, economy of motion, the way to use deception, the way to get it done efficiently, all of those sort of things, you know, and and having no rule that rules you, you know, you have a set of implied rules. But the bottom rule is that no rule rule you, no matter, even if I tell it to you, and I think that you should do it that way, you still got to do it your way. So all of that in martial arts. You learn patterns in martial arts when you begin. But if you're still using patterns, or you think, if those number those that right punch, I hold him number two, then you didn't learn it. You, you those, those are the tools that are given to you by which you then begin to create. It's the difference in being a carpenter and an artist. You should be able to do both if you're an artist, but a carpenter isn't necessarily a great artist. So it's the same way, and it's helped me become, I think, a more dedicated writer. I think it's made me do better work. I've certainly done some carpenter work in my time, and will probably do more because but, but still, I. That down, and I got it done, and martial arts had a lot to do with that.

Michael David Wilson 2:00:04
Okay, well, Brian would also like to know, what are your strategies for making readers sympathize with extremely unlikable characters. I

Joe R. Lansdale 2:00:15
just have to be interested in them myself. I don't even know they have to sympathize with them. They have to be interested in them, but I never believed in that sort of thing where you have to have a likable character. James King certainly proved in Double Indemnity and the postman rings twice, and other books of his that you don't although he did make them intriguing now likable, there are moments when they were, in fact, likable and you kind of wanted them to get away with it. But I've also read things where the characters weren't likable but they were intriguing.

Michael David Wilson 2:00:45
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

Joe R. Lansdale 2:00:48
I never found I like Hannibal Lecter. I don't like Hannibal Lecter, but I find him interesting. I find him intriguing. I find him somewhat disturbing, because, and I think the reason those things work because whether people want to admit it or not, all of the most positive elements in the world and all of the worst elements in the world are in all of us. And it's a matter of degree. It's a matter of how those are addressed in your life, which makes you either the good person or the bad person. But all of us have thoughts sometimes that aren't the best, or we have very fine thoughts that we don't act on. So it's that mixture that that makes a character interesting. I mean, he was a horrible person, but he liked dogs, you know. And he had, he had other things that he liked that were very human, but he was a monster.

Michael David Wilson 2:01:36
Yeah. Well, Brian's final question, this is a bit bizarre, which is why I've saved it for the end during an otherwise lovely vacation to the Far East, you are spirited away in the middle of the night by an interdimensional warlord and forced to fight in a tournament that will determine the fate of the world. Alam, mortal, Kombat, however, in an extreme twist, reminiscent of Ghostbusters. You get to pick the form your opponents will take. You must fight and defeat three horror icons in order to save the world. Who or what do you fight?

Joe R. Lansdale 2:02:18
Oh, I have no answer for that. That is just beyond my interest, you know. But if I got to choose to be somebody, I'll just choose to be Tarzan, John Carter or Mars, because I know I've got a good chance of winning,

Michael David Wilson 2:02:33
right? There you go. Well, what advice would you give to your 18 year old self,

Joe R. Lansdale 2:02:43
ah, you know what? I don't think he would have listened. I think that the best thing to happen is experience. And I was fortunate enough to get through it all without it turning sour. But generally, it worked out pretty well. I think the hard times made for better times. And, you know, I think I was very fortunate, and I think I had, you know, a lot of background with my parents and things like that, that made my life good. But I don't know that my 18 year old self would listen to my 65 year old self, right?

Michael David Wilson 2:03:18
And what has been your best failure. So a time where you failed or made a mistake that resulted in a big win overall,

Joe R. Lansdale 2:03:29
got that, you know, you make all kinds of mistakes all the time. I mean, that's that is also a very important thing, is don't be a fear, a fear dev a scared of failure, because everybody's going to fail from time to time, and you will too. I've had a lot of success because I've had a lot of failures. And the more failures you have, the more you're willing to get up, the more determination it gives you. And you do really, I know it's cliche, but you really do learn from your failures. And as far as like, a particular failure, I you know, I could tell you, I think there's just been so many in life, but fortunately, nothing spectacular, nothing that's, you know, made my life miserable, or anything, but you know, you learn from those things.

Michael David Wilson 2:04:13
Definitely. Is there anything that you have changed your mind about recently?

Joe R. Lansdale 2:04:20
Oh, there's all kinds of things, little things I don't always, you know, I'm not always aware of it. I think, you know, in general, viewpoints about the way I see life, I think that it's always been pretty much the same, but I'm probably, and this is not a real reason, but in the last 20 years or so, I'm probably a lot less in love with humanity. That doesn't mean I don't like people, but it means as collectively, I think that we're not doing too well. I think individually, you know, you can have some really fine examples of humanity, but sometimes when we get together, we're like a, you know, a hungry pack of Wolverines. We respond poorly. Of it. So I'm a little disappointed in that. I'm a little disappointed that people don't look at the, you know, climate change and realize that this isn't a joke. Something needs to be done or we're going to disappear, right? And, you know, there's, there's so many things like that that, you know, I, I was aware of many, many years ago, because of science fiction, because it predicted these things, and because in the 70s, there were nonfiction books that came out predicting these problems with pollution and waste and overpopulation and all these things. But nobody listens, because the truth of the matter is, we don't learn from history. We sometimes learn from our personal history, but we don't learn from history. We repeat those same things over and over, because at the base of humanity, there is a self destruct button. And by recognizing that doesn't mean that I want that to happen. I sure don't, because I believe I want humanity to go on, but I wanted to grow. I wanted to have learned from its mistakes, but when it does, it doesn't learn very long from what I've seen. So I'm a little I'm not cynical, but I'm a lot more skeptical of humanity and what we're trying to do. And I say we've got to rise, man, we've got to do better than we're doing. We've got to remember that you don't, you don't get do overs in this life, for one, and the planet doesn't get a do over either or if it does, it won't be with us,

Michael David Wilson 2:06:32
right? Oh, I

Bob Pastorella 2:06:33
agree. There's absolutely nothing negative about awareness,

Joe R. Lansdale 2:06:37
no. And that's one of the things that people say, Oh, he just hates humanity. I saw thing and I thought, Well, I'm not fond of humanity, but I don't hate it, and I love many individuals. I'm a very gregarious person. I like people, but I don't always like what we do. And I don't just mean those other people, I mean all of us, and though there are some that I think are far worse than others. I mean, you have these stupid Nazis and Ku Klux Klan. Why haven't they learned anything? Why? Why do they not understand that they're specializing in a narrow minded sort of thinking that doesn't help them at all. It hurts humanity as a whole. Why hasn't anybody learned from this? Why don't we just keep doing this stuff. Why do we keep repeating these and I'm not saying everybody does it, but the idea that you know you have this and people say, Well, you know they got their point of view when you know there's a point when a point of view that's designed to eliminate another group of people is not a point of view. It's, it's a it, it's hate and it's genocidal thinking. So there's things like that that just seem to me, are obvious. It's not about a point of view. There's no point of view there. You know, it's something that's designed to destroy other people. It in the same, be the same. If I thought I want all those people, I'm gonna line them up and shoot them all. No, I don't want to do that. But I don't want them to exist in that state. I would like for them to evolve into understanding that people are people, you know, you take a DNA test, and most of us are going to go, Oh, I didn't know that. And, you know, these people are, this whole idea about this, you know, this wider area and identity, just dump and it makes no sense, and it doesn't make you special. And then the people, you know, white people, they just don't have the chance they had before. Oh, come on, you know, if nothing else, I came from the poorest background, and I knew black people that came from that same background, they didn't get the chances I got. And I got those chances because my skin was pale. I don't have guilt for that, but I have responsibility, and that responsibility is through my work, through my actions. The best way I can is to do my little bit to make that different. That's why so much of my work is so anti racism, anti homophobic, and, you know, and, and those are things I learned, you know, when I was, when I was a kid, I didn't even know it was racist, you know, that that black people were treated that way. I thought that's how it was. But as I got a little older, and I read Huckleberry Finn, and I saw I read, or I saw to kill a Margaret, then read that, and I saw experiences in life, I began to understand, because I was willing to understand, you know, and when I was growing up, the whole idea of somebody being gay, you know, you did, those were like all perverts, you know, my God, they're perverts. And then when you get older, and you get more experience, and you start people, you realize, you know, perversion has nothing to do with your sexual orientation. It has to do with your actions and just those things you know you should learn and and if that sounds like I'm trying to tell you something, and you don't want to hear me do that, well then go fuck yourself, because these are not any kind of great awareness on my part. This is how humanity survives. We don't have to. Put up with anybody that's bad, be they straight, be they gay, be they act, be they white, you know, those are things we don't have to put up with, but we don't have to become like that. You know, we can do better. And I think that's, that's something I always think of, even because I write a lot of dark characters and stuff, or I have these terrible things happen. That's to me. Those are warning signs. There's entertainment there, there's a way of pulling people into it. But even the happen Leonard novels, which you know people like because they've got action and they've got crime and so on and so on, those are novels that, in my own small slide way, are ways to talk against homophobia, racism, sort of, sort of conventional viewpoint that people have about where they're from. I mean, hap and Leonard are proud of being southerns, and they often make jokes about, y'all, my guy, he's not from Texas or something. But that's that's also meant as satire. It's meant as irony, and all those that stuff is there. And somehow, to me, those were the kind of works that impressed me more, even though I didn't understand it at the time when I read Huckleberry Finn and Huck talks about having to turn Jim in and that he he knows that's the right thing to do. He knows that's a Christian thing to do, but he knows he'll go to hell if he does it. And then he just decides, well, Jill's my friend. I'll just go to hell. And, you know, he really thinks he's making this bad decision by making the correct decision, and it was done through satire. And those things taught me so much. You know, I learned so much from those kind of stories that didn't just spell it out or lecture me, but show me. And I just think that that's what we have to stop and do we entertain yourself. That's all you want. There's nothing wrong with that. But, you know, and this comes out of not me trying to tell you how to say to Apple, but because somebody asked me, What have I learned? Well, that's what I've learned, is that we're all in this together. And it's not about like, who's got the most money. Are there a different color? Are there a different station in life? We're all in this together. You can't love everybody, but God damn you sure gotta try to love a bunch of us.

Michael David Wilson 2:12:10
100% agree, definitely. It's been nodding throughout that and what an amazing note to end on. Thank you. Well, where can our listeners connect with you?

Joe R. Lansdale 2:12:26
Well, I have a fan page now. There's a there's a Facebook page with my dog on it, but that's not me. I will never go on that page. That's an accidental page, but there's a page that That's Joe R lansdale.com and that fan page, you can communicate with me there. I don't have a like the like page and all that. I do that it's a fan page. And usually I just put things on there about writing, or I put there on things about my books forthcoming. I run, you know, things that let you know what I'm doing next in film or comics or stuff. I run things about people's books I like. I run things about my son and daughter. My son writes screenplays and graphic novels. And my daughter is everywhere. You know, she does audio books. She's a professional singer songwriter. She writes stories, she acts, you know, she does commercials, she does all of that stuff. So I'll run things about them too, and I'll have friends. I put things on there about Stephen Graham Jones. I put things on there about other writers. So you can go to that. And you can also go to my website, which is Jor lansdale.com too. It's, it's called the orbit, and you can go there and find out what's going on. And you can read a free story every week, just about every week that my webmaster puts in. I'm on Twitter, so that kind of tells you all the places where I'm available.

Michael David Wilson 2:13:45
Alright. Well, thank you so much for spending the majority of your evening chatting with us. It's been a great experience and been really educational as well. Well,

Joe R. Lansdale 2:13:58
I don't know about that, but I enjoyed it, and I hope you did too. Oh yeah, it

Bob Pastorella 2:14:02
was great. Thank you so much.

Michael David Wilson 2:14:04
Do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to leave our listeners with?

Joe R. Lansdale 2:14:10
Ah, no, I think I've said enough, and maybe more than enough, so I think I'll sign on call. Call in the dog, as I said. You you.

Michael David Wilson 2:14:23
What an incredible conversation with Joe Lansdale. Thank you so much for listening.

Bob Pastorella 2:14:30
Yes, this was probably one of my favorite episodes. I love them all, but man, this stuff here, golly just hits it. It's in all the right spots.

Michael David Wilson 2:14:42
Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so much to take away, so much to think about, you know, I think I'll be listening to it multiple times, exactly the conversation.

Bob Pastorella 2:14:56
Yeah, no, we're part of the conversation, and we're going to listen to our own. Podcast. Because, I mean, the thing about it is, is that Joe is a natural storyteller. So, you know, one of the things that I noticed immediately talking with him is that he's going to tell you a story. He's going to break it down in such a way, whether he's talking about writing his life, his, you know, his past, or anything like that. He's a natural born storyteller. He's going to tell you a story, and you're going to enjoy it, and you can take that home as as part of writing advice, because, as we talk about we're talking about storytelling

Michael David Wilson 2:15:32
exactly well, if you enjoyed the conversation and you want to support the podcast, if you want to hear more episodes like this and get early bird access every week, then please join us on Patreon. It's only $1 www.patreon.com, forward slash. This is horror. There you go. Now, before we wrap up, let's have a quick word from our sponsors,

Bob Pastorella 2:15:59
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PMMP 2:16:31
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Michael David Wilson 2:17:03
All right, and we're back. What is it that you've been reading and watching recently? Bob,

Bob Pastorella 2:17:11
well, I'm still reading the dark net. I'm also have been reading the monk by Matthew Lewis, which is a gothic classic. It's one of those books that your your college professor tried to push off on you, and you didn't want to read it because you didn't think were scary. And it's, of course, you know, it was written very, very long ago, and its style is, is a little different. But once you get into it, it it is actually quite, quite good, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Of course, the dark net, by Benjamin Percy, that is excellent. Excellent. What I've been watching, of course, Game of Thrones. We're coming up on the end of that. Been watching the defenders, but still watching uh, black sales and uh in Bosch, on an on an Amazon, Amazon produce show, uh Bosch, which is, uh, the Michael Conley books. If you haven't checked out Bosch, you need to check it out. It's fucking Excellent.

Michael David Wilson 2:18:16
All right, what

Bob Pastorella 2:18:17
do you been watching? Man?

Michael David Wilson 2:18:19
Well, I mean, I've been watching Ozark, come on Episode Seven. I think there's 10 episodes, and I think it's great. I think it's one of the best television series that I've seen since Breaking Bad. It's very I've been hearing that a lot. Sorry,

Bob Pastorella 2:18:38
I've been hearing that a lot.

Michael David Wilson 2:18:41
Yeah, yeah. Well, it comes highly recommended is it's dark, it's addictive, great characters, great storytelling. May even be the best new show that I've seen all year. It's that good.

Bob Pastorella 2:18:58
Well, I'm definitely got to check it out.

Michael David Wilson 2:19:00
What else have I seen recently? Hmm,

Bob Pastorella 2:19:05
I know what we're going to be seeing pretty soon. If you have watched it recently, is Day of the Dead. Well, that's right,

Michael David Wilson 2:19:12
yeah, because we're going to be recording a story, unboxed episode for that. So I mean, kind of cunning how the patrons voted for Day of the Dead, because I feel to completely appreciate it. I should probably rewatch Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. So a lot of Romero in my future, which is no bad thing.

Bob Pastorella 2:19:37
Well, you know, I think it was pretty slick that they chose that one. But I also think we should give them exactly what they asked for and just talk about nothing but Day of the Dead. But that's just me. Of course, of course, we're not going to be able to do it without mentioning the other films. I mean, it's just, it's impossible. It's, you know, it's our you know. Our thing for Romero. You know, remembering George Romero,

Michael David Wilson 2:20:06
right? Well, I'm not gonna unbox all of them in a nine hour episode, if that's what you're but I think, like we will, we will make mention of the other films, it would kind of be impossible not to really

Bob Pastorella 2:20:23
Right exactly.

Michael David Wilson 2:20:25
Other than that, I actually, I recently watched The Conjuring two which Kev Harrison recommended to me he writes for. This is horror, as well as writing a number of short stories and various anthologies, and neither of us had really enjoyed the original conjuring, but he said, Look, watch The Conjuring too, because it's genuinely scary in parts and it's better than the original. Well, I watched it, and I've got mixed feelings about it. I mean, firstly, I did enjoy it more than the original. I'll say that. I think the London setting and the fact that it was based off the Enfield Poltergeist case, like added another layer to it. It made it more intriguing, but the fake London accents were pretty poor, and that made it a little bit off putting when it's like, well, I can tell you're clearly not from London to begin with. So that was a floor of the film. I felt as well. It went the lazy route of, we're gonna use Christianity to save the day, Christianity and Jesus will save us from this demon, or this presence that is in the house, and I just feel like, come on, you can do you can do better than that. You know, one day I want to see a film where someone comes in and they're praying and then like, trying to cast the demon out, and the demons like, you know that bullshit doesn't really work on me, because I feel that would make it more scary, and it just feels overdone, really,

Bob Pastorella 2:22:38
right? I agree. It's kind of like the Fright Night moment, you know, whenever, you know, when Roddy McDowell holds up the the cross to to Chris Sarandon, you know, and tells him, you know, get back, you know, and all that. And Sarandon, you know, vampire, just laughs and says, He gotta have faith for that to work on me, yeah, you know? And it's, and it's kind of like, at the same time, though, it's like, that's a cool line, but at the at the time, it's, you realize that Roddy McDowell's character didn't have any faith in himself, right? And only, only whenever he gains his faith back. Does that? Does the power work? You know. And it was an interesting article that was published on Dark Moon digest, talking about how ghost stories don't work, you know. And kind of reminds me of that, and it kind of goes back into, you know, like a whole different process of thinking that horror stories in general, are based or bad decisions, you know. And I got that from David James Keating and uh Keaton and uh J David Osborne on their podcast. But it's something that that resonated with me, you know, quite a bit. And it's like, you know, if there's a haunted house and there's people in it, and the ghost suddenly reveals itself, and you know, the smart thing to do would just leave the house and the credits would roll, and you wouldn't really have a movie. So horror is nothing but a tragedy of bad decisions. But just for once, we'd like to see some people make you know what they believe is sound and right decisions, only to have them fooled by the other characters story, who are believed to believe that their decisions, though opposite, are also just in sound, right? And if you can have something like that, then you've got something not really original, but something that's going to keep the audience's attention, you know, to apply that, that kind of esthetic into a horror film or horror novel, a horror story or ghost story, man, that would take some work. And that's, that's kind of what the article hit hints upon, is this kind of stuff. You know, we don't need too many more films where you have this, you know, what they call a do X machina. You know. God steps in or, you know, not that nothing, you know, I'm a believer or, you know, or unbeliever, or anything like that. It's just, it's sloppy writing, you know, it's sloppy writing. It's catering to, to the lowest common denominator. It's, it's dumbing down the thing to where, you know, the normal person who say, Well, yeah, the days of save the day, you know. And I don't you know if the if the movie was about Jesus, then that's totally different than yes, you know, certainly he should be the hero of his own damn story. But we're dealing with other characters here who need to figure out how to end things on their own. And so just to me, it's just it's sloppy writing. I I'm not gonna lie to you, I like the second one, the second conjuring better than the first one. I like the fictionalized aspect of Ed and Lorraine Warren compared to the real nasty aspect that they were kind of charlatans and all this kind of stuff. And I love that fictionalized, romantic version of them that the films does, because I grew up believing that was the real, you know, the real warrants. And so there's part of that nostalgia, you know, of you know, the ghost hunters and things like that. But be honest with you, man, I like the second one better than the first one. The first one was pretty damn creepy,

Michael David Wilson 2:26:28
though. Well, yeah, I mean, that's what I've said that I don't The second was better. It was flawed. But I think, I think there were some moments that were genuinely uncomfortable. So I would say that it's at the higher end of films of its ilk. It's kind of like a reasonable six out a 10 film in a sub genre filled with a lot of twos and threes, right? If they'd have done a few things like actually got Londoners to play the characters who are from London, or at least people who can do a convincing London accent, if they had maybe been a little less a lazier with the storytelling, and perhaps if to scare the viewer, there had been less obvious jump scares and just more creepy, eerie moments. If they could have done all that, then we could have took it from a six to a seven or an eight, but they didn't, and they're probably not going to listen to this and now re record, but that's what I would do.

Bob Pastorella 2:28:00
And I can't think of the movie recently that I watched that was actually pretty decent because of, I mean, I watched a lot of movies, but they did something pretty interesting, where they they had a jump they had a jump scene without a visual. They did it simply by sound, and it worked. I mean, it was incredible how they built tension just based upon, you know, the the music swelling and but nothing, nothing happened. But it wasn't like, Oh man, I didn't get, you know, I didn't get what I wanted out of the scene. It's like, oh shit. I'm, like, really creeped out, you know. And I can't remember the damn film that did it. So it may not have been that memorable, but maybe the actual aspect of that was the most memorable part of it sounds kind of stupid, but I mean, if church, somebody will make sense out of that, right? I hope they do.

Michael David Wilson 2:29:00
To finish the episode, I believe Bob that you have a quote. Yes, I

Bob Pastorella 2:29:05
do. It's one of my favorites. He who attempts the ridiculous can achieve the impossible.

Michael David Wilson 2:29:11
Good quote, good advice. And with that said, Go out there, attempt the ridiculous until next time, look after yourself. Be good to one another. Read horror and have a great, great day.