Maggie Stiefvater - Bad Teen to Badass Author

Full transcript: Maggie Stiefvater on London Real

5:17 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose.

5:29 With me today is Mr Patrick Vickers, who is a former credit derivatives trader for Goldman Sachs before he changed things up entirely and became a mixed martial artist and a promoter. That’s a pretty good assessment, right? Y Patrick was one of our first guests in his show is called Goldman Trader to Fight Maker. If you want to check it out, I’m totally checking it out. Actually, I’m going to do it while we’re doing the podcast, so Maggie’s a little quiet, then you’ll know why.

5:56 She’s watching the show Um, our guest today is a Miz Mrs Maggie Stiefvater. She is a New York Times bestselling author of what they say young adults and urban fantasy novels, including the Shiver trilogy, which spent 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. God damn, Maggie, and has sold 1.7 million copies of her latest book, uh, sorry, of that series. That’s a lot of books. It’s actually 1.8 now, 1.8 million.

6:24 Wow, that the 0.1, that’s a lot of books. It sure is. Um, anyways, and her latest book is the Raven Boys, which you can check out here. Um, it is the first one of a four-book series, from what I understand. Yes.

6:37 Um, Maggie, welcome to London. Thanks. I see you have prepared beautiful weather for me. It’s amazing. It’s the apocalypse.

6:42 Oh yeah, it’s like the Wall from Game of Thrones. It snows here all the time, you know, I can see that. We just, we just protect from the, what are they called, the White Walkers? They’re coming soon, that kind of thing. So, um, have you read those books?

6:54 I have read the first one. This is the part where I admit that I actually did. You only read them because of the TV series? I have not seen the television series. This is the Game of Thrones books.

7:03 Okay, so you had read them before. One. I’ve read one, actually. A reader gave one to me. They came up to me at a signing and they said, “This is my favorite book ever.”

7:11 And so now I get to be all hipster about it. Like I read the first one before he was him. Okay, so you read this years ago. Yeah, okay, years ago. But you haven’t watched it?

7:20 When we were young? No, no, I have not. Why is that? Because I was on the road one day out of every two last year, and uh I just don’t watch a lot of television. I catch up on everything on Netflix.

7:32 Okay, James, okay, that’s a good answer. Um, I want to get back to that in a little bit. How was England treating you? Do you have a crazy, you have a crazy fan base over here, don’t you? I do.

7:41 They’re amazing, actually. I love it because online I have a huge number of British fans that follow me on Twitter and Facebook, and it’s cool when they come through the line, they introduce themselves by their online screen name, so that’s kind of cool. Wow, do you know some of them? You’re like, oh, you’re this person? It’s true, although I didn’t know that strange Swissman who asked me to run away with him.

8:00 He wanted to tour the museums of Europe. He said H. Didn’t know him, did you consider it? Slightly. No, he was really old.

8:07 Okay, what, what if someone imposters like their screen name? How do you know it’s them? I don’t know. I mean, I guess that didn’t occur to me. Now I have a new level of paranoia.

8:16 Do they have a unique voice from their screen names that you can recognize? Oh well, see, I only see them in print. I mean, it’s Twitter and Facebook, so it’s all in print so just so anyone listening can hear, there’s a bit of madness going on with Maggie. She has signed her signature for the London legal release, telling me that there are 14 points of her signature that make it not a forgery. She’s brought me in the notes from the snowdrift rally race in America.

8:38 Just, I mean, these are like the real notes, like turn four, don’t die, that kind of thing. That’s true. Um, among the other weird things that she’s already said, so I don’t know where we’re going, but this is great, but um, first I want to ask about the Shiver trilogy. Why wolves? Oh Dear, this question is so terrible.

8:54 Okay, okay. And is it true that you met some wolves? I did meet some wolves. Okay, so here’s the thing. People usually ask me why werewolves, and I hate this, because I actually have to admit on screen right now that I’m not a big fan of werewolves.

9:07 Are you guys fans of werewolves? No, I’m not. But you know, I’m not a fan of vampires either. Rumor has it that Patrick has read Twilight. All right, Patrick, come clean.

9:17 I have read Twilight. You’ve read Twilight? Yeah, okay. All right, so Patrick, why wolves? Um, I don’t know.

9:24 I like werewolves, they’re fine and I like vampires. Yeah, I’ve said it. Not no, I’m not. I just, why don’t you like werewolves? Well, they shed they slobber, they savage the local clerk at the convenience store way back before any of us were born.

9:37 The Germans invented them. I just, I don’t know. I just feel like they’re kind of overplayed, and so this whole idea of why werewolves I always hate that. But when you say overplayed, do you mean in literature generally, or just because of Twilight? No, no, in literature generally.

9:50 I mean, I think that all magical creatures are just metaphor anyway, and the whole, well, at least for an American, the whole metaphor for a werewolf is that you’re losing yourself to your beastly side, which when you’re a Victorian that’s terrifying, but when you’re an American, I mean, we’re practically encouraged to do it every day. So I just didn’t think that werewolves are very relevant. But why wolves? See, you did say why wolves. All right, so I can answer that question with the story.

10:13 So once upon a time, when I was much smaller, two years ago, I was in Hungary on tour, and my Hungarian publishers took me to meet a guy who trained wolves for Hollywood movies, and uh they had given me appropriate apparel, which was two rain jackets and a pair of purple boots with ducks on them. Okay, and uh, we are met by Zoltan the Wolf Man. He takes us to the Zoltan. I mean, he really had no other choice of a profession, did he? I mean, Zoltan the Wolf Man.

10:39 He had to be. It rhymes in English, but in Hungarian it might not rhyme. Probably not. Wolfman or whatever it is. So yes, I’m taken there, and um, they, he has big huge packs of wolves on the back, and he opens the gate just enough so that they can’t get out, and then he throws me in, and as I go flying through the air he shouts, “When they bite your hands, it’s just their way of saying hello, bite your hands.”

11:03 Yeah, and they all wanted to say hello. Okay, yeah, so they’re all, they nibble your hands or bite them? Or no, they, they bit. I mean, they didn’t break the skin, but still it was pretty filthy, and they were leaving indentations, and they all wanted to say hello, and they’re nothing like dogs. So there’s this really distinct alpha and he’s growling over the right to bite my hands, and after about 15 minutes we’ve reached an equilibrium.

11:24 I’m sitting in the back. There’s a wolf beside me who has won the privilege of sitting beside me. Okay, Zoltan, and the wolf man comes right up to me and he says, have you ever heard a wolf howl up close? Yeah, I live in Virginia. I hear them howling all the time as they go running up and down the highway.

11:41 No, I haven’t heard a wolf howl up close. Zoltan nods, and he says, oh. At this point I’m a little confused, because I’ve never heard a man how up close. I’m confused, but beside me my new best friend, he howls, and all of the other other wolves begin to howl, and they’re nothing like dog house. So it’s one pure note, and they just sing it, and even not being afraid.

12:06 I could feel all of the hair on the back of my neck and on my arms slowly stand up as something deep and primeval inside me goes, Maggie Stiefvater, you’re going to die. And so that’s why wolves. Because I mean I can’t think of any other animal in our kind of literature and our cultural lexicon that’s so inherently beautiful, but also so incredibly terrifying. They have an effect on everybody. Okay, and this is before you wrote the books.

12:31 You met the wolves. This was in the middle, in the middle, and it just kind of, for yeah, because I’m a research junkie so I’d already been doing loads and loads of research on wolves beforehand. And can you meet wolves in the States, or did you have to go to Hungary? If you can. There was a really mangy pack that I met in North Carolina actually.

12:47 And the alpha had a real problem with me as soon as I walked past the the chain link fence. He threw himself at me, and they went, oh oh, we’re so sorry, what’s the problem with this wolf? Why is he savaging the fence? When he was looking at me, and they said it was because everyone else in the room was treating me like the alpha, and so he thought that I was a threat, and so he was going to eat me first. Okay.

13:07 And did the alpha make friends with you in Hungary, or was he staying away? No, he was fine. He was fine with it. It was probably the purple duck boots they gave me. Okay, where were you in the pack?

13:15 Did you have a place? Do you think? Well, Zoltan the Wolf Man said that he was officially the leader of all the packs, and it was really interesting. He said that um, he had some agitators in the packs that were always trying to be the alphas, and so he would move them around, so they’re always in a state of disarray and never could really challenge his authority. But those wolves, he was quite good with them.

13:36 They always assumed all humans were up above and then wolves down on the totem pole. Okay, so chance of being eaten and hungry, quite slim. North Carolina, quite high. Okay, right? Also banjo music.

13:47 Okay, that happens in North Carolina, but you live in Virginia. Yeah, there’s some banjo music, but usually it’s more to the west of me. Okay, and wolves in Virginia? No, no wolves, but bears. Okay, also you should ask me about my pets.

14:00 Okay, we’re going to get to that definitely. So Shiver was three books in the series. It was about wolves, but not about werewolves. True. Okay, all right.

14:09 And that’s been, what has that been, your most popular series to date, or, or is that something that you keep in mind? That’s really the one that broke me out. Yeah, the Shiver series, I mean the challenge as an author is always to not be known as the author of the Shiver series for the rest of my life. I’d like to write things that also live up to that. I don’t think it’s my best work.

14:28 But okay, and is it always your intention to write a series of books? No, no. I wrote the the one about killer water horses in between was a standalone. Okay, all right. So it just happens sometimes to be a series, and sometimes, like the Raven Boys, you’re like, this is the first one of four.

14:41 Like, how do you know that? Because it’s all planned out beforehand you have to know what happens in each one. Okay, otherwise you get lost in the woods and wander in plot wilderness forever. Okay, so you have a rough outline for everything that’s going to come? Yes, okay.

14:55 Is this, I mean, Patrick, you read a lot of fiction, is that right? Much more than I do. I think General Patton once said that men should read history, and so I was always on that tip. So now I occasionally allow myself some fiction, but I mean, I don’t think I allow myself to do it, but you read a lot. I, I only read fiction, uh, generally probably 90%, and it’s usually just for escapism.

15:16 So you just read stories that are interesting, and you can, okay, go and you’ve read half of the Raven Boys, right? And what’s your honest opinion? And just cuz she’s here, don’t pressure. Just ignore the fact that she’s here. Leader of the pack already.

15:30 Um, no, I really enjoyed it, and it’s um very well very well written, um, which I know it’s going to sound a little bit bad, which I was very pleasantly surprised about um, because there’s, there’s always a uh, um, I guess you’re always worried when there’s a tag applied to uh I guess young? Is it young fiction? What’s the technical term? Young adult. Young adult, but it’s, you know, it’s really, it’s incredibly well written.

15:55 And if you think about some of the other, um, I guess, books or novels in that sort of genre as well, with, you know, your Harry Potter, Hunger Games. They’re all, you know, they’re all very well written books, and I think you get, there’s a negative stigma attached to it, that, you know, it’s somewhat dumbed down, but I think that’s uh I don’t think that’s the case at all. Not in the stuff that I’ve read, in that type of uh type of book. So we were talking about this earlier already.

16:20 Yeah, yeah, got it. So we were talking about this earlier about, like, how people, since it’s about young adults, a lot of people, adults, assume it’s like you said, dumbed down, or it’s for the teenage audience, when in fact it’s for an adult audience, or it can be. Well, in the States they just released a study that 55% of all young adult books are being bought by adults for adults. So that means when I do a signing in the States, fully half of my audience I know is going to be someone over the age of 30 according to the study, and I have to say my signings seem to bear that out.

16:50 My lines often will be entirely adult and not teens. The thing to remember is that really it is the age of the protagonists, and if you read an adult thriller, like a genre, you know, they can be crap. Absolutely. If it’s just written just to be a fast airport read, and same thing. Young adult, you can pick up a young adult book that’s written just to be a fast airport read too.

17:10 So it really depends on, it’s why I’m so faithful to particular authors. You know what to expect. Do you pride yourself in, like, making your work really good, as then you want it really well written? So Patrick’s like, okay, wow, this is someone took the time to make it really well. I mean, as opposed to cranking out novels I know if that’s a weird question.

17:27 No, no, it’s not, actually. I really, I always think that unless this book can be better than my last one, there’s no point writing it. And I read all of my novels out loud while I’m writing them. I want them to be, to sound as good, the words to sound as good as the story. Okay, I want to get into your writing style at some point, so might as well, now.

17:45 How do you write? You’re hanging out in your, your place in West Virginia. I just imagine West Virginia. You just, oh sorry, in the banjo zone, right there Jesus. You’ve never been to this?

17:55 Have you been to West Virginia? Virginia, I’ve been to Virginia to play rugby, yet we have some fans in West Virginia, so no offense to you, but it’s a very different place. Virginia and West, you say that because of the song? Which song? Isn’t there a song?

18:06 West Virginia, M Mama, take me home, Country Road. I think that’s how most people know Virginia. You’re English, at least, in England. Um, Maggie, maybe you can tell us the difference between Virginia and West Virginia? Well, I don’t date my cousin.

18:20 Wow, ouch. Okay, she said it. Um, there’s a great documentary called the Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. It’s actually, I mean, West Virginia is actually really gorgeous. It’s just that there’s no one there, and there’s a lot of banjos and possums.

18:32 I mean, it’s just the way it is. And then in Virginia we’re elitist snobs, a drive Range Rovers. I mean, okay, so you’re on your ranch with your Range Rover? Well, I don’t have one. I have the Camaro instead.

18:42 Okay, we’ll get to that, definitely, theoretically. And so you, you read your stories out loud, or how do you write? That’s what I just want to know. I mean, what, what’s your day like, if you can tell us. I’m always fascinating.

18:50 Well, I used to think that I had to have a very specific sort of schedule to write. I had to have my cup of tea. I had to have the music playing. Now when I’m on the road so much, I had to learn how to write while I was on the road. So I thought, you know, I could have a lot more time if I could actually learn to write on planes.

19:05 But then I thought, if I’m writing on a plane, the person next to me is going to be looking over my shoulder, and that’s going to be a strange sort of sensation, to have someone reading my book while I’m writing it. Then I thought, no, Maggie, you’re being too egotistical. No one is reading. You’re writing while you’re on there, and so I started writing on planes all the time as long as I have my headphones and my music, I was good. Then I was writing the Raven Boys on the plane back from Frankfurt, and I wrote a joke into it, and the German gentleman beside me laughed, and I thought, like why did you do that?

19:32 You ruined my life. And now I always request a window seat, and I sit there like a gemin. But the only thing I really need is to have headphones and the music playing, that keeps me in the mood for that book in particular, and then I just go. I try and read a scene at a time. I think in chunks.

19:47 Are you typing on a laptop? Typing, typing. And what music are you listening to? I always have to pick music out beforehand, that keeps me, that, um, I think with the mood of the book first, before even the plot. And so I always pick out songs and put them into playlists, and don’t let myself listen to them unless I am writing that book, so that way when I hear that song, instantly it’s like I’m, um, I don’t know, a serial killer being programmed by the government, I guess.

20:09 Instantly I’m thinking of the Raven Boys. I’m ashamed to say that. For the dream thing I was listening to a huge amount of Colombian hip-hop. Colombian hip-hop, interesting. And can you even divulge some of the tracks on the playlist for the Raven Boys?

20:20 Throw us a bone, Maggie. The Raven Boys. Oh well, it’s going to be a death theme? No, I was listening to, um, I say Fever by of Falls was the very first one, but I don’t know if that’s the the truest one. Now maybe Death Hands by White Flight.

20:34 Okay, so it would be like 20 tracks or 30 tracks that you just have on the playlist? Well, for that one I have about four hours of playlist, and then I narrow it down, and I always release them for the fans, so that’s kind of cool. Okay, and when you’re done with the the first Raven Book, will you put that playlist on like never to be listened to again? And when you come up with a new one for the next book? Yeah, usually a song is played out if I listen to it successfully during a book, it’s done.

20:59 Okay, that’s pretty cool. Um, I’m thinking of the movie Misery. I don’t know if you well, I’m sure you saw it. You have not seen it? Cuz it’s a Stephen King book, and it’s about this woman that she kidnaps this author and makes him write a book.

21:11 A promising story already. What’s your point here, Brian? She actually yeah, she like breaks his clubs, his feet, so he can’t walk. Anyways, get comfortable in this studio. But um, no, he has a ritual when he’s finished with every book.

21:22 He, like, lights a cigarette. He has a bottle of, a glass of champagne, Dom Pérignon, and throws the glass in the fire, and he’s got this whole ritual when he finishes his book. Do you think that’s what Stephen King does? Um, I think he does. Apparently he stops smoking, but he has a cigarette after every book.

21:35 Did you notice he looks a lot like the live-action version of the Grinch? You mean the, the one with um, with Jim Carrey, Google that Jim, that f***. Okay, that’s, I don’t know, that’s really not a nice thing to say about Mr King. Is it? I mean, maybe it’s not a nice thing to say about the Grinch okay, maybe that’s a nice thing to say about Jim Carrey.

21:55 Um, all right, so you don’t have a ritual? Oh, I go out and I buy a whole stack of research books for the next one. I let myself buy a giant stack of novels and things. I’m going to spend the next month reading while I’m recharging and getting ready for the next one. Okay, and do you know when you’re finished, or do you have to send it to the editor and see what they say and then you take some comments on board, and then you finish it?

22:15 There’s a rigorous editing process for all of them but actually, by the time my editor gets it, it’s quite, it’s quite polished, because usually it gets sent off to my two critique partners first. They read everything before he does, and so by the time he gets it, it’s pretty much the book, and now I know when it’s done. You can tell all the character arcs kind of get to the end. Okay, what about little words here and there? Do you get picky about that?

22:35 Like, definitely. Okay, that’s when you start reading out loud. Okay, and see how it sounds, especially dialogue. Every bit of dialogue gets read out loud. Yeah, that’s smart.

22:43 That’s smart. I made a short film a while back, and I wrote all this cool dialogue, and then when the actress got to do it, it was just a mess, cuz it sounded good on paper, but when they’re talking, it was like, nobody talks like that. It’s true, it’s difficult. But then it’s difficult too to have that balance, isn’t it? To put down in a novel how people really talk.

23:02 Because actually we go, um, like, do you put, um, in a lot a lot? Times, excuse me. In some novels lately there’s this whole writing style where you, you just put the words from each character in, you know, without saying she says or without being articulate about that. Are you a fan of that style are you not? Um, you mean without a dialogue tag?

23:20 He said, she said? If I can put an action in there instead? I think it’s a better use of words. Okay, but I can’t stand it when you have those long, long conversations where you have no idea who’s talking, because they’re just going back and forth, and I lose track, and I have to go back and figure it out. That annoys me.

23:34 Fair enough. Um, all right, now I have to ask you the question I’m sure you’ve been asked by everyone, which is comparing you to all these famous authors that now have movies, so I’m just going to hit you with it. So what do you say when people say you’re like the next JK Rowling or the next Stephenie Meyer? What do you say? God help us all.

23:50 I mean, no one really wants to be the next JK Rowling or Stephenie Meyer? Right now I make, um, quite happy income doing what I’m doing, and I know I can write whatever I want to write, but I don’t have to worry about walking down the street and people recognizing me for the most part. I mean, occasionally it happens, but they’re usually crazy fan girls from the blog, and that’s fine. I don’t know if I want to actually reach that level of celebrity. Now, would I like to have a movie?

24:12 Yes, but that’s a different question than being the next JK Rowling. I think that, I don’t know, it’s kind of insane, isn’t it? JK Rowling to a point where she had so much pressure on her for that next novel, The Casual Vacancy. I don’t know if I would, if I want to have that kind of thing now. That said, Warner Brothers has optioned two of my movies, or two of my books, the film rights, The Scorpio Races and the Raven Boys, both, right?

24:34 And occasionally my film agent, my old film agent, used to call up and say, hey Pooky, what’s going on? Pooky, Hollywood is very confusing to me. Wow. I wouldn’t know what JK Rowling or Stephenie Meyer look like, and I’ve read their books, really all of them. Yeah, okay.

24:47 Well, yeah, she gets a little bit of, maybe it’s like UK paparazzi harassment or something, but they take pictures of her kids and stuff like that, I think, and she has a castle? Did she? Yeah, okay. So that’s a lot of pressure. But you do think movies are, are important?

25:01 Pressure to have a castle these days. Yeah, the mowing, can you imagine. Yeah, but movies are important. You say it’s an, it’s a necessary progression for you, or you think, oh no, it’s because I love movies. Okay.

25:12 I say, and I also really love, for the most part, movie and book adaptations or film adaptations of books. I’m a big fan of them. I mean, there’s some really terrible ones, but a lot of times really successful movies are based on books you just never have heard of, the books to start out with. And I don’t know I just like the idea. As long as I keep the mood the same, I’m quite happy for there to be two different versions of a story.

25:32 Have you seen Cloud Atlas yet? I haven’t yet. I have the book. I want to finish reading the book first. Is it amazing?

25:37 Don’t. So I read the book, and it is, it’s very, it’s very good. Where are you? Where are you up to? I’m only one-third of the way through.

25:43 Okay, it’s a big story they’re trying to make. It’s hard to imagine how, reading the book, it’s hard to imagine how it could be in a movie. Though I mean, I saw the trailer. I haven’t seen the film yet, and um, they seem to emphasize the similarities a lot more Mm, yeah, I can see that. How they streamline it, they would have to, because right now it just seems impossible.

26:01 Desperate Yeah, how much control would you have over the movie? If, if, you know, if it gets made, theoretically, I have a consultation role with both of them, which I think means that they will call me up and say, hey Pooky, so Grace has red hair, going to blonde, and they go, great, get the redhead. That’s how I think it will actually go. I think they will ask me, and then they will do whatever they want to do, really. I kind, I kind of feel like I would either have complete control over the project or no control.

26:29 I would rather be able to wash my hands of it and say, yeah, they, they did that, that’s them, or to be able to go through and actually do it, because with a novel, of course, you’re like, God, you can do everything. It’s all you, and so it’s that’s the most challenging part is handing it over to the filmmakers and then being his tiny little partner in. I don’t really do group projects very well. You don’t, cuz your authors are very solo people anyways, right?

26:51 Yes. Um, so have you ever seen someone write a screenplay from one of your works yet, or bits of it? That must be hard. I have seen the screenplay. Shiver was option for a long time, right?

27:01 But you put the kibosh on that, is that true? I did some scandal. They turned it into a horror movie. Okay, there’s lots of stabbing and screaming. Okay, so you did ultimately have the control to say I don’t want to make this, this F.

27:14 Well, I mean, they have the option. For, they buy the option to look at the film rights for, like, 18 months. In that case, and at the end, they have the choice to renew it or for me to say no. I will take my principles and sit over here my coffee, and I took my coffee. Okay, so you ultimately, you can say I don’t want to go in this direction?

27:32 Yeah, okay. I mean, at the end of the option, if they were actually making the movie, right, then they could just make it f so they have the option. Then they get to look at it, and then if they want to buy it, they can say, we’re going to do this with it. You’re going to be like, there’s no way. Yeah, okay.

27:46 That’s when I threw the D.A. tantrum, really. Maybe I haven’t done it yet, but I’ve been saving up. Okay, that’s kind of cool. Do your fans know about all that drama, or do you just kind of like try, no, try to keep it, try to keep it cool and positive? Okay, well, it’s your work though.

27:59 I mean, you know, you want to be able to control it right? Well, and I think fans would prefer to have a good movie or have no movie to a bad movie. I would assume. I mean, that’s how I feel. I love Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, and they made an absolutely dreadful movie version of it, and I just pretend it doesn’t exist.

28:15 So I assume that most readers are like me. Yeah, it just seems like a lot of young authors would like, want to get the movie, maybe for cash flow reasons or for fame reasons, and it’s just like, it would be nice if you’re not in such a rush, because it should be really good. I mean, Jesus, it’s your books, right? They should be kickass movies. Well, for me, you know, I live out in the middle of nowhere.

28:34 It’s just me and my principal, so I don’t have a problem saying no to these things. Okay, also, I’m quite patient. I figure I’m in it for the long haul. If they don’t make the movie now, I mean it can take them 10 or 15 years to make a movie, and I’m going to a screenwriting seminar actually, as soon as I hit the ground back in the US and figure, huh, maybe that will be the way forward. Maybe I’ll try and adapt one of my own books.

28:56 Yeah, that’s tough, isn’t it? Yeah, you have to be very objective. Yeah, be able to, like, just chop things out. But I’m good at revising, chopping things out. I figure with an ax, nothing is too precious.

29:06 Who does their own screenplays? Can you think of any authors, or can you, that, that do that for their own movies? Oh, there’s this little one, Suzanne Collins. Oh, okay. She wrote the one for Hunger Games.

29:15 She was a screenwriter beforehand okay. Yes, okay. That was a good movie, right? You didn’t see it? I saw half of it, so it must have been really good if you only saw half.

29:25 You know, I was busy half, which great actress in it, you know, I I’d have liked it. I don’t think he saw any of it. I’d have liked it if they’d done the Hunger Games but they’d done it for, you know, they made it like an R movie. So I’d have like to see more sex and more violence, and I think it had a great opportunity to do that. It was pretty tame, and the only thing I felt quite uncomfortable and the book, of course, it has all of those underlying themes of, you know, attacking our culture of voyeurism and things like that, and then by the time you went to the movie, that stripped out, and so we’re really just watching kids killing other kids, and I thought, oh well, it’s completely removed all the subtext, and instead we’re just being the voyeurs again.

30:03 When I was in the theater watching, I was reviewing it for VH1, and my first review was entirely about the audience instead of the movie, because it got to the part where one of the kids was killed, and they had, um, painted them as a, a villain, because they’d killed one of the other kids, and in the theater everyone clapped when they died, and I thought it’s just terrible. I, I don’t think I like the future. It was like budget future for me, with hair, with a weird hair, and I was like, I’m not buying this future scenario.

30:30 That’s all. Oh so you saw the half with the weird hair? Yeah, the first half. I think I just, that’s why I shut down so, but I mean, saw the trailers. You guys read the books, so you’re probably more apt to give it more of a chance.

30:40 Yes, we’re literate. Um, you say you, you say you work a lot. I mean, everyone probably romanticizes the, the the occupation of an author, especially a bestselling author, like you, traveling the world, but is it really hard work? Ian, you said one out of two days you’re traveling promoting these books. That’s true.

30:58 That was last year. It’s a little bit better this year because I’m writing three novels this year, so I told them I had to stay home more, but I don’t know. It’s like, I don’t have to tell you, it’s like every creative profession. If you want to do what you love and it’s a kind of off the beaten track. You end up working twice as hard, but same time you also love what you’re doing.

31:14 So, I, the hardest part for me is when I get home, and theoretically I have a week off is actually taking a week off. I’m not good about that, because I’ve made my hobbies into my career. So normally I would have sat back and done some art or written some music or, but do you find it less because you do it as a job? I think if I did, I would stop doing it. I actually was a full-time.

31:33 Oh, this is embarrassing. I was a full-time portrait artist before I was an author, and towards the end I was making my living entirely out of doing, um, reproductions of the great masterworks with the heads of cats instead of humans, and uh I began to truly hate all cats, all great masterworks, and I just thought it is time to get out of this profession. It’s true it did spoil it there, but it was because I wasn’t creating work that I thought thought was actually interesting or important or adding anything to the world.

32:00 When I’m writing these novels, these are the novels now that I would have loved to read if I was just coming to them as a reader. So as soon as that stops, I jump ship, do something else. Race rally cars. When I uh when I moved from trading to uh working in the sport, I, um, that I loved. I, I found that I had less love for the sport because it became my job.

32:23 Yeah, and I never said I never wanted to train people, and I never wanted to be a personal trainer, cuz I knew that then I would want to go to the gym less. And I see it my brother, who um, who runs a gym in uh in Australia, and he uh he’s in the gym every day, 10 hours a day, and he just doesn’t want to train as much as he did before, and he doesn’t want to do, as you know, what he was doing previously, because it’s now work, uh, and it’s not, you know, he’s, he’s moved a little bit away from something, and he’s tainted something that he really loved, and I and I definitely saw that. Um, by making it your job, I can definitely, I mean, that was exactly how I felt about my art.

32:55 I mean, I really did get burned out, and I wasn’t doing any art for myself. I would have before done and experimented and all kinds of things. Now, no, not so much. But no, it’s been I don’t know, five years, six years that I’ve been doing the writing full-time, and quite full-time, just never a day off, and still not tired of it. How, how much?

33:15 What’s the balance between how much of your time has spent creating and how much of your time has spent promoting? If you had to do a percentage? Oh, it’s hard to pull them apart, because for instance, before I came here I was working on the novel in the hotel room while I was stuffing at cryst on my face and sneezing crumbs into my hair. It’s very, I took them out beforehand just for you. It’s podcast, you have to look beautiful, you know, and uh, so it’s difficult to pull those two things apart, but I would say I spend probably a third of my time actually writing, and the rest of it is touring or blogging or being at signings or research.

33:49 I spend loads of time on research, which research is always kind of more like playing, theoretically, driving the rally cars with research, so I’m going to count that as work. How do you separate, separate yourself from the fry? I mean, I go to the bookstore and I go to the section, and I’ll see all these, all I have is the cover to go on, you know, and like, I started to read this, and I gave my nine-year-old stepdaughter the book, and she started reading it.

34:09 And you gave your nine-year-old that? Do you know how many swear words are in that? She only got through first 15 pages. Oh, was good that there’s probably only a couple in there. Okay, good, child services.

34:17 Um, but you know, I was, how do you separate yourself from the, from the fray? Because how do you separate your books from what you call an airport read? Well, as a, I can answer that as a reader, because I think if you just walk into a bookshop, you need to. It’s very rare that I walk into a bookshop not knowing what I want to buy, and you have to have done your research in the F, in like, you go on to Amazon, you go on to blogs, and that’s why you spend so much time on the internet.

34:39 I expect it’s just a way of getting your um, uh, a way of getting your products out there, by, you know, I go, you go and search under an author’s name, and you look at their website, and uh you read the reviews on Amazon, and um, that’s, that’s how I decide whether I want to. How many stars you have on Amazon is usually a big uh, is usually a big uh, uh decider for me, to whether I’m going to look at you in the first place, and then personal recommendations from other authors and stuff like that. So it’s, it’s rare that I’ll go into a bookshop and just be browsing, generally.

35:10 Okay, I think that’s true, and especially true, why? I mean, when I was saying that I was faithful to certain authors, I mean it’s true for you too. Yes, I mean, when you find an author you love, you’re more likely to look at that book sitting on the shelf. So I think it’s easier now when you’re debut trying to get noticed, as opposed to when you’ve had people read the previous seven novels, when they see your name they go, oh yeah, Maggie Stiefvater. I know her books.

35:31 The most frustrating thing for me is when you find an author that you really like, and they don’t have a big backlog, a back catalog of history, like in the last, the three, the before this, the three previous books that I read were first novels, and it’s so frustrating. I now have to wait another year for the next novel to come out. But I guarantee you, because I love them so much, is that I will go back and I will make sure that, um, I make sure that I read them, and I’m, I’m, know that with a lot of guys now that I’ve read all of their work, and I’m waiting for new stuff to come out.

35:59 George R.R. Martin, he’s been like, his last book, it was five years between his, um, the last, uh, it may even be more between his last uh book and and the one he released, because they, like, did you read Neil Gaiman’s blog post on it? No, but again, Neil Gaiman is another one of guys that I just think he has one coming out this, this summer, set his first, um, adult novel since Anansi Boys. Neil Gaiman does. Yeah, he’s an amazing writer.

36:26 Um, there’s there’s so many, uh, there’s so many guys. I’m just waiting now for, for the next novel. It’s very frustrating. And Maggie, how do you separate yourself from, from The Fray, like the last few years, is there something you do intentionally? I mean, is it the touring or, I mean, well, touring is a big deal, because it gets you out in front of it, but touring also can be quite uh dodgy.

36:44 You can go out there and just sit in an empty bookstore, and there’s no one there. I remember that on my tour for Forever, which is the third book in the Shiver trilogy. They were touring me in the summer. Normally they tour the authors during the school year, because then they can put you into schools, and you kind of have a ready-made, forced audience that has to sit there and listen to you talk and then buy your book. And they said, no, we’re touring you in the summer.

37:06 We’re going to see how it works out. We’re going to see how many people come from your blog. No pressure. And we had no idea. Now my blog gets a million hits every single year give or take, and I thought that’s good, that’s fine, but commenting on a blog is a big difference to actually getting in a car and going to an author event.

37:22 And so thank God we came to the first one. There were 200 people, but it’s true that they had to come compliment each other, and you can’t, you can’t really be marketing, promoting yourself people don’t want to. There’s so many authors that are just shouting into the void: buy my book, buy my book. You actually have to offer something for people to come to your blog and read about it. So I have writer advice and humorous essays.

37:40 At least I think they’re funny. So that’s what you, so what do we find on your blog if we go there? Writer advice. Yeah, though. I feel like I’ve said everything I can possibly say about writing without getting any better at writing myself, and so now mostly you find out things about my goats and things.

37:55 Goats. You have goats? I’m getting goats. Okay. I, the first day after I get back from my film writing seminar, I’m picking up two goats.

38:04 I’ve always wanted them. They are not just goats, but they are miniature silky fainting goats. The indoor goats. Indoor goats. I like the way you say that, as if you have great knowledge.

38:16 Indoor goats, outdoor goats. They are indoor pigs, right? What? Yeah, come on. Are there indoor pigs?

38:20 Do you know about this? Is this a British thing? Doesn’t George Clooney have a pig? What, see where have you been? You’re spending too much time writing books, clearly.

38:28 No, these are outdoor goats, and so they’re miniature. They’re they’re small, and they have silky hair, so that means they look like mine, and if you clap, they faint. So like if they were in your hallway, where you have the zombie lighting, then they would see that, they’d get shocked and they’ fall over. I did some research on this because I wanted to know if fainting was bad for them, because you better believe every single time people come over to my house I want to make those ghosts fall over.

38:49 And so I was looking it up, and it turns out it’s like, when you’re shocked and you have that moment where you freeze, the average fainting goat freezes for 10 seconds, which is enough time to fall over, doesn’t hurt their heart. And so my favorite part about this is, I was reading an article and it said that older fainting goats, when they think they’re in a stressful situation, they will repair themselves by leaning against a wall. Wow, doesn’t make them very good?

39:12 Uh, uh, well, it makes them very good prey. That’s what they were actually bred for. Your comes along, they were bred into them exactly for, to be with the sheep, because then the wolf would come along, and the goat would go, oh my God, and fall over, and the wolf would eat goat, and the sheep would get away. So it’s a sacrificial lamb, except for a goat, except kid sacrificial kid. Yeah.

39:31 Will you eat the goat at some point? What? Wow, do you eat your pets? Like indoor, indoor pig eating goats in Africa. Goat is quite, you can make a goat curry, and you know it’s quite good.

39:43 So do you have pets? I don’t know. She keeps eating them. You can see I’m not very good with animals. But all right, you’re picking up goats, but goats won’t be part of your, um, your book?

39:53 I hope not. Okay, you’re going to write three novels this year. That’s no joke. I am writing three novels this year. I’m writing the third Raven Boys book, and I’m working on a new middle-grade project with Scholastic.

40:04 It’s collaborative, so they came up with the idea and kind of the world and then asked me if I wanted to write, and because one of my urchins is the right age for, I thought oh sure, I’ll write that. It’s incredibly difficult. They can’t swear, they can’t die messily, they can’t have sex. I mean, it’s just very difficult to write. So your fourth one will be G-rated?

40:23 Is that what you’re saying? Yeah, okay. Oh, no it’s not in the series, it’s all by itself. Sep, what do you think? These, if they were given a uh film certification based on the novel, what would they be?

40:33 Uh, how would they be? That one would be R, really, for sheer usage of the f bomb. Well, you, you don’t agree? Frigid, frigid? No, no, it’s only in the UK that the frigid I haven’t seen any use of the uh the f bomb in the half of the book that I’ve read.

40:49 Oh, maybe it’s edited out, and you can surely not. I was told by someone that there’s, they uh, have a blog which is the content of books, and mine has apparently over 24 usages of the f-bomb. Maybe I’m so desensitized to it now. It’s possible what is, can you explain how your books change by being in the UK? Like you were saying earlier, what, what words they don’t like, and what words?

41:10 Well, so normally, of course, they want to change all the trucks to lorries, and they change all the spelling, from color with a u and things like this, right? Tires with y’s, yeah. Weird, isn’t it? But then they also change all the swear words, because all of the shits have to become crap, apparently f*** is worse than crap. I told you I was going to swear on this podcast.

41:28 I just didn’t. That’s fine. So f*** is worse than crap over here. Yes, theoretically. So you want to tone, they want to tone your shits down.

41:34 Exactly when they said Google that f*** it would have been Google that crap. Okay, and um, then of course they want me to change all of the instances of frigid to something else: cold, cool, icy, because of course has something to do with sex in the US. Frigid just means cold. But I guess here you cannot have a frigid mountaintop, or you can, maybe, but you wouldn’t want it. Okay, or it doesn’t want you.

41:56 I don’t know. Okay, and you’re cool with all these changes, frigid with all of them? Okay. Yeah, no, it’s not. I actually asked them to keep all this where words.

42:05 It’s the same in The Raven Boys. It’s for an older audience. So your bud just fell out. Okay, it’s caught in my hair with croissant crumbs. Um, do you ever want to be like, just leave my book alone?

42:16 I’m American. It’s an American story. It should be in American English, or you like, whatever, if it has to get translated. It’s cool, I don’t know. It would be very distracting, I think, if uh a UK reader is reading it and they have to think about about the curbs, and what is a sidewalk, what is pavement, etc, etc.

42:30 So I don’t have a problem with that and if you had any aluminium in there, then people would just don’t understand it at all. Exactly. Crazy, so much crazy stuff. Um, and how many other languages is this translated into? I think this one is like 15 or 17, and Shiver’s 38.

42:45 That’s crazy. It is. Wow. Um, I have a very crushing story about, um, foreign languages though. So there’s three of them: Shiver, Linger, and Forever.

42:55 You’ll notice they all end with ER, and I get asked a lot if I would write another one. And last year I had the terrible idea that on April Fool’s Day I posted I was writing a fourth one, and I posted a cover of how I was writing Litter. Litter, and on the front of it it had the heroes with a bunch of puppies at the bottom, and half of my readers thought it was hilarious, and then a quarter of them were furious. Maggie Stiefvater, you trample on our hopes and our dreams.

43:19 And then a quarter of them, most of them in the foreign languages, believe me, because of course Litter is not hilarious. Apparently when you are in Slovenia it’s just oh you’re ready the next one, Slovenia. And so I still have to go to library websites occasionally and ask them to remove it. Litter is not happening. I’ll go to school events, they’ll tell me that they’ll give me my introduction and say I’m writing Litter.

43:39 I have to tell them, no, it’s my worst idea ever. Okay, so don’t, the joke didn’t go. You’re messing with children’s hearts. Then it’s true, I did. I mean, how do your fans, they must really get invested in some of your characters, and they must get, do they get mad at you sometimes, like when the third book comes out and they’re like, Mm, why did you kill him?

43:57 It’s true, they do. Actually there’s a character that does not die, but there’s kind of a fake-out in one of my books, and someone sent me an email and said, I’m not reading any further, I’m just so furious with you. I’m like, oh no, no honey, keep going, it’s fine. I mean, you didn’t want to give it away, but he doesn’t actually die. Okay, he doesn’t die.

44:13 He, he doesn’t die. Well, I mean, there’s so many near-death experiences in these books. Do you, do you interact with your fans online? Do you try to stay a little bit removed? I think I read a comment where you’re saying that you got overwhelmed at some point, where you can’t, you know, respond to everyone’s messages, cuz then you can’t write books, right?

44:30 It’s true. Well, I took my email address off. Okay, because I was getting 4,000 of them a month, and I did the math, and if I had done like a minute with each of them, it was 16 business days I was spending answering my emails, which is a bit insane. And so now I try and reply on the blog as much as I can, and I also really love it when people post questions on Facebook, because then I can answer them and other people can see the answer right there. So a lot of Facebook, a lot of Twitter.

44:54 Okay, and do you get stalkers? Do you get scary people? Was the Swissman? Okay, but otherwise you don’t have a lot of hate or anything that you have to worry about? Um, well, I don’t really pay attention to it.

45:04 A lot of authors out there, I mean, it’s true, there’s people out there that say, oh my St H, we wish she was dead. But I mean, who doesn’t, who doesn’t wish you were dead? That’s right. Now we get that too here. So um, all right.

45:17 You, before you actually published Lament, you had dozens of years of rejections, and nobody thought you were cool, and nobody wanted to make your books into movies. That’s true. I mean, this is like, what, ’07 or ’08? Uh, what was that like? How, how did you break through to get your first novel published?

45:34 Well, I started writing when I was a tiny little maggot. Actually, terrible, terrible novels. How old were you? I don’t know. I just remember my dad, I was typing a novel on his word processor that tells you how old this story is, and he asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up?

45:47 And I said, I want to be a writer, and he said, oh, you want to be poor? Now, in his defense, I remember the novel I was working on, it was about two dogs test driving a car. There were Scottish terriers, and it was a red Porsche, and the first line of dialogue was, it like hugs the road. So maybe not the stuff of bestseller dum. But I was writing terrible, terrible political thrillers as well.

46:09 I remember I found one that I wrote when I was 16, and this is what I actually sent to publishers and got rejections for, and there’s this huge kerfuffle, some terrorists and um, policemen and bystanders, a dog running by, and a flag flying overhead, and who do you think, Brian, I chose to tell that story? The dog? That would be so irrelevant. What would the dog have to offer to that scene? I chose the flag.

46:32 The flag. Okay, yeah. So yeah, I had started trying to get published when I was 16, but they were terrible novels. I mean, there was, as soon as I wrote a novel, it was actually worth reading, it got published. I think it’s quite a fair business, it seems.

46:44 Do you think you need to, can’t you self-publish now with the prevalence of uh online stuff? Do you read much self-published? A little bit, cuz they give it away for free, uh, on your iPad and stuff. Yeah, it’s true. And do you find that the quality is the same?

46:59 But it’s a good way of getting noticed? No, I don’t know. See, I have, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with self-publishing, but like I said, I was an artist beforehand, and I was a self-representing artist for the first half of that, which means I spent 60 hours a week on the road at art shows doing the promotion, and then this tiny little bit of it actually doing the art, and it was fine. I mean, the promotion was interesting and all of that, but still this much time doing art, this much time getting it out there, and then for the second half of my career I pitched to a gallery, got accepted.

47:30 I started making more money, and I spent this much time doing art and this much time doing what it was, that. But you don’t, phys, when you put something on the internet, you don’t physically have to travel around all over the place and all. Well, no, but you’re like throwing it into a hole. I mean, the thing is, there’s so read the studies. There’s literally hundreds of thousands of self-published manuscripts, so if you just put one out there, unless you have a platform on there or a way of getting somehow noticed by Amazon or iBooks, where you’re put onto one of the lists.

47:59 Yeah, people aren’t going to find you. So it’s kind of the same thing where I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with self-publishing. It’s just that, you, I think you should be prepared to have to do that level of promotion. Is that because publishers essentially are curators, as in they do notice the stuff that they think is good, so that makes the stuff that they put out more relevant. They push it.

48:17 That kind of thing. I think the stuff that publishers put out is more commercial, which is not the same as good. Okay, and I think Patrick knows exactly the difference between what’s good didn’t, what’s commercial, as a reader? Yeah, don’t you think? Absolutely.

48:28 But that’s why I think that they can, they can miss yeah, that’s, agree. And self-publishing is a way that you can have another shot, because if your voice is, if your writing is good enough, then eventually I think you’ll get noticed, and it might be that it doesn’t fit the current, um, you know, what’s on Vogue, uh, at certain publishers, but that’s why I guess people are resorted to it. See, I don’t know. I think life just, just happens so fast that unless you’re out there promoting it in some crazy way that people might not ever notice.

48:55 I know that sounds pessimistic. But well, and there’s also a lot of publishers out there now, especially with e-book publishers becoming more popular, where they kind of the infrastructure and the cost requirements are a lot. It’s starting to get in there, but I mean, it’s, I mean, it’s exciting. It’s different, and it’s new. And I mean, certainly people didn’t expect to be reading on e-readers so quickly.

49:13 We didn’t think that the cost would come down so fast. It’s, know, changing world. I wrote, well, I very rarely post anything on Facebook, and I wrote a big, my books of 2012, um, all the books that I, not all the books, but my recommendations and the books that I’d enjoyed during 2012, and one of the things that I talked about was the rise of using my iPad to read, rather than just buying the hard copy and I still, you know, ideally you’d always be able to read the book in, you know, in it, in its physical form, because you get a nice, the smell’s nice of a new book, and you know there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot to be said for the texture of, of reading an actual book.

49:51 But if I’m going on holiday and I’m going to read, say, 10 books. I can’t, 10 books takes up all my hand luggage requirements, so I can’t. But downloading 10 books onto the uh, onto my iPad, or just knowing that if I’m in a place with, um, with Wi-Fi that I can, uh, uh, that I can download a book once I finish another one. Just makes it just makes it so much easier. Um, that I think it’s only going to, it’s only going to go down that route, and continue, and then books are actually cheaper as well if you buy them electronically.

50:20 So it’s only going to go more in that way. I think they’re definitely taking over the entire paperback market. I mean, the stuff that you used to buy in the supermarket, now that market is, those people have e-readers. I mean, if you’re reading 200 books a year, you want to have an e-reader, not the giant stack of books. Yeah, what makes a good publisher?

50:38 That’s a leading question for an author or for a reader, in your opinion? Uh, like for you, like for you as an author, what makes a good publisher you know, for you, have you always been happy with your publisher? Yeah, I love Scholastic. They do a great job with my books. Well, for starters, they love my books, which is a good thing.

50:55 Okay, also they are invested in making them last for a long time, so it’s not just the getting them on to the bestseller list once and then seeing what happens. They’re invested in them staying in print for years and years and years. And also the thing I really love about Scholastic US is that they do understand the difference between a book as just, um, something you read, and a book as an art object. So while there are the e-books out there as well, they really spend the time to make the hardcovers beautiful as well.

51:22 So it’s a very distinct kind of object, and a book, so you can choose one or the other, depending on what’s important to you, cuz I think that’s important. If you’re going to spend 18 bucks, you should get something which looks beautiful on your shelf. So I like that, and I also like the fact that they’re really picky so they’re not going to be getting on a whole bunch of authors and just throwing up the wall. See if they stick. They know what they want, and they go for it.

51:44 What was your process of getting to Scholastic? Were they your first publisher as well? No, they were my second publisher. My first publisher was quite small. Okay, and it’s difficult with a small publisher to get onto bookshelves in bookstores.

51:54 Okay, and that was my big issue with them. I love my editor there I’m doing another project with him, actually. I’ve done a short story collection with him last year, and doing another one coming up. So I really loved him, but it was difficult to get into bookstores, and that’s true of a lot of, well, I mean, it’s the same issue as with the e-books, getting them in front of readers. Small publishers, and how many books did you have to write before you could actually get that, that publisher?

52:17 And was that a process of years? I know you started when you were a munchkin, but like, I’m not going to say real books, but like, when did you, you stop becoming an artist full-time, and you’re like, I’m going to write full-time now? No, no, I was writing and doing the art at the same time. Towards the end I knew that now was the time I was going to try and a big push forward. I would say I wrote five serious novels that I thought were actually getting close before I got published but I knew, like I said, I knew when I wrote Lament that this looked like the books that I saw on the shelf, and it was the one to go for.

52:46 And then, did you push it yourself more than the other books? Yeah, okay. What does that mean? Like, you knock on doors, make phone calls? Oh no, yeah, you just, it’s, you send a letter to the publisher, or to an editor, or to an agent, that says, Dear editor, my book is about this.

53:02 Do you want to read the rest of it? Love, Maggie. And uh they mostly say, no, actually, we don’t want to read the rest of it? That sounds terrible. It’s about homicidal fairies.

53:11 We’re done with you. Stop it. And usually it’s a form letter, and then it’s, it’s over, and you send to the next person instead, and sometimes they say, oh sure, we look at the first three chapters, and you send the three chapters, and sometimes they say, this is amazing, send us the rest, and most time they say, oh dear God, please stop homicidal fairies. So yeah, it’s a process, but the thing is, it’s the exact same process that a reader goes through. Everyone says, oh, it seems so unfair to send off one page saying what the book’s about.

53:36 Well, how much of a chance do you give a book when you’re in the bookstore? You read the back of it and maybe one page? Yeah, or you do your research before? Yes, it’s true, and you didn’t have any other presents, like, so you just literally write the letter. If they say no, then you go to the next one.

53:51 And after 30 publishers you have no other options. This is back then, when you didn’t have a blog or any other way to promote it. Well, I had my art blog, and so having a platform helps, but not as much as with non-fiction, you really want a platform. Fiction, okay, all that matters is the book. Patrick doesn’t care if I’m a rally car driver.

54:07 He cares if the book is good, but of course the rally car driver authenticity will come out exactly right. Of course. All right, we should talk about rally cars. But um, I’m curious, you say you advise on your blog, like, you must have a bunch of young, probably female, girls that want to be writers that say, Maggie, girls are female, how can I be you? What do you tell them?

54:29 Well, you should start wearing jewelry bigger than your head um, no, the big thing is that I always tell people they should write the book that they wish was on the shelf already, because most people when they start out, they write quite general books that are just, they’re sort of fake sequels to what you’ve already read. You’ve loved reading it, and you just keep on going. But instead, you should write the book that only you can write, and that’s the big piece of advice, and then just don’t take no for an answer.

54:54 No just means not yet. Okay, and keep writing. I mean, after that third novel you must have been like, Jesus, how many more of these do I have to write? In order? A lot of people would have quit at two or three.

55:03 I was indefatigable. That’s a big, what does that mean? It means I was unable to be tired by the process, and did you know that those books weren’t good enough? In a weird way, as, be realistic with yourself. Oh definitely, I think I mean, the thing is that you’re not trying to get published just to get published as an endpoint.

55:20 If you can’t get past the gatekeepers, you’re trying to woo readers. And so if these readers aren’t in love with you, why would you think that more readers would be in love with you? I mean, yes, it’s kind of a choke point, but still, when you start getting close, you get letters back that say, not for me, but really promising. I mean, so it’s not like it’s mysterious process. It really isn’t.

55:37 They’re just readers. They’re just trying to find a way to make a buck. I mean, they might be slightly more commercial than the average person you meet on the street, but I don’t know. I just, I really like the publishing industry. It’s bizarre and giant and old-fashioned, but I think it’s inherently fair.

55:51 Wow, that’s interesting. What, not what I would have expected from a writer, to, to, expected anger and bitterness, yeah, or something like, you know, like independent filmmakers will tell you the Hollywood system is wrong, and that’s because they call each other Pooky. Pooky. No one’s ever called me Pooky. Who do you, uh, who do you like to read?

56:08 And what, what are your favorite authors? Oh my goodness. So I really love Audrey Niffenegger. She wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife as a first and only book to ever make me cry. I never cry at books or movies, and even knowing how that one ended, when I read it the second time my face was a ruin of snot.

56:23 So that was delightful. I like Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. I love Neil Gaiman. I’m very happy for that. I’ve read The Night Circus.

56:30 Did you read that one? No, no, it was very good. I love anything that’s the real world with a tiny hint of magic. I just, have you read any Katy Griffiths, like the midnightmare and she uses London as the uh, as the backdrop for uh all her books, but they’re, and it’s kind of, he’s a, he’s a magician, and uh, but London is a character, really comes out of it. It’s a bit like on London.

56:53 Oh yeah, by, um, China Miéville. I’m saying that wrong? No, I think that’s, yeah, that’s his name. Um, but he, yeah, he uses the, um, he uses the uh city as a, um, uh, as a character, and it’s, they’re really really good. I defend my sort of thing.

57:08 I love when the setting is a character. Have you read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? No, it’s big fat doorstop of a book. Okay, yes, you like it? Okay.

57:17 Do you have like classic authors you love as well, like Hemingway, or people like, I love The Great Gatsby. Okay, um, when I was a child, actually though I was reading Diana Wynne Jones, who wrote Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s this big anime movie, and I loved that before it was the movie. It was very dry British humor, but also magical, and I thought that was, that was cool and then I was reading my dad’s hand-me-down thrillers, all of these things that were called things like Point Blank and Born Dead.

57:45 And I’m running, and on the back there was a picture of a guy wearing like a leather jacket with his gun, or his SUV, or his dog. So that’s kind of my literary training right there. It’s quite dreadful when you think about it. That’s influenced you as well, must have. Yeah, okay, yeah.

57:59 But I mean, by the time you get to the Raven Boys, which is all like, um, magic and helicopters and guns and boys behaving badly, I think you can see the pedigree quite clearly. And you like a little magic? You don’t like too much magic? No, no, I don’t really like high fantasy that much. Okay, me neither.

58:15 I do. Do you? Okay, I like it on film, I have to say, but and I used to read loads of it when I was younger, but it takes a lot to not feel retread to me otherwise it just feels like much questing in porridge. All right, rally racing, their own, yet? Yes, talk to me about rally racing.

58:31 You have a 73 Camaro. The opposite of questing and porridge? Was that? Oh, I don’t know what that was. Rally racing and questing and porridge, the opposite.

58:38 Um, talk to me about your Camaro, 73 Camaro. What kind of engine you got in there? Oh, I love it dearly. It’s a 350, and everything about it is, uh, Cleveland. Is that what that is?

58:48 Everything about his original, except for it’s got a five-speed, which means I was talking to a German actually, and he said, what kind of fuel mileage does it get? Only he didn’t know the word for fuel mileage, and so he said, what is its fuel hunger, and I thought, yes, the Camaro has fuel hunger. It really does. Does it get 9 miles to gallon? No, it actually gets 18 because of the five-speed.

59:09 Okay, it originally had a three-speed manual, four, four manual, manual. Okay, that’s five-speed manual. Okay, and it’s my business car. What does that mean? That means that the TA deductible, tax deductible.

59:20 Okay, it only gets driven, listening, it only gets driven to events and things like this. I convinced my publishers when Forever came out that instead of flying me across the country, I would drive 5,000 miles on that car. Really? How many times did it break down? It did not break down any, but the air conditioning died just outside of Nashville.

59:38 Okay, and I remember it cuz the the engine is so hot, the V8, that I remember it was the hottest summer that had been on record and when we got out it was 104 degrees, and when we got out the gas station it was cooler outside, because the engine was cooking us slowly inside. That that was a trip. Wow, what kind of carburetor you got on there? God knows. Okay, um, and has this been your baby?

1:00:01 Like, you had it for years and years and years? No, no, well, I’ve had this one for just a couple years, since 2010, and then before that I had a terrible, terrible pig of a car that was the exact same year. It was bright orange, though, instead of blue, and that was one that had an old Caprice engine in it. Okay, and a bunch of Jersey boys had tried to do drag racing with it, and nothing in it was original, and it broke down all the time, most famously when I went down to do a NASA TED talk, right in front of everyone, and uh, that car is definitely a character in that book.

1:00:30 That’s a Camaro as well. Yes, okay. You like the Camaros? I do. And you like 73, not earlier split bumper?

1:00:36 Okay, well, 70 to 73 68, 69 Camaro. Everyone does. That’s why they’re so expensive. I had a 68 Mustang, so, and that was my baby car but it only had a 302 engine, smaller than Maggie, but um, it was an earlier time. I see, I think the 350s didn’t come out.

1:00:50 351s didn’t come out till like the 70s or something. No, it’s true. My car faster than, well, so the thing about it is that the 73 Camaro, you know, that was the only car at that time that was made that the Italians said was pretty enough, made by the Americans, to drive on their roads? Really? All of the Italians voted.

1:01:06 I guess it might have been. I don’t know. It’s pretty good-looking car, I think. So yeah, late 60s. But no, it’s very nice, and they are fighting words.

1:01:16 But um, well, also, you know, she’s, it’s General Motors. I was a Ford, Ford and GM classic car people don’t get along. Oh my gosh, it broke down outside of a FedEx the other day, and I was standing there, and I was looking at, and I’m thinking, what’s happened? Probably the fuel pump. It’s probably the fuel pump, that’s what’s happening right now, and this guy comes over and says, well, can I help you?

1:01:34 Is your boyfriend coming and I’m like, first of all, stand there while I punch you in the mouth, and then secondly, he goes, this is why I drive forward. I was like, okay, seriously, come over here. Nice, nice, my man. Yeah, yeah, was it you? No, I don’t think so.

1:01:47 No, it was probably one of my people. But um, your people, yeah. But no, there is a bit of a rivalry there. But you don’t race the Camaro, do you? No, no, I don’t, although, although I did take it to um, the track at Summit Point, and there are videos of me driving it basically on two wheels entirely around it.

1:02:00 It just has so much body roll that by the time you’re going around a turn you’re going, who, those cars should not be ever even cornered. Yes they should. Okay, do you have a sport suspension on it or anything? No, Jesus okay. That’s, we have what we call, like, a, a prayer suspension on it.

1:02:16 You just get in there and you check out your relationship with God. Yeah, I mean, seriously, yeah. In high school I used to pull up to people’s houses, and their parents would sometimes not let their kids get into my car, cuz they were just scared, cuz, just, they thought it was going to kill them. Yeah, it told you. The car, it just looked old.

1:02:34 It’s old, it’s just old. So um, and and talk to me about the rally racing. Is it something you do often? Do you just started this year as a matter of fact. Do you drive?

1:02:43 Do you navigate? Is there a difference? Is one harder than the other? Well, I always wanted to rally race, actually, and I just figured, you know what, I’m 31 now, is the time for the midlife crisis. I’m going to do it.

1:02:53 So I, for midlife crisis, right? Well, I started having when I was 15. So okay live dangerously. Can you explain what a rally race is? People to say, what’s a midlife crisis?

1:03:02 Like, well, I don’t know yet. You, you leave your job, question everything, something about coconut oil, do something stupid, put coconut oil all over your body and in your coffee. Um, all right, what’s a rally race? Okay, so a rally race is basically, um, it’s supposed to be production cars. So it’s cars that you normally would drive, and it’s on actual roads, so they shut down logging roads and back roads, and then it’s supposed to be you against the road more than you against other cars.

1:03:30 So it’s not like NASCAR, where you’re really just doing fine little bits of things. It’s really who makes it to the end, because for starters, I, my first race that I did, was 64 cars started, and I think it was 22 or something finished. The rest of them, you would pass on the way in, lakes and ponds and overturned. We’ve all got roll cages in there because there’s such a high attrition rate. It’s still dangerous, though, isn’t it?

1:03:52 Yeah, people rarely die. You, you always see those great outtakes of the rally car losing control. It goes around a bend, and there’s a spectator, and it, you know, comes within inches of, yes, smashing him into the next. But that’s what I like about it, because I love the fact that it’s about you learning the car. I mean, that’s really what it is.

1:04:11 It’s you against the road, not you against others. So it’s a race, but um, but you’re not, you’re not neck and neck. You’re going for time, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, you’re the fastest time, still wins, but you’re not neck and neck.

1:04:22 Usually when you’re passing, it’s because you’re really, really fast on stage. They’re usually 1 to 3 minutes apart as the intervals, so you have to be super fast to pass someone on the stage. Is it big in, in the States? It’s huge in Canada. It’s fairly big in the States, but it’s not as big as it is over here.

1:04:37 I would love to do a rally over here. Over here it’s big do you have a camera on the inside of it too? So you can see everyone, especially when you roll over. You’re like, a, so my favorite rally moment is, uh, we had made it all the way through the stages. There were 20 stages, and um, we had made it all the way through on the last one, and we just thought, if we just win, you know, we’ll be at least in the top five, just if we just get to the end of the stage and right before the end we stuffed it in a snowbank.

1:05:03 I mean, it’s front-wheel drive, we’re useless. We’re just sitting there, we’re totally screwed, and there were spectators all around with bonfires, and 20 of them came running over, all pushed on our hood and push us out, and then go, go, go, go, and it’s all very inspiring. Smoke, flames, car. So he finished in the top five. So that was, is that legal?

1:05:24 Probably not. Okay, um, I, they’re gonna take that back now. I was like, wondering what you do when you just stuck in the snowdrift, and then you’re sitting there with your partner, and you’re like, you actually, about them, Lakers? Everyone has, um, the hooks in the back, and you, the co- driver, and that’s, seat I’m sitting in, in this particular car, uh, you have to get out and stand there with the hook, and they recommend, with, like, a $20 bill on the other hand, as other cars go by, because sometimes you can convince one of the other friendly rally cars to stop, pull you out real quick, and then off you go, because no one really wants to be beaten by the road.

1:05:55 You want to beat the other person because you’re just a better, a driver, and so if you have the time you will stop and pull someone else out, really, even though it kills your time. Yeah, because it’s only what, losing 5, 10 seconds? Okay, and what kind of cars are these? Like souped-up Ford Escorts. Oh my gosh, it’s like a Ford Fiesta.

1:06:10 So you tell people I bought a race car, and they’re like, what kind? Because they’re like, oh, you have a Camaro, and your other cars, what, an EVO? And the EVO’s like 0 to 60 in 4 seconds. Everyone’s so excited by that, and then uh, like, yeah, it’s a Fiesta. Is the R so it’s, it’s a rally edition, so it’s not your mother’s Fiesta, but still your mother probably does have a Fiesta.

1:06:30 Okay, and do you, do you drive with your husband? No, no, we’d kill each other. He has a separate Fiesta that we’re in now. I drive with one of the drivers from, um, the first school that I went to, and I thought I would be driving, to tell you the truth. And I wanted to rally my EVO.

1:06:44 That was the dream, and I found out that because the EVO’s turbocharged, you have to have a certain number of races under your belt before they’ll let you behind the wheel. Okay, and so I thought, well, Bill, the guy’s driving now. He’s never gotten to driving a race, but he teaches how to drive rally cars. I will correct my karmic balance, but I’ll race with him. He’ll drive, I’ll get the coefficients.

1:07:05 Navigating is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and next year I’m going to be out there on the EVO, so that’s the plan. That’s the plan. Okay, what do your kids think of mommy, the race car driver? Oh, they think that we’re amazing. My husband and I, of course, rock stars, and I always thought so.

1:07:22 If you rebel by being more wild than your parents, what are my children going to do? And I figured it out. So the, the, the older one, she’s eight. Well, she just got kicked off the school bus for punching another boy in the throat, but only one day, so it couldn’t have been a very good fun. Throat strike is very, like, crab, M.

1:07:38 It was very specific. The note home punching in the throat. Yeah. The other one wears pressed pants and collared shirts, and he’s very polite, and the other day his teachers told me he said, thank you for teaching us. And I think this is how you repay me at your age, I was standing on my desk and burning things down.

1:07:54 So that’s how he’s going to rebel, by being a congressman or something. Wow, okay, so you found that they’re taking it to a different level, literally. Okay, you gave a TED talk and you said you tell lies for a living, and you were talking to NASA, and you said something about how you were a bit of a rebel when you were younger, but then, like, later they were celebrating you because you had done some stuff outside the box. I don’t know, could you just explain what you were talking about?

1:08:18 Well, it’s like making the joke about standing on the table and setting things on fire in school. I really was kind of a Val is terrible child that didn’t like to sit still, and was silky, and now I mean all of those same traits, and nothing about me has changed. It’s like my superpower, my inability to grow and learn from my mistakes, and now everyone just thinks oh yeah, that’s cool, you’re fine. And it’s only because now I pay my taxes, and back then I was a child.

1:08:42 So then what do we learn from that? Let kids be themselves. Yeah, especially when you’re a really unique, crazy kid. You’ve got these kid geniuses out there, and I go and I see, see them in schools, and they’re trying so hard to make them look like everyone else, and a lot of times you have to be given enough rope to hang yourself, to really find out where your boundaries are. You think the school system stifles creative kids?

1:09:04 Yeah. Do you home, do you homeschool your kids? No, they’re in a small school. Okay, homeschooling is crazy, right? I was homeschooled from sixth grade on.

1:09:12 Okay, go ahead. Get her out. I should have let you go down that road a little bit further, really, and hang myself. No, I mean, it was interesting, because it gave me a lot of time to do, I mean, to write, to show horses to do just crazy stuff, to learn how to play the bagpipes competitively, and uh, so that was useful, but by the time I got to college I was so painfully shy. I was just sat there and sulked and wore black all the time and told people I was mourning the death of modern society.

1:09:39 So that was the downside of homeschooling, not enough social interaction. Yeah, definitely. Okay, also my mom is a quite clever and brilliant and well read, but I can imagine that if your mom is not quite clever and brilliant and well read, that you might have a somewhat terrible teacher in the form of your parents. Yeah, I’m more power of anyone who does that, you know. It just seems like a huge investment.

1:10:01 We have a mutual friend that does that, uh, yes, we do, right? Yeah, we do. His wife does that. She’s very crazy about it, right? Yeah, three or four kids.

1:10:08 I, I’ve never seen what the home school looks like. I’d love to. I think they seem to have quite a good life. Yeah, I guess if you just make sure you do the social thing too. It’s really true.

1:10:17 If I had, fine, exactly, that’s right. If we had been out, not we were out in the middle of no, as part of it, so if we had actually been in a city situation or even a suburb situation, I probably would have a very different answer for it, but otherwise, yeah, it gave me so much time to do the things I wanted to do, and also it let me be a completely strange and weird person, that now I can go into a high school and say, oh yes, well, that would have been me in that detention box, right there and there and there. Or I went and did some school visits at alternative schools, and these are for kids who are at high risk of dropping out, not because of grades, but because they just don’t care.

1:10:51 I could have been one of those kids. I, by the time I got to college, I thought, huh, what is this? I’m not interested. I don’t need this to be a success. Do you have thoughts on what should change about the school system?

1:11:01 Um, they should be smaller. That’s a big thing in the US. Especially, the first school visit that I did was 3,000 senior high kids under one roof, and when the bell rang it was like, will of beasts? Would you ever write a non-fiction book, perhaps, about this, about schooling? No, I don’t know.

1:11:21 Oh my gosh, because then, can you imagine? Then they would say, yes, but look how you turned out. See, you, you like it, but other people think you didn’t turn know manager silky fainting goats slow yeah, yeah. Of gloss over that. But would, did you think you would ever do anything, write anything but fiction?

1:11:36 I was a history major, so I spent a lot of time writing non-fiction. I can imagine writing a narrative non-fiction about someone cool and awesome, who has been dead for a long time, Alfred the Great. He’s my long dead artistic historic boyfriend. What about a fictionalized history? Some of those are really good.

1:11:53 No, call those novels. No, this is like about an actual person, like Hannibal. I read one where they actually kind of, like, fictionalized Hannibal, like from his first-person perspective, and him crossing the Alps. And I have actually been kicking around the idea of a novel about John Singer Sargent, the portrait artist. I really like that, but I don’t know.

1:12:10 It would definitely look like a novel. It would not look anything like history. I like them to be quite well separated, myself. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Um, what, um, what was I going to say your kids know you’re, you’re, you’re right?

1:12:24 Obviously they do. They read your books? No, okay, already screwed that up. They’re really they’re really R-rated? Huh.

1:12:30 Well, that’s not rated so far. No, no, but they are. I wouldn’t even say that they are full of content. It’s just they’re quite dense. I mean, for an eight-year-old they wouldn’t really enjoy that.

1:12:39 I don’t think I would have gotten tired of it. It’s character-driven, for the most part. I mean, they have plots as the exterior structure but really is about how the plots change the people. And as an 8-year-old, that wouldn’t have interested me. Okay, it’s teenage I think is the is the the starting point?

1:12:56 Do you agree? And three novels this year? Well, it sounds like you finished the second one, or a close to? Yeah, it’s done. It’s done.

1:13:03 Okay, it has all of my favorite things in it. Okay, which are, well, it’s got cars. Yeah. Say, well, that’s specifically street racing? No, there’s no goats in it.

1:13:11 I never said goats are my favorite thing. Fainting, just because it has a, um, a hitman in it. That’s, I like that magic. Yes, he’s a magic hitman. That’s spoilery.

1:13:23 Okay, yeah. Do you not, you are, you try to keep pretty tight-lipped about your books? I do. I’m not supposed to say anything about. I’ve said too much right now.

1:13:32 I’m doing a trailer I’m doing a trailer for it. I always animate trailers for them every year, and so that, by its nature, will be spoilery, because it will involve some of the visuals from it. Okay, I watched some of your trailers. Um, you used to do a lot of color pencil art, right? So all of your trailers are in color pencil?

1:13:46 No, no, some of them are ink, and some of them, The Scorpio Races one was all painted. I did the first one in colored pencil and hated it and threw it all out right before the deadline, and did the rest of it in about four hours on my kitchen table with paint. So it’s just what I have at hand. I think I think I’m going to be doing more ink for the next one. How important is a trailer for a book, or to sell a book?

1:14:06 Oh, I think it’s like an ad. You can throw an ad out there, but if everyone’s seen an ad that looks like it before it’s not going to make a difference, but if it’s a cool ad, people will pass it around. And so for me the goal is always, I want to create a trailer that also stands alone as its own kind of thing. I want to actually, it, to be an art project more than an ad. It’s more, to the first one, was definitely to entertain myself more than anything else.

1:14:29 And I was completely shocked that anybody watched it, and it got loads and loads of hits, and I thought, oh well, this is great, cuz it makes all of my, um, studio time tax deductible. There you go this businesswoman’s mind here. I like the tax thinking. Oh, we had, um, Tim Ferriss and Daniel Pink there, which you know, they don’t write fiction, but they were saying that the trailer, it’s, it’s just like, it’s necessary these days to sell a book. Yeah, and it has to be.

1:14:51 Have you ever seen a book trailer? I’ve seen their book trailers and yours any other book trailers? Yeah, but I’m not like a consumer. Seen any book trailers? They’re irrelevant to me.

1:14:59 It’s two different media, right? I mean, one of them is visual, and one of them, I’ll read your books based on reviews or, um, your previous work, not on having seen a trailer. Okay, so after the Raven Boys series, are you going to take a little break? You don’t seem like you take breaks. Is this American work ethic, or is this the Maggie work ethic?

1:15:19 You just enjoy it. I just, yeah, I just do. I don’t think I could stop. I just, you don’t take breaks either I guess not. But like, you know, one out of two days promoting, that’s a lot.

1:15:29 Well, I would like to travel less, I guess. But you don’t enjoy, you’re doing that cuz you have to, but you wouldn’t come home and then go traveling again. You’d come home and write your book, because that’s the thing that you enjoy. Exactly. And you’re rallying too, so yes.

1:15:40 And so next year rallying, and I think next year I’m going to build a recording studio? Really? Yeah, okay, for bagpipes. Don’t be ridiculous. You said you did competitive bagpipes.

1:15:51 I don’t comp, more, the whole competitive bagpipes, a hashtag on Twitter, five other. Okay, what do you play? Okay, so I play the Celtic harp, of course, the piano. Okay so the piano couldn’t be anything normal. What’s the difference between a Celtic harp and a normal harp?

1:16:06 I’m glad that you asked, Patrick. So, so a Celtic harp has levers to change the keys, so if you want a sharp or a flat you have to put a lever, and it changes the length of the string, and a classical harp has pedals on the bottom, and you hit a pedal, and it changes the key automatically. They’re also much larger, like the size of a piano okay, and you have one, I presume? Yes, a Celtic harp. Yeah, and so uh, and a Celtic harp can fit in and out of a trunk, which is important if you have a Celtic band in college, which I did.

1:16:35 My current harp has been in and out of more trunks than a mafia body. So the piano, I actually had an opportunity two years ago to buy a house, and my husband and I were very excited about this, and I thought I could buy a house or I could buy a piano, and I really love my Steinway, so I bought a Steinway and had to save up for two more years to get a house. So I have a piano. Wow. And then I play the guitar and the bodhrán, which is an Irish drum, and a tin whistle, and I’ve just started taking lessons for the Irish pipes, which are bellows-blown instead of mouth-blown.

1:17:04 Okay, all right, so like bagpipes but not. Yeah, and they play better with other instruments. If you hear Scottish pipes on a soundtrack, it’s actually Irish pipes. Can you put them all on at once, like the guy on Venice Beach, that’s the one-man band. Can you just play that?

1:17:18 Sounds like a video that’s going to be my next book trailer idea. I mean, I’ll take it, you know, a little finder’s fee for that. But are you going to record like your music? Do you think in the future? Or, well, yeah, I mean, I write and record a song for every single trailer.

1:17:30 So I already do that, and I’ve, I wanted to be a soundtrack composer when I was a small and tiny maggot. I mean, I wanted to be lots of things when I was small. I also wanted to be a fighter pilot. Okay, I actually still have the calendar from when I turned 16. I officially got, um, too bad of eyesight to be able to go to Annapolis to learn to be a fighter pilot, and I had the great Annapolis let down written on there in big letters.

1:17:53 I’m sure I was wearing black that day. Anyway, so I want to be lots of things, like a rose horticulturist. I also want to be a radio personality. I thought that would be cool. Yeah, anyway so I have all of these things that I wanted to be, but I keep coming back to the writing, music thing do you think you’d score your first movie?

1:18:08 Oh man, is that in the, is that in the, like, fine. It would be cool to score a movie eventually, but no, I want James Newton Howard to do my movie. I want it done right. Okay, good answer. Okay, that’s cool.

1:18:20 And a movie in the next year or two, would that kind of make you happy? If one of these things happened, that’d make me very happy. Especially, I think the Raven Boys will get uh, will get made into a film. Do you think? Yeah, that’s my prediction.

1:18:31 Is that your psychic spidey sense? Yeah, I think it will. Why is that? I just think it, I think it will. Um, following in sort of the footsteps of Hunger Games and that kind of thing, it will be a uh, I like his, I think, I think it, be very, he’s the Yes, man.

1:18:46 He’s the good cop. Call, call Pooky and tell them I will, and it’ll be easy to do. I think I think it would translate quite simply. Do, do you like being compared like The Hunger Games and the Twilight series? Do you like being talked about in that same genre, or you kind of like, I’m me, I’m wearing black, leave me alone well, sometimes it irritates me if people don’t understand the differences, like where they generalize about the young adult.

1:19:10 They all say well, you know, it’s all dumbed down, and without reading it they make the comparison. I don’t mind if they read it and they say, yeah, someone who loves Hunger Games will like this because X, and they’re intelligent about it. I mean, why not? It makes it easier. I, uh, also think, like with Twilight for instance, that’s like the, the gateway.

1:19:25 Some people never read fiction for pleasure until they read Twilight. So I would never be sad about that. Okay, fair enough. What do you I don’t, I don’t like, um, either of Twilight or The Hunger Games, although I’ve read most of them, um, but I think that’s better. You don’t like the movies?

1:19:41 You mean no? I didn’t really. The books were okay. They were like six out of 10. I think that’s better than six out of 10.

1:19:48 I really like this guy, and it feels like I’m just being factious, but I’m not. Yeah, you just met him, but he’s, he, he only speaks the truth. That’s good. That’s the thing with, only speaks the truth. So yeah, and you know, yeah, I’m glad you’re here.

1:20:01 Well, this is, I would say that, um, this is the most Maggie book out there, and so this one was the most terrifying to put out there, actually, because it felt very specifically, especially with the humor in it, it felt very specifically that if people didn’t like it, they were rejecting me personally instead of just my writing style. And so I’m quite pleased that it’s doing well, but also it’s quite difficult to actually get good enough to write a book that’s specifically you, and to get rid of all the other literary influences that aren’t important to you. Is that cuz it’s an insecurity thing that you’re not?

1:20:32 Most people aren’t ready to put themselves out there? No, it’s just, um, which character are you? Then, are you? Everyone always asks that. No no, definitely not.

1:20:40 So everyone asks me if I am my characters. In my B, you just said you put a lot of yourself into it. It’s true, but it’s third person, so I’m the narrator technically. Yeah. The others have all been first person.

1:20:50 I think of my characters as portraits, just like when I was doing a portrait of a person. The first goal is always, when you’re starting out learning to draw, to draw a picture as good as a photograph, and then your next goal is to write, or to draw, a picture that would be as good as a photograph but even better. So you catch something that the camera can’t catch. And then the final, like, the boss level of creating a portrait, is you create a portrait that not only looks better than a camera but also looks like only you could do it.

1:21:18 So that’s the reason why John Singer Sargent is my long lost dead artistic boyfriend, because when you walk into a museum, his paintings look like the person who sat for him, but also you can stand there and say, oh yeah, that’s the Sargent. So that’s what I’m trying to do when I’m writing my characters. So these people are not me, but they are stolen they are all definitely real people that I have coupled together and taken their souls. So no, I wouldn’t say I’m any of them, although Gansey is quite interested in asking questions that I am interested in asking at the moment.

1:21:49 Is that ultimately what makes good art is when you put yourself out there, in like that real raw form, and like you said, write a book that only you can write, or, or put your own, you know, your character out there, even though it makes you feel very vulnerable. Yes, I think specificity is the key to good art of any kind. Okay, be specific about, yeah something that only you can do. I mean, and the thing is that you’re going to lose readers or viewers, etc, etc, by making your television show more specific or making your book more specific, but you’re also going to be better by being the best in that particular class, and offer something that the world hasn’t already seen before, as opposed to, I think Hollywood tends towards the generic.

1:22:27 They want to try and catch as many by being as generic as possible, but I don’t think that’s really the ideal formula. Okay, I’m going to ask you a very London Real question, and then we’ll wrap this whole thing up. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Maggie and give her a bit of advice, and you can’t tell her keep doing what you’re doing, and you look great in black today. Um, did what? Um, what advice would you give that young Maggie?

1:22:51 Oh my goodness. Um, wow. 20-year-old Maggie. So, well, see, 20-year-old Maggie was already, was already 31-year-old Maggie, though. That’s too late.

1:23:00 Okay, because 20-year-old Maggie, at 19, I met my husband, and um, in a month and a half we were engaged, and so by 20 I was already writing the book that was going to be published so I already knew, and I remember when I met my husband I said, I know that right now I am a young and poor history major, but one day I’ll, will be a rich and famous author, and I will keep you in the manner to which you’ll quickly become accustomed. And uh, so the first book got published, and he was like, that’s, that’s great, and then the second book, and the third, and the third book went crazy. It hit the bestseller list, and he’s, that’s, that’s great.

1:23:30 It sold all of these rights. It’s sold in Germany, on the moon, etc. That’s right. And finally I said, why don’t you ever get surprised? And he said, well, you told me so.

1:23:38 When I was, when I was that age, I was already me. You had it together. Yeah, ex. We should, we should ring 16-year-old Maggie and no. Let’s do, let’s do 17-year-old Maggie, and I would say, don’t kill yourself, that’s what I would say.

1:23:53 Yeah, okay. Wow. But she doesn’t need to take that advice, cuz you’re still here. It’s true. Well, it would have, would have saved a lot of near misses.

1:24:00 Okay, don’t kill yourself. Yeah, okay. And on that same note, I was wearing black on the inside as well. Okay, I respect that. Some, yeah, yeah.

1:24:06 It builds character. That’s true. Makes for great stories, I think so and dri and drive, and it’s always a happy ending, or it makes a good story when you get to the happy ending on the other side. Look back. That’s true.

1:24:16 Do you always have to have a happy ending? I like to have a bittersweet ending. I want to have hope more than anything else. I, some people say that my endings are too open but I always think, as long as you have the clues to know what’s going to happen and a little bit of hope. I just never realized how many people were pessimists until I started writing open endings.

1:24:36 They all think they’re all going to die and pools their own blood. Lovely. Hopefully, lov, no, not hopefully, lovely. Oh, lovely. No, on, on that same note of you at 17, like, what, what would you say to, like, the 17-year-old girl listening now, as far as, like, doesn’t know what they want to do, or, he might have been in the same spot that you are?

1:24:54 Besides, don’t kill yourself. Um, well, actually, I mean, the thing is that the thing I most needed to hear when I was 17 is the reason why I actually like doing school visits now. I don’t think I’m very educational when I go into a school visit now. I don’t really tell them how to write. I don’t tell them how to get published.

1:25:09 I just tell them about my life, basically, about the books, and I tell them about the goats, etc, etc, and the most valuable thing that they can see is the fact that there are other strange people out there. So if there’s strange people, they can see that you don’t hit a age where all of a sudden, I mean, my fear when I was 17 is that suddenly I would look up, I would be 30, I’d be driving a minivan, I’d live in the suburbs, and my life would look identical to all the other adults that I saw around me, and that was a terrible sort of future. And so the most valuable thing for me as a 17-year-old, will be able to see that.

1:25:40 No, there’s no magic button. You continue being bizarre and crazy, and not only that, but the world is filled with bizarre and crazy people. So just by seeing you now at the schools they’re like, oh, Maggie’s kind of like me? Yes, and she still seems to. And they ask questions like, how did you come to be so evil?

1:25:55 They ask that at the last school. Really? You tell, I wouldn’t have got evil as the vibe. No, no, she was pleased too, because she seemed quite evil as well, and she seemed happy to think that I was that. And someone else asked me, why do you hate people?

1:26:08 Don’t think I look like I hate people? Surely not. I don’t get that vibe, but I didn’t read all your books yet, so he doesn’t think that they’re not even, uh, vated? He says that’s what he said. But well, you read George R.R.

1:26:19 Martin, so in comparison, this is like a walk in the park. Absolutely no. I don’t get, I don’t get evil. Yeah, well, I get weird, nor evil. I think that’s what they mean by evil.

1:26:28 Yeah, that was really different. Yes, you’re not even that weird. No, probably not. The goat thing’s pretty weird. Yeah, goats and rally, you have to send us pictures of the goats.

1:26:39 That would be cool. Yes, yeah, I’m going to send you videos, pre-faint and faint. Yeah, video of or gifts? Yeah, exactly. Video make it a lot easier.

1:26:46 We could see them faint. Although I looked up animated gifts online. A friend sent me a bunch of fainting goat things, and there’s people running up behind their goats and doing this, and they have entire herds just rolling over, and I just thought, J, I don’t know if I’m going to have to be really able to do that to my poor little goats. I haven’t named them yet either. I’m trying to think of what to call them.

1:27:04 I’m thinking chaos and anarchy maybe. Why do you have to get the fainting ones? Can you just get normal goats? It was totally a side effect. I just wanted the small ones.

1:27:11 Oh okay. And then they just happened to be silky, and they happened to be fainting. Okay, awesome. I’m sure I believe that. Well, you know, I wish you all the best with your goats.

1:27:23 Next time I’ll bring them into the studio. Um, yeah, that podcast. Yeah, yeah, I think we are going to be seeing her movie sometime in the future, right? Absolutely. I’m definitely going to bank on that.

1:27:33 Okay, no, I think so. Invite me to the premiere. That’d be fine. Oh, this is really exciting. Like, when your publicists talk to me, and they talked about you I was like, this sounds really cool.

1:27:42 We haven’t really had anyone like you before on the show. You know, we’ve had like, you know, a lot of non-fiction guys and people writing serious books and how to manage your workflow and all this other stuff. So, um, have learned nothing from this? And what are you talking about? They learned, they learned there was a spoiler earlier.

1:27:57 That’s right. It’s true. I think, no, but it was awesome. Thank you so much. It was nice meeting you um, if you’re ever in the UK again, please stop by.

1:28:04 Awesome. Thank you guys for having. Without your goats, and that kind of thing. Um, Patrick, thanks for being in for this. Appreciate it.

1:28:11 If you are listening to us on iTunes, please subscribe, because we’ll have more cool people on here, and if you want to see the incredibly controversial and maybe dressed in black or not, you can come to our YouTube channel and see Maggie at uh London Real TV, and we’re on Twitter as is she, you are, M, M Stiefvater? Yes. Stiefvater, that’s S-T-I-E-F-V-A-T-E-R. Oh, well done. I don’t even think you were looking at a sheet or anything.

1:28:34 I was just like, I know, which means stepfather or something, you in German? Yeah, which is very appropriate, because my father-in-law has been married three times. That’s crazy. Okay, is that cause or aor? I’m now that I am actually live recording, I’m not going to say he could be watching.

1:28:52 Okay. He might be, um, all right. Well, that’s good. So come find us on social media. Maggie, wish you the best.

1:28:56 Um, I can’t wait to see that film, and I want to make sure my stepdaughter doesn’t finish that book. Now, very good okay, thank you guys. Until then, it’s about the journey, rock and roll. All right, peace. Population that we can really appreciate how much more peaceful the world is today.

1:29:15 Uh, this is true in the scale of, um, homicides, where, uh, saying in Britain, uh, an, uh, Englishman today has about 135th the chance of being murdered as his medieval ancestors. Fascinating stat. Uh, yeah and that’s, it’s a surprise when you see.