Mindy:            Today's guest is Dan Koboldt. Dan joined me today to talk about his publishing journey with SciFi, non-traditional routes to success in the audio world and how to put the science in fiction. 

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Mindy:             Your SciFi series Gateways to Alissia was published beginning in 2016 with the Harper Voyager imprint. So if you could talk a little bit about that experience because I know it's slightly different from the traditional publishing route. I think it would be really interesting for listeners to hear about someone that achieves success through something other than a traditional manner.  

Dan:                The experience was pretty traditional for me because I had to go query, get an agent, go on submission, and they are a Big Five Publisher. I think the difference was the imprint itself. So I was actually published through Harper Voyager Impulse, which is an imprint under the Harper Voyager envelope. It has, in theory, the backing of Harper Collins, but their model was a little different. 

They decided to try sort of a digitally focused imprint, which a lot of publishers were trying at the time because they could see that self and indie publishing were really taking off, and they wanted to try new things to compete with that market. So under the Voyager Impulse imprint, our books came out in e-book first, and then they came out in print like a month and 1/2 after that. 

I think a lot of things were the same to what some of your other interviewees who have gone Trad Pub have experienced with the exception that this was kind of an experimental approach. It was very digitally focused. They also probably signed a lot of authors and books. I think at the peak of Impulse they were putting out 2 to 6 titles a month. maybe more, so they were putting out a lot of releases. Probably too much for what sort of their publicity marketing could really support in substantial ways. So that was the experience. I mean, it's been a while now, but remember it being a little bit different from what some of my friends have gone through other modes of publishing have experienced.

Mindy:            For example, cause I know it's also now all of them are also available in audio and in physical copies. Did you see it as a successful experiment? Did you move many e books? 

Dan:                Most of us sold mostly e books and that was the focus of the imprint, I honestly think that they offered a print version mainly because they would have had difficulty signing authors if they didn't have that component to it. So because, you know, authors like, Oh, wow, it's Harper Collins. If it were digital only offer, I think a lot of us wouldn't have signed, myself included. But, um, e books have always been the focus. And I think their model, if they wanted to go after was, we're gonna focus on E books. We're gonna keep them reasonably priced as another component of impulse. I think all all the e books are priced Dollar 99 to 3 99 maybe 4 99 at the highest. So it really was them trying to compete with what you'd consider the Indie model right now, from the point of view of producing a quality e book that's reasonably priced and having it available across all the e book platforms, I think that part was a success.  

I think where the imprint struggled is in marketing and promotion because they put out a lot of these. We were assigned publicists and we got some sort of basic support along those routes. I think that the venues that were being pitched about us were aware that this was sort of a digitally focused thing and that, like, shifts you into a lower priority tier for coverage, as you're probably aware. So it was a struggle for us to get publicity, and there were other types of support and marketing that we didn't get compared to, sort of, a classic Voyager Imprint author might get where they're only doing one or two of those tiles a month.  

Mindy:            And do you think that in general, SciFi performs well in that ah medium of e books? Because obviously, romance is always the e book, the big push for e books. That's where romance does a lot of their business. Ah, Indy publishers and self publishers obviously hit that pretty hard, but we're talking about traditional publishing houses. SciFi Is that something that generally does well in E books? Because they know that I write YA, and we don't move e books. Everyone talks about teens always being attached to their phones and attached to their computers, and the truth is that when they want to read, they actually sign off. They have a physical book. So you're writing SciFi for adults. Do you find that your audience is there for e books? 

Dan:                Oh yes. I think SciFi is probably second only to romance, possibly also the mystery in e book adoption, cause I mean, think about the readership people like SciFi. We're usually very tech adjacent, And so they were early adopters. And that's been the case even for authors who like pretty well established traditional SciFi authors, for example, Ann Leckie. I met her once and she gave a seminar and and I think she reported that 75% of her sails are E books, and she certainly has got all the different print and other format options that you could imagine. But it's just the readership, we're very tech adjacent. 

Mindy:            Yeah, definitely. No, that makes sense. And it's something that I know as someone... you know, I look at my my royalty statements and I sell like 1/4 of my sales is e book. They just, they're not there. But I want to talk about audio books as well, because I see you also have your books available in audio now. Is that something that was part of the original plan? Or did the very recent boom of audio books make that a possibility? 

Dan:                That's a great question. It was not part of the original plan. None of the Harper Voyager impulse authors got audio books. But HarperCollins, even in the mid 20 teens, was requiring audio rights for any book contract. Like they were forward thinking in that way, and their house was notorious for it in a time when not many houses were requiring that, but Harper Collins did so they had the audio rights, but they were pretty up front about not having intentions to produce audio books because it's expensive. 

The boom hadn't quite happened either. It was just starting. And so it was one of my great regrets that we had sort of given them the audio rights. But they were going to languish because an audiobook wasn't going to be made. So what happened is my agent and I worked out a deal with them where they wouldn't revert the audio rights, but they'd allow us to shop the rights, and then they would get a cut if they were sold. But we could at least market them. And that for me was important because I could see that audio was really blowing up. And I, um, I had had some other projects come out in audio, one of which we're gonna talk about later. 

And it was just so amazing for me. And I thought, it would be fantastic to get my books into audio. I think they would do pretty well in that format. And also, I could just tell a segment of the readership was moving to where they only read books that are on Audiobook. I even saw that in 2015 when I was approaching book reviewers a lot of them had start asking, Do you have an audio book? Because that's what they had switched to as their preferred format. 

So I didn't get that initially, but once we worked out this deal and were able to, we shopped the rights, this was somewhat later, this was in the past year or two, my agency started shopping the rights around. I think the handicap, though, is that yes, audio's hot, but a lot of publishers are sort of less enthusiastic about something that's not a brand new book, right? I mean, It's not, It couldn't be an audible original or something had been published for starting in 2016. The market was growing enough that we did get some interest and we eventually got Blackstone Audio made an offer for all three books, which we were super excited about. At least one other Voyager impulse author has also gotten audio books. So I think the segment and the format is so hot right now that some people are having success even in books that sort of have come out already.

Mindy:            I think Black Stone in particular, I know that, Ah, friends of mine that have gone into self publishing, and indie publishing, Blackstone has bought up their rights, and they produced fairly quickly as well. They were very surprised at how quickly the, and the quality of the audio that was produced and on the market very fast.

Dan:                I'm impressed with that, too, and that exact same impression. I mean, it seemed like we were just sending that contracts and stuff, and very soon I was, you know, getting narrator auditions, MP three's and stuff, so it did move very quickly. That's a perk of like an already established work that someone comes and gets the audio rights to, is it's already been through edits and copy editing and everything. It's I mean, it's a publishing ready product, and so it's just making the audio.  

Mindy:            Speaking of audio, let's talk about a project that we worked on together. We worked on a series for a company called Serial Box. And since that is your baby, why don't you explain to the listeners what Serial Box is and the model that we followed in order to make that come alive?  

Dan:                It might have been my starting baby, but eventually that was adopted by the three of us, Yes, so Serial Box is a relatively new publisher. They've been around for a few years now, and their model is that they wanted to publish projects that were co written by multiple authors in episodic format. So rather than having a book, you would have a season of episodes like nine or 10 episodes, each of them being about 10,000 words that were written kind of like how TV show writers would do it. There would be a writer's room involved, and a writer would take the lead on each episode and they would get released week after week in these bite size chunks. 

And what was different about Serial Box, everything is essentially released through their app, so you can open a Serial Box app. You can start reading, Ah, one of their many serials that they have. The first episode is always free, so you can try it out and see if this is kind of interesting to you, and then you can buy additional episodes or buy the rest of the season. It's usually like 10 to $12 to buy the entire season, so it's definitely a different model for publishing. And it was my first experience in co writing, too. 

But I had heard of Serial Box. I had met some people who wrote for them and was started hearing about them. And my agent let me know. Hey, this company Serial Box is interested in hearing pitches. So they had issued a prompt at the time they said something along the lines of We're interested in new series, basic premise being that a group of people are getting some sort of messages, preferably in audio, because they were really pushing the audio format, that are related to a mystery they're trying to solve, and that was a loose prompt they gave. So almost right away, I just had this idea for it. I thought it would be really cool to do something with the Bermuda Triangle because I'm sort of conspiracy theory, hobby fan of that sort of stuff. I like historical mysteries, and I was thinking about what we know from history about the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle could be a really interesting setting for that. 

So we put together this proposal, the basic premise being that after a particularly bad hurricane season, the Bermuda Triangle reawakens and starts claiming ships and planes at an accelerated rate. And so there's a team of people that are assembled to try and figure out what's going on. And as part of that, they're getting these snippets of audio from the crafts that have disappeared like shortly before they disappeared. So that was the basic premise that we pitched Serial Box. They liked it. They said, we'd like you to write a series bible of what a whole season one would look like And we did that, and they sort of green lighted the project and they said, Okay, now we want you to find a couple of co writers to write this with you. That was sort of the establishment of the baby, as you called it.  

That was when we first got started. Then it was like, Okay, now let's talk about what co writers do you want. And they came to me, which I was a little surprised by. But they're like, we need you to pick some people that you think you could work with who, and they also wanted writers who were somewhat established in some way. And so I had two thoughts for people that I found it reasonable to recruit. One is Sylvia Struck Wrigley who was an aircraft crash expert and a friend of mine. And I knew her through some writing groups. And I thought, this is somebody whose expertise we're gonna need with all these airplanes and ships disappearing and radio conversations, et cetera. So I said we should try and recruit Sylvia. 

Serial Box had sent me a list of people that they thought might be valuable to try and recruit to write for project. And your name was on it. And I was like, Mindy? I know Mindy and I knew you were a boss and I was like, We should try and get Mindy So that's how it all started. 

Mindy:            One of the things about it that I was so excited about as a writer was to have this experience of co writing, because at that point in time I had not done that. And the other part of the model that is so interesting is that Serial Box flies us all in and puts us together, and we're in a writer's room and we bang out a season. And it's actually so much more in tune with how you would write for TV than how you would write a novel, because you are planning an entire season with an arc for the season. But an arc also for each episode, and what was so interesting to me was how truly collaborative it was, because we started with an arc that became something entirely different by the time we worked over like, three days. I think we only worked for three days. Is that correct? 

Dan:                That's right. They were long days, but there were only three of them, and through they were long days.

Mindy:            They were very long days, but it was really interesting to me to have that writer's room experience. So if you want to talk about that a little bit, and I like how it's so different from the experience of writing in isolation. 

Dan:                That's true. And part of the process that they had sort of set up was okay. When we GreenLight a series you and your co writers, we're gonna have a writer summit. It's in person, but we all went to New York City. Serial Box, brought us there, and we had this schedule of three days where we were going to basically map out the entire season, figure out what was going to be the plot arc overall, what was gonna happen in each episode? The characters, the world, the rules of the world, etcetera.  

So it was really interesting. I mean, we're all got together and we were literally in a room for three days, as we said, planning this stuff out and our starting point was the series Bible that I've been paid by Serial Box to write. But that got heavily revised as we started working through a lot of the questions and like. Okay, So if we're really gonna make 10 episodes out of this, what's gonna happen in each one? How are the character's gonna interact? What are the relationships gonna be like? So we were creating and deleting characters from that, like nobody's business. And I think we all brought something interesting to the conversation, which I think was immensely helpful. We also had our producer in the room who was helping guide the conversation. So is, um, I thought, It's a really interesting experience. 

Mindy:            Yeah, definitely. And I thought, to, how interesting it was to be working with a series. One of the things that was difficult about it. And it could be frustrating, but it was also really pushed the edge for me creatively was we had to leave a window for a season two. if we got one, which we didn't. But we needed to make sure there was the possibility of one, yet also completely settle everything like more or less we had to write a TV series that was only in audio that could be a stand alone with serious potential. 

Dan:                It was funny because I was always thinking about that. I'm always like Let's leave this open for this. And so I came in from the point of view of leaving way too much open. And they're like, OK, no, we need to somehow close this. That needs to be a complete story in itself with just room to do more.  I mean, for me the challenge was when I initially conceived the idea with the premise I already described, the idea I had for this first season is they assembled this team. This team gets together on an island and starts working on the problem of all these ships and planes have gone missing. Their investigation was like the 1st 2/3 of the season, and then basically not to spoil anything, but they find a location that they need to go investigate and end up sort of crash landing on this island where this source of the mystery seems to be located. 

So we had this plan of, like, all this investigation with all these audio clues, and I was thinking that's gonna carry us forward, and then they were like, No, we need to, Is there any way you could have them get to the island like right away? And I was like, Oh my God, I had  this whole season in my head about resolving the mystery and all the disappearances and we kept having to squash that as much as possible basically cut to the chase as far as the series was concerned, So that was the hardest part for me. 

Mindy:            Yeah, that was definitely difficult, because I think I think your original plan was to have them getting to the island and, like the end of Episode five, and we did at, like, beginning of Episode two.

Dan:                It is so crazy, just like trying to squash all that in and make it interesting and just totally reframe our thinking. I think because Serial Box is part of the process, they use a producer who's involved in the series. And they also eventually have, like a beta reader of the people who, some company people in some external advisors, and everyone was saying like, Let's get there as soon as we can. So I think that's the direction was going. 

But you're right. It was challenging because we kept having to squish all that and make it make it intense and pacey and lay the appropriate groundwork. But then also get to where the mysteries took it as soon as possible. But one of the nice things about that is we got a season much as we had to squish all this stuff I had planned for the first half of the season. We got to expand and build upon kind of what happens once they get there. And that was a lot of fun, because I had. It wasn't just me. I had you and Sylvia and we were all coming up with ideas and talking about different interactions and who would be on the island, what would be on the island? How would that unfold? As time went on, that was a lot of fun. 

Mindy:            Yeah, it really was, and so non traditional for me, as far as writing style and just procedure, it was so different and it was such a great experience. And that's part of what, it's part of the reason why I signed on right away. When you contacted me, I was like, I need to expand my wheelhouse and expand my skill set. I don't know how to write for television I because that's basically what we were doing. I don't know how to work in a writer's room or be a co author. It's like, Let's do this. Let's go for three days and bang out some shit, you know? And it was great. Like I I was freaking exhausted. At the end of it was it was creatively draining. I thought it was great. It was a great experience as a writer. 

Dan:                I know. It almost killed me. Um, yes, but it was also like I look back, but then when we finished you know, the writing portion of it was really interesting, too, because we didn't write the whole thing that weekend. Obviously, we sort of laid out the season, made the assignments as best we could. We framed what would happen in the episodes, and we decided, Who's going to take a lead on writing each episode. And then the other interesting element to how Serial Box does things is their creative process for the whole writing of it is also under this formula. So the team of writers we each take an episode and they're the sequential episodes like 1,2,3 or 2,3,4 And we're all writing those simultaneously. That part was also like a little crazy because you're writing something that's gonna end right where somebody else's picks up and we're all writing at the same time. 

Mindy:            It was crazy and we would get together, there were Google chats where everybody would be like, this is where I'm stopping. My biggest concern. Of course was and I think everyone else's was, too, was continuity, continuity, continuity. How do we do this and keep things straight across? Because even things like, Ah, one of our main female characters is a police officer. But she's on a particular island where it was like the culture there, they wouldn't call her a detective. They would call her something else. And so we had to make sure we were using the right word, and all of us were using the right word every time. And the same was true of like Sylvia knows more about planes than I do. You know more about boats than I do. So it was like, you know, we had to make sure that all of us were using the right terms and consistently using really small things like that, that we had to be sure that we were consistent about what we were calling things even.

Dan:                Right there. I mean, that was a challenge. And I think it was since I was assigned to be the lead writer it's technically my responsibility to ensure continuity. But there was also no way I could do that by myself. So that was the purpose of these get togethers. We would talk, and there were even, like, simple things that came to light that were like, Okay, well, here's what I'm gonna have, you know, my characters do in this part, and we're like, wait you can't have those two because I have those two making out in the cave. So, like banging out all the stops, the sort of model out and figure, where is everyone and what's happening? And what happened with this ship wreck? There are a lot of details, and it's funny, too, because our our personalities came out, I think a little bit. We're on a scale of detail oriented, where Sylvia, I think, is by far the most detail oriented and very technical and very capable. In that way, you were probably the least caring about details, and were just like, No, that's probably what we're gonna work out. I'm gonna write this thing and I was somewhere in the middle. I try to.. I was trying to follow some details, working it out with Sylvia, but also, like, not to her level of being being that capable. So it's really Interesting seeing how we would handle stuff like that. Like usually, if it's like, OK, if we have to figure out how this speculative element is gonna work, let's work out. The timing of this and Sylvia and I are like trying to do these calculations and all the stuff you and you were just like just let me know what you guys figure out. 

Mindy:            Yeah, I was like, I literally don't care. Like that is, well, timelines for me - and I'm like this with my editor on my own books - I'm like, I don't care if you say it has to be a Tuesday, then just tell me it's Tuesday and I will do whatever.  You figure it out and tell me and that's what I'll write. But I'm just like I don't know, timelines linear time. I do not care. I I don't even exist in it very well. I'm just like whatever. I'll be there when I get there.  

Dan:                It's so true. But, you know, you you brought your strength to the to the project to. Like you were really good at killing people. And so whenever we had somebody that had to die, we were like, Well, that's clearly gonna be a Mindy episode because someone's going to die horrifically so that will go to you. And if there was, like, a plane crash or a boat crash or whatever, it was we're like, well, we should have Sylvia do that, clearly. 

Mindy:            Sylvia's gonna take that one. Yeah, Yeah, it was fun. 

Dan:                It was so fun, cause I think we all got into the story. And what's great is we all you know, after that summit, we all had invested, and it was our group story that we created together, and we're all super excited about what we're gonna write the week to week. You know, writing schedule was intense and it was, like, creatively and physically taxing, like you said. But it was also just fun because we weren't in alone. We're all writing together, and something we could count on you, Mindy, is you were, like, always done first. Like we had to write 10,000 words. And for me, and Sylvia it was, like, brutal to write that much in some short period of time. And you were always, like, done way before us, like an authority. 

Dan:                It was so great. So it was like, my goal to like, one time during the season beat Mindy in creating my first draft. I think I got it done once. But that was it. 

Mindy:            I think you did. I think you managed. Like, at one point, I think I was on tour and you were like, I did it. And I'm like, I'm on a plane, Dan, it's because I'm on a plane, okay? 

Dan:                I gotta victories any way I can get him. 

Mindy:            I understand. Yeah, it was It was fun. Like I had a good time with it. 

Dan:                It was a cool experience. I learned so much from writing with you guys. And we learned so much from you. Learned so much from Sylvia. Um, so it was really It wasn't just a work co writing experiences, it was really educational. I felt like I grew as a writer because of all those different elements working with you two, and the sort of dense timeline, and the team approach to this. It was, it was really interesting for me.

Mindy:            Let's talk about your book Putting the Science in Fiction. It's from Writer's Digest Publishing, and it was really cool, because what you did is you put together Ah, bunch of advice for writing with authenticity in science fiction, fantasy and also other genres. So you brought together scientists, physicians, engineers and experts in other areas to talk about how to put these things into your story. Essentially, your title says it all, Putting the Science in Fiction. So why don't you talk about that a little bit? 

Dan:                So I'm glad you asked. That thing has been a long running project. Basically, several years ago, I started a blog series where once a week I would invite an expert in some area that requires technical or engineering or medical expertise to come and do a guest post on my blog about their particular field and in particular, how to write it accurately. If you're just a lay person and I think the inspiration for the series was that I as a person who is a genetics researcher. I am easily annoyed by what I see as mistakes in the field of genetics and DNA research and that sort of stuff. Whenever I encountered it bothers me. That's just my personality, I guess. But like if it's a TV show, a movie, a book, anything where they're just making gross errors about the scientific accuracy, something it would bother me.  

And and so I started running a couple of these articles about, like, how to put more science in your genetics themed story that got a good response. And so I started inviting these other experts because I, sadly, the great secret about scientists is we don't know everything about all sciences. And so as much as I try and keep that on the D. L, there are a lot of other disciplines where my knowledge is cursory as anyone else's. And so I knew I needed to find other people who had expertise in those areas, and I would invite them to come to a guest post. It would basically be like this format. Okay, tell me the things that you encounter in media where people get something wrong about your area of expertise and then tell us about some ways that you could get it right or some elements to this particular subject, that if I understood a little bit about it and show that I would come off as a person who's convincingly knowledgeable about X and X might be space travel. It could be genetics, like in my case, it could be gravity. It could be systems, biology, anything like that. 

We basically wanted to come up with these relatively short pieces that would instruct an author in enough information to be dangerous. That's what we wanted to have, and so that blog series was going for some time. And then my agent said, Hey, you know, we should think about maybe trying to propose that to become a book and Writer's Digest books was the natural venue to pitch. But we put together a proposal and said, Look, we had this long running series. It's got a good readership. People really interested in this and we think would make a good book and this is what we put in. We proposed, I think, to do 30 or 40 chapters covering a lot of different disciplines and we would have 10% of those be ones that did not appear online, that were unique to the book because that's important when you're kind of taking something from online to book format. That's what became Putting the Science in Fiction. I mean, we pitched it to them. They really liked the idea. And I worked with my contributors to get their chapters sort of edited and consistent for inclusion as chapters in the book.

Mindy:            Very cool and I own that, I personally really enjoyed reading it. I find, without having much of a science background myself as a farmer's daughter, whenever I'm reading anything or watching a movie that has farming in it, I'm just like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, All wrong. And so you know, we all have our areas that we are specialists in, and I think that putting together specifically something ah, that is science based and is for science fiction and fantasy writers. Specifically, I think it's just fantastic. I love the idea. I love the book. There were plenty of things that I found useful to me. Even without being a science fiction author.  

Dan:                I'm glad you said that I appreciate your kind words, and you remind me to point out that this book is, I mean, the audience is writers, firstly, writers who are in genre fiction, but it's really any writer whose whose work might cover some of these technical elements. And so, um, there there's obviously gonna be some genetics because that's my wheelhouse. But there's also chemical, psychiatric and neurology components to it. There's wildlife biology. Then there's computers and technology, Earth and other planets. astronomy, and then actual rocket science. I mean, we have people who are astronomers and true rocket scientists who make contributions to it. So that's that's one of the appeals Is everyone who wrote an article for this is an expert in that field who works in that field. And so I think that was one of the unique things about it is that you can count on this person really knowing the nuances of it. So what I need to do clearly in the future is to get a farming article from you because clearly you're the farming expert.

Mindy:            Actually, I was sitting here thinking we should ah, band, together with a few other folks that we know and just do Putting the Midwest in your fiction because it's never right. It's never right. It's always just like either pure Appalachia or everybody's a redneck and is like, Dude, you know, I mean Dan's from Ohio and Dan's a genetic scientist. So it's like, I'm from Ohio. I am not a redneck. It's really bad. Whenever I see anything that's supposedly set in the Midwest, it's like everyone is racist and sexist and they all kick their dogs.

Dan:                Yeah, it's so true what you bring up, because I see a lot. I grew up in ST Louis, Missouri, which is a city. And But if you ever see Missouri portrayed in any form of media, it is, um, it's the absolute worst, most backwards hicks that you can imagine. So that bothers me, too. I'm totally behind this, putting the Midwest accurately in fiction idea. I think we should talk more about it.  

Mindy:            I think we should, because it is something that I could I could get on my soap box about. 

Dan:                You make the notion that everybody's an expert in something. It could be about where your from, about what you do for a job, even if you could even be something. It's like you're a custodian and you see how custodians are portrayed in TV snd it's totally wrong. All that stuff. Everyone has something they're an expert in, so I like it when bloggers and podcasters like yourself go out and find those people and interview them about this, their expertise because there's only so much research you can do on your own online, like Googling things or reading Wikipedia. That is a useful starting point. But finding someone with real expertise is so valuable and getting a little bit of their time to talk to them makes such a difference in how you are able to graft subject matter. I just I highly recommend it whenever you can do it. And most people, I don't know if you know this Mindy, but most people like talking about stuff that they know about their job.

Mindy:            I mean, the easiest thing to talk to someone about is themselves.  

Dan:                That's good. Yes, see, and most people probably don't get asked as much as they would like to about their job that they do. And about what things they bring to work or where they're from. So it's so easy to have those conversations, especially among other people who were also writers. 

Mindy:            You know, it's funny, you know, when you go to the doctor's office and you have to update all your paperwork and all that stuff if you're only there for your yearly or whatever. I'm always amused because it's like I will sit down and I update everything, and I fill everything in. I don't have a lot of medical like problems, history and my family. So it's a lot faster for me than it is for some people. But so it's like, You know, I'm just like, boom, boom, boom. Fill it out and I hand it in. And without exception, every time the secretary will say, Wow, that was fast. I'm always like, Well, I knew all the answers. 

Dan:                Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's helpful. 

Mindy:            I mean, it's not a test. It's like you're literally asking me about my own body, and I know these answers.  

Dan:                There's so much information out there, right? There's so much misinformation out there. It's sometimes comforting to know that you can trust the source. If something's worth printing right now with Corona virus, and then there's like an overwhelming amount of information. And I'm trying to sort of cull how much stuff I get so that I only get it from people who are known and trusted experts in the thing that I'm interested in. And that's something we should all strive to do in the information age is sort of reduce the noise and focus on good, high quality information. 

Mindy:            That's so true and will continue to be true. Moving forward. Last thing. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your books? 

Dan:                We'll start with my books. My fantasy series is now in audio is called Gateways to Alissia. It's about a Vegas magician who is trying to make it on the Strip and gets recruited by a company to go on a mission in this secret medieval world that they've discovered. And so the first book is called The Rogue Retrieval that's available in audio now. For my nonfiction book that we discuss is called Putting the Science in Fiction and the project that you and I discussed the Serial Box project that's called The Triangle, and you can listen, listen to or read the first episode for free on the Serial Box website that's serial as in Serial killer or you can get it through their app.