God Stone series & Wrack and Ruin w/Otto Schafer

Welcome And Author Introductions

Welcome everyone to In Other Worlds. Today we are sitting down with Otto Schaefer. Otto, how are you?

Good, good. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to have you here. So you have a couple of series that uh you have published. You've got uh God of Stone and Rack and Ruin. I try to keep everything kind of spoiler light for people who haven't read the series, and so we'll mostly just cover what is in book one, probably for each of the series that you have out.

Okay.

So God of Stone is your YA series. Give us a little bit of a rundown on that one.

Two Teens And A Hidden Journal

Right. So this follows, and in all my writing, I do this, but I bounce between two characters typically, male and female. And in the secret journal, I wrote it that way, and the two primary characters are Brianne and Garrett. Uh Garrett's from a small town, actually based in my hometown. Um, a lot of people say, Is Garrett you? And I say, Well, I mean, I think all your characters are you to some extent, but Garrett is in a small town, and he and his buddies, you know, all come from kind of blue-collar families and don't have a lot of money, and they run around town together, just like you would think of a typical small town group of kids, right? And they're doing some work in this old Victorian home uh for a kind of a I don't know if mysterious character is the right term, but it's a he's a real churchy guy, and he bought this Victorian, he's fixing it up, and they're in they're in his basement and they're doing some work and they're horse playing while he's not around and they're like kicking and punching, and you know, somebody's got a pair of pruners and pretending like it's a sword, and the other kid kicks it out of his hand, and it goes behind through this little opening and into the crawl space, and so they had to get back there and go get it before the owner comes down the stairs and catches them. So one of them's kind of doing lookout, the other one's climbing back in there, and they find this part of an old journal behind that wall. And one of the kids, Pete, who is a kind of a fan favorite, he is kind of the nerd of the bunch, and he figures out a way to get this journal, like he takes it home and figures out how to make this little humidifying chamber to moisten the pages so that he can open it. Um, because it's real brittle.

So pretty intense.

Yeah, so he starts like kind of getting it, he's using garbage bags and a humidifier and stuff and trying to get this thing softened up. So, anyway, he starts reading it, but it's so it's so old and like stained that they're missing pieces of it and they're only getting certain clues. But it kind of leaves these kids on this mystery, I guess, on how to figure out where this journal is leading them. And in the meantime, you've got Brianne, who has a much more exciting life, I guess, than her counterpart Garrett, but she is the daughter of a famous archaeologist, and he is usually on locations somewhere around the world, and she's spending summer with him before he goes, with her dad, before he goes, she goes off to college. So she's on a dig site in Mexico when the book starts, and they ultimately end up on Oak Island. Um, I love it. Because some mysterious person who doesn't want to be named is funding this huge expedition and wants her father to lead it. So they fly out to Oak Island and he begins this expedition that follows a little bit like the real Oak Island series, except in my book they find stuff. Um so, but it's not what anybody thinks it's gonna be. So in book one, they do enter an underground chamber when a little bit of magic kind of starts to happen in that space. So I do think that you know, book one of this series reads kind of like a mystery. It's not like you're not gonna get tons of dragons and giants and all the things that you will get throughout the series, but it's a five-book series, and you do get dragons and giants and senient trees, which are probably my favorite, believe it or not, throughout the series, but they don't really come into play in the first book. The first book kind of reads more like a mystery. So the idea being that Brianne and her father find what they

Releasing Magic Through The Godstones

think is the whole like Ark of the Covenant. They thought they found like maybe the Holy Grail and all these things inside this treasure chest that they find, but that's not actually what's inside of it. So when they find it and discover it in the book, you find out that it's actually the godstones. And the godstones, when assembled, become a crown, and it's a really powerful magical catalyst that is in this chest and buried deep in Oak Island because nobody was ever meant to find it. It was hidden there for a specific reason. And once they find it and open it, um, it kind of releases magic back into the world, and that secret um or mysterious guy who was funding everything turns out to be the guy who's trying to get a hold of that. I won't go into too much about why, but he's not a good person. Don't even want to say he's a person, but he's not good. And um, he's our villain, so he wants to get his hands on that very powerful Godstone's crown. And then in the meantime, Garrett and his buddies end up getting to the point where they know kind of where the book's leading or where the the journal's leading them, they know who wrote it, they get that far in book one, and then in book one, also we see Brianne and Garrett's kind of storylines merge and how they because I think a lot of what the readers are wondering through the first book is like, how do these two storylines ever come together? Like, how does that happen? So I think part of the fun of the first book is finding out how those two eventually connect um and and kind of like join up, and then in book two, they can start working towards going to this secret place that they figured out the journal was leading them, while our villain also needs to get to that place, and he's got you know the power of the godstone. So that's kind of how the whole series kind of kicks off, I guess I'd say.

Sentient Trees Giants And Dragon Lore

And then as we get into the next book, we get into trees and sentient trees being my favorite. Is there's a whole like hierarchy of trees. I kind of kind of thought about Tolkien, um, yeah, and like how he did how he did trees, but I wanted to create this whole hierarchy, so what I did is I used a lot of trees that we have around the world. We have a lot of really cool trees that have names, right? That are really old. We've got some 12,000-year-old trees, but they've been alive and watching how humans treat them, right?

We have some angry trees.

So, yeah, so think about how you know how trees might feel when like I live in a log cabin and I've got a couple oak trees outside the house that are.

You'll be the first one to go.

I mean, I just built my home out of their bones, basically, right? So, furniture and whatever, and we're tearing, you know, we're we're clearing the rainforest for more pastures for cows, and there's just you know, we're not very good to trees, probably. In book three, we get the cover of book three. I wish I could show you covers on here, but the cover of book three is the tree queen, and she's got a three-headed dragon behind her on the cover because he comes into play too in the third book. But anyway, um, so yeah, book three is probably my favorite, I think, of the of the series, just because of the trees and so much stuff that comes into play. So I've also got an army of giants that live in the center of the earth that once magic's released feel it and know that it's time to go back to the surface. So they they're coming and they're coming a whole massive horde or whatever you want to call of giants that also you know look at humans as food. So they're coming up from the middle uh in and they're coming out in the rainforest in a from a cave there. And then I have dragons, and I use some real places, which is kind of fun. So I've got this. If you if you Google the band of holes, you can just Google Band of Holes Peru, and you'll see these holes that go in a band all the way up this mountain. And the cool thing about it is nobody really knows for sure what those holes were for, but they're like four feet deep and like maybe you know, four or five feet across, and they're just holes in the side of a mountain, and there's no foliage on this mountain, it's just like desert, right? But this band, you can see it from space, band that just goes all the way up. So, in my in my book, those were where dragons were buried, eggs were buried, and then they hatched.

Ooh, I like that.

Yeah, so that's where dragons were buried and hatched, but then there's also mountains around those that you don't see those holes because those are where eggs are that haven't hatched. So under the right conditions, yeah, under the right conditions, they'll hatch. And so I get dragon hordes, giant armies, and the trees, and these kids all trying to stop this really bad wizard guy to save the world. So that's essentially what the books are kind of

Oak Island Obsession And Lincoln Cameos

about.

Now, did you pick Oak Island because you are fascinated by Oak Island? Because I grew up reading everything that I could about uh the mystery of Oak Island.

Yeah, I was I love the Oak Island story. I watched all the seasons um of the Oak Island show. And I think I was like so frustrated because I'm like, can they please find something more than a leg cross?

Anything. I those ox shoes, I got so sick of seeing the ox shoes.

Yeah, right? So I was like, I don't want to write, I want to write Oak Island in, but I want to feel like that's where I want my magical thing to be, baby, right?

And there's the theories are that there's it's you know the the Ark of the Covenant or Um the Holy Grail.

Yeah.

Yeah, fascinating. I I've been obsessed with Oak Island for gosh, almost my entire life.

Yeah, I know, I love it. And so I, you know, I have my own like spin-off of like the Knights Templar. I've got a president that grew up that there was a president in my hometown here in Illinois. I'll just tell you who it was, it's Abraham Lincoln, who surveyed the streets for the town that I I grew up in. He was a surveyor, it was one of his many jobs. He also lived at a little place called New Salem, which is it's a state park now, but like the reconstructed cabin that he lived in and all that stuff's out there, right? So Abraham Lincoln was a big part of my childhood. I actually worked at that park when I was a kid. And so having him be part of the story in a fictional way was a lot of fun for me. So the locations that I used in my little hometown of Petersburg, Illinois were real locations. The tunnel's a real place, the brickwork inside that tunnel's real and creepy. And, you know, it's it's pretty much true until it's not, if that makes sense. It's pretty much, you know, I told it pretty pretty true to my childhood until it wasn't magic, right?

You added magic in there.

Yeah, yeah. Um, so that was that. It was definitely a fun series and seven years of writing to get that because I started writing it. I guess I really started writing it in 2016, published the first book in 2019, and published one book every year after until it was done. So probably more like eight, eight or nine years of actual writing that

Research And Making Fantasy Believable

story.

That's a long time. So, what do you think of the hardest part of of adding in these magical, like mythical creatures into our everyday world was?

I don't know. I don't I mean the research, because if you're going to to probably stay true to real locations and when I'm inside of a you know a pyramid in Mexico and I'm describing what they're seeing and the archaeology and stuff, you know, I wanted it to be even to the point where I talked to, I spent some time talking to a lady who she had traced her ancestry back to Mayan, and she actually knew um Mayan language. Like she could, she knew it, she studied it and she wrote about it, and I had been talking to her, and she helped me with like some of the words that I used, some of the language that I used in the in the I guess it would have been like mostly the second and third book. I actually have a character that joins the group in book two who is Mayan descendant. She's a uh a young girl who kind of connects with with Garrett and Brienne in the next book. So anyway, I'd being able to use that, but I think the magical stuff making up stuff's easier for me than it is like the research on like all the real stuff is the hard is where the work comes in, right?

Yeah, yeah. Did you have to do a ton of research on um like the humidity chamber and how to build your own?

Yeah, I had to do some research on that and how to build it. Yep, I researched it, and then I also had to do a lot of Abraham Lincoln research and kind of the the mystery and stuff around why he never joined the Freemasons, but his mentor was a Freemason, and I had to do a lot of Knights Templar research. I had had to do, I mean, some Oak Island research, but I was pretty good at that because I knew I I was a that's the fact that I was kind of a freak. Yeah, I was a freak when it came to that because I knew I had watched every episode. I mean, that was there for me, right? But yeah, I think that I think with when it when it comes to magic, it's how do you make that seamless transition, especially when you're doing a modern day fantasy, into you know our modern day and make it believable, right? Without it being hokey. So for me, I feel like that's the tricky part, that's the art, is if you can really make it transition, it's like make it as seamless as you possibly can and believable as you can. Like if this were gonna happen, this is how it would happen, and I can believe that, right? Yeah, even if it's gonna be completely nutso out there, like because some of it is, some of it's so. I mean, we go off-world at one point in the series. Um you find out where some of the characters are from. I literally, literally solve like all the mysteries of the universe in in this series. I feel like I got it. It's all it's all there.

Fantastic.

Right.

Somebody needs to solve them.

I did it. It's all there. Just gonna read it.

So this is a finished series. Do you have any plans to revisit this universe? I you know, could you like it a little open, a little like a little open, I think. I didn't if you wanted to.

I did leave it open for the very reason that I could, and I and I have great ideas for spin-offs and different things. I guess it would depend, you know. I mean, maybe after I retire from my job, and um, which is only about four or five years away, and I can write full time.

Are you planning on retiring early?

Well, I mean, I'd like to retire by the time I'm like 57, maybe 58. So maybe I'm look at it like six to eight years, I guess, depending on when I go. But yeah, I would like to go back and revisit it, but it's also not, I mean, like, it'd be easy for me to answer you with like on the zombie stuff, like, do you plan on going back? I've already gotten a whole nother, like, the next book's gonna be the last book in the series, but then I know I want to jump forward like 10 years, then journey's 16 years old, and then I want to tell a whole nother story with her from her POV, where she gets a clue about her dad and goes off to find him on her own. And so I've got this whole like idea for her, and I can do that and it'll be fine because it's it's a really pop if to me. I mean, and by my measurements, it's really popular, but you know, the secret journal stuff has been, you know, it's done okay, but it's not definitely not as popular as maybe my zombie stuff. So, do you invest and go back and do that and and write spin-offs of something that's maybe not as right, you know, as popular as your other stuff? I don't know, you

Rack And Ruin Zombies With Science

know.

Speaking of the zombie stuff, Rack and Ruin is your other series. Give us a kind of a quick rundown on that one.

I always wanted to write zombies, I'm a huge zombie fan. I love probably Dawn of the Dead, um, maybe my favorite. I love Train to Busan. Um, I love I just love zombie zombie horror in general. I've read a lot of zombie stuff. Mountain Man's probably my favorite book series, um, though there are some good ones out there, but um I always wanted to do it, I always wanted to write it. And so when I finished this series of writing YA, I also wanted to write a series that I could just swear constantly. Um, because I couldn't through this series. I don't know why. I was always having to find other yeah, it's YA. So I couldn't like the kids banter back and forth and they swear a little bit, but I couldn't like really um use drop the F bomb. And I figured like zombies is about the best time as any to be dropping F bombs. But I also had this, like, I wanted to write a zombie series from again. I went between a male and a female. My male is a garbage man, right? He's a sanitation worker, garbage man, whatever you want to call it, that doesn't offend people. But I used to be a garbage man, so garbage man works for me. Um, I I drove a garbage truck, so I knew a lot about what that job is like. Um, you know, I did that 20 years ago, and so I wanted to write it from his his PO his point of view, but I also wanted to write it from a nurse's point of view who's like just trying to figure out what's happening. That way I could get real science-y, and I wanted it to be backed up by science. So my zombie series definitely um leans heavily into the why they're becoming why people are becoming zombies. So I wanted that to be really plausible, and I used a lot, a lot of research on parasites and different, you know, different types of parasites, and it's crazy what's in nature already without introducing like an alien wherever it's from into it, right?

You don't know, we don't really know, so we don't know.

Yeah, it was that was what I wanted to do, and and so I had a lot of fun writing that. Um, and I didn't want to write like a lot of your typical zombie stuff, you know, it's some you're following the military or some military person who's just a badass, and they're you know, they know how to use every kind of gun and they know, you know, and I didn't want that. So, like the fact that my character even survives the first book is pure stupid luck. I mean, because he did some dumb, some dumb stuff. In fact, it drove some people crazy. They were like, is anybody that stupid that would they would do do that? And I think but the answer is yes. There are people that you know, um, and I don't think it was out of stupidity, it was just, you know, maybe not the best decision making under pressure, right?

Well that and panic and I wouldn't make stupid decisions when you're right, you know, in a panic state.

Yeah, like when I was writing it, I'm like, God, I wouldn't do that, but okay, if that's the way if that's and I talk to my characters like that. I mean, if you're sure you want to do a display, I mean, okay, you know, but I'm probably weird when I write, but yeah, that's totally the conversations I have with my characters. And then, you know, I thought Zoe and the way, and they also have their marital issues and different things going on, which I think made it kind of fun. And then, of course, you know, I like to say I do zombies different. Um you find out in book one that you find out in book one that when you get infected, you don't have to be dead to get infected, and being infected it in itself doesn't kill you, so you just become

Running Zombies Cravings And Monstrosities

insane. And I'll tell you where what made me think of this is I watched a movie called The Crazies. Have you ever seen that?

I was actually an extra in that movie.

Were you really?

I was. They filmed it, they filmed it in Perry, Georgia, and a friend of mine was an extra, and they needed more people, and he was like, Do you want to come do it? And I said, Yes, I do. Three 12-hour shifts overnight in the cold, but it was a hundred percent worth it. It was so much fun. Did I see you in the movie?

I will go watch it right after this.

You probably can. I my brother was watching it and paused the screen and called me and was like, I can see you on my TV right now. But in the I have like really I have like a really short pixie cut and it's bleach blonde in that movie. And I play I am in the scene where they're all lined up and the military has shown up and they're trying to like take everyone's temperature to see if they're infected or not, and then they're kind of corralling everyone. So I'm in one of those lines and I'm getting my temperature checked, and then I end up in the um corralled off area with the crazies. It was so much fun.

That sounds so awesome. Yeah, I love that movie.

That's a good thing. I was actually gonna ask where the inspiration for that came from, though, because it's that's the inspiration for the first phase.

Yeah, phase one, they lose their minds, but you know, they're crave the cravings that you get as you're a living person who gets this infection. This right, you you you get infected and you crave it and you smell it, and it's like imagine the thing you would crave more than anything. It's worse, right? It's like undeniable craving, and you can smell, or at least there's some chemical a human brain puts off that is is now, you know, you can you can smell it. So they talk a lot about that through the book, right? I can smell it. Um give it to me, and you can't keep it for yourself, and just the crazy things they say is almost creepier than we when they become full-blown zombies, right?

It is, it is.

It is just their oh, yeah. And then, and of course, the fact that they can operate a vehicle or they could use a gun, and you know, but it's still like the worst drug you could ever imagine. You gotta have it, so you just go nuts for it. That's that's the phase one of it. And then, you know, if you kill them, don't destroy their brain, then they come back as a full-blown zombie. But my zombies run. I like running zombies. I don't like zombies.

I would never survive a running zombie.

Yeah. Yeah. I know, I probably wouldn't either, but that's my favorite kind of write about because I just I got so bored with Walking Dead zombies, and it became less about Walking Dead and more about the soap opera of what's going on with the infighting and stuff, which is interesting, but I don't know. I just really I wanted to write about zombies. So then it's like, okay, so I as I've written through the series, how do you rant how do you amp that up, right? So then we start to get into the amalgamations, which is where the zombie and I I guess I shouldn't go too much into it, but it's where the zombies start to merge and become these monstrosities of human, you know, conglomerations. Yeah, it was gross, wasn't it?

It was so gross, but it was so good.

Thank you.

Disgusting, but good. This series.

Editing Cliffhangers And Genre Switch

has so much action in it, but it's also incredibly character driven. How did you find that balance between action and character so there wasn't too much of each?

Yeah, that's a good question. So um you always have to tell the story within the story, right? So I think a lot of it is, you know, what are going what's the story going to be? And in this story, we have a little girl whose mom is is died in this horrible accident and then Oliver has now, you know, taken her in essentially and is trying to get home while his wife is in another part, you know, another city opposite direction, trying to make her way back home. So both as we bounce back and forth they're both trying to get home. So just going like what are the things that they're thinking about and then you know there's that underlying it the book starts off after a horrible fight that they had over you know her convinced of his infidelity and so you've got that whole story. So you got this that story happening in you know that tension and then you have a little girl kind of thrown into this mix with them that's not their kid. So you know just tell them that story. And then I think the other thing that I'll just drop here that's important in both my series is I have an amazing editor. So her guidance in telling me when you know hey can you give me more interiority from you know Zoe on what she's feeling about this right now in this moment. You know when we when we edit so I think I've been with my editor for all my books this all these all both series it's been the same editor and she's you know I did try a different editor before her um and it was not I could tell right away it's like no this isn't gonna this isn't gonna work and when I found Kristen it was just like it was perfect. So she tells me and it's not always things I want to hear sometimes I'll get my feedback and be like I I've I've learned now after so many books that I get my feedback I read through it sometimes I get pissed then I just close the laptop and I take a day and I let it and then I come back and I read it all again and what I find is when I read it again I'm like oh God she's right about that. Oh yeah that makes sense oh I should have saw that you know and so I can kind of come back and and just you just gotta give myself time to digest it a little bit and then come back and look at it anew right and I don't know for she's been really good. So a lot of her guidance helps me strike that balance you know and sometimes it's adding more to a scene and sometimes it's cutting right killing your darlings which she has no no problem doing to my work when it needs to happen. Were there any ma major scenes that you had written that she wanted you to cut that you you were disappointed that you needed to take out yeah I'm sure there were probably you know the first series that I wrote the keepers of the light and the secret journal were all one book and it was really long and she said I think you need to break this into two and I think you need to lose all this and I think this needs to go and blah blah blah and I'm like holy crap. Like it was a ton of work getting through the first two books. After I published the first one though I was able to do the second one pretty quick because it had already been written it was just rewriting and rewriting and I don't think I've ever rewritten a book as much as I rewrote The Secret Journal. That one was really hard. But I mean I think you know there's a journey through that series of I hope of those books getting better as you go and me becoming a better writer right um as I go and then I think that it I don't think I could have started off writing Rack and Ruin without this other series having you know having given me all the experience that it did. So then I came into Rack and Ruin and I said okay I just wrote this epically long fantasy series and that last book in my fantasy series like 600 and some pages right so specifically coming off the last gift which I do think I do I do love that book a lot but coming off that I was like okay I want something fast I want it punchy I don't want to write I don't want it to be long I want a short punchy story that just get let's get right into it and I think within a within a dozen pages the apocalypse is hit and we're going right I mean it doesn't take long and we're just rolling into it so I think I kind of knew what I wanted going into that how did I wanted it to be a lot of action and I do love to end chapters on cliffhangers and then bounce to the other POV which is just even more punishing to the poor reader but it just makes it that much more yeah it makes it that much more tense. And every chapter can't be a cliffhanger so you've got to it's a tool use it use it wisely as my editor would say right what was the hardest part of transitioning from a YA series to kind of an adult horror I don't think there was anything hard about it. For me I I mean it's harder to go the other way I would think right I feel like the rule there's more rules right you know like here's an example book two of the keepers of light in the fantasy series super action packed that one compared to the first one like it's action but I describe somebody getting their arm cut off right and I describe gets his arm cut off blood and blah blah blah and like what looks you know and she's like hey this is where she used this example it really taught me a lot I go into all this yeah I all this description about this person getting their arm torn out of their socket or whatever she's like you can say this you can say that their arm got pulled out of socket but you cannot describe in detail what that looks like because this is a YA book right so you can't now nightmares yeah you can definitely the arm can go but you gotta you can't you just gotta do it in the right way you can't so that to me that I get into the rack and ruin and I want to describe somebody eating somebody's brain or eating a cat's brain or whatever gross stuff that has happened through that series. And I do there's you know I if I can make my editor like nauseous or something and she and she'll tell me like I almost yakked in that part but then she'll also praise me for it I'm like that's a win like that's what I'm going for. So yeah they get pretty gory right um I think it would be harder to go the other way to go back.

But I could do it I just think you just gotta know the rules right yeah and I think you'd have to get into that different mindset before you started writing it also. You'd have to be like all right I gotta write it in I gotta remember that it's kids I can't get too gory. Yeah. And so there are gonna be the now this series

Future Projects Retirement And Farewell

is done. This all the Rack and Ruin series is also done right it's four books.

Five.

No I'm writing the fifth one now when will number five be out it uh next summer.

Let's just say next summer. But if I ended it where this book ends at people would hate me because it's not definitely not complete. But it'll be complete at the end of the fifth book story's complete and then I just have to decide you know if I want to do that 10 year jump ahead and pick it back up and I think I do. I think I will want to do that. I might you know write another book in between that so this book I was telling you about that I haven't told anybody about um I've been writing this in between there's times there's times for a writer when your book's setting with the editor and you're kind of stuck in limbo waiting and you don't want to start the next book because you're not sure what's going to change in the one you're in and you just got this like time right where you can do do other so I've been like I call this book my I've been working on it for like two years in between in between the last couple books. In those so I say that because I don't want readers to be like why are you writing another book when you got to yeah I'm waiting on you to get this book I yeah I would be I mean it wouldn't happen any faster if I wasn't writing this book I'll put it that way.

Right. Yeah I mean you've got some downtime in between sending it off to an editor and getting it back and all that.

Exactly.

So is that what's next? Is that so book five is gonna be the next one that comes out and then uh so this is gonna be what you do after Rack and Ruin is over?

Book five will be the next will come out next summer. Um this book will come out this year the book that I'm get I'm about to send back to my editor for like its third round. It will come out this year but it is not in either of these worlds. Well that's not true. It is in the world it's in the world.

Just not in the zombie apocalypse.

Right. I actually had uh Oliver and Sam even if you remember Sam from the first book. Yeah his partner making a yeah I may I had them make an appearance in this other secret book that I'm working on.

Oh nice and so will this also be a horror is this gonna be fantasy it's uh it's a techno thriller okay okay it's different it's different than anything I've written so that's exciting yeah it'll be it'll be fun I think nice so are you gonna be at any events this year any conventions or book tours or anything?

I haven't planned on any um just hard with my job and as busy as I am but I would like to do some some stuff I might I might do something local I think they're having something in Peoria I live pretty close to Peoria and they do a something at the convention center once a year usually in September I think yeah so I could I could end up going going and doing something there but I I want to do more stuff people ask me quite a bit other authors ask me too and I'd love to just do it but my career is demanding has me traveling a lot I've been like to Ireland and Switzerland and a lot of different places already this year and and then a lot of places Texas Georgia South Carolina North Carolina Indiana so I just yeah my work has me doing a lot of stuff so it's it's tough um but I'm not that far from retirement so once I retire I think I'll just do I just think I'll go everywhere with I just want to do like yeah that sounds awesome uh well I hope you get to retire soon that'll be great yeah I mean if I could maybe your your podcast will launch my uh Rack and Ruin series over that we can get just get me a movie deal or something and then I could there we go see now I would want to be you can be yeah then yeah you definitely will have to be in the movie. You've got experience.

I do I do just a little bit just as an extra just a little bit uh but it is honestly it's one of the most interesting takes on zombies I think that I've ever read well thank you I finished book one and I was like wow this is really really good this is not anything I've ever seen before. Yeah no I appreciate that it was really good so I think that's everything that I had for you was there anything that you wanted to talk about that I did not ask about no I don't think so I appreciate just want to say thank you and appreciate you having me on and um it was a lot of fun talking I don't get to do this very often um so it was really nice I appreciate it now I'm happy to have you on the books were fantastic thank you so I am I am overjoyed to spread the word I wish they uh you could see me because I'm smiling but I do I do um nothing I'll be sure the the picture that I put up I'll be sure it's a smiling picture.

Okay. That's fair then I could be smiling the whole time.

There you go. All right well I that's that's everything that I had thank you again so much for coming on and spending some time with me. Thank you everyone for sticking around. Thank you to my Patreon subscriber TJ Lombardi for being amazing. And uh yeah keep leveling up