May 5, 2025 • 40 mins
The brothers Forbes, Zach and Joshua, join the program to discuss their writing process as a team of brothers, their career in writing, and the Continuum series of books they write together.
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(00:00):
Hello and welcome back to the program.
My name is Michael Finney. Today I am joined by Zach and
Joshua Forbes, two brothers thatare writers.
Would you like to say hello, gentlemen?
Hi, happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Howdy. Great.
So let's talk about where you'refrom and, you know, maybe tell
(00:23):
us about being brothers. Let's start there.
Being brothers is it's a blessing and a curse.
Yeah, we're. So we both live in Florida right
now, but we live in separate places.
I live in Brazington with my girlfriend.
Joshua lives in Cape Coral, so same state, different houses.
(00:50):
I'm also originally from Massachusetts.
He is Florida native his whole life.
Yeah. So we kind of got into this
writing thing together and now we're co-authors on our main
series, our flagship series together, Continuum.
And so it's kind of a it's a unique situation to be in.
(01:13):
It's a challenge in some ways, also helpful in others.
You know, Joshua and I, we can edit each other's work.
We can kind of be our own beta readers until we hire more.
At the same time though, we are dependent on the other person
finishing their side before we can get to the next step.
(01:33):
And we may not agree on everything in terms of how the
story flows, how we word things.So like I said, there's a
positives and negatives. I think generally it's it's a
positive and it does help us, but there's always some
obstacles there. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with
that. But of course, as brothers you
come to expect at least one big fight per book, and then you all
(01:56):
you have to separate for a day and reconvene.
So that's just how it goes to siblings writing.
Yeah, super interesting, right? I feel like there are lots of
people who have writing partnersor even potentially ghost
writers on things, but maybe notso many of them are family
(02:18):
members or brothers. In this case, let's talk about
maybe where you both got interested in writing.
Zach, I assume you're older, so maybe you were doing it already
and Joshua got interested. Or did it come from different
places? Tell us about that.
Joshua actually started. I was in college at the time.
(02:43):
I was about halfway through, I think my junior year and you
know, we had talked a lot duringCOVID.
We had a lot of spare time, a lot of time together where we
were either playing video games or just hanging out.
Maybe we were working out on thepatio or something.
And we just talked, talked and talked about story ideas about
(03:08):
and we like to analyze differentmovies and and what works for
the plot and what doesn't. And, you know, we kind of
cobbled together this idea in our head, a really, really rough
idea of this like fallout esque world that we wanted to correct.
And it wasn't real at the time. But like there was the thought
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that like, well, what if we wrote something with this?
And what if we made something? But I went back to work in
college. I was studying and one day Josh
just kind of threw 1st chapter at me.
He was like, hey, read this. And it was obviously a very
rough draft. You know, we hadn't really
(03:51):
learned a lot about how to writeback then about perspectives and
you know, we sentence structure,but it was something tangible.
And so I read it and I said, wow, like you took that step,
let me try to write something now.
And so I jumped ahead in the story and I wrote kind of a
(04:12):
crazy scene later on in the bookand shared it with him.
And it just kind of snowballed from there, you know, one, one
page after another. We started writing and we
studied. I took a couple classes my
senior year on literary fiction and authorship and all that.
(04:32):
And you know, ever since then we've just been learning and
growing. And now we've got a few books
out that we're proud of and we we feel we've really polished to
a point that we're proud to share them.
Yeah. So that's, that's kind of our
story. That's how we came to be, you
know, he was the first, even though he's the youngest.
And we we just picked up each other's work and we started
(04:53):
polishing it. It's very cool.
I like it. Let's hear maybe about the
influences. I know you mentioned writing
something kind of in the vein ofFallout, you know, maybe what?
What's your favorite Fallout? Mine is very clearly the best
(05:15):
one. New Vegas, but you guys might
like something else. No, it's it's definitely New
Vegas. I, I couldn't argue with that if
I wanted to. I wasn't.
Really old enough when that gamewas popular, so I never got to
experience that first hand. But we played Fallout 76 all.
We would pull all nighters with that game just because it was
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one of the first things we coulddo together.
You can't really do that with any of the other ones without
modifying the game. Right.
And we created a lot of modded campaigns in Fallout 4 because
that that one opened the floodgates for mods.
It let the console players mod it.
And so, you know, we we created followers and threw in
(05:59):
characters from different video games and we just had a lot of
fun with that game. But raw experience.
I mean, yeah, New Vegas was definitely the best one I
played. Love that game.
We took some of the aesthetics of the NCR soldiers.
They have like the black masks. Sometimes they show them with
like the red glow to their lenses.
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We took a little bit of that forour National Guardsmen that we
have in this story, that aesthetic school, just the the
really like dark, oppressive soldier in a dystopian
apocalypse. You know that that's a really
cool aesthetic. Same thing with Resident Evil.
Josh was really, really big on Resident Evil back then and I
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played a couple games with him. So we kind of took a few
different of those in terms of video games.
And you know that that world really spoke to us.
Dark, oppressive, post apocalyptic, It's really cool.
And we're both big on guns. So we took a lot of inspiration
from like stuff that we'd fired,guns that we owned, and it
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helped to tailor the experience to us a little bit.
Yeah, that that 4th Resident Evil game is probably my
favorite game of all time. And it's funny that game had a
resurgence with the remake because back when it came out,
people were like, oh, this is getting a little super spy
esque. It's not as scary as the other
ones, but I liked that. I liked this very powerful Leon,
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who's been through the experiences in Raccoon City, and
we have a character in our storywho's very strongly inspired by
that kind of archetype. Interesting, Yeah.
I'd like the aspect of being in these game environments, getting
into modding them and then that becoming kind of a jumping off
point for writing and really having, you know, full imaginary
(07:51):
imaginative control of a story. And also doing it together.
Not only like the the playing aspect of games, but then the
writing of stories and novels and stuff like that, which I
sense is perhaps a little bit like a multiplayer game for the
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both of you. It's become a little more like
that. I that's a really interesting
way to look at it. I don't know that either of us
have, but you know, the way we play single player games
together with the way we played before we started writing was
we'd kind of choose characters. It's like any level where this
(08:32):
character was was being played, you would, you know, play as
that character. So like Resident Evil 8, there's
probably 2 levels where you playas Chris Redfield.
And so I was like, OK, I'll playthose levels since I'm big and
strong and Josh is, is a little taller and lengthier.
(08:52):
So Josh was Ethan and I was Chris.
And so writing it's it's we comemore like that.
As we've written the first book,we kind of just wrote different
scenes. Now we tend to divide it up by
characters more. This third one that that's
coming out June 20th, it is, youknow, I wrote a lot of the main
(09:16):
characters scenes and then Joshua wrote a lot of the
secondary character scenes. So we kind of adopted them as
this is our player character. And it helped being two
different people because we really put two different lenses
on how those characters see the world, how they interact with
it, because it's literally two different people writing.
(09:38):
So yeah, in a way it is kind of a multiplayer game with us going
through this world that we work together to craft as two
different characters. That makes a lot of.
Sense I do think it's important to mention that we we try our
hardest to blend those two voices into a consistent prose.
It's not as if we have two different writing styles
(09:59):
necessarily, It's just our own experiences will of course go
into how these characters react to stuff, but I would like to
think we smooth it over enough to where you shouldn't be able
to tell who wrote what. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Who are maybe your writing influences or books that you
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guys are reading? I, you know, I looked at your
website and I, you know, obviously saw some of your
favourites, but I think it's important for you guys to talk
about them and maybe even address how that finds its way
into your writing. James Patterson is was arguably
the first author I really started reading just because his
books are always at airports. I could grab it and read it.
(10:41):
They're fairly stored, fairly easygoing.
They don't take that long. That doesn't necessarily mean
they're the most well written things I've ever read, but I do
think a lot of that comes into the way I write stuff.
I love the way he did first person and third person in his
Alex Cross series. He kind of bounces between them
(11:02):
in a way that I could never imagine doing.
My favorite book of that series was The Big Bad Wolf, which was
in that Alex Cross series about this underground sort of sex
trafficking ring. It gets uncovered and so I
thought that was really cool. Yeah, I, we both were big fans
of Lee Child. I think on our website we listed
(11:26):
him under both of our influences.
I know for a fact for me, I definitely take a lot of my
perspective style from him. Lee Child, you know, he has a
way of they, they call it almostlike commercial style prose
where it's very simple. The sentences are there's some
(11:48):
grammatical leeway where it's almost like you're following a
train of thought. You know, rather than pointing
something out, comma describing it, you separate it into
separate sentences. You say like green and yellow as
a sentence on its own and like, yeah, that's not grammatically
correct. But if I'm in, in Lee Child's
(12:10):
case, Jack Reacher's head, I'd be thinking that that's how my
thoughts process. I, I put adjectives into their
own separate slot. So I, I really enjoyed writing
in that way. I think it makes it snappy to
read. I think it it's very user
friendly, so we're not overly complicating it, but at the same
time, if you use the right wordsand use the right similes and
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comparisons, you can really paint a vivid picture doing it
that way. So, you know, reach out.
Huge, huge inspiration. Love his books.
I've read almost all of them. Another one was Timothy Zahn.
He wrote a lot of the expanded universe Star Wars books.
I really, really loved his character work.
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You know, he could have like 17 different perspective characters
in one novel and somehow he'd make you care about every single
one of them. There's never a point where you
get into somebody's head and you're like, oh, this guy.
Like, you know, I wish I could skip it.
I can't wait to get back to Luke.
It would be, oh, I can't wait tosee what General Bell Ablis does
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in this scene because he's giving you the time with them
and made you can, you know, you know their strengths.
You know what their values are. You're excited to see what they
do as a real talent that he has for that.
And he paints their voices so vividly.
Even the characters from the movies he does really well.
So usually those are the main 2 I like to take.
I say we got the pros kind of the style of Lee Child and then
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the character building, little bit of the world building of
Timothy Zahn. Then there was a few others I
like Michael Crichton. The Andromeda Strain was
something that I read in preparation for writing our book
because our book, the first one,Three Rivers Plague, is about
this outbreak that becomes an undead apocalypse and creates
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this dystopian world. And so I was really interested
in how other authors handled that.
And Michael Crichton's a pretty reputable author.
So I thought, let me read this one.
And I really like how he describes a lot of the
scientific analysis in a very not dumbed down, but like easy
to understand way where the average reader could read it and
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get what's being said, but somebody really smart could also
read it and not scoff at it. It's digestible for both ends of
the spectrum. See, there's plenty more, but
you know, those are some big ones that I always like to point
out. And you know, we could talk
about it all day, but we got more to cover.
Well one more thing though, something that's a little harder
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to transfer into the stories we've been writing.
Something I personally love are the Witcher stories and I
watched the show Henry Cavill. I respect him for how much he
loves the series, but the show is just not it.
If you've read the books, you will understand how much, how
much Gerald's thought process just gets like pushed to the
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side in the show, completely ignored.
But it's like it's a very he's avery interesting character to
follow in this in the books. You know, I haven't read those
books or played the games. I have watched the show.
I thought it started out pretty well, kind of meanders off a bit
over the years. I like the, there's like a real
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episodic nature to that first season and then they try to make
it a little bit more linear and it, it, you know, not that
there's a problem with it. It just felt very different than
the first season. And then obviously, you know,
now it's going to be something completely different.
I I sense. Yeah, I mean, the first episode
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of the show where there's that whole, like, there's that old
sage up in the tower and there'sthe girl whose prophecy is to
destroy this town. There's this whole thought
process. Geralt goes to where he puts it
all together. And in the show they just dumb
it down to him waking up and saying like the town, and then
he runs over there. That's it.
So I don't know. It didn't do it for me, but I
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know some people like it. Let's get to your books.
Let's hear about Three Rivers Plague.
And you know, why did you, why did you pick Pittsburgh?
You know how'd that come up? Pittsburgh is a very interesting
city. I don't know if you've ever
been, but it's. I have.
(16:37):
Yeah, it is. Topographically, it is such an
interesting place. There's mountains surrounding
it, almost like the setting of avideo game, right?
These are the boundaries. You can't cross these.
But then you overlook essentially A Moat around the
city, which is Three Rivers, right?
The Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio River.
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And they meet at this fine pointright at the center, which is
the tip of Point State Park, which used to be an old Fort, an
old American Fort back in the day.
And you know, there's so many different elements to the
climate there. You got the rivers, you got the
mountains. It's always rainy.
There's the surrounding forest, you know, the Amish to the
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north. Pennsylvania alone is
interesting enough, but Pittsburgh is really the
culmination of those elements all meeting at a point on the
West End of the state. And I had been there with my
girlfriend. She's from Pittsburgh.
And so I visited there with her,and I was so enamored by it.
It's got a lot of history. They've got a big statue of Mr.
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Rogers outside the stadium. You know, the all, like I said,
all the Fort stuff. And it's just, it feels like the
ideal location to blow shit up. You know, like let's let's have
some kind of war here. And obviously that culminated
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for us in a post apocalypse, youknow, people running for their
lives. And then you get to a year later
and people are just scraping by.It's the shell of what the old
world used to be. And it, you know, Pittsburgh
really embodies that Americana. You know, this is the old world
America. We're living in the shell of it.
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We get to see what was once a normal everyday life, but we're
shooting and running and and battling to survive and what's
left of it. Originally, we had written the
story to be in Philadelphia, just at random.
That first chapter Josh had given me was in Philadelphia.
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It was at the Lincoln Financial Field instead of the Three
Rivers Stadium. You guys did Three Rivers
Stadium, That's fantastic. When is this supposed to be
based? This is in the 80s, is in 1980,
Yeah. So back when that was a thing.
It's not a thing anymore, I don't think.
I think they moved. Well, they it used to be the
home of the Steelers and the Pirates, but now both the
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Steelers and the Pirates have their own stadiums.
Yeah, I mean, we were in that alternate history sale that the
base book sale did the other day.
Because it is. It's alternate history.
It's in the 1980s, so it's kind of a period piece with like the
rock'n'roll aspect. Our main characters are a rock
band. We thought that was a fun little
twist on like the zombie apocalypse to make our main cast
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like these sort of quirky different band members.
You got the big guy on the drumswho's like an ex bouncer, you
know, you got the kind of littledifferent in the head guitarist
who just really likes to play with stuff like season's hands.
You got the lead singer who's a little bit of a drug addict,
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kind of lost his mind a little bit trying to find out what he
is and what he wants. And and we really like that idea
of playing with that. So we figured, OK, let's set it
in the era where these sorts of characters and personalities
find the most. And that was. 1980s America.
And so we threw them in there. Like I was saying, they
(20:17):
originally were performing at Lincoln Financial Field when the
apocalypse breaks out. But now we changed it to Three
Rivers Stadium because we thought Pittsburgh was just a
much more interesting place to put it instead of just a big
like, metropolitan city. It's kind of everything all at
once, if you know what I mean. Yeah.
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I also think that, at least for me, the time that we started
writing this book is very interesting because it was right
after COVID. Obviously, my high school years
were essentially destroyed by COVID.
I'm product of that generation. And so a little bit of that
comes off in his first book, butit's funny as it's in the 80s.
So we take these 80s stereotypesand almost twist it into what if
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this quarantine had happened back then and it was actually
some crazy virus that's killing people, how would these groups
have reacted to it? How different is it from how it
was in 2020? Obviously.
I like what you guys are doing in terms of mapping skills,
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which is I would say a very video game centric perspective
against the band. And then placing them into the
setting in the world that that you're crafting.
That's again, I see a strong parallel between those things
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for you guys. I I think that it, whether or
not it's like front of mind or just by happenstance, you know,
it seems very evident to me. Yeah, it does function a little
bit like an RPG would, in a sense.
I think the biggest thing that sets that apart is how the party
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changes throughout the story. We we were very afraid towards
the start of writing this story to just knock characters off the
table completely. But as we wrote it, we realized
that's the kind of story we wantto write.
We want the reader to be on their toes so party members will
just drop without a second thought.
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And I mean, that's what separates us from RPGs.
Have you guys explored lit RPG? A little.
I'm aware of it as a genre. You know, there's isn't Sledge.
Sledge is a technically a lit RPG, is it not?
I'm not familiar enough to speakon that to be honest with you,
(22:50):
OK. I guess you haven't read it yet.
Sledge is a popular one everybody talks about now.
I, I liked Sledge. I thought it was cool.
You know, he's kind of going through like a dungeon taking on
bosses. You know, he's this big, like
Opie character. And so you, you get to see him
smash some heads. It wasn't what we set out to
(23:11):
write. I I'd be interested to read more
from that genre just to see how it compares because you're
right. And not all of its front of
mind. Like our story.
There are sort of like mini bosses sometimes where there's
characters that are lieutenants of the main antagonist that you
(23:32):
come into conflict with in a particular place.
You know, it is kind of mapped out that way.
But like Josh said, you know, the party changes.
There's characters that seem like they're on an arc, like
they're going to change over a long period of time in this
story. And just like in the real world,
they don't always get there. You know, somebody might get
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knocked off and die, and they never really got to achieve what
in an ideal world, they would have.
And I think that only amplifies the journey of the other
characters who do make it because you see what could have
been and what's been lost. And, you know, Walking Dead does
that a little bit in terms of television.
(24:15):
You know, that was something that I watched a lot of trying
to take in other zombie media. And it it does that a little.
But there's also a lot of plot armor and Walking Dead like
characters shouldn't survive certain things.
Rosita is a particularly poignant example of that.
At one point she tries to shoot like the main big bad and fails
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and instead of killing her or like punishing her, they kill
somebody else. And it's it just kind of struck
me as, I don't know, that didn'tseem very in character for this,
this villain. She was under contract, yeah.
Yeah, so they had to keep her around, right.
And you run into that problem asyou go.
But there's other times where they did kill off characters
(25:01):
that I wouldn't have expected. So that they, you know, it was
ups and downs, but we we really wanted to do that.
We said no matter how much we love this character, no matter
how great their story is so far,not everyone gets there.
And that's a fact of life. And the ones who do get there
and get to be celebrated even more because of it.
(25:22):
Let's move into You guys have been doing this for five years
now, right? That's when you started,
basically. So how many books have you
released thus far, either solo or collaboratively?
In terms of the main series, by the time this interview is
(25:43):
aired, I believe the third one would be published.
So there will be 3 mainline stories in our Continuum series.
And then there was a equal storythat Zach wrote for the majority
that set in our same world. It's a little more spy thriller,
a little more. This is the mission.
It's set in Chile and it's it's a much shorter story.
(26:06):
And then Zach has his own spin off that I don't, I don't dare
look at. He can tell you about that.
Brutal. Yeah, it's hard to get him to
read stuff I write on my own, but yeah, we have our mainline
series. I always call it our flagship
series because it's our biggest thing.
It's what we put most of our time into, and that is the
(26:30):
starting with Three Rivers Plague into Foot in the Grave,
which is the sequel. And then we have this third one
coming out called Tooth and Nail, and that's our zombie
apocalypse series. We try to give them these sort
of horror as thriller names, andI like all of them so far.
(26:50):
But the one he's referring to, the prequel is called Long
Caldera Run. It was kind of a test, you know,
I wanted to write a novella because novellas, they take a
little less time, they're snappier for the reader.
And so it's kind of a good way for a reader to get a sense of
you as an author, see what your style is.
(27:13):
If they like it, they can buy the bigger one.
If they don't, well, they don't have to commit.
And so it doesn't really waste them too much time.
And so that formal formulated into this sort of spy thriller
prequel where you take one of the secondary characters from
the apocalypse story who is kindof involved with the CIA and we
(27:37):
tell a story with him prior to the outbreaks a few years prior.
And it's it's just kind of this set up to like, what's the state
of the world, political tensions, you know, the, the how
close this world kind of is to the brink.
And it's just the 1 mission in Chile that this Black Ops team
(27:59):
goes on, but the stakes get really high really fast.
And even in this short story that that just follows this one
mission, you get a real sense for how conflicted this world is
and just how easy it was for theoutbreaks to happen.
(28:20):
And we've got great reviews on that.
It's currently our highest ratedbook on Amazon, so it's good.
I really liked it. I had a fun time writing it.
I'm excited to write more in that vein once we finished our
main series, You know, God knowswhen that'll be, but you know,
(28:41):
it's a fun little side project. And then I have Slipspace, which
is kind of what I'm known for atthis point.
Slipspace Terra Nolius was my space opera sci-fi book that I
wrote all by myself. It just kind of to pass the time
while Josh was working on his part for our main series.
(29:04):
I, you know, I thought about it,I've been reading a lot of Star
Wars books, a lot of, you know, space hoppers and stuff from
other indie authors. And I thought, why don't I give
this a crap, you know, try to flex my creative side for a bit
and really branch out into this completely made-up world, you
(29:24):
know, made-up Galaxy almost. So I wrote that it's about
150,000 words, so it's shorter than the others.
The others are longer than that,but it's really.
It's. Yeah, so we write long books.
You do. Probably because it's both of
us, probably because there's twopeople.
(29:44):
So we just get a lot more like out of it.
I I like to lean them out as much as I can, but it just, when
we write together, it doesn't work that way.
We get a lot on the page. So we try to make the chapters
snappy and we divide them up into episodes.
So you'll have like 6 to 12 chapters per episode.
(30:08):
That way it makes it digestible.It makes it so the readers can
get through it at a steady pace rather than just feeling like
they have to read through the whole thing.
But yeah, we write long books. 150 is on the lower end.
Yeah. And so, you know, Slip space
obviously was in that competition, the SPSFC, and
(30:31):
there was a lot of controversy with the SPSFC.
You know, when Devin Erickson got booted.
And I was one of the few people that jumped out alongside him
just to say I don't really like the decision that this
competition's made. And I got a lot of positive
response for that. A lot of people went and bought
(30:51):
Slip Space in solidarity. You know, I, I sold several 100
copies in one month, which is anoutlier for us, and it became a
profitable book. It's definitely our most
profitable book that we've made just because of that one
incident. So feels like I have to do a
(31:14):
sequel to it at some point. But it was a, it's probably the
hardest book I've written as well, just because it's so out
there. But I do think it's good.
I do really like it. I'm proud of the fact that I
stepped out and wrote such a a unique story.
But it'll take some effort to write a sequel, I think, to
(31:34):
really dive into that world again.
So let's talk about the Continuum series, because you
work on it together. Do you have the whole narrative
arc mapped out? Do you know how many books there
will ultimately be? How far along into that are you?
Anything along those lines? I would, I would like to say
yes, but there's always another book is why I look at it.
(31:57):
We have had this two-part finaleplanned ever since we wrote the
first book, Three Rivers Plague.And then we realized, OK, we
have this good idea for a secondbook, we'll write that one.
And then after that was done, werealized the two main
characters. Now, first, the character was
established in the second book'srelationship with the main
(32:18):
character could be developed better.
So now we had to write this third book, and it's become
arguably the best thing we've written, in my opinion.
And so now we have this good idea for a fourth story.
So we're going to write that. I would like to say 6 is the
right answer, but who knows? It could just keep growing.
(32:39):
Yeah, we always come up with newideas in the middle.
This two-part finale that we've had in mind, it is it's pretty
definitively A finale to the story.
It takes a lot of like the worldthat we've built and matches it
together. The, you know, we make reference
(33:00):
to a lot of different locations.We like to see the next stories
as we write. And so in Three Rivers Plague,
for instance, we refer a couple of times to a quarantine zone in
New York where one of the main, like enemy factions is based out
of. And then Book 2 is set in New
(33:22):
York, in the New York quarantinezone.
And then throughout both of those books, we make reference
to what the hell is going on in Washington, DC like where's the
US government? And our intention was to build
up to that in the two-part finale where DC is finally
getting involved again and they're recruiting for their
(33:44):
militia, trying to take back certain parts of the country.
And so the first part of that finale is the recruitment is a
particular mission set in Florida where we live.
And then that book would end with like a sledgehammer coming
down on all of it. And then the second part of that
(34:06):
finale would be building up whatwe can out of out of that
catastrophe and giving our characters a proper alike, OK,
this is the world we live in now.
But as we've gone, as Josh said,there's certain elements that we
felt we wanted to use more. A particular character in Book
(34:26):
2, as he said, younger characterwho joins the group.
And he is very close with our main character Thomas by the end
of Book 2. And he's supposed to be very
close with him by this finale, but the reader doesn't see as
much of that as we would like. So we thought, OK, let's give
(34:49):
him a new adventure to go on together.
We'll take some of these seeds that we've planted and expand
them a little bit and just buildup this whole new book right in
the middle. And so that's where Book 3 came
from and we had to put some characters on the back burner
for a minute who are going to come back for the finale just
(35:10):
because there's only so much room in one story.
You know, even for us, obviouslytrying to take inspiration from,
from Timothy's on, you know, it's hard to juggle a lot of
mean characters all at once. It's it's not an easy thing for
anybody, no matter how much you like to read it.
So we, we did, we divided up whois necessary, who needed to be
(35:30):
there. And we wrote this expedition to
Boston in Book 3. And there's a lot of emotional
work that we do with these characters, a lot of cool set
pieces. One of my signatures when I
write is I like to just think ofthe craziest like set piece for
a fight you could think of. You know what, what would like
(35:55):
in Book 2, we have this set piece where it's the enemy
faction is kind of this construction site.
It's where they're based out of.And so they have a cell where
they keep a prisoner in danglingfrom this enormous crane above
the work site. And to put like an action set
piece there. And this little cell dangling
(36:16):
100 feet in the air, it's like, wow, like how are they going to
get out of this? I like to write myself into
traps like that and then figure out how to get characters out.
So we always do little things like that.
And Book 3 has a a few really cool examples of that.
And it's also, like Josh said, Ithink in terms of emotion and
(36:37):
like character building, it might be our best work so far.
And we pulled it out of nothing just because we wanted to
develop these characters more. Yeah, very good.
Are there things that we haven'theard about that either of you
feel we need to know, either about yourselves or your work,
(36:59):
the craft of writing, anything? I think one thing for me that
definitely shows in the way I write is music.
The music I tend to listen to isvery, very much story.
It's not the whatever trashy pop, it's I.
There's this man named Jason Isbell, who of course his songs
(37:20):
are very much put to himself in the head of a character who
writes this song, and he tells this story in 3 minutes.
And by the end, you feel like you understand this person's
motivations perfectly. And I think it's the way that
music can be formed like that. I try to emulate the way those
lines flow in my own writing. Of course, not 100%, but I think
(37:44):
that's a big a big part of it. Yeah, music is huge for us.
You know, we already talked about video games and TV shows
and other books, the music, eachof our episodes, not just in the
Continuum series. It started with the Continuum
series where each episode would be named after a song just
(38:05):
because the main characters are all musicians.
You know, it's a rock band. And so it fit the vibe, this 80s
aesthetic where every episode was Free Bird and then End of
the World as we know it, stuff like that.
But that kind of became one of our signatures.
So now even Slip Space does that, where every episode is
(38:27):
named after a song. Slip Space wasn't restricted to
80s music because it's not set in any particular time period.
But it's a huge influence on us,like Josh said, the way that we
structure our prose, the little things that we give references
(38:48):
to, you know, how we name our characters, how we build our
settings. Music plays a huge part in that.
We're both very musically inclined people.
And I, you know, I, I think there is real storytelling in
music for sure. Absolutely.
As a musician I would agree withyou.
(39:09):
As a writer, I also think music is one of those sensory
components that is probably not used in world building enough in
general, so I'm happy to hear you guys incorporating that into
your work. So when can people expect to see
(39:32):
the next book out? I believe it was June 20th, you
said? Yeah, June 20th is tooth and
nail the release date. You know, we're doing our cover
reveal soon, so that'll all be done and gone by the time this
is published. This.
Interview. This will probably come out in
May, just so you guys know. It'll be a little bit before,
(39:53):
but that's all right. OK Oh well the cover reveal is
going to be the end of April. We're working on it now.
It's either going to be April 25th or April 30th, so that'll
be done by the time this is out.But I guess the book will still
be coming out. So June 20th.
Yeah, that's the release date. Pre-orders will probably be
opened already, but. It's going to be a blast.
(40:17):
Like I said, this is one of our our best works.
It might be our best work so far, and we're going to jump
right into writing Book 4 as soon as it's out.
Awesome. Well, guys, thanks for joining
me. Thanks for taking the time,
telling us about yourselves, telling us about your work and
look forward to the release. I'm glad to be here, man.
(40:38):
And thank you very much for having us on, especially both of
us. I know we're we're a package
deal. So sometimes it's a long.
Hello and welcome back to the program.
My name is Michael Finney. Today I am joined by Zach and
Joshua Forbes, two brothers thatare writers.
Would you like to say hello, gentlemen?
Hi, happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Howdy. Great.
So let's talk about where you'refrom and, you know, maybe tell
(00:23):
us about being brothers. Let's start there.
Being brothers is it's a blessing and a curse.
Yeah, we're. So we both live in Florida right
now, but we live in separate places.
I live in Brazington with my girlfriend.
Joshua lives in Cape Coral, so same state, different houses.
(00:50):
I'm also originally from Massachusetts.
He is Florida native his whole life.
Yeah. So we kind of got into this
writing thing together and now we're co-authors on our main
series, our flagship series together, Continuum.
And so it's kind of a it's a unique situation to be in.
(01:13):
It's a challenge in some ways, also helpful in others.
You know, Joshua and I, we can edit each other's work.
We can kind of be our own beta readers until we hire more.
At the same time though, we are dependent on the other person
finishing their side before we can get to the next step.
(01:33):
And we may not agree on everything in terms of how the
story flows, how we word things.So like I said, there's a
positives and negatives. I think generally it's it's a
positive and it does help us, but there's always some
obstacles there. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with
that. But of course, as brothers you
come to expect at least one big fight per book, and then you all
(01:56):
you have to separate for a day and reconvene.
So that's just how it goes to siblings writing.
Yeah, super interesting, right? I feel like there are lots of
people who have writing partnersor even potentially ghost
writers on things, but maybe notso many of them are family
(02:18):
members or brothers. In this case, let's talk about
maybe where you both got interested in writing.
Zach, I assume you're older, so maybe you were doing it already
and Joshua got interested. Or did it come from different
places? Tell us about that.
Joshua actually started. I was in college at the time.
(02:43):
I was about halfway through, I think my junior year and you
know, we had talked a lot duringCOVID.
We had a lot of spare time, a lot of time together where we
were either playing video games or just hanging out.
Maybe we were working out on thepatio or something.
And we just talked, talked and talked about story ideas about
(03:08):
and we like to analyze differentmovies and and what works for
the plot and what doesn't. And, you know, we kind of
cobbled together this idea in our head, a really, really rough
idea of this like fallout esque world that we wanted to correct.
And it wasn't real at the time. But like there was the thought
(03:31):
that like, well, what if we wrote something with this?
And what if we made something? But I went back to work in
college. I was studying and one day Josh
just kind of threw 1st chapter at me.
He was like, hey, read this. And it was obviously a very
rough draft. You know, we hadn't really
(03:51):
learned a lot about how to writeback then about perspectives and
you know, we sentence structure,but it was something tangible.
And so I read it and I said, wow, like you took that step,
let me try to write something now.
And so I jumped ahead in the story and I wrote kind of a
(04:12):
crazy scene later on in the bookand shared it with him.
And it just kind of snowballed from there, you know, one, one
page after another. We started writing and we
studied. I took a couple classes my
senior year on literary fiction and authorship and all that.
(04:32):
And you know, ever since then we've just been learning and
growing. And now we've got a few books
out that we're proud of and we we feel we've really polished to
a point that we're proud to share them.
Yeah. So that's, that's kind of our
story. That's how we came to be, you
know, he was the first, even though he's the youngest.
And we we just picked up each other's work and we started
(04:53):
polishing it. It's very cool.
I like it. Let's hear maybe about the
influences. I know you mentioned writing
something kind of in the vein ofFallout, you know, maybe what?
What's your favorite Fallout? Mine is very clearly the best
(05:15):
one. New Vegas, but you guys might
like something else. No, it's it's definitely New
Vegas. I, I couldn't argue with that if
I wanted to. I wasn't.
Really old enough when that gamewas popular, so I never got to
experience that first hand. But we played Fallout 76 all.
We would pull all nighters with that game just because it was
(05:35):
one of the first things we coulddo together.
You can't really do that with any of the other ones without
modifying the game. Right.
And we created a lot of modded campaigns in Fallout 4 because
that that one opened the floodgates for mods.
It let the console players mod it.
And so, you know, we we created followers and threw in
(05:59):
characters from different video games and we just had a lot of
fun with that game. But raw experience.
I mean, yeah, New Vegas was definitely the best one I
played. Love that game.
We took some of the aesthetics of the NCR soldiers.
They have like the black masks. Sometimes they show them with
like the red glow to their lenses.
(06:21):
We took a little bit of that forour National Guardsmen that we
have in this story, that aesthetic school, just the the
really like dark, oppressive soldier in a dystopian
apocalypse. You know that that's a really
cool aesthetic. Same thing with Resident Evil.
Josh was really, really big on Resident Evil back then and I
(06:42):
played a couple games with him. So we kind of took a few
different of those in terms of video games.
And you know that that world really spoke to us.
Dark, oppressive, post apocalyptic, It's really cool.
And we're both big on guns. So we took a lot of inspiration
from like stuff that we'd fired,guns that we owned, and it
(07:03):
helped to tailor the experience to us a little bit.
Yeah, that that 4th Resident Evil game is probably my
favorite game of all time. And it's funny that game had a
resurgence with the remake because back when it came out,
people were like, oh, this is getting a little super spy
esque. It's not as scary as the other
ones, but I liked that. I liked this very powerful Leon,
(07:26):
who's been through the experiences in Raccoon City, and
we have a character in our storywho's very strongly inspired by
that kind of archetype. Interesting, Yeah.
I'd like the aspect of being in these game environments, getting
into modding them and then that becoming kind of a jumping off
point for writing and really having, you know, full imaginary
(07:51):
imaginative control of a story. And also doing it together.
Not only like the the playing aspect of games, but then the
writing of stories and novels and stuff like that, which I
sense is perhaps a little bit like a multiplayer game for the
(08:12):
both of you. It's become a little more like
that. I that's a really interesting
way to look at it. I don't know that either of us
have, but you know, the way we play single player games
together with the way we played before we started writing was
we'd kind of choose characters. It's like any level where this
(08:32):
character was was being played, you would, you know, play as
that character. So like Resident Evil 8, there's
probably 2 levels where you playas Chris Redfield.
And so I was like, OK, I'll playthose levels since I'm big and
strong and Josh is, is a little taller and lengthier.
(08:52):
So Josh was Ethan and I was Chris.
And so writing it's it's we comemore like that.
As we've written the first book,we kind of just wrote different
scenes. Now we tend to divide it up by
characters more. This third one that that's
coming out June 20th, it is, youknow, I wrote a lot of the main
(09:16):
characters scenes and then Joshua wrote a lot of the
secondary character scenes. So we kind of adopted them as
this is our player character. And it helped being two
different people because we really put two different lenses
on how those characters see the world, how they interact with
it, because it's literally two different people writing.
(09:38):
So yeah, in a way it is kind of a multiplayer game with us going
through this world that we work together to craft as two
different characters. That makes a lot of.
Sense I do think it's important to mention that we we try our
hardest to blend those two voices into a consistent prose.
It's not as if we have two different writing styles
(09:59):
necessarily, It's just our own experiences will of course go
into how these characters react to stuff, but I would like to
think we smooth it over enough to where you shouldn't be able
to tell who wrote what. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Who are maybe your writing influences or books that you
(10:19):
guys are reading? I, you know, I looked at your
website and I, you know, obviously saw some of your
favourites, but I think it's important for you guys to talk
about them and maybe even address how that finds its way
into your writing. James Patterson is was arguably
the first author I really started reading just because his
books are always at airports. I could grab it and read it.
(10:41):
They're fairly stored, fairly easygoing.
They don't take that long. That doesn't necessarily mean
they're the most well written things I've ever read, but I do
think a lot of that comes into the way I write stuff.
I love the way he did first person and third person in his
Alex Cross series. He kind of bounces between them
(11:02):
in a way that I could never imagine doing.
My favorite book of that series was The Big Bad Wolf, which was
in that Alex Cross series about this underground sort of sex
trafficking ring. It gets uncovered and so I
thought that was really cool. Yeah, I, we both were big fans
of Lee Child. I think on our website we listed
(11:26):
him under both of our influences.
I know for a fact for me, I definitely take a lot of my
perspective style from him. Lee Child, you know, he has a
way of they, they call it almostlike commercial style prose
where it's very simple. The sentences are there's some
(11:48):
grammatical leeway where it's almost like you're following a
train of thought. You know, rather than pointing
something out, comma describing it, you separate it into
separate sentences. You say like green and yellow as
a sentence on its own and like, yeah, that's not grammatically
correct. But if I'm in, in Lee Child's
(12:10):
case, Jack Reacher's head, I'd be thinking that that's how my
thoughts process. I, I put adjectives into their
own separate slot. So I, I really enjoyed writing
in that way. I think it makes it snappy to
read. I think it it's very user
friendly, so we're not overly complicating it, but at the same
time, if you use the right wordsand use the right similes and
(12:34):
comparisons, you can really paint a vivid picture doing it
that way. So, you know, reach out.
Huge, huge inspiration. Love his books.
I've read almost all of them. Another one was Timothy Zahn.
He wrote a lot of the expanded universe Star Wars books.
I really, really loved his character work.
(12:56):
You know, he could have like 17 different perspective characters
in one novel and somehow he'd make you care about every single
one of them. There's never a point where you
get into somebody's head and you're like, oh, this guy.
Like, you know, I wish I could skip it.
I can't wait to get back to Luke.
It would be, oh, I can't wait tosee what General Bell Ablis does
(13:17):
in this scene because he's giving you the time with them
and made you can, you know, you know their strengths.
You know what their values are. You're excited to see what they
do as a real talent that he has for that.
And he paints their voices so vividly.
Even the characters from the movies he does really well.
So usually those are the main 2 I like to take.
I say we got the pros kind of the style of Lee Child and then
(13:41):
the character building, little bit of the world building of
Timothy Zahn. Then there was a few others I
like Michael Crichton. The Andromeda Strain was
something that I read in preparation for writing our book
because our book, the first one,Three Rivers Plague, is about
this outbreak that becomes an undead apocalypse and creates
(14:03):
this dystopian world. And so I was really interested
in how other authors handled that.
And Michael Crichton's a pretty reputable author.
So I thought, let me read this one.
And I really like how he describes a lot of the
scientific analysis in a very not dumbed down, but like easy
to understand way where the average reader could read it and
(14:24):
get what's being said, but somebody really smart could also
read it and not scoff at it. It's digestible for both ends of
the spectrum. See, there's plenty more, but
you know, those are some big ones that I always like to point
out. And you know, we could talk
about it all day, but we got more to cover.
Well one more thing though, something that's a little harder
(14:46):
to transfer into the stories we've been writing.
Something I personally love are the Witcher stories and I
watched the show Henry Cavill. I respect him for how much he
loves the series, but the show is just not it.
If you've read the books, you will understand how much, how
much Gerald's thought process just gets like pushed to the
(15:08):
side in the show, completely ignored.
But it's like it's a very he's avery interesting character to
follow in this in the books. You know, I haven't read those
books or played the games. I have watched the show.
I thought it started out pretty well, kind of meanders off a bit
over the years. I like the, there's like a real
(15:32):
episodic nature to that first season and then they try to make
it a little bit more linear and it, it, you know, not that
there's a problem with it. It just felt very different than
the first season. And then obviously, you know,
now it's going to be something completely different.
I I sense. Yeah, I mean, the first episode
(15:54):
of the show where there's that whole, like, there's that old
sage up in the tower and there'sthe girl whose prophecy is to
destroy this town. There's this whole thought
process. Geralt goes to where he puts it
all together. And in the show they just dumb
it down to him waking up and saying like the town, and then
he runs over there. That's it.
So I don't know. It didn't do it for me, but I
(16:16):
know some people like it. Let's get to your books.
Let's hear about Three Rivers Plague.
And you know, why did you, why did you pick Pittsburgh?
You know how'd that come up? Pittsburgh is a very interesting
city. I don't know if you've ever
been, but it's. I have.
(16:37):
Yeah, it is. Topographically, it is such an
interesting place. There's mountains surrounding
it, almost like the setting of avideo game, right?
These are the boundaries. You can't cross these.
But then you overlook essentially A Moat around the
city, which is Three Rivers, right?
The Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio River.
(17:00):
And they meet at this fine pointright at the center, which is
the tip of Point State Park, which used to be an old Fort, an
old American Fort back in the day.
And you know, there's so many different elements to the
climate there. You got the rivers, you got the
mountains. It's always rainy.
There's the surrounding forest, you know, the Amish to the
(17:22):
north. Pennsylvania alone is
interesting enough, but Pittsburgh is really the
culmination of those elements all meeting at a point on the
West End of the state. And I had been there with my
girlfriend. She's from Pittsburgh.
And so I visited there with her,and I was so enamored by it.
It's got a lot of history. They've got a big statue of Mr.
(17:45):
Rogers outside the stadium. You know, the all, like I said,
all the Fort stuff. And it's just, it feels like the
ideal location to blow shit up. You know, like let's let's have
some kind of war here. And obviously that culminated
(18:05):
for us in a post apocalypse, youknow, people running for their
lives. And then you get to a year later
and people are just scraping by.It's the shell of what the old
world used to be. And it, you know, Pittsburgh
really embodies that Americana. You know, this is the old world
America. We're living in the shell of it.
(18:25):
We get to see what was once a normal everyday life, but we're
shooting and running and and battling to survive and what's
left of it. Originally, we had written the
story to be in Philadelphia, just at random.
That first chapter Josh had given me was in Philadelphia.
(18:46):
It was at the Lincoln Financial Field instead of the Three
Rivers Stadium. You guys did Three Rivers
Stadium, That's fantastic. When is this supposed to be
based? This is in the 80s, is in 1980,
Yeah. So back when that was a thing.
It's not a thing anymore, I don't think.
I think they moved. Well, they it used to be the
home of the Steelers and the Pirates, but now both the
(19:09):
Steelers and the Pirates have their own stadiums.
Yeah, I mean, we were in that alternate history sale that the
base book sale did the other day.
Because it is. It's alternate history.
It's in the 1980s, so it's kind of a period piece with like the
rock'n'roll aspect. Our main characters are a rock
band. We thought that was a fun little
twist on like the zombie apocalypse to make our main cast
(19:32):
like these sort of quirky different band members.
You got the big guy on the drumswho's like an ex bouncer, you
know, you got the kind of littledifferent in the head guitarist
who just really likes to play with stuff like season's hands.
You got the lead singer who's a little bit of a drug addict,
(19:55):
kind of lost his mind a little bit trying to find out what he
is and what he wants. And and we really like that idea
of playing with that. So we figured, OK, let's set it
in the era where these sorts of characters and personalities
find the most. And that was. 1980s America.
And so we threw them in there. Like I was saying, they
(20:17):
originally were performing at Lincoln Financial Field when the
apocalypse breaks out. But now we changed it to Three
Rivers Stadium because we thought Pittsburgh was just a
much more interesting place to put it instead of just a big
like, metropolitan city. It's kind of everything all at
once, if you know what I mean. Yeah.
(20:40):
I also think that, at least for me, the time that we started
writing this book is very interesting because it was right
after COVID. Obviously, my high school years
were essentially destroyed by COVID.
I'm product of that generation. And so a little bit of that
comes off in his first book, butit's funny as it's in the 80s.
So we take these 80s stereotypesand almost twist it into what if
(21:04):
this quarantine had happened back then and it was actually
some crazy virus that's killing people, how would these groups
have reacted to it? How different is it from how it
was in 2020? Obviously.
I like what you guys are doing in terms of mapping skills,
(21:25):
which is I would say a very video game centric perspective
against the band. And then placing them into the
setting in the world that that you're crafting.
That's again, I see a strong parallel between those things
(21:46):
for you guys. I I think that it, whether or
not it's like front of mind or just by happenstance, you know,
it seems very evident to me. Yeah, it does function a little
bit like an RPG would, in a sense.
I think the biggest thing that sets that apart is how the party
(22:08):
changes throughout the story. We we were very afraid towards
the start of writing this story to just knock characters off the
table completely. But as we wrote it, we realized
that's the kind of story we wantto write.
We want the reader to be on their toes so party members will
just drop without a second thought.
(22:28):
And I mean, that's what separates us from RPGs.
Have you guys explored lit RPG? A little.
I'm aware of it as a genre. You know, there's isn't Sledge.
Sledge is a technically a lit RPG, is it not?
I'm not familiar enough to speakon that to be honest with you,
(22:50):
OK. I guess you haven't read it yet.
Sledge is a popular one everybody talks about now.
I, I liked Sledge. I thought it was cool.
You know, he's kind of going through like a dungeon taking on
bosses. You know, he's this big, like
Opie character. And so you, you get to see him
smash some heads. It wasn't what we set out to
(23:11):
write. I I'd be interested to read more
from that genre just to see how it compares because you're
right. And not all of its front of
mind. Like our story.
There are sort of like mini bosses sometimes where there's
characters that are lieutenants of the main antagonist that you
(23:32):
come into conflict with in a particular place.
You know, it is kind of mapped out that way.
But like Josh said, you know, the party changes.
There's characters that seem like they're on an arc, like
they're going to change over a long period of time in this
story. And just like in the real world,
they don't always get there. You know, somebody might get
(23:53):
knocked off and die, and they never really got to achieve what
in an ideal world, they would have.
And I think that only amplifies the journey of the other
characters who do make it because you see what could have
been and what's been lost. And, you know, Walking Dead does
that a little bit in terms of television.
(24:15):
You know, that was something that I watched a lot of trying
to take in other zombie media. And it it does that a little.
But there's also a lot of plot armor and Walking Dead like
characters shouldn't survive certain things.
Rosita is a particularly poignant example of that.
At one point she tries to shoot like the main big bad and fails
(24:39):
and instead of killing her or like punishing her, they kill
somebody else. And it's it just kind of struck
me as, I don't know, that didn'tseem very in character for this,
this villain. She was under contract, yeah.
Yeah, so they had to keep her around, right.
And you run into that problem asyou go.
But there's other times where they did kill off characters
(25:01):
that I wouldn't have expected. So that they, you know, it was
ups and downs, but we we really wanted to do that.
We said no matter how much we love this character, no matter
how great their story is so far,not everyone gets there.
And that's a fact of life. And the ones who do get there
and get to be celebrated even more because of it.
(25:22):
Let's move into You guys have been doing this for five years
now, right? That's when you started,
basically. So how many books have you
released thus far, either solo or collaboratively?
In terms of the main series, by the time this interview is
(25:43):
aired, I believe the third one would be published.
So there will be 3 mainline stories in our Continuum series.
And then there was a equal storythat Zach wrote for the majority
that set in our same world. It's a little more spy thriller,
a little more. This is the mission.
It's set in Chile and it's it's a much shorter story.
(26:06):
And then Zach has his own spin off that I don't, I don't dare
look at. He can tell you about that.
Brutal. Yeah, it's hard to get him to
read stuff I write on my own, but yeah, we have our mainline
series. I always call it our flagship
series because it's our biggest thing.
It's what we put most of our time into, and that is the
(26:30):
starting with Three Rivers Plague into Foot in the Grave,
which is the sequel. And then we have this third one
coming out called Tooth and Nail, and that's our zombie
apocalypse series. We try to give them these sort
of horror as thriller names, andI like all of them so far.
(26:50):
But the one he's referring to, the prequel is called Long
Caldera Run. It was kind of a test, you know,
I wanted to write a novella because novellas, they take a
little less time, they're snappier for the reader.
And so it's kind of a good way for a reader to get a sense of
you as an author, see what your style is.
(27:13):
If they like it, they can buy the bigger one.
If they don't, well, they don't have to commit.
And so it doesn't really waste them too much time.
And so that formal formulated into this sort of spy thriller
prequel where you take one of the secondary characters from
the apocalypse story who is kindof involved with the CIA and we
(27:37):
tell a story with him prior to the outbreaks a few years prior.
And it's it's just kind of this set up to like, what's the state
of the world, political tensions, you know, the, the how
close this world kind of is to the brink.
And it's just the 1 mission in Chile that this Black Ops team
(27:59):
goes on, but the stakes get really high really fast.
And even in this short story that that just follows this one
mission, you get a real sense for how conflicted this world is
and just how easy it was for theoutbreaks to happen.
(28:20):
And we've got great reviews on that.
It's currently our highest ratedbook on Amazon, so it's good.
I really liked it. I had a fun time writing it.
I'm excited to write more in that vein once we finished our
main series, You know, God knowswhen that'll be, but you know,
(28:41):
it's a fun little side project. And then I have Slipspace, which
is kind of what I'm known for atthis point.
Slipspace Terra Nolius was my space opera sci-fi book that I
wrote all by myself. It just kind of to pass the time
while Josh was working on his part for our main series.
(29:04):
I, you know, I thought about it,I've been reading a lot of Star
Wars books, a lot of, you know, space hoppers and stuff from
other indie authors. And I thought, why don't I give
this a crap, you know, try to flex my creative side for a bit
and really branch out into this completely made-up world, you
(29:24):
know, made-up Galaxy almost. So I wrote that it's about
150,000 words, so it's shorter than the others.
The others are longer than that,but it's really.
It's. Yeah, so we write long books.
You do. Probably because it's both of
us, probably because there's twopeople.
(29:44):
So we just get a lot more like out of it.
I I like to lean them out as much as I can, but it just, when
we write together, it doesn't work that way.
We get a lot on the page. So we try to make the chapters
snappy and we divide them up into episodes.
So you'll have like 6 to 12 chapters per episode.
(30:08):
That way it makes it digestible.It makes it so the readers can
get through it at a steady pace rather than just feeling like
they have to read through the whole thing.
But yeah, we write long books. 150 is on the lower end.
Yeah. And so, you know, Slip space
obviously was in that competition, the SPSFC, and
(30:31):
there was a lot of controversy with the SPSFC.
You know, when Devin Erickson got booted.
And I was one of the few people that jumped out alongside him
just to say I don't really like the decision that this
competition's made. And I got a lot of positive
response for that. A lot of people went and bought
(30:51):
Slip Space in solidarity. You know, I, I sold several 100
copies in one month, which is anoutlier for us, and it became a
profitable book. It's definitely our most
profitable book that we've made just because of that one
incident. So feels like I have to do a
(31:14):
sequel to it at some point. But it was a, it's probably the
hardest book I've written as well, just because it's so out
there. But I do think it's good.
I do really like it. I'm proud of the fact that I
stepped out and wrote such a a unique story.
But it'll take some effort to write a sequel, I think, to
(31:34):
really dive into that world again.
So let's talk about the Continuum series, because you
work on it together. Do you have the whole narrative
arc mapped out? Do you know how many books there
will ultimately be? How far along into that are you?
Anything along those lines? I would, I would like to say
yes, but there's always another book is why I look at it.
(31:57):
We have had this two-part finaleplanned ever since we wrote the
first book, Three Rivers Plague.And then we realized, OK, we
have this good idea for a secondbook, we'll write that one.
And then after that was done, werealized the two main
characters. Now, first, the character was
established in the second book'srelationship with the main
(32:18):
character could be developed better.
So now we had to write this third book, and it's become
arguably the best thing we've written, in my opinion.
And so now we have this good idea for a fourth story.
So we're going to write that. I would like to say 6 is the
right answer, but who knows? It could just keep growing.
(32:39):
Yeah, we always come up with newideas in the middle.
This two-part finale that we've had in mind, it is it's pretty
definitively A finale to the story.
It takes a lot of like the worldthat we've built and matches it
together. The, you know, we make reference
(33:00):
to a lot of different locations.We like to see the next stories
as we write. And so in Three Rivers Plague,
for instance, we refer a couple of times to a quarantine zone in
New York where one of the main, like enemy factions is based out
of. And then Book 2 is set in New
(33:22):
York, in the New York quarantinezone.
And then throughout both of those books, we make reference
to what the hell is going on in Washington, DC like where's the
US government? And our intention was to build
up to that in the two-part finale where DC is finally
getting involved again and they're recruiting for their
(33:44):
militia, trying to take back certain parts of the country.
And so the first part of that finale is the recruitment is a
particular mission set in Florida where we live.
And then that book would end with like a sledgehammer coming
down on all of it. And then the second part of that
(34:06):
finale would be building up whatwe can out of out of that
catastrophe and giving our characters a proper alike, OK,
this is the world we live in now.
But as we've gone, as Josh said,there's certain elements that we
felt we wanted to use more. A particular character in Book
(34:26):
2, as he said, younger characterwho joins the group.
And he is very close with our main character Thomas by the end
of Book 2. And he's supposed to be very
close with him by this finale, but the reader doesn't see as
much of that as we would like. So we thought, OK, let's give
(34:49):
him a new adventure to go on together.
We'll take some of these seeds that we've planted and expand
them a little bit and just buildup this whole new book right in
the middle. And so that's where Book 3 came
from and we had to put some characters on the back burner
for a minute who are going to come back for the finale just
(35:10):
because there's only so much room in one story.
You know, even for us, obviouslytrying to take inspiration from,
from Timothy's on, you know, it's hard to juggle a lot of
mean characters all at once. It's it's not an easy thing for
anybody, no matter how much you like to read it.
So we, we did, we divided up whois necessary, who needed to be
(35:30):
there. And we wrote this expedition to
Boston in Book 3. And there's a lot of emotional
work that we do with these characters, a lot of cool set
pieces. One of my signatures when I
write is I like to just think ofthe craziest like set piece for
a fight you could think of. You know what, what would like
(35:55):
in Book 2, we have this set piece where it's the enemy
faction is kind of this construction site.
It's where they're based out of.And so they have a cell where
they keep a prisoner in danglingfrom this enormous crane above
the work site. And to put like an action set
piece there. And this little cell dangling
(36:16):
100 feet in the air, it's like, wow, like how are they going to
get out of this? I like to write myself into
traps like that and then figure out how to get characters out.
So we always do little things like that.
And Book 3 has a a few really cool examples of that.
And it's also, like Josh said, Ithink in terms of emotion and
(36:37):
like character building, it might be our best work so far.
And we pulled it out of nothing just because we wanted to
develop these characters more. Yeah, very good.
Are there things that we haven'theard about that either of you
feel we need to know, either about yourselves or your work,
(36:59):
the craft of writing, anything? I think one thing for me that
definitely shows in the way I write is music.
The music I tend to listen to isvery, very much story.
It's not the whatever trashy pop, it's I.
There's this man named Jason Isbell, who of course his songs
(37:20):
are very much put to himself in the head of a character who
writes this song, and he tells this story in 3 minutes.
And by the end, you feel like you understand this person's
motivations perfectly. And I think it's the way that
music can be formed like that. I try to emulate the way those
lines flow in my own writing. Of course, not 100%, but I think
(37:44):
that's a big a big part of it. Yeah, music is huge for us.
You know, we already talked about video games and TV shows
and other books, the music, eachof our episodes, not just in the
Continuum series. It started with the Continuum
series where each episode would be named after a song just
(38:05):
because the main characters are all musicians.
You know, it's a rock band. And so it fit the vibe, this 80s
aesthetic where every episode was Free Bird and then End of
the World as we know it, stuff like that.
But that kind of became one of our signatures.
So now even Slip Space does that, where every episode is
(38:27):
named after a song. Slip Space wasn't restricted to
80s music because it's not set in any particular time period.
But it's a huge influence on us,like Josh said, the way that we
structure our prose, the little things that we give references
(38:48):
to, you know, how we name our characters, how we build our
settings. Music plays a huge part in that.
We're both very musically inclined people.
And I, you know, I, I think there is real storytelling in
music for sure. Absolutely.
As a musician I would agree withyou.
(39:09):
As a writer, I also think music is one of those sensory
components that is probably not used in world building enough in
general, so I'm happy to hear you guys incorporating that into
your work. So when can people expect to see
(39:32):
the next book out? I believe it was June 20th, you
said? Yeah, June 20th is tooth and
nail the release date. You know, we're doing our cover
reveal soon, so that'll all be done and gone by the time this
is published. This.
Interview. This will probably come out in
May, just so you guys know. It'll be a little bit before,
(39:53):
but that's all right. OK Oh well the cover reveal is
going to be the end of April. We're working on it now.
It's either going to be April 25th or April 30th, so that'll
be done by the time this is out.But I guess the book will still
be coming out. So June 20th.
Yeah, that's the release date. Pre-orders will probably be
opened already, but. It's going to be a blast.
(40:17):
Like I said, this is one of our our best works.
It might be our best work so far, and we're going to jump
right into writing Book 4 as soon as it's out.
Awesome. Well, guys, thanks for joining
me. Thanks for taking the time,
telling us about yourselves, telling us about your work and
look forward to the release. I'm glad to be here, man.
(40:38):
And thank you very much for having us on, especially both of
us. I know we're we're a package
deal. So sometimes it's a long.
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