041 - Counted With The Dead by Peter O'Keefe

Peter O'Keefe started his career working with George R. Romero on the television series Tales from the Darkside. His recent novel retells the classic Frankenstein story told within the dreary apocalyptic landscape of late 90s Detroit. We discuss the corpse that was Detroit during the 90s, his time writing scripts, his short movies, and Counted with the Dead.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to the Weird Reader podcast, an extension of
Jason's Weird Reads found on YouTube. Welcome, Welcome to episode

(00:32):
forty one of the Weird Reads podcast. This week, I
have a guest spent a few weeks now since I've
talked to him, and I apologize to Peter for taking
so long to get this up in podcast format, but
I have gotten behind, which is pretty familiar for me
if you've been listening to the show for any length

(00:54):
of time. But Peter O'Keefe wrote the fantastic Counted with
the Dead, and he and I sat down and we
talked about his love hate relationship with Detroit, and we
also talked about his book Counted with the Dead, which
is a fascinating retelling of Frankenstein that I highly recommend. So,

(01:15):
without further ado, here is my conversation with Peter O'Keefe.
Hello everyone, today, I am joined by Peter o'keith. Now,
thank you for coming. When you texted me, or not

(01:36):
texting me, he sent me an email. I think it
was way back in May.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, somewhere around there before my book came out in Ji.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, well, well before when did your book come out? Yeah, Okay,
so it was not well before, but it was at
least a month before, and all you wanted was was
for me to review it. But I'm like, do you
want to come on my show?

Speaker 2 (01:59):
I'm yeah, that's very cool. I'm happy you did, so.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Would you mind giving us a brief introduction? Who are you?

Speaker 2 (02:06):
And I'm I'm Peter O'Keefe. I'm fairly new to fiction
horror writing. This is my kind of With the Dead
is my first novel. I've kind of led a very
zigzag career and life. I grew up in Detroit, lived

(02:31):
there for basically the first three decades of my life.
It's been had pretty much a waste troll youth, I
guess I could say, because it took me ten years
to earn my four year art degree and at Wayne
State in Detroit, and I went to New York. I

(02:51):
wrote some plays, had some stage readings, was making art
and then I entered the Writers Guild used to have
a fellowship program, and I said, well, I'll write a script.
And I got a book on screenwriting and wrote a
script and entered it and was awarded a fellowship. That

(03:15):
got me an agent, got me a gig on the
show called Tales from the Dark Side back in the day.
And then I wrote a script which actually, and this
is decades ago now I'm not going to say how many.
I wrote a screenplay, a horror screenplay that became this

(03:39):
book that I just published in June, and it got
a lot of attention. It got me a ton of meetings.
So I moved to LA. I got some writing assignments.
I optioned this script ten or twelve times over the years.

(03:59):
Never made, never really came close to getting made, but
you know, I made a little bit of money on options,
and I kind of lived out there for a decade,
alternating between writing assignments and working as a word processing TELP.
You know. So I finally decided I was kind of
a square peg in a round hole and returned to

(04:21):
the Midwest versus to South Bend and then to now
my wife and I were and were seeing Wisconsin kind
of they're both kind of rust belt light, very reminiscent
of Detroit where I grew up. And you know, once
I left LA, you know it. You know, at that point,

(04:43):
it wasn't a lot going on social media wise, so basically,
when you were gone, you were gone. So I didn't
get any more assignments. I started making my own short films.
You know. I started just I made a documentary that

(05:04):
was awardedly an Emmy, not actually a documentary about artists
in the Midwest, and uh yeah, I just kind of
bounced around from you know, a variety of jobs, video copywriter,
you know, whatever, making a living. Yeah, and then I
but the script kind of What the Dead just stuck

(05:26):
with me, and a couple of years ago, I just
sat down and wrote it as a as a novel,
and it just felt right because I was able to
go so much deeper into the characters, so much deeper
into the world that they existed in in Detroit in
the late nineties. And so it's it's been. It's gotten

(05:48):
a good reception from reviewers. I wish they had sold
more copies, but I'm still working on that, and you know,
and I've you know, sold some short stories and you
know worked. I'm pushing another horror novella and writing another
horror novel at the moment, and you know, that's that's
where I'm at. Now.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
What was the uh the novel we're talking about is
Counted with the Dead. What was it like transcribing it
from its script format into the novel, Did you just
like have the story outline basically, and then.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, I mean basically the screenplay became the outline where
I basically you know, worked scene by scene through that,
you know, and lots of things changed, you know, Whole
parts of the story got thrown out, Characters got thrown out,
characters got added. You know, white characters became black, Black

(06:47):
characters became white, and great characters became gay, you know,
you know, just you know, things changed, and and what
really you know, the two things where I was able
to really go deeply into their inner consciousness, you know,
their thought process, which was great. You can't do that
in a screenplay. And I was able to really go

(07:09):
deeply some people may think too deeply into the geography
and of Detroit, and you know, kind of the world
they moved through, which you know, a screenplay is exterior
factory day, you know, and I was able to go
and describe the factory they're in and describe the environment.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
And yeah, I actually feel I actually really loved that
that part of the book because it felt like the
novel had a love hate relationship with with Detroit and
Detroit very much plays a character.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Detroit is the character. I mean, it's kind of it's like,
you know, it's basically a retelling of Frankenstein, but instead
of of the monster climbing the Alps and hiding in
the wilderness, he's in this what was then a ruined
city of you know, blocks of abandoned skyscrapers and factories,

(08:13):
which have now I have to make the point, have
now all, you know, almost every structure in my novel
that was abandoned at the time I wrote it, or
the era that I wrote it in, has now been
completely rebuilt.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah, rehabilitated.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
So it's been a complete turnaround.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah, that's like I said, Like I was saying that
that part of the novel really impressed me. It had
like an other worldly feel to it. The atmosphere I
felt was steeped in dread, and it was like painted
in gray and blacks, and it's very visual. You could
kind of tell that it might it might have been
a screen I was going to ask a question about
this because it felt like it might have been a

(08:54):
screenplay before.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
But it is a very ear the environment. Because when
I was in art school in Detroit, I had friends
who basically you know, moved into abandoned skyscrapers and you know,
Jerry rigged their own power and lived in those places.
And and that's just a spooky, a spooky, dark, dangerous

(09:20):
world to exist and to make art, you know, And
that's in a lot of ways trying to recreate that feeling.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
It's almost like an apocalyptic apocalyptic wild West.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yes, yes, So can you tell us what the.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
Story is about before we move on just a little
bit so listeners will have an idea.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Basically, the story centers around a mafia hit man in
Detroit who wants to he wants to get out, he's
had enough his and his last his last hit turns
out to be the man who has married the hitman's

(10:03):
ex former love of his life. So he's he's motivated
to carry this out. And then then for him, you know,
that's it, I'm done, And for him it becomes this
very desperate search for absolution, because that was the original
idea behind it, you know, the very very Catholic kind

(10:25):
of idea is how badly can you sin? How badly
can you do and still be forgiven? And you kill
people and then go to confession and be forgiven. I mean,
is that possible? So he becomes determined, you know, he
goes to his priests. His priest says, no way, am
I giving you absolution for all the things you've done.

(10:48):
You know, you've done nothing to fix it. And so
he goes out into the world to try to fix this,
and then, to his horror, his past life comes back
to haunt him in a form of this Frankenstein monster
created from the bodies of all those past victims and
using the now deranged brain of his final victim. And so, yeah,

(11:12):
so it becomes the hit man hunting the creature and
vice versa through these you know, this very dark world
of nineteen nineties Detroit.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, you mentioned the characters. I really enjoyed the characters
because they're not your typical fiction characters. These uh, these
these guys Jack and his brother Marty, they're not They're
fun to watch, but they're not exactly easy to like.
They've done They've done some bad things and he probably

(11:44):
wouldn't want to meet them in a dark alleyway. Yet
Jack does have an interesting redemptive journey throughout this book
because of everything else that goes on.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, and that's that's bag. I mean the original title
was Absolution. Okay, yeah, that's of the screenplay. That's I mean,
it is all about what how far bad can you go?
And go back?

Speaker 1 (12:10):
And maybe even how do you find redemption when you've
gone that far?

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, because it and it's it's also you know, you
mentioned the brothers. I had been to a lot of
meetings about this script in l A and and to me,
it was always this horror story, Mafia versus Franken, hit
Man versus Frankenstein. And and then I met with this
one producer who he says, you know, I read this,

(12:37):
and to me, it's it's not really a horror story.
It's a story about two brothers. And I had never
even thought about that that that's what it was about.
And and it makes sense because it was written. The
screenplay was written at a time when you know, I'm
one of eight siblings and the brother closest to me

(13:01):
we both lived in New York City at the time,
and at the time I was writing this screenplay, he
was dying of AIDS. So it was just a you know,
and I just buried myself in writing this thing to
kind of deal with what was going on around me.
And so it became, I guess subconsciously about two brothers.

(13:23):
You know, you know, my brother and I were nothing
like Marty and Jack, but that relationship, yeah, kind of
kind of wove its way into the story.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah, did you find yourself exploring your relationship with your
your siblings, especially the one who passed away when you
were transforming this into a novel?

Speaker 2 (13:46):
And in some ways, I mean his world, you know,
he was he was a gay man, and his world
kind of comes into it a little bit. And the
Marty character, who's a closet a gay man. My brother
was class but I certainly knew a lot of men
like that, and and and just the kind of in

(14:07):
developing it from the screenplay, you know, the kind of
interplay between two brothers, you know who who say things
to each other that in any other context might be unforgivable,
but because their siblings, you know, it's kind of part
of their relationship and in the end that that relationship
is the most important thing in the world.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, they even betray one another, and after the initial
shock and anger of it, there's still forgiveness when if
it was anybody else, Yeah, they're no way. Yeah, Yeah, absolutely,
I have I really loved their dynamic together. I also
loved the monster. The monster itself was kind of scary

(14:52):
and went well constructed pun intended. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
I mean that was the fun part of turning it
into a novel, because you know, there wasn't much room
to describe the monster in the screenplay, but in the
novel you can go not just into his physicality but
into his thought process. And you know, he's this former
guy who was not really a bad guy, but whose

(15:19):
brain has become damaged in the process of being you know,
removed from his skull and put into the skull of
this beast. And so that was fun. Yeah. So yeah,
I just enjoyed that. And I remember when this when
the screenplay was being shopped, occasionally a producer would show me, oh,

(15:40):
I hired this artist to do their idea what the
monster looks like, and then it would always be no,
it's nothing like that, you know, So this way, it
was a really really you know, envisioned the way I
saw it.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Yeah, what I really liked about him was how confused
he was and he's he's kind of like he kind
of reminded me of the original Frankenstein. Monastery's delirious, confused
and angry, and he's trying to figure out not only
what happened to him, but his place in the world.
And so that was like, uh, that made him terrifying

(16:16):
and dangerous, I found, And that was like very well
done and.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Also hopefully a little bit sympathetic because you know.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
Yeah, absolutely, because he's gone through something right, you know,
and in the end, you know, there there is some
sympathy for him. I think, yeah, absolutely. I've noticed that
a lot of old classics get retellings all the time,
but I find that Frankenstein retellings. I don't know if
there's more. Maybe Dracula holds the uh, the the championship

(16:48):
for this, but I think Frankenstein is very close behind.
What do you think it is about Frankenstein stories that
that people want to use to retell it.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
I think it's just Mary Shelley's vision of the of
this beast. It is so I mean, it's so captivating,
you know, it just could go in so many different directions,
and and the whole thing of the beast, and and
to me, the beast and his creator, you know, that

(17:21):
dynamic and the whole thing of of you know, being
a frightening, horrifying creature, but also being lost and trying
to figure out what happened to me? How how do
I survive in this world? How do I learn to
speak to people? You know? And everyone who sees me

(17:42):
is horrified at the sight of me. There's just you know,
it just seems there's so many there's so many different
ways into the story where you can tell it this way,
you know, tell it in the future, or tell it
in Detroit in the nineties, or you know, tell it
as you know, a female version the Frankenstein, you know.
I mean, it's just so many places you can set

(18:04):
it and and so many ways you can look at
those characters.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
Absolutely, I wanted to talk a little bit about the
pros because I found it it's very beautiful pros. It's
it's even like maybe on the dent side, which is
fine because if some people they can't do dent pros.
But I found you did it very well. Does this

(18:29):
come naturally to you or did you find you had
to struggle to get the words just right now?

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Now? I mean, I write kind of the things I
like to read, and it's you know, I'm kind of
a perfectionist when it comes to describing a place or
a person or an event. So you know, I'm a
very slow writer. I just spend a lot of time

(18:57):
honing that down. So it's exactly the way I see
it in my head. And that sometimes leads a dense
pro pros and it and it was denser, believe, oh yeah,
because the novelist, uh could be you know Iglesias edited
the manuscript.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
Oh nice, Yeah, I think I saw that.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah, and ten thousand words of description went out the window.
So because yeah, I mean it was even denser. That's
a good free hand, I will, you know, I mean Frankenstein,
the original Franksin is incredibly dense. Yeah, it's it's for
modern readers. It's hard to read because it is so

(19:42):
you know, every every little pebble described, and yeah, every
of ice described an incredible detail. But that's one of
the great things about it. But you you couldn't do
that today. You could do that today and get published. No,
So I try to draw the line. I try to

(20:02):
to My writing's kind of dense, and you know, yeah,
it's it's also being kind of set free. Because my
various careers have been as screenwriter and copywriter and video writer,
producer and commercials writer and things where we had to
be very very you know, keep it going and just

(20:26):
use as few words as possible. And I got good
at that, but it's not it's not what I wanted
to do. I wanted to really, you know, tell the
story the way I want to tell it, and this,
the novel, allowed me to do that.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
It feels like you have a love for the English
language and you like to play around with sentences and words.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I I guess that's true. I
guess I have a love for storytelling and words are
the tools to tell those story So I really get
focused on kind of being a perfectionist. You know. I
spent a lot of time just looking for the right
word or the right turn of phrase, which, like I said,

(21:13):
makes me a very slow writer. But I mean I'm
very I'm happy. I'm proud of the results, you know,
that come out of that.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
I have a feeling that you're the type of writer
who likes to correct as you go, So you want
to get the sentences just the way you want them
as you're going, and then you don't continue until you're
happy with where you're at.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
I do that a lot, and and then I do
ten more passes to do it again, you know, yeah,
because yeah, people are like, oh my god, I did
three drafts on this thing, and I'm like three, I
do thirty, you know. Yeah, every time through looking for
a better way to say that, you know, a better
way to turn that phrase, or a better way to
describe that scene or that person.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
Yeah. Now, were you always a big fan of Frankenstein?

Speaker 2 (22:03):
It was. It was one of the books that really
got me into the genre. It's the one that has
always stuck with me. Yeah, there was something about that story.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, me too, honestly. Yeah. I always found that I
could identify with the Monster for certain circumstances, and that's
one thing that really drew me to it. And I
think although no movies really captured that the essence of
the book, they were able to at least capture that

(22:35):
sort of identity crisis, the the you know, who am I,
where do I belong type feeling, And.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
You can also identify with the creator of the Beast,
you know.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
Frankenstein, especially being the writer.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
You know, yeah, his kind of arrogance and you know,
the you know, the unintended consequences of what he's done
and to deal with what he's done, what he's done
and the way it destroys the people around him. I
mean that's he's also a great character.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Absolutely, yes. So where where did you start with your
journey with horror? How far back does it go? When
did you start reading or watching horror movies?

Speaker 2 (23:23):
The way I like to tell it is, there's no
I'm a falling away Catholic. But I grew up you know,
in a you know, Detroit Parish school and then Detroit
High School, Catholic high school, and it's like, in my mind,

(23:44):
how can you grow up that way and not become
into horror? In second grade, we had this elderly nun
who you know, had had a sheet of glass on
top of her desk, and underneath he had these images
of the Christian martyrs m hm, of you know, being

(24:07):
skinned alive, being burned. And the one that always stuck
with me was this entire family in ancient Rome. Mom, dad,
and the kids all have their both hands cut off
and or one by one being thrown into a boiling
pit of something or other. H I was like, how

(24:30):
can you not become a horror writer? You know, constantly
hearing about the martyrs and their courage under torture and
you know, horrific acts.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
And if you had pictures of like hell Raiser or
Freddy Krueger on your desk, he'd be, uh, yeah, if
you grew up like that, you know, he'd be like,
there's something wrong with you.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
Not to mention, you've got this guy in front of
every classroom nailed.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
To a cross, you know, looking like he's an Eggan.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Kind of a dark way to.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
Look at the world. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
I was mainly a kid into sci fi, and then
then I think it's reading Frankenstein probably, I don't know,
junior high or something that turned me more from sci fi.
You know, to me, sci fi was hard because it's
always about the future, and I always wanted to write
about things that were happening to me now, you know,

(25:27):
time and place, and horror was a good way to
do that. And then I, you know, I wrote some
horror and I wrote the original screenplay for kind Of
with the Dead, and I had some horror assignments as
a screenwriter. But and then I made some short films
that are horror films, and I made early I was
way ahead of my time making this web series. Sister

(25:53):
Mary Martha's Martyrology, where Sister Mary Martha has a talk
show and she interviewed is the dead Christian martyrs. She's
able to bring them on her show, you know, and
of course what could possibly go wrong? And yeah, so
it's always kind of been there, but I've never until

(26:15):
I addressed, you know, turning the screenplay into a novel.
I never really had the time to really dig into it.
It was always like, oh, I got to go to
work and make videos, make commercials or whatever. Yeah, you know,
And finally when I had the time to just sit
down and write a novel, you know, I was like, God,
why did I do this so much sooner?

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah, Well, at least it came because you could have
never never approached it, right.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah. And another influence I think is Greek mythology, you know,
all that stuff, all those things about you know, gods
and men and monsters and cyclops and and all that
sort of thing. I always was fascinated by that. Yeah,
there's a lot of monsters in there. The first thing
I ever wrote, I was still in art school and

(27:07):
I was doing posters for this dance troupe in Detroit,
Clifford Fiers Dance dance troupe, which was an very athletic
African American dance troupe, Dunham based Katherine Dunham type dance.
And I was doing the posters and and the the

(27:27):
Chris Clifford fair Is one point said, boy, I wish
someone would write a libretto for me that we could
do a whole performance. And I'm like, and I was
taking some creative writing classes, you know, just for credit,
and I said, I'm a writer. And I wrote, you know,
the story of Theseus and the Minotaur as a libretto,

(27:52):
which I had to go to the library and see
what a libretto was before I could do it. And
he loved it. He corea aft it and it you know,
premiered did he tried Institute of Arts and it was
I was like, oh, I like this, I like writing nice.
But nothing nothing went so easily ever again, you know quickly, No.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
That that never happened. I wouldn't say that never happens,
but like, have you ever worked on a short story
or perhaps a novella or a novel or it just
like popped out of you and you're just afterwards like
that was a great experience.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, I mean I've actually written some short stories. One
I can think of in particular that's kind of a literary,
a very dark literary kind of story that just I
literally dreamed the story and woke up and wrote it
and and then sold it as a short story. It

(28:49):
was it just it just came. That happened so rarely.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, I love it when that happens. Honestly, You've worked
many jobs in in in your life, and I have
a list here from your web page. You've worked as
a night janitor, a postal clerk, loading doc worker, warehouse grunts,
and store clerk, among other like what you've already mentioned.

(29:17):
But doing these more blue colored type of work, did
you find that's fieled your creativity at all?

Speaker 2 (29:26):
In some ways, the monotony of those jobs would allow
your mind to kind of wander and you'd come up
with ideas. But I think was the main value was
the people I met and the situations I found myself in,
you know, those things just you know, as a writer,

(29:47):
living living a life is I think is the most
important thing to be a writer. I mean, I was
sixteen years old with my first real job. I'd had
other jobs, first real you know, clock in and clock
out job in a warehouse in downtown Detroit, and that,

(30:10):
you know, it was what an introduction to the real
world of Detroit. It was the entire warehouse crew was black,
the entire dock crew was white. I had a job
kind of taking stuff between those two crews, and and
then at one point everything exploded into this racial conflict.

(30:32):
And just just to see that, you know, to experience
that and to have friendships on both sides of that
was you know, that's something I keep coming back to
in my writing, and there's an undercurrent of that and
kind of with the dead, you know, these the racial
geography of Detroit and the politics and all that stuff.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
I have to wonder if that that experience didn't influence
and maybe even a large part your short race memory.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah, that was very much influence that. It's a very
dark video about cops, basically in a cop bar, and
gender and race play a big part. And that was
one of my first roommates when I left home was

(31:25):
an extra Troy cop and and he was still buddies
with all his buddies on the force, and they would
come over and we'd smoke dope and they always had
the best dope and drake, you know, beer and tequila
shots and you know whatever, and the stories they would tell. Yeah,

(31:48):
and their attitudes. I mean, I really liked my roommate,
he was a really good guy. But some of these
guys were just frightening. Yeah, And the stories I told
were frightening, and you just hoped sometimes they were not true,
but it was certainly. It was a lot of material
and a lot of that went into that film Race Memory.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yeah, that was really well done. I watched that and
I got kind of lost in the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Because some of the some of the stories the guy,
the white maybe former cop, were actually stories I heard
cops tell. Oh really, you know, pretty much almost a
word for word. So yeah, I was those are kind
of things that make you a writer, you know, just
experiencing people like that, absolutely diving into those worlds, those

(32:40):
other worlds that are so different than your own.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah. Now, your bio also mentions that your your I
guess your professional creative writing journey started with writing for
George jar Romero's Tales from the Dark Side, which you
talked about in your uh in your introduction. Now, I'm
sure you've been asked this before, but how did you
get connected with Romero?

Speaker 2 (33:05):
I'm trying to reb I was never I never even
met him. Tom Arnold was the show runner.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Basically liked Tom Arnold.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
No, this was another okay, And that's when I I
right at the same time, I got the writers Guilled Fellowship.
I can't remember how I I think I might have
just cold called him, like, hey, I just got this
writer's Skilled Fellowship. And because I didn't even have an

(33:36):
agent yet, and I went in there and pitched some
stories and they, you know, hired me. And I wrote
three episodes and you know, some of them I'm proud of.
Some of them I'm not so proud of. Yeah, it
was a good experience pitching because I, you know, I'm
basically especially know it's basically a shy person. Going and

(34:00):
pitching to people was hard. And I would spend a
week coming up with all these stories I thought would
be perfect for Tom. Yeah, and I'd pitched the first one,
now I already did that. I pitched the second one
that's thought for us. I pitched the third one. Oh,
we're doing that same story next next month. And and

(34:21):
then I'd like make something up out of the top
of my head and you go, Oh, I like that,
I have to go figure out how do I write
this story that you know, there's no story there yet. Yeah,
and you know, so it was good. It was good experience,
it was good practice.

Speaker 1 (34:38):
And yeah, so he never got to even talk to
George Ramiro or he.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
Was you know, this was I don't think he was
in New York in those days, okay, And they were
based in New York at that point.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
So was he just like had his name on it maybe?

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Yeah, producer. Yeah, i'd have directed some episodes, I don't remember, Okay. Yeah,
he was the at the top, and you know, people
like like Arnold, you know, we're the ones that chose
the stories and I are all kinds of different directors
and all kinds of different writers.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
Did you ever get to like check out any of
the sets or anything like that.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
No, because when I was in New York, they had
already started making them in LA.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Oh okay, Yeah, so.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
I wrote my three when I lived in New York
and they were being made in LA at the time,
and by the time I moved to LA, the show
was done.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
So that must have been a pretty cool experience though,
because that was on like primetime TV. Right, did you
ever like get excited and sit down and watch your episode?

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Oh yeah, yeah, and you know, of course told everyone
in my family and you know, all that stuff, because
you know, at that point, Tales the Dark Side was
pretty well known, pretty well known show, and so that
was fun.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
I used to watch it all the time.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
I loved the opening credit sequence of that show.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Mm hmm, you know.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
So, yeah, it was It was fun. It was a
good experience that I never really had any other TV
experience after that, though, I kind of went into features
and I wrote. I wrote one television movie for a
German network. Was fun and interesting. I got to go

(36:23):
to Munich and have meetings and stuff and and I
I shouldn't even tell this story, but my my biggest
you know, wish I could take it back moment of
my career was I was doing okay, I was getting

(36:45):
all these you know, various writing assignments, and I got
a writing assignment from Imagine Universal and I just froze.
I just froze, complete writer's block. And for months I've
been going in and having meetings with Michael Mann and

(37:07):
you know, he put in my agent at the time.
He just liked for some reason, he liked me because
I was from Detroit anyways, and you know, went to
all these meetings. I'd pitch all this stuff and nothing
ever came of it. And then I'm sitting there with
writer's block on this imagined project and they're calling me,

(37:30):
where's the draft? Where's the draft? And my agent calls me, Oh,
Michael Man wants you to write a TV movie. But
it needed to be done like right now, and I
didn't do it, and I just, you know, I should have,
you know, I should have taken drugs or something and

(37:51):
try to do both projects at once. Is the nothing.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
You know.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
I was never able to get another meeting with him
after that.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
Oh yeah, And.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
It's one of those man if I had that to
do over again, if I could go back and visit
my younger self.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, but you know you got to you gotta be
gentle with yourself too, right if it's if it's not
going to happen, it's not going to happen. So I wouldn't.
I'm sure you've had time, but I don't. You don't
need me saying this, But you know you shouldn't be
so hard on yourself for that cause, oh yeah, because
you know.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Like, it's that that Catholic guilt. Yeah, complex. Yeah, even
though I'm not a hit man, I'm constantly hard on myself.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
You feel like a hit man of your own self?

Speaker 2 (38:37):
Right, find absolution somehow.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, Now that's not the short that I mentioned. Race
Memory isn't the only one you've done. You've done a
bunch of others. But I wanted to talk briefly about
Sister Mary Martha's or Martyrology. Can you tell us what
that's about? And where can if every anyone who wants
to watch these videos, they can just go to your website.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
Yeah, go to my website, or go to video or
go to I think they're on YouTube. Still, it's been
so many years since I've looked at them, but Vimeo
or my website, and and this I'm mean basically, yeah,
it's been so long since I made those I don't
even remember the names of the saints. But she we

(39:21):
shot the first episode trying to make it look like
an amateur production. So we purposely shot it to look
really amateurish, and that came back to bite bite me,
because everyone's like, this thing looks terrible. I don't want
to watch this thing. So so after that we got
rid of that concept.

Speaker 1 (39:41):
And she just.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
She just sits at her desk and magically these martyrs appear,
and she interviews them, and she magically ends up, you know,
in their place in some instances, being tortured, you know,
by a torture her in a in a in a mask,
you know, with torture implements, and and yeah, it's hard

(40:08):
to describe. It's hard to describe, you know. She she
rescues one saint who was swallowed by a dragon according
to the various martyrologies, and she manages to rescue her
from the the mouth of this dragon. And but then
the dragon someone else has to replace this saint, this

(40:31):
martyr that's been freed, and at first it looks like
it's going to be Sister Mary Martha, but then it
turns out to be this evil priest who's always trying
to shut her down, who gets slurped up. So it's
just kind of a wild, crazy fun look at these
and these crazy martyrology stories, you know, the Christian martyrs

(40:52):
of you know the things. You know, this one, you know,
they tried every way to kill her, and they couldn't
kill her. They tried to burn her or they tried
to poison her, they tried to kill her of arrows,
and finally she got swallowed by a dragon. You know,
it's just like, how do you you know, how do
you not want to you know, visit revisit those stories?

(41:13):
You know?

Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, are shorts a thing in the past now or
are you still?

Speaker 2 (41:18):
Pretty much? I mean because the time, and I mean
if I went, it would certainly be easier now. You know,
I usually had the rent cameras and lights and and
sometimes when I was working as a producer, I could
use their equipment and use actors and not actors. And yeah,

(41:41):
I mean the amount of work that went into each
one eventually just got to be too much, you know,
I just you know, I need to just sit down
and work at a word process or to tell stories.
And then, of course, my sister Mary Martha went and
and got married and started having babies. Although I did want,

(42:04):
I really wanted to do an episode with her pregnant,
but yeah, it just didn't happen.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
So is it more of a relief now that you
can just like roll out the computer and start pounding
away on the keyboard.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean I if I was younger,
I would love to get back into doing that, But
now I've got so many stories I want to tell,
and the only way I can tell those stories is
writing them. If I go out and try to make
them as videos or movies, you know, I'll never even

(42:38):
make a dent in that backlog of stories. So yeah, yeah,
you much more control when you're writing. I mean, you
can yeah, set it anywhere.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
You know, you're your own director.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Number of extras, you know, you don't have to although now,
of you know, I would never use AI, but I
guess people are using AI to do all that stuff,
you know. But I just yeah, just I just like
look at the screen and writing the story.

Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah, I mean, you can be your own director and
you don't have to worry about the budget for all
the explosions you're putting in, and I don't have.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
To worry about actors not showing up or not not
you know, embracing your vision.

Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, exactly. Now, were you always maybe dabbling in short
stories or writing novels throughout your life or did this
all come later?

Speaker 2 (43:27):
This mostly came later because I started out after I
did that that dance for a Minotaur, I started writing
plays and I had a little bit of success. I
got some stage readings in New York and Chicago, and
then I started writing screenplays because I got the fellowship.

(43:48):
So it always and then the jobs I would get
when I wasn't writing were related to that, you know,
writing marketing videos or training videos or commercials or you know, documentaries.
So I never really had the kind of the mental space,
the bandwidth too, you know, do the day job and

(44:12):
make short films and think about writing short stories or something.
So yeah, so once once I decided, you know, this,
making videos is just too hard and started writing, just
you know, and that's been in the last I don't know,
five six years or so.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
Nice now you mentioned AI or just like a question
or two ago, and I was wondering that there's a
lot of writers and I think I'm sort of on
board with them that are really against AI. What are
your feelings about I have it in.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
My contract for kind of with the Dead, no AI
covers or anything.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
Completely, I'm in the same boat you're in. I just
I don't know, it's just taking the human imagination out
of this.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yeah, to me, to.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Me my dreams already, AI. You know, they put together
people in scenes and situations from my entire life, and
you know, like, who needs a I when you know
you can put those kind of stories together on your own. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I just yeah, it's it's slow, you know.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Yeah. I think also you've got to wonder what the
intention is. If somebody is going to have chat GBT
write their novel for them, is it What are they
looking for? Because I when I'm writing a story, it
can be very frustrating and hard to do, but when
it works, there's nothing else like it in the world. Yeah,
it makes it too.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Easy, too easy, and not very good, and that scares me.
In terms of you know, literature, in terms of publishers,
and in terms of movie producers, they don't always care
if it's good. Yeah, as long as it's quick and
as long as they get in an audience. And once you

(46:10):
train people not to expect much from films or not
to expect much from novels, you're going to get an
awful lot of people that are perfectly happy with AI
produced content. That's the part that scares me.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
That's what scares me too, honestly, because I could see
that happening. Yeah, I mean, it would be too easy
for that to happen. I think there is a readership
that wants their stuff created by humans because you do
lose that human connective tissue. You could say, to watching
a movie, what you identify with? If it's written by

(46:45):
a robot, then what am I supposed to identify with?
Where's the story? You know, like, is this a robot
story or is it a human story?

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, And we talked about, you know, my kind of
dense style and kind of with the dead, and you're
not going to get that with AI. I mean that's
my particular.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
You know, process your fingerprint.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
And not not just pulling descriptions out of off the
internet from you know, one hundred million different sites to
put together your your little mosaic and having you know,
walk through those abandoned buildings, you know, just that experience,
that human experience. I don't think it's going to be
replicated by AI pulling up photos of old buildings and yeah,

(47:31):
manufacturing a scene.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
Yeah, and that you know you mentioned like them AI
pulling from different works of art. That's a whole other
can of worms, because you know it's theft and nobody's
being credited or paid for that. And that's a huge
issue as well.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, all right, Yeah, yeah, I hope. I know the
Writer's Guild has made some some progress in that area
of their last contract against using A and yeah I
think that. Yeah, yeah, don't you want to go down
that path? It's kind of scary.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
What do you think of people who use AI just
to like assist them like maybe in writing their book
blurbs or helping edit or or or whatnot stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
You know, I haven't given that a lot of thought even,
you know, because you have a lot of people using
AI to write their work emails and that sort of thing.
And to me, it gets to the point where your
AI generated message is talking to their AI generated messy

(48:47):
and so how is anything getting accomplished? And that's a
very good point. Yeah, And usually the best things happen
when you're bouncing ideas off each other. Yeah, you know,
they send you an email about well what about trying this,
and you're like, oh, yeah, I haven't tried that. Even
when you're going back and forth and you're just gonna

(49:08):
get lazy.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
Yeah, And even when you're halfway through that email, other
ideas will come to you.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
Ye yeah, yeah I have Yeah, I'm watching a film
or I'm reading a book and I'm like, oh, yeah,
that that solves that problem I'm having with my scene,
you know, doing something like that, you.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
Know, absolutely right. So you came to writing short stories
and and and novels fairly late in life. And I'm
glad you did because I have a similar sort of
story and that I started out early, but then I
stopped and then I had I started again, and then
I had a kid and I had a complicated job,
so I kind of stopped again for about eight years.

(49:47):
And now I'm back into it and it's it. You know,
the road ahead is quite a bit shorter than it
was before. So do you have any advice to writers
who are in their fifties and they've always wanted to
write a novel and now they kind of have the time.
What would you say to them? Like, what would you

(50:07):
be your advice?

Speaker 2 (50:09):
Boy? It's it's so hard because everyone is different, you know,
everyone's story is different, is you know, depending on your
writing background. If you don't have a lot of writing
in your background, then start start taking some courses. And
because I always found you know, I you know, it's

(50:32):
not true that I didn't write short stories and some reason,
because I remember when I took fiction courses in college,
you know, it really motivated me from you know, week
to week to come up with the little story because
it was due and for those so I did write,
you know, some short stories. And I think that's one
good way to start is go someplace where you have

(50:55):
deadlines and have feedback. And if you do have a
writer a writerly background, just you know, decide what you
want to do and sit down and do it. And
and try not to do what I do, which is
I'm always going in ten directions at once, and you know,

(51:16):
it takes me forever to finish something because number one,
I'm a perfectionist. Number Two, I'm doing eight, eight or
nine other things. So yeah, just find a story that
you really, you really bought into and just focus on
that and and you know, join writers groups and yeah,
you know, because I've you know, really found helpful. Is

(51:38):
I'm a member of the Bless You, the Horror Writers Association,
and and I've joined the local chapters. I'm in Wisconsin,
halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago, so I've joined both chapters.
And so you get to meet other writers who are
doing what you're doing, and and you know, get some support,

(52:02):
and uh, you know, I think, yeah, just being alone
in your room it really makes it hard, really makes
it difficult if you're feedback, you're not you don't have
some sort of deadline, you know. I mean some people
can work with self and post deadlines.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
But I'm not very good at time.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
Yeah, and that's why those fiction courses were so good
for me. I just I had to come up with something. Yeah,
and then you know, over since then, I've had so
many professional writing jobs where yeah, You've got to have
this written in the next hour or by tomorrow or whatever.
So yeah, you know, with that kind of experience, you
you learn how to do self imposed deadlines and meet them.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Mm hmm. Now what are you working on now, like
novel wise or you mentioned a novella earlier.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Yeah, I have a novella that was also edited by Gabino,
which I'm shopping since I don't have an agent. You know,
you're you're limited to the number of places you can
put it out to. But it's it's also a difficult.
I like it a lot, I'm really proud of it,

(53:14):
but it's it's very much you know, Like I talked
about my background growing up in Detroit, it's it's very
much about that. It's very much about race. It's a
a kind of very very nice white couple who have
adopted a black infant and as a teenager, they're a

(53:38):
teenage black daughter is killed by the police. And there
are old house that they've always lived in with her,
which was always haunted, but it was always kind of
like their daughter would always just make them laugh about it.
It's not a big deal. But now that their daughter
is dead, the house is seriously coming after them, and

(54:02):
so it's about so it's very much in your face
about race. It's a horror movie. It's it's kind of
I don't know, a little bit like get out in
that they can't get out of the house. They don't
know why it's trying to kill them. Is it is

(54:23):
it seeking vengeance for what happened to their daughter, Is
it seeking vengeance for what's happened for the last three
hundred years, or is it something completely unrelated that's going on?
And then the cops get involved, and of course what
could possibly go wrong? You know. So it's it's a
tight little horror story, haunted house, horror story, very urban,

(54:51):
and it's actually so far be into a lot fewer
places than kind Of with the Dead and gotten a
lot better respect, but still no one's It's gotten a
lot of Oh I really love this. This needs to
be made, but it's not for us kind of thing
which I didn't get very much from counter Of with

(55:12):
the Dead, so that that makes me a little bit hopeful.

Speaker 1 (55:15):
Yeah, keep shopping. I'm sorry, go ahead, keep shopping it.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Yep. That's all I can do is don't give up.
And every option I see, and then I'm writing another
horror novel because of more along the lines of kind
Of with the Dead, kind of.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
You mentioned that you I want to ask this before
we sign off, because I saw it. I forget where
I saw it. It might be on your website. But
you've worked with Gabino Iglesias. Uh, he's edited your your work.
How did you get connected with him for editing? Did
you just like it?

Speaker 2 (55:52):
It's kind of a funny story because I finally got
onto Twitter actually when I started writing fiction and writing,
and I was kind of like, you know, and my
stuff is kind of a mix of horror crime mm hmm,
and I just wasn't seeing a lot of that out

(56:13):
in the world, like am I wasting my time. And
and I started connecting with these are not so much
connecting is following these horror writers. And then I discovered
Gabino's work and I'm like, oh man, he's doing exactly
a thing that I want to do that I'm trying
to do with his novel and people like Lard Barn,

(56:34):
you know, and I was just like, oh, okay, you
can do horror crime. You know his Isaiah Colors.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Yeah, I love those books. I haven't actually all.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
And so, I mean we were friends on on Twitter
and you know, and I finished my my draft of
kind Of with the Dead and and and it was
like looking looking for someone to edit it. And I
posted to a bunch of the people I followed, can

(57:07):
you suggest an editor? I described the project and and
you know, it's a paying gig, can't pay a lot,
but you know, and Gabino messaged me back and said, hey,
I'll edit it for you. Oh my god. Sure, you know,
my literally my favorite writer, and he's just volunteered to

(57:29):
edit my manuscript. So and then when I wrote the novella,
he edited that. You know. Now, I think he's way
too busy to do stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (57:38):
He might be But what's it like working with him?
He seems like such a great guy.

Speaker 2 (57:43):
He is, you know, he's a he's a I think
it's his sensibility. You know, he's very much, very much
like a lot of the people I grew up with
and knew in Detroit. He he's very progressive, you know,

(58:04):
out there, but not a very weak need progressive. He's
pretty hardcore.

Speaker 1 (58:10):
Yeah, you can get that dispremist fiction.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
And and pretty much you know, in terms of his writing.
F you, f you if you don't like that I
write stuff in Spanish sometimes, yeah, and and so that
I really appreciate it. And and I like to think
he kind of appreciated some of that in my work.
You know. It's just I'm not writing something that I
think is going to be popular. You know. I think

(58:35):
while I was working on it, I thought, oh man,
this is I already know this is going to be
a tough sell. Yeah. So yeah, I mean he yeah,
I mean, it's not like we're buddies or something. But
I really, I really, you know, respected his opinions on
my work, and he seemed to really like it. He
had good things to say. Like I said, I you know,

(58:55):
I ended up losing ten thousand words with his notes,
and I think that made it a much better, better story.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
Yeah, awesome. All right, So final question before we we
wrap things up here and ask this to all my guests, now,
are there any authors out there for many genre? It
doesn't matter that you feel not enough people are talking about.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
You know, three or four years ago, I would have
said that about Cabino, but now he's taken off. And
another person I would have said that about, very very
is who a few months ago, Cynthia Paleo in Chicago
Forgotten Sisters, and you know a number of you know,

(59:44):
kind of folk hore very much where Chicago is very
much a character. But now all of a sudden, she's
she's in terms of the horror world, she's everywhere.

Speaker 1 (59:54):
Yeah, she's starting to blow up too.

Speaker 2 (59:57):
Yeah. And you know, there's another writer I like who
is not really that visible yet is Kelso Hurtado, HS writer,
and I think he's in San Antonio and he's written
a couple of books I really like. I'm trying to
The Devil's Promise is one of them. There's I Forget

(01:00:22):
if that's the first of a second and in a
sequence of two related stories, and I think I was
turned on to him by Abino, and I hesitated at
first because I thought his stuff would be young adult
because his characters, his lead characters are teenagers. And but

(01:00:46):
it's not. It's definitely not. And it's also, you know,
in a good way, kind of densely written, and the
characters are are very deeply written, nice the description. So
it's the kind of writing I like to read and
the writing I like to write. So I think he's
someone that people need to pay more attention to. And

(01:01:11):
and then there's people that I think really like Larred Barron.
I wish people would pay more attention to him outside
the horror world. You know, such a good writer.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
He's you know, he's one of the best.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
And you know, then there's I'm looking at my list here,
you know, another one, Andy Davidson, outside of horror should
get more attention.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
And have you read The Boatman's Daughter.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Yes, I like that book a lot. It's got the
density of I think, the urban stories that I like
to write, but it takes place in the Bayou, but
it's got that same density where you can just see,
you know, every tree, and you know every bog and

(01:01:56):
you know the characters are so deeply written. Yeah, so
him definitely. And and then people like a. Laurel high
Tower and Haley Piper are people whose books I really.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
Like a lot, and I love both those authors, and.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
I think they both should become more mainstream than they
are and probably will, though probably following in the path
of Cynthia Playo.

Speaker 1 (01:02:24):
You know. Yeah, well Haley Piper I think is on
her way to that, and uh m hmm. Laurel high Tower,
I think she's going to Yeah, like definitely, it's it's
in her cards, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
Yeah. I mean she's also got a lot of stuff
out there, which yeah, I always always hate stuff. Yeah,
it takes me forever.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Yeah, I hear you. All right, So do you have
anything coming out soon that people can look forward to,
like short stories or anything like that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
Nothing, unfortunately, Yeah, nothing until till next spring. I have
a short story coming out and nice I can never
pronounce that word, that c h T, that creature, the
the whola, uh yeah, forget it. But I was short

(01:03:25):
story coming out next spring in a quarterly or quarterly Okay,
you had me at hello, a very Detroit urban story.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
So if people want to check you out online, where
can they go.

Speaker 2 (01:03:40):
They can go to Peter O'Keefe writer dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:03:45):
Send you on Twitter too.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
I'm slowly moving off Twitter. I'm mostly on Blue Sky now,
which I don't even know my handle, guy, but you know,
search Peter O'Keeffe and you'll find me.

Speaker 1 (01:03:59):
Yeah. Uh so. Yeah, I've taken the plunge too, because
Twitter has become a bit of a ship storm, and
it seems like it's a sinking ship too. A lot
a lot of people are bailing, yeah, a lot of.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
I've seen all these people on Blue Sky that were
on Twitter, and yeah, yeah, I don't want to get
into politics, but I just don't want to support it.
I want to support that site me too, in any way,
shape or form.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
Yeah, so absolutely. Well, I want to thank you for
being a guest on my show. I had a great
time talking to you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
Yeah. Likewise, I'm so happy you invited me. This is Yeah,
I really enjoyed it and looking forward to I hate
watching myself, but looking forward to hate watching myself on video.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
Within the next week or so, this will also become
a podcast episode, and I'll try to remember to to
let you know when that's up. So I want to
thank the people who came out to watch. There was
some some people who did mostly they come afterwards. So
if you're in in the future watching this or listening
to it on the podcast, thank you very much for
showing up, and you're invited to come back. Whenever you

(01:05:07):
have a project you want to talk about, just let
me know send me another email.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
And although when Matt Novella gets picked up somewhere to
talk about, well.

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
We'll do it all right. Thank you, Peter, and we'll
talk to you again soon.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
Okay, Thanks Jason, bye bye.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
If you like what I'm doing here and want to
support the channel without involving any money on your part,
you can do so by sharing the podcast on social media.
You can also write a review on Apple Podcasts or
rate the show on Spotify. I can't stress enough to
you how much I would appreciate that alone. Please please

(01:05:43):
leave a review on Apple Podcasts or rate the show
on Spotify. As I just said, each and every way
you can help out the channel and podcast grow would
be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much. Thank you so

(01:06:04):
much for listening to my conversation with Peter O'Keefe. I
highly recommend going and getting counted with the Dead and
giving it a read, especially if you like Frankenstein retellings.
I haven't read too many of them, to be quite honest,
but I have to say that I really enjoyed this one.
All right, So moving on, If you want to support

(01:06:26):
the show, there's quite a few ways you can do so,
I would really appreciate it if you wanted to go
to Apple Podcasts and leave the show a five star rating.
This helps Apple share the shows, share this show with
other people, and then the show can grow, and that

(01:06:47):
would be awesome. If you want to send me your
hard earned money, you can join the Patreon. Links for
that are in the description in the show notes there.
And as I said, I'd be I'd be more than
appreciative if you were willing to part with your money
and help this show keep going and help me maybe

(01:07:09):
even get some more or better equipment. All right, So
that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. If
you've been waiting for the final Dark Tower book from
Sin and Me, we decided to take a break from
that for a couple of months and we are back
on it now. So hopefully that episode no promises, but

(01:07:32):
hopefully our conversation will come out before the end of
the year. If not, you'll see it at the beginning
of twenty five. I have a lot of projects in
store that I will be announcing soon, so stay tuned
and we will catch you in the next podcast. Personally,

(01:08:07):
absolutely absolutely