A Conversation with Joelle Presby

[00:00:00] Halfling: Thank you all for tuning in to the Halfling in the Spaceman. If you're new to our show, we welcome you and hope you are entertained and inspired to start your own journey into active fandom. If you are returning listener, thank you for choosing to spend some more time with us and today we are excited to be talking with author Joelle Presby, who'll be talking with us about her writing for the Honor Harrington Universe or Honorverse, along with and under David Weber.

[00:00:31] Halfling: She'll also be talking about her work with BuNine and or the Bureau Nine. Joelle, welcome.

[00:00:38] Joelle: Hi. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:40] Halfling: Oh well it's great to have you appreciate you coming on. So let's just dive right in and talk a little bit about the Honor Harrington series, which was first written by David Weber. Give us just a little bit of a description for our listeners.

[00:00:54] Halfling: I mean, we've not actually read them. We have listened to them on audio books, so we are we're familiar, but for our listeners out there who may not know of Honor Harington, just talk a little bit about the series.

[00:01:07] Joelle: It's a very well selling series by David Weber. Often described as Horatio Hornblower in space. Gosh, I've lost track of how many novels there are in the main line. Over 20, I'd say. And then he did a branch off with Eric Flint. And the two of them together actually completed their entire arc for the branch.

[00:01:28] Joelle: And, also there's a second branch with Timothy Zahn and Thomas Pope,

[00:01:34] Halfling: Oh wow.

[00:01:35] Joelle: The Manticore Ascendant, which is sort of, a whole prequel series from before Honor was born. And there's four books in that series, and I have them, but I haven't read the last one, so I don't know if the fourth one is the end of that arc or if there will be more coming.

[00:01:48] Halfling: Okay. Okay. Well, fair enough. So we appreciate that and I would highly recommend, , people get ahold of these books. Either audio get the physical copy or kindle ebook, they're great reads. They're fun stories.

[00:02:01] Halfling: You do have to like, how military type stories, but there's more to it than just the military, 

[00:02:08] Joelle: There's certainly a lot of space battles. So if you love space battles and big ships, these are definitely the stories for you. But there's also, I totally forgot to mention the YA series with the Tree Cats with Jane Lindskold. Four of those now. A new clan was the most recent one that, Jane and David wrote. And David is very generous bringing in other authors. He's got an anthology collection that is called Worlds of Honor. And I got started with David writing short stories in the Honorverse in his Worlds of Honor anthologies and those continue to be published. We've got the Seventh Worlds of Honor coming out, next year, which is What Price Victory.

[00:02:50] Halfling: Mm-hmm. Good I'm sure that would be interesting to, to take up as well. 

[00:02:55] Spaceman: Well, Joelle, one of the important things we're doing with our show is to give our listeners insight into creators journeys from being fans to becoming creators or active participants, can you tell us how you first got involved in the Honorverse and with BuNine? 

[00:03:08] Joelle: it was all my husband's fault.

[00:03:10] Halfling: isn't it

[00:03:11] Joelle: everything is 

[00:03:12] Halfling: isn't it always

[00:03:14] Joelle: Yeah,

[00:03:16] Halfling: Sorry, 

[00:03:16] Halfling: Space 

[00:03:17] Joelle: uh, Andy Presby was a David Weber fan before I knew David Weber existed. I've been a writer for a long time and, I was going to the United States Naval Academy. I was a mid shipman. I was a regular on baen.com, on the web board.

[00:03:33] Joelle: Getting to know people there and getting to read snippets from authors. I've read some of David Weber, but I certainly never expected to actually meet authors. I started to learn that there existed things called science fiction conventions, and I was pretty suspicious because. I hear that, people go to meet strangers that they met on the internet and they wake up in a bathtub full of ice and missing a kidney.

[00:03:56] Joelle: But I did well at the Naval Academy and I got sent to a graduate school immediately after commissioning. And so I was at, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. And, my future husband, Andy Presby, was also there as a student, but I didn't know it.

[00:04:12] Joelle: Thanksgiving break was coming up and I hadn't accrued enough vacation days in the military. They're called leave days to be able to take all four days of Thanksgiving and then also take all the days that were available for the winter break over Christmas , but the military's got a sort of halfway vacation time thing called liberty, which means you're not, you don't have to be somewhere in uniform for your job, but you don't get to go far away.

[00:04:43] Joelle: And for reasons that made sense to the admiral in charge of the school far away was defined as anywhere within the state of California was not far away. And there are these people on baen.com who are telling me Thanksgiving weekend there's a science fiction convention in LA. So I drove down from Monterey to Los Angeles and attended my very first science fiction convention Lost Con, 2003, the GOH.

[00:05:11] Joelle: I had no idea what the GOH was. The guest of honor was this guy named David Weber, who I recognized and I met up with around 40 people for breakfast Friday morning, day after Thanksgiving, who I never met before, but around 20 of them I recognized from their, from the internet. And one of them decided to send forth another minion to bring the only other Navy person he knew of who was at the entire convention.

[00:05:41] Joelle: Andy Presby introduced to me. Unfortunately, he did not know that I was a freshly minted ensign who had just come out of the Naval Academy and at the Naval Academy, the lieutenants. The third rank in the military are the scary people who are always telling you what to do and getting mad at you. And the higher ranking people that the admiral and the captains are kind and compassionate, and if they see something wrong, they'll tell the lieutenant who will circle back around later and yell at you.

[00:06:08] Joelle: So, Ray Chatterji introduces Ensign Joelle Mann, please meet Lieutenant Andy Presby. And I spend the rest of the weekend of avoiding Andy because I wanted to have fun. But eventually he convinced me that he was an okay person and that lieutenants were not actually evil. And I started dating him back at grad school afterwards. But, okay, Well, continuing on, you wanna know about getting involved with David Weber. So Andy is going to grad school studying spacecraft engineering, which apparently science fiction authors consider a very useful thing to have one of your beta readers know about. So Andy has convinced David to let him read early copies and give him insights for, okay, this one thing that you said in this other book follows with actual science in this way.

[00:07:01] Joelle: And this other thing is brilliant, but if you explain it one of these two other ways, it will actually still fit with science. And so David could make tweaks like that to increase the science in his science fiction if he chose. Come around. Six years later, it's getting to the point where David Weber is going to have the 20 year anniversary of the first book of his Honorverse series coming up, and Toni Weisskopf at Baen wants him to produce some kind of anniversary edition.

[00:07:30] Joelle: She's got plans for a leather special order edition. But also there's become some other authors have done things where they published a companion book, which is like an encyclopedia in universe details. And so David says he's got a whole lot of other things to do and he doesn't have time to write a companion 

[00:07:50] Halfling: uhh 

[00:07:51] Joelle: but. he's got these people who have been his beta reader assist tech people for a while, and he has a lot of material that his unpublished reference work that is in part supported by these other people. And he tells these other people, Andy Presby winning one of them. Why don't you guys get together and you sign a contract with Toni Weisskopf to produce an Honorverse companion. And so they do. They figured out that there's nine of them. They incorporate and call themselves BuNine and. I'm sitting along the whole time not planning to be any part of this. Andy is a founding member of BuNine. I am not, I'm just the spouse writing my seventh novel and my laptop in the corner while they talk, and occasionally when there's breaks in their conversations about making this companion, talking with David about how he does writing and listening to his insights, which is very invaluable for an aspiring writer. And so Andy and these eight other people have these great plans and then the Navy changes what job Andy has and he suddenly has no time to make this happen.

[00:08:52] Halfling: Mm.

[00:08:52] Joelle: And people are including me in their conversations cuz I've been there, but I still don't think of myself as part of it. But I realize this isn't gonna happen unless somebody else steps in and does the stuff that Andy said he was gonna do.

[00:09:05] Joelle: And so I appoint myself a kind of assistant project manager and push hard and do a significant amount of writing for this book. And also printing out things and sticking it in front of Andy when he has a few minutes and saying, Check the science on this spaceship because we're gonna finalize it make him do it.

[00:09:23] Joelle: And he meant to do it and he wanted to do it, but it was important to do this , and bring it together and, David decides to also write a short story, which for him is a novella and stick that in, but certainly also help the sales

[00:09:35] Halfling: right.

[00:09:36] Joelle: But David and his wife Sharon, appreciate my help in this and in putting this all together.

[00:09:42] Joelle: Baen is also doing a thing where they're starting to put, short fiction and nonfiction articles on the website each month and changing them, and Toni asked David if in coordination with the release of the companion and the leather bound edition for the 20 years, if he would have a short story to put on baen.com.

[00:10:01] Joelle: And he says, Toni, I tried to write a short story. It came outta novella. I don't do short stories, my short stories are long. I really don't have time. I've got all these other things that I have to write for you. Well I'm aspiring writer listening back here, and I decide to write an Honorverse short story, and I'm kind of proud of it.

[00:10:19] Joelle: I don't expect anything to happen with it, but I show it to some other members in BuNine. And, Tom Pope, who at that point is the president of BuNine, likes it and without talking to me, he shares it to Sharon Rice Weber, who likes it, who shares it with David, who likes it. And again, without talking to me, gives it to Toni Weisskopf who buys it. And so I found out that it has been bought before. I know it has been submitted.

[00:10:44] Joelle: Oh wow.

[00:10:45] Joelle: And so my first publication is on baen.com. The, a short story, and it turns out that the fans also really like this bit of a tiny snippet of in Universe story. And because of that positive reaction from the Royal Manticoran Navy fan club and the readers.

[00:11:03] Joelle: I get an invitation to submit to the next Honorverse, anthology Beginnings, which is a Worlds of Honor, number six, and then people like it again. And so David is able to convince Toni Weisskopf to let me, who has never published a novel on my own, or a short story on my own at that point, to co-write with him in the multiverse series. And I mean, I would've been terrified to show my short story to Tom Pope if I had known that then that each thing would potentially lead to another big thing. And I mean, now I, I've got my first solo novel coming out from Baen in November, and David and I are working on the next multiverse novel. And we have more novels after that, that we're under contract for.

[00:11:54] Joelle: And it turns out that I have a writing career and it's all Andy's fault.

[00:12:00] Spaceman: Just curious, what's the name of that novel that you just produced?

[00:12:03] Joelle: Coming out in November. This is The Dabare Snake Launcher. It is not an Honorverse novel. It is a Joelle Presby novel. I grew up in West Africa in Cameroon. Dabare is a word from, Fallani language. It's what it means depends on whether you are asking a Fallani person in East Africa or West Africa, or whether you're going with, the notes that, the British Army wrote that Dabare meant after they'd been, well, depending on when in the war, whether they'd been massacred or been being massacred by the fall. So it, it usually means some kind of engineering device that has been put together with an unusual assortment of materials, and it is really amazing and sometimes it works. If you ask the British Army, it is nasty, evil, scheming, possibly improvised, explosive device kinds. And if you go to East Africa, there's often a magical association to it too.

[00:13:00] Spaceman: Okay. Well, it sounds like based on, the, BuNine group, that there is a lot of technical detail that goes into the Honorverse novels and that you're a big, contributor to that. So how does your background tie into the work you're doing for the Honorverse?

[00:13:17] Joelle: I went to the US Naval Academy, from the Naval Academy. I was commissioned into the surface warfare, community and worked in the Navy nuclear power engineering pipeline as an officer. So, I was working with nukes, steam power, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, putting everything together and making it work and fixing it.

[00:13:38] Joelle: So that shipboard focus on the integration of engineering is useful for understanding ships and fictional ships. After the Navy, I worked for a corporate consultant,, Booz Allen Hamilton. And arguably our job was to fix more broader system problems, which again, can relate.

[00:13:58] Halfling: Were you always drawn to, technical, you know, or. I'm not sure exactly what the word is I'm trying to look for,

[00:14:06] Halfling: but 

[00:14:07] Joelle: engineering kind of stuff.

[00:14:08] Halfling: yeah. There you go. Thank you. Yeah. Have you always been 

[00:14:11] Joelle: I

[00:14:12] Halfling: that. 

[00:14:13] Joelle: I'd say I was, Cameroon where I grew up has a lot of languages. It's a country where if you travel, if you travel over a mountain range or across the river, the next people group. Usually has a different language entirely. The country of Cameroon says that they have over a hundred distinct languages, not dialect, languages, and locals, all speak lots of languages, usually at least four fluently.

[00:14:41] Joelle: My parents were missionaries in Cameroon, which meant that we kind of moved around the country and weren't. In the same town all the time. And so other people with that kind of childhood would've gotten really good at languages. I'm, my parents are great at languages. I'm not great at languages.

[00:14:58] Joelle: Fortunately for me, there are some games that were really common that involve rocks and holes and moving the rocks around Very math focused or sciencey, depending on which, which aspects you were playing it and you. Have to know how to speak in order to play these games as a kid, . So I could still have friends and play without being able to communicate yet.

[00:15:22] Halfling: Wow, that's that. Yeah. That's. Amazing background. It really is.

[00:15:28] Joelle: And you're probably like, Why did you end up a writer when you were so bad at it? Well, apparently aptitude is not something I'm willing to let be my limitation

[00:15:37] Halfling: Well, I think he just actually kind of started to answer Spaceman's question. When he was asking about, What sort of inspired your writing or first Got you interested in writing?

[00:15:49] Joelle: Yeah, I've always been interested in writing, in Cameroon, there were a limited amount of books that were in English. And so I dealt with that some by reading books that were way above my level. I remember I was in elementary school when I first read The Scarlet Letter, and it was such a boring book.

[00:16:08] Joelle: I couldn't figure out why anybody cared about the letter A, I missed almost everything that the book was actually about. And my parents, I remember my parents had a conversation about whether or not to take it away from me, which made me focus and actually try to finish it. And I still couldn't figure out why they consider away for me as above my level.

[00:16:28] Joelle: And I think they patted themselves on the back that I both was willing to push through and that I, they were right, that I didn't understand. So well, when you love stories and there's not a lot of them, you reread the ones you have and you make up new ones.

[00:16:42] Halfling: I can imagine. So going back to something that you said a minute ago, talking about differences or similarities between the actual US Navy in terms of their ships, ranks and, procedures, that type of thing versus what we read about in the Honorverse.

[00:17:01] Halfling: Speak a little bit about differences or similarities.

[00:17:04] Joelle: The US Navy's ships. Require a lot more boring day to day work than you ever see on the page of an Honorverse book and I'm sure that's a narrative requirement. The people who make it into being on the cover characters are pure human beings or have better dialogue. There's more women in the Honorverse who are serving, the people serve longer in the Honorverse. We don't have prolong in regular life. And so people in peace time, Navy, you've got 20 years to serve and for the most part at 20 years, thank you for your service. Goodbye.

[00:17:41] Joelle: You're not sticking around for 60 years and gonna make it all the way up to be at Earl White Haven's level. Right? What else? When I was on John S. McCain in Japan, it's a guided missile destroyer named after the senator's, father and grandfather who were four star admirals. We worked with the Japanese Navy and with the South Korean Republic of Korea Navy separately, in multiple exercises. And it was kind of interesting to see how the other fleets sometimes had attributes that fit better with what actually happened in the Honorverse than our own US Navy did. The Japanese Navy, for instance, is amazing at how clean and completely capable they appear to be keeping their ships. And in the US Navy. Everything. You try to keep it operational, but sometimes you can't get all the parts you need and things, Things have to be tagged out as non operational, and yet you can't tell people that it's not working.

[00:18:38] Joelle: But you have work around ways that if you have to use this weapon system, you'll be able to use it, but you're gonna be looking at these other gauges here instead of the primary gauge, because it's been broken for three years and this plate, face plate is on special order, and maybe one day it'll come, but you're not counting on it being while you're there for your three years.

[00:18:55] Halfling: Oh.

[00:18:57] Joelle: Well, the Japanese Navy when you did tours of their ships, and I realized this could be that they only showed us the stuff that was pristine, but it seemed like, that they had fewer enough ships compared to their budget, that they could keep everything perfectly working all the time.

[00:19:11] Joelle: You didn't ever see a rust line down the side of the ship because it had been underway for eight months and didn't have time to get back to a dry deck. They'll go in and out and they'll be back. If there's anything, they'll fix it immediately. Well, the US Navy was a little bit rough around the edge.

[00:19:25] Halfling: So would you say that the Royal Manticoran Navy is more akin to the Japanese Navy?

[00:19:31] Joelle: In the sense of that parts are rarely broken, and they seem to always be able to get them fixed before they, they send them out to war. More akin to the Japanese Navy and more akin to, the Republic of Korea Navy in that, the Republic of Korea Navy, they were considering themselves actively at war with North Korea the entire time I was over there and so, When they had, a machine gun on the deck of a ship, it would have live rounds right there, uploaded and ready to fire and if a ship, if a small boat came by that wasn't supposed to be there, they'd fire actual warning shots at it. And from the US Navy perspective, like, whoa , that, that was, Well, I guess you're at war. You think that might be an actual adversary? Well, we would not be making that assumption.

[00:20:20] Spaceman: You know, it's funny talking about, the inspirations of the different navs and, comparing it to the fictional navy and the Honorverse and the different powers in the Honorverse. I was thinking of the movie Master and Commander and several people have said that movie is the best Star Trek movie you've never seen.

[00:20:37] Spaceman: But coming out of it, I was thinking this is the best Honor Harrington movie that's never been made.

[00:20:43] Joelle: Yes. Yes. that's a fun movie.

[00:20:48] Halfling: So you've done both your writing on your own and, obviously collaborative. Which do you prefer and which do you think is more challenging?

[00:20:58] Joelle: The one I'm doing while I'm doing it is the most challenging one, , but I really value being able to switch back and forth. Writing with David Weber, he does things different for depending on which collaborator he's working with, but, When he and I write together, we come up with an outline together that is mostly based on his previous ideas for the series because, David and Linda Evans together started this series and I only joined, on the third book.

[00:21:25] Joelle: So there is a grand arc for the series that was planned before I was even ever part of it that we're keeping true to. And then, so I have the chapters I'm gonna write, he has the chapters he's gonna write, and we have a pretty detailed outline that we're writing to. If I'm doing it on my own, I don't have to have an outline if I don't want to.

[00:21:44] Joelle: And so coming out of, writing The Road to Hell, I'm starting into The Dabare Snake Launcher or I was like, I'm not doing an outline. I love when I can just be free with my words and discover what's gonna happen next. I got to 85,000 words and I didn't know how this thing was gonna end, and I had never had that experience co-writing with David because w e had a very detailed outline, so I had to go back through and create an outline for myself and pull out which pieces no longer fit because it needed to all tie together and work in a single book and not in a Lord of the Rings, kind of one book that's three books long, but we'll chop it in into pieces because I am not JRR Tolkien and so I can't count on readers to hang with me that long.

[00:22:29] Halfling: In talking with one of our other guests, I would say I think that most people, there are times when they work better collaboratively or with the team, and then there are other times when the same person may work better or self-directed. I think part of it is the nature of the project and how motivated they actually are to do whatever

[00:22:55] Halfling: Yeah. I mean, 

[00:22:56] Halfling: I'm, I'm that way, I'm that way. I, you know, there's some things that I, I just wanna be left alone to do my way and get it done. And then there's other times when I'm like, Okay guys, what do y'all think about this? I'm thinking about this. What do you think? You know? And that way, so. What about you?

[00:23:16] Halfling: Spaceman. As a DBA you work with a team, but you also have a lot of time that you're self-directed, right?

[00:23:24] Spaceman: Yeah. It depends on the amount of, ah, "appropriate" management is the way I would call it. Sometimes you just need to roll your sleeves up and get the job done, but most of the time, it's okay to work collaboratively. There are all sorts of different frameworks for working with other people.

[00:23:40] Spaceman: And I would, one thing I really want to explore at some point once we get our podcast really going and we start deep diving into subjects,

[00:23:48] Spaceman: is how collaborative groups, especially on writing projects, do their work and how they coordinate and the tools they use. Although this isn't really a podcast about writing, this is a podcast about people, 

[00:24:00] Spaceman: uh, 

[00:24:01] Joelle: Right.

[00:24:02] Spaceman: But being, a former project manager, I'm a guy who goes, well, how can this be broken down?

[00:24:06] Spaceman: How can we find efficiencies? , no. I want to have a good time,

[00:24:12] Joelle: We used a website called Base Camp for writing the companion, because we were not even all in the same time zone and certainly not able to get together and pass out physical drafts. And so it, it was helpful to have sections and. Be able to write notes that were not in the manuscript without track changes.

[00:24:29] Joelle: You probably figured this out. But track changes does have a limit. You can't do an infinite number of changes in different people before it starts corrupting the file. And then you have the horror of how far back have we lost the work. 

[00:24:42] Spaceman: You know, it's so interesting. Uh, one of the things that happened to me, I will never be a writer. I just don't have the talent for it.

[00:24:49] Spaceman: I can't wordsmith. I can write, I write technical documentation all the time, but back when I was in college, I did a collaborative work with a friend and, we took turns writing chapters.

[00:24:59] Spaceman: And it was interesting to see the different voices from the different chapters because my writing was much more people oriented and his writing was much more thing oriented. So, It's interesting when you see, collaborations like that, especially when you have one theme and you have an anthology where you have a collection of different authors writing with the same characters.

[00:25:21] Joelle: Yeah. 

[00:25:22] Halfling: Is that a challenge for you to. Write the same character that somebody else was already writing. Have you found that to be problematic or is it just kind of come naturally to you?

[00:25:34] Joelle: It can be intimidating, especially the characters that I'm pretty sure that it seems like Linda Evans was the source of them rather than David to, to want to honor what she might have meant for those characters to be. But it's such a big cast of characters that they don't individually get a huge amount of screen time.

[00:25:52] Joelle: I hope that together Dave and I have been able to make it so that the readers aren't turned off by, changes that would have to have happened, I dealt with it to some extent by sometimes adding new viewpoints. If I'm really concerned that I'm not capturing the tone and the feel of a character in the entire scene, to have it come from a different character's viewpoint when that character that matters and needs to be part of the story.

[00:26:16] Joelle: But other times it's, it's a balance about giving reader. 98% of what we wish we could give 'em more. Or if you can just totally flip it and give them not what they expect and have it still be good.

[00:26:29] Spaceman: One of the things that, we like to talk about people is we find that many people who are involved in speculative fiction and associated things often have multiple overlapping interests the Halfling and I, we're into most everything. At least at some point, comics, anime games, science fiction, fantasy novels, we even publish our own online zine about crime stories.

[00:26:53] Spaceman: So we've been busy. One of the things we were always interested in with our guests is what areas do you cross over into that, that are outside of your writing? Do you have any other interest in the kind of nerdy arena that you might like to share with our listeners?

[00:27:07] Joelle: Well, I was warned when I was transitioning into writing as a hobby to writing as my job, that I was gonna have lost my hobby and I will need a new hobby. And so I've picked up some other things. I'm not sure if they're mainstream or nerdy or if they're just, not even up to nerdy.

[00:27:23] Joelle: They're weird , but I like to knit. And I've, there are a lot of things that I like to do, but I'm not very good at. I like to bake. I, I like to decorate cakes. It's bad for my waistline, so I can't do it as much as I . I play Pokemon Go, still, Yeah, I'm still continuing to play Pokemon Go.

[00:27:43] Joelle: I realize it's like three 

[00:27:44] Halfling: Okay, 

[00:27:45] Joelle: but.

[00:27:45] Spaceman: Hey, it's a good news. It's a good excuse to get outside and take a walk.

[00:27:48] Halfling: Yeah, sure, sure.

[00:27:51] Joelle: Cause otherwise I would be in front of my screen all the time.

[00:27:54] Halfling: yeah. Well, does that mean that, because you play that, do you watch any anime.

[00:27:59] Joelle: You know, I haven't, my younger brother has given me a list of anime that, that I should watch. But I've got little kids and I've got deadlines and so visual storytelling is something that I ration. I have finished watching Arcane. I don't know if you would consider that anime or if you would consider that, cartoon, but I thought it was awesome, 

[00:28:18] Joelle: but I made the excuse to get to watch it because Casey Azel and Justin Watson, who are fellow Baen authors, We're doing a podcast with me, and so we would watch an episode and then we would get on a podcast and talk about it.

[00:28:33] Joelle: And if I hadn't had the excuse of, I have to watch this for my job because we're gonna talk about it, I would've had difficulty justifying it to myself. 

[00:28:42] Joelle: Because I think it was beautifully well done, and so many, There are so many parts of storytelling that make me not like visual storytelling and want to stick only to books, but this one didn't make those mistakes where I don't know if other people had this feeling that sometimes when it's TV they put all their effort into making it fascinating, interesting. Through the beginning without having any plan for how it's gonna end. So that as an audience member, I have trust issues that they're not gonna finish the story and they're gonna give me a, a stupid, and then it was a dream and they woke up, or, the screen just went black and, I want fulfillment, you know?

[00:29:23] Halfling: Joelle, I have never been so mad watching a TV series than when we watched the XFiles because we were loyal fans

[00:29:33] Joelle: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:33] Halfling: for the entire series, and toward the end. Things just took a turn and by the time it got to the last episode, I wanted to get on a plane and fly to California or wherever Chris Carter was and punch him in the mouth. because it just seemed like there was no, there, there was no thinking about the actual ending and how to actually end the series in a way that made sense. And I, I was left befuddled and angry and thought, you know, I feel like I just wasted all this time, so I get exactly what you're saying.

[00:30:21] Spaceman: And I've heard the same thing from Game of Thrones fans, so you know,

[00:30:24] Joelle: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:26] Halfling: Uh, um, well, so you have taken your enjoyment of the Honor Harrington series and you become an actual, participant in it. 

[00:30:37] Halfling: Do you have any advice for our listeners that might have read these books or thinking about reading them now and they read them and then think, Wow, these are really cool. How can I get involved in some way? Like you yourself have done. Do you have any advice for anybody who may be thinking about that?

[00:30:57] Joelle: I'm not sure. I don't know if David Weber is looking for more co-writers at this point, or anything that to try to follow exactly along the path that my writing path has been, and I didn't know I was in my own path. And so I feel like that was a, being struck by lightning and it also kind of hurt a little bit and maybe you didn't wanna go that way.

[00:31:20] Joelle: if you've got other options. So if you are an aspiring writer and you'd like to, sell books to Baen or another publisher and you'd like to write science fiction or fantasy. I think that my advice would be to, subscribe to the Writer Dojo podcast by Larry Correia and Steve Diamond, and listen to their very detailed and specific advice about developing your skills and trying to find ways to get started.

[00:31:48] Joelle: I do think that. If you write, more than two short stories before you try to start write a novel, you'll have an easier time of it, and you won't need seven drafts to get to the point where David Weber would consider it good enough to publish, for instance, . And you'll save yourself some pain if you do some of those drafts aren't on smaller length work.

[00:32:07] Joelle: So I think there are other paths that are better than mine that people should take.

[00:32:12] Spaceman: If someone out there is interested in your work, What one piece of your writing would you recommend to them as their gateway? This is who Joelle Presby is as a writer. And just to define what work of yours, either short work or long work, do you say represents. Your approach techniques, storytelling method which is uniquely you.

[00:32:36] Spaceman: Where can a reader listen to Joelle's voice?

[00:32:40] Joelle: All right. Well I would recommend that they go to my website, joellepresby.com and sign up for my newsletter cuz they will get three different short stories for free. by doing that, and then you can immediately unsubscribe. I won't sell your information to anyone or, my personal, current favorite short fiction is in this anthology, which just came out, 

[00:33:04] Halfling: Which is 

[00:33:05] Joelle: initiative,

[00:33:06] Halfling: okay. What is it again? I'm sorry.

[00:33:08] Joelle: The Valkyries Initiative.

[00:33:11] Halfling: Oh, okay.

[00:33:12] Joelle: And I realize I'm biased. And often the last thing I finished is my favorite . Chris Kennedy Publishings , has produced this. It's in the Hit World series and, Marisa Wolf is the editor. It's my first attempt at Urban Fantasy and, humor and. The title of the short story is The Troll Ate My Homework, and I laugh so much writing the story and I plan to take some of the things that I learned from that story and put 'em in the next book.

[00:33:41] Halfling: I like that title. That's cool.

[00:33:44] Joelle: Yeah.

[00:33:45] Spaceman: Going, off topic just a little bit. As a writer sometimes, some of the writers we know to further develop their craft, go to the trouble of reading other authors. Do you have any authors that you recommend to people who are interested in the more? I'm struggling for a term I would say, technical aspects of science fiction where the believability of the setting 

[00:34:12] Spaceman: and the operation thereof, are paramount. We're talking about the, BuNine, the efforts that are put into maintaining the technical correctness of it.

[00:34:24] Spaceman: And you can read that in the books. In the margins 

[00:34:30] Spaceman: Even Even when they don't explicitly explain how something works, because everything else in the book works. You just assume that everything works and it works in a way that you can understand. Do you have any, recommendations for other authors or other works that would represent the same level of detail outside of the Honorverse?

[00:34:49] Joelle: Hmm it's a different way of doing high levels of detail, but, Eric Flint's 1632 series has. The community that have written for that series have definitely done a lot of hard work to make sure that their 1632 level science plus current modern day science that could be replicated with the tools that they had in 1632 are as accurate as possible.

[00:35:18] Joelle: And there is a tremendous body of work there, I recommend that writers find things that they enjoy reading. and they use those when they're gonna study for the technique because if you as a reader don't enjoy how it is applied, I think you'll have a really hard time repeating that.

[00:35:37] Joelle: And also you might repeat the parts of it That other people have read this and it's a blockbuster seller. In spite of that, instead of because of that, if you're picking something that you don't like, if, for instance you hate Twilight, but you're studying it because you wanna be able to sell as well as Twilight sold, I think that's a bad practice.

[00:35:56] Joelle: And you should instead pick something that you love and try to figure out which parts of it you can also copy.

[00:36:03] Spaceman: I think that's great advice. I think that's about gonna wrap it up today. I've had a great time and I'm sure the Halfling 

[00:36:09] Halfling: Absolutely. 

[00:36:10] Spaceman: I'm glad to get to know you and hear about your journey. But before we go, can you tell everyone where they can find out more about Joelle Presby works and where they can get your books?

[00:36:20] Joelle: I am primarily published through Baen Books, and I have a website, joellepresby.com, that will always have the newest updates. If you want it even before I'm ready to hit an update on the website, just sign up for my newsletter. I'm also on Facebook and Twitter, but the newsletter people always give the information first.

[00:36:42] Halfling: Well we'll put links to those things in our show notes, so, encourage everybody to check all that out. I find the concept of a community, especially a community of people that come together to make sure that, the technical pieces or the scientific pieces, of a series are correct.

[00:37:03] Halfling: I know that like on TV shows they'll have consultants, right? Police drama. They may have former detective or some such, come in as a consultant, that type of thing. But they actually have a group that's dedicated or a community as you eloquently put it, dedicated to making sure that those things in the different series are correct.

[00:37:25] Halfling: I think that's wonderful. And I think it absolutely helps to bring, different series. To life. So, that's great and we appreciate you taking the time again to be here with us. 

[00:37:36] Spaceman: That begs another question though, Joelle. Have you seen the kind of, outreach, from the people to subscribe to your, newsletter to build a community around your works? That the Honorverse, maybe not to the scale that the Honorverse has but do you have a core group of fans that are always there for you?

[00:37:55] Joelle: I certainly do. My husband is first, he's a engineer at NASA now. He's outta the Navy and so he is continuing to develop his spacecraft engineering know-how with practical application. And I have a number of. Engineering friends who I shared the manuscript of The Dabare Snake Launcher with, and they were able to give me a lot of helpful guides, steers here and there to fix things because yes, I have an engineering background, but I.

[00:38:21] Joelle: I don't have practical recent work experience in every field of engineering that can be related to, in this case, building a space elevator . And so I had enough knowledge that I was able to see which areas I had gaping holes and try to find people , among my friends and friends of friends who are willing to hear this is a draft of my novel.

[00:38:44] Joelle: Please take a look at it. And I've gotten some early copies and I'm getting ready to mail them out as thank yous to the many people who've helped me out.

[00:38:52] Spaceman: Do you have any advice to young folks starting out who are looking, maybe just had their first work published and they're looking to start building their fandom or their community around their work? Tools you could recommend or any approaches they might take? For example, our conventions, a worthwhile endeavor for young aspiring authors.

[00:39:11] Joelle: I think you need to choose which convention and figure out, You gotta consider what your budget is. Dragon Con. For instance, if you're an introvert and you're gonna go by yourself and you've never been to a convention before, is possibly not your best first place to go. But if money is no object and you love crowds anyway, why not dive straight in?

[00:39:36] Joelle: There are a number of conventions that specifically have developed writing tracks to focus on having programming that is for the aspiring writer. And so if you wanna go to a convention for the purpose of trying to learn how to write better, look at if the convention nearest you.

[00:39:55] Joelle: Doesn't have their programming up. You can usually find what their programming was last year and look to see if it has one of those, if it doesn't have a writing track. And that's really what you wanna do. You might wanna see if you can scrape together the money to go a little further, a field to one.

[00:40:08] Joelle: That does, I think conventions are especially useful for people who are just starting out. There gets to be a point where you have only a few things out and the introductory level information being shared in the writing track might not be great use to you because you already know that, where it becomes less return on your dollar, and then once you have more, then it becomes

[00:40:34] Joelle: helpful again, because of the networking opportunities of you are on a panel with someone and you do a good job and you're engaging with the fans, and so you go to lunch with your panelists afterwards, before your next panel and you get to talking and you get invited to be part of their anthology and the networking then starts to, to help a lot.

[00:40:54] Joelle: And then again, you each another plateau where it's not as useful as it was. And then suddenly if your sales take off or you win an award, you might be invited as a guest of honor and then you could go and have all that useful stuff without having to pay for it. Then that could be really great.

[00:41:11] Spaceman: That's ultimately our goal. So, you

[00:41:13] Spaceman: know, uh, well we've, we've been to some great conventions ourselves. We just got back, well, okay, not just got back, but back in,, March, April, we went to Raven Con, and we ran into the Royal Manticoran and Navy there. We had met them before and, we got the talking.

[00:41:30] Spaceman: We were strangely enough there both on the literary track panels, even though we wound up doing all gaming related panels, which was just weird. Nope, nope, nope. The Halfling did a panel on short stories.

[00:41:42] Halfling: Yeah, I did. Even though I didn't really find myself qualified, but when they need people to be on panels, they'll tell

[00:41:48] Spaceman: If you're writing the check, then you're

[00:41:51] Joelle: When the programming coordinator tells you, this is where they need you to go,

[00:41:55] Spaceman: That's exactly 

[00:41:56] Halfling: what I'm, that that's true. That's, that's true. 

[00:41:58] Spaceman: I'm glad you were able to share all the, things about your career and about how you work with the Honorverse, and most importantly, advice for young authors and aspiring people who might be a little timid like you were at your first sci-fi icon and encourage them to get out there and do those things.

[00:42:14] Spaceman: That's one of our goals is to help other people do, 

[00:42:17] Joelle: I do wanna warn people. You will. You don't have to marry somebody you meet at your first science fiction convention. It is not a requirement.

[00:42:24] Spaceman: Oh my God, Janet.

[00:42:25] Halfling: Oh, well, you know, Spaceman, you know, I guess we're gonna have to get 

[00:42:30] Halfling: a divorce, 

[00:42:32] Joelle: you don't have to it's an option.

[00:42:35] Halfling: No, no. Little secret. We just celebrated 35 years

[00:42:40] Joelle: Congratulations. 

[00:42:42] Spaceman: thank you And we've, 

[00:42:42] Joelle: at the Science fiction Convention.

[00:42:44] Halfling: No, we actually met in a religion class in college, 

[00:42:48] Spaceman: but 

[00:42:48] Spaceman: we've gone to more than 

[00:42:50] Halfling: share of

[00:42:50] Spaceman: science fiction 

[00:42:51] Spaceman: conventions. you know

[00:42:53] Halfling: It's wild what life throws at you and you know, you think you're gonna go in one direction and you end up going totally different.

[00:43:01] Halfling: Nothing you plan, but that's okay. Life takes you where it takes you and you just try to enjoy the ride, right?

[00:43:09] Spaceman: That is very true. 

[00:43:11] Halfling: We wanna thank our listeners for tuning in today, and we hope that you've enjoyed and perhaps become inspired by today's guest, Joelle Presby. Joelle, we wanna give you a huge thank you for taking the time to join us today. We've had a lot of fun. It's been great to meet you.

[00:43:28] Joelle: Thank you so much for having me on, and I, I look forward to continuing to listen to your podcast in the future.

[00:43:35] Halfling: Absolutely. 

[00:43:36] Spaceman: This is the Spaceman of the Halfling and the Spaceman signing out.