J.D. Blackrose, Author

[00:00:00] Halfling: Thanks for tuning into the Halfling and the Spaceman :Journeys In Active Fandom. We're having great conversations with people that have turned their love of fandom into something creative. We're fans talking to fans, and today we're talking with JD. She is a writer of fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal romance.

[00:00:27] Halfling: She does it all. Welcome JD.

[00:00:30] JD Blackrose: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. The whole name is JD Blackrose, if anyone's looking for me, and that's just because I needed a name that people could say and people could spell because my actual last name is really difficult in both ways. It's impossible to spell and tricky to say, so there we go. That's why I did it.

[00:00:52] Halfling: Okay. That makes perfect sense. So, we appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and we will continue to refer to you as JD Blackrose. We wanna make sure people know that's when they start to look for you.

[00:01:08] JD Blackrose: Oh, thanks.

[00:01:10] Halfling: So welcome and we're gonna get the ball rolling with just, asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.

[00:01:18] JD Blackrose: Sure. So, you know, I'm a writer. I'm an author of fantasy in various formats of Fantasy. There's so many sub-genres today it's almost impossible to draw lines. They all blur, but in that general world. And, I think, you know, I was sort of born a writer. I, couldn't really help it.

[00:01:37] JD Blackrose: I wrote my first short story when I was seven..

[00:01:40] JD Blackrose: And, yeah, I have it actually in a box above me here on these shelves. And, it's about Jack the horse who had one leg shorter than the other, and a little girl loved him anyway. And I ran, the stairs cuz I, I typed it on this old manual, you know, typewriter.

[00:01:56] JD Blackrose: And I ran up the stairs to show it to my dad, and he told me it was a good story. And if he hadn't said that, I'm not sure what would've happened. Like, that was really critical because he told me it was good. And then I wrote a series of detective stories about a detective named Qwerty because I thought I was so clever and I discovered that the first, you know, letters on the typewriter keyboard, Q W E R T Y, Say a name like, or pronounceable.

[00:02:23] JD Blackrose: So I thought I was a genius and I mean, I was seven, so, I wrote a series of detective stories about Qwerty, the detective. And, so I was already writing short stories, you know, at seven and eight years old. and I did that and I wrote, I wrote poems and I wrote everything. And I wrote, you know, sort of fearlessly, through elementary school, then junior high and high school.

[00:02:46] JD Blackrose: And then I even took a short writing, short story writing class in college. And then, went to graduate school and got married and the babies came in, as I always say, like all that just ate my brain and I stopped and I, had this big corporate career in communications and marketing and media and social media. And then, somewhere around 45, age 45, I realized that my kids were growing up and leaving and I had to do something for me and I needed to fill this time that I had been spending, raising three children and working full-time. And, I decided to start writing again so that's, you know, sort of where things went.

[00:03:29] Halfling: Your story in terms of starting that young? Really actually not that unique. We've heard this a few times with different writers that we've had on, and it, for some reason though, I always get shocked, by the idea that a seven year old is writing the story.

[00:03:47] Halfling: So it always kind of boggles my mind. I mean, and to be frank, we have some very smart people come on our show, very intelligent people. So we almost feel like we're out classed sometimes,

[00:04:00] JD Blackrose: Oh, well that's ridiculous. You know, though, when people say like, if you, love something, I mean, you know, people talk about the arts a lot and they'll say like, if you could do anything else and love it as much as this, whatever it is, as writing, as making music, as painting, as dancing, whatever, it's, you should go do that.

[00:04:19] JD Blackrose: Right? Because a career in the arts is going to be very difficult. I always say to my, I always think like, I can't do anything else. It's literally the only thing I really know how to do is work with words. You know, I'm adequate with math, you know? I'm not a scientist like my husband or my father.

[00:04:39] JD Blackrose: My mom is a biology teacher. I, didn't get any of that. So my skillset is with words. It's not a particularly wide skillset. But it's pretty deep. So we're gonna just run with that. We're gonna go with that.

[00:04:52] Halfling: Well, I think it's great that early on, you knew exactly what you wanted to do because I do think that's kind of a rare thing, just in general. Now, I know, like I said before, a lot of writers know from a very early age that that's what they want to do. But I think a lot of people struggle, in their formative years, and even like in the college, you get people that are like, I don't know what I'm gonna do when I graduate, you know 

[00:05:15] JD Blackrose: Well, keep in mind though, I didn't like, I loved writing and I did it, but then starting after college, I went to graduate school. I have a master's degree in communications, and it's really a research, heavy degree communications research. And, I then went ahead and had this big corporate career, and I didn't write a word for 20 years.

[00:05:33] JD Blackrose: I didn't write anything. I tried, at one point, I tell this story a lot, but at one point, I was holding my baby, you know, and my five year old son, I was holding his sister and I said to my son, could you please go get me a tissue? Which was like, literally just right over there. Okay.

[00:05:53] JD Blackrose: Like, just right over there in the other room. He had to go like down the hall and it took like 30 minutes to come back. I had gotten a whole box of tissues by that and I said, what took you so long? And he said, I'm sorry, mom. I had to battle the droids in the kitchen.

[00:06:10] Halfling: Oh my goodness.

[00:06:11] JD Blackrose: And I realized, and he was totally serious, because in his mind, the battle droids, the enemy droids were, you know, they were there.

[00:06:21] JD Blackrose: They were real. And he had to battle the droids in the kitchen before he go get the tissue for his mother. And I was very sad because I realized I could no longer see the droids in the kitchen. And I had always had that kind of imagination. I was so happy that my son did, but I had grown up, you know, I had done the Peter Pan thing and grown up, and so I tried to write a story about that literally called the droids in the kitchen, and couldn't, I just couldn't.

[00:06:47] JD Blackrose: At one point I was sort of upset about it, and I'm not now, like, looking back, I mean, I was just doing other things, when you were working full-time and eventually, like I said, there, I had two kids at that time that I eventually had a third. You know, that's where your energy is and that's fine, that's okay.

[00:07:05] JD Blackrose: But what I try to tell a lot of people is that starting again in your forties is also perfectly fine. Many, many people I've talked to who are in this position where they were raising kids and now they're trying to figure out what they're gonna do when they grow up. Feel like they're so behind.

[00:07:26] JD Blackrose: Like we're all playing catch-up, right? We have to hurry up. We haven't written a word or a painted or set or made music in 20 whatever years. And what I try to tell people is we're really at a great place because we have something to say. And when you're writing and you're, you know, and you're 21, nothing against people who are writing when they're in their early twenties.

[00:07:46] JD Blackrose: I mean, God bless you, but I don't know what you write about. Like there's, what do you say? I have no idea. So, maybe this is why we have so many like YA teenage angst books, because that's sort of what you know at the time. But as you get older right, you gather experience. And I think that we can look at that as an advantage.

[00:08:08] JD Blackrose: We have more stuff to talk about, basically more depth of emotion.

[00:08:14] Spaceman: Well, JD, we usually talk to folks about the development of their craft, whether it's a hobby or whether they're an author or they're turned into a profession from the point of view of how they started out and how fandom influenced them. So that's our show Journeys In Active Fandom from consumer to creator.

[00:08:34] Spaceman: So what does it mean to you to be a fan of something and what is your earliest memory of being a fan of anything?

[00:08:43] JD Blackrose: Yeah, I mean I think fandom is when you love an imaginary world where whatever that is, so much that you would like to go live there, right? If I could go live there, if I could live in, the world of the Lord of the Rings, if I could go live where the Justice League is real, if I could be, in Sunnydale High and be part of Buffy, like, I wanna be part of the Scooby gang, right?

[00:09:08] JD Blackrose: And my very, very early fandom, and this will show you how much of a born and bred geek I was. My very early, early fandom was when I started reading at a very young age, because I read a lot. I started reading Edith Hamilton's book, mythology, and I actually still have my original copy and it's very beat up, but I discovered Greek and Roman and Norse myths.

[00:09:35] JD Blackrose: And I had this night shirt that my dad had gotten some time when he was on Bourbon Street in Louisiana. And it was like, cut up the side. I don't know why. It was just a weird night shirt. And I used to put it on and then hike it up, put a belt on, and like run around pretending I was Artemis and like, like, I can't believe I just admitted that, but like, This is true.

[00:09:59] JD Blackrose: Like I pretended to be a Greek goddess because I loved the idea of the goddess running around the woods, you know, with a bow and arrows and, so clearly I just, there was no escape for me. It was, this was just the way it was gonna be for my whole life. And that was that, I think one of my biggest like literary influences in terms of wanting to write urban fantasy was Anne Rice.

[00:10:25] JD Blackrose: Interview with the Vampire was absolutely seminal in establishing urban fantasy and the trope of a vampire as a complex character, not just like, you know, a monster. So, that was great. And I mentioned Sunnydale because I loved Buffy. I loved Buffy. I mean, I was way older than Buffy, but, I loved Buffy and, you know, that I loved that show.

[00:10:50] JD Blackrose: So,

[00:10:50] Spaceman: were big Buffy fans too,

[00:10:52] Spaceman: so we, 

[00:10:53] JD Blackrose: like, I mean, I, it's so sad that like, now we know that there are all these problems on set and Joss Whedon's maybe not a great guy and all of that stuff, but, taking the show for what it was and when it meant to a lot of people at the time, it was great.

[00:11:06] Halfling: yeah, yeah,

[00:11:08] Spaceman: I'm not gonna let Josh Wheaton steal something from us.

[00:11:11] JD Blackrose: Right, right. Well, and that's like a whole show in and of itself, like separating the, the artist from the art, but

[00:11:17] Halfling: That's probably not for us to talk about on this show, that we'd have to start another podcast

[00:11:23] Spaceman: yeah. That's beyond the halfling and the spaceman.

[00:11:26] JD Blackrose: be an entire thing. I know that's,

[00:11:28] Halfling: Well, I used to play Nancy Drew when I was a kid. You know, I'd get my neighbors, I'd get my neighbors involved, and I played Charlie's Angels as well. That was, you know, so, yeah, exactly.

[00:11:42] JD Blackrose: Oh, you have to walk around with the finger gun. Right? I loved Nancy Drew. Yep. That was great.

[00:11:50] Spaceman: So, JD, you've written stories in different genres. What sparked your early interest in all those different genres? Because it seems like quite a mix.

[00:11:58] JD Blackrose: Yeah. Well, as I mentioned, I read everything. My parents were huge readers. I was a very good reader early on. Obviously I was already writing and playing with words and doing stuff like that. So it was definitely like where my strength was. So I read a lot and my parents read a lot of mysteries and thrillers. So I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, right, because that's sort of what you do. And then my dad introduced me. My dad read a lot of hard science fiction, the like old fashioned, the Azamovs and the Ray Bradburys and the like all them, the Heinlin and all that stuff.

[00:12:33] JD Blackrose: And I tried to read it and was absolutely left cold because you know, when you look back on it, there was nothing for a young girl in those stories, right? Nothing. But then he introduced me to Anne McCaffrey and I read the Dragon Writers of Pern. I wanted a dragon. Talk about fandom. I wanted to be on the birthing sands, the hatching sands so much to have my own dragon. And I didn't care what color the dragon was. I was like a little Green Dragon's fine. But I wanted to be on those birthing sands with the dragon so much that literally if wishing, like heartfelt, wishing could have made it.

[00:13:12] JD Blackrose: So I would've been there if like you could have wished yourself in to existence. That's all I wanted was a dragon. I just, that's all I wanted was to be on those sands and have a dragon pick me and have a best friend dragon that could talk in my head. And ugh, God, I prayed for that, but obviously not meant to be.

[00:13:34] JD Blackrose: I do not have a dragon last time I checked and, I mean, I have little statues of dragons, but no real one. And that's what I wanted. So when I read Anna McCaffrey, it was probably the first time that I saw myself at all represented in science fiction and, yeah. So that was a big influence for me in terms of sort of moving away from thrillers and detectives to like fantasy.

[00:13:59] Spaceman: May I ask a quick side question because you got me thinking about something. The Halfling and I are a little old for the Harry Potter phenomena. I've seen the movie, she's read all the books. So it doesn't hold the special place for us that say the Anne McCaffrey novels do, or Tolkien. But I wonder if that speaking to you with the younger characters is why so many people hold that franchise so dear to them.

[00:14:28] JD Blackrose: Yeah, so Harry Potter is an interesting place in my house. I read all of them, but of course I read them one at a time as they came out, right? Like, you read the first one and then it was, you know, these were the days where you wait a year and then there was another one, and then you waited another year and there was a third one.

[00:14:44] JD Blackrose: And I read them all like that when the very last book came out. My daughter, my middle child. Picked up the first one. And she was not much of a reader. My son was always a reader, but my middle one was not much of a reader. And, you know, again, we have to separate the artists and the art here for a little bit. But in terms of just the conversation, I mean, JK Rowling taught my daughter to read because she, that really taught her, but taught her the love of reading because she fell into these books and became a, I just fell into them.

[00:15:24] JD Blackrose: She read the first through the seventh, like, like a binge, just a total binge. And she kept saying to me, I can't imagine what it must have been like for you mom having to wait a year for the next book to come out. And then she went back to the beginning and read them all again. And she has done this. Many, many times.

[00:15:45] JD Blackrose: And she actually has read them. She's fluent in Hebrew and she has read them in Hebrew 

[00:15:50] JD Blackrose: as 

[00:15:50] JD Blackrose: well. 

[00:15:51] Halfling: wow.

[00:15:52] JD Blackrose: So, and she had collected her own collection and then she went to college for about a year and then decided that wasn't her.

[00:16:01] JD Blackrose: She changed her mind when some did something else. But when she was in the dorm, there was a flood and that collection of her own that she had spent her own money on and saved up for, got flooded and got ruined. And it was horribly sad for her and my brother. Yeah. Oh, it was terrible. My brother, her uncle bought her this set that came in A case like that looked like nutz commander's case.

[00:16:26] JD Blackrose: Like this, this thing. I swear to God, if you open it up, it was like the Holy Angels sang Oh, because, All these brand new books were in there. It was amazing. And, yeah, so that whole thing, I watched a child fall into that. Like I just, I watched it happen in real time and, we sort of had a rule growing up that you couldn't see the movie until you read the book.

[00:16:51] JD Blackrose: It didn't quite work as well with my youngest, but my middle one, it did. And so she read the books before she saw the movie. So yeah, I think that, you know, that fandom, that love of something, like I said in the beginning, that so much so that you wish you could be there, that you wish it was real and you could live in it.

[00:17:10] JD Blackrose: And if you could just walk through a magic door like Narnia and go into that world, you know, that's where fandom is birthed. And that's what happened, I think with Harry Potter for that whole generation of kids.

[00:17:26] Spaceman: I, understand the way your daughter felt when she lost that collection of books. The first thing I ever bought for myself with my own money was a science fiction book. Over the years, I've had many things in my life. Possessions. None of them were as valuable to me as that first book.

[00:17:42] Spaceman: And I loaned it many years ago to a friend and you know, when you loan something, you should be prepared to never get it back. So I feel for her

[00:17:55] JD Blackrose: Yeah, it was very sad. It was like such a thing and, and, and it was hard to describe to people, so I appreciate that you understand that, but I mean, she's fine. But yeah. But just getting back to that idea of, you know, that's part of the fandom too, right? Is you, Your own money and you invest your own time and you talk about it with other people who are like-minded and maybe you collect the toys or maybe like everything you wanna do, everything that encapsulates that world.

[00:18:26] JD Blackrose: And when it you are a child and, $10 is a lot of money for you, and maybe you buy a paperback for 6 99 or whatever. Yeah. That's a, it's a big deal.

[00:18:38] Spaceman: It is a big deal. Now, you told us that you started with your first story at seven, but how did your career as a writer start? When was your first foray as a professional author? What was your breaking into point and what was your big break?

[00:18:55] JD Blackrose: Yeah. So I'm not sure I've had a big break, but, I've been very lucky.

[00:19:00] Spaceman: Man, that's a.

[00:19:01] JD Blackrose: Yeah. Right. That's true. That's true. I'm here. So, okay, so here I am 45 years old. I haven't written anything in 20 years as I mentioned. And I was following a writer who I love Faith Hunter, who writes Urban Fantasy. She wrote Jane Yellow Rock series as well as others.

[00:19:21] JD Blackrose: And I was a big fan and I was following her on Facebook and I saw that a lot of her fans were saying, and I never wrote anything. I was a total lurker, right? And, but I saw a lot of her fans were saying, we're gonna see you at Dragoncon. I was like, what is Dragoncon? I have no idea. So I went and I looked up Dragoncon and I was like, oh my God.

[00:19:45] JD Blackrose: Like all these people come together and it's like a convention and people dress up. Oh my God, I have to go. So here I am, 45 years old and I decide I'm gonna go to my first convention. And the one I chose was Dragoncon, which is ridiculous cause it's one of the largest, right? It's like me and 79,000 of my closest friends.

[00:20:03] JD Blackrose: But I did go by myself, but I, there was a lot of story behind that and I, I wound up meeting some people and all of the stuff there, , that's a thing on the to itself. But, I got very lucky. Like, that was really a turning point for me, if you wanna know that, that it was it, because, I met so many people and I saw people writing even when they weren't famous authors, but they were writing, they were writing and they were publishing.

[00:20:31] JD Blackrose: And I thought, okay. So that was a big turning point for me. And I came home and I said to my family, I'm gonna start writing. And I knew I was not ready at all to publish, like at all. Not even like close, but, I decided to start a blog. I knew nothing about a blog, about blogging. I knew nothing about. I knew nothing. Nothing. Literally nothing. But I knew, I knew there was this thing called Godaddy. And um, I went and I bought the URL slippery words because to me, words are slippery and hard to pin down. That's the feeling I have about them. And I got slippery words and, started blogging. And so that process of going to Dragoncon and sort of making this mental commitment and then getting the blog started was, you know, a big turning point for me.

[00:21:26] Spaceman: You know, it's funny your domain is slippery words. Our business name is portable nouns.

[00:21:32] JD Blackrose: Portable Nouns. That's great. There's a whole group of artists, who share a space and their thing is called muddy colors. And I know one of the artists and. His name is Dan Do Santos. And if anybody wants to see some really cool fantasy art, go check him out. Dan Dos Santos and he does the covers for an author named Patricia Briggs, who is one of my all-time favorites.

[00:21:55] JD Blackrose: And he and other artists have this website called Muddy Colors. And so when I told him I had slippery words, we just, you know, we were like, it's the same. It's the same.

[00:22:07] Halfling: Well, I mean, it's the same and yet different, so you know, it's 

[00:22:13] Spaceman: I we're all trying to communicate the same meaning though.

[00:22:18] JD Blackrose: Yeah. I think it's, it does communicate the same meaning to me anyway.

[00:22:22] Halfling: yeah. Oh, well, so what sort of preparation did you have for actually solidifying a career as a writer?

[00:22:35] JD Blackrose: None. There's no preparation.

[00:22:38] Halfling: Okay.

[00:22:39] JD Blackrose: There's nothing you can do to prepare to be a writer other than read. You can read and you can take classes and you can do those kind of things for sure, but at some point, the only way to be a writer is to write and notice no one says to be a good writer. No, because starting out, I wanna clear this up for everybody who's thinking I wanna be a writer to start out, you are going to be a bad writer. Okay? That's it. It is a 100% guarantee you are going to be a crappy writer in the beginning. That is okay. It is absolutely where everybody starts. It's totally fine. You should write anyway and remember. Just because you write it doesn't mean you have to share it with anyone. You can write it and then put it away, and then write something else and then put it away, and then write something else and then put it away and get it to a point where you think, oh, okay, maybe I should show this to someone else.

[00:23:42] JD Blackrose: And they can give me critique and feedback, which is an entirely different topic. But, that's the way you become a writer. You are a writer. That's the process of being a writer right there. You write something, it sucks. You show it to somebody else, they tell you why it sucks. You write it better. Rinse, repeat.

[00:24:04] JD Blackrose: That's it.

[00:24:05] Spaceman: I have two quick stories. First I have a friend who is a writer and he was at a convention and he went up to Orson Scott Card. And was talking to Card and he said, right, are you a writer? And he said, well, no, I cannot dabble. Card says you're either a writer or you're not a writer.

[00:24:23] Spaceman: Pick a lane, which I thought was funny. And yeah. And so he decided he was a writer. And yeah, it started writing. I mean, really, he started writing. The other one talking about development is we have a mutual friend, the Halfling and I, who has been working on his, novel for years and we've read like four different drafts of it and it's finally gotten published.

[00:24:42] Spaceman: So if the first draft doesn't work, there's always a second draft and a third draft and a fourth draft and a 45th draft. So you know, if it's the thing you wanna write and you absolutely have to write it, write it!.

[00:24:54] JD Blackrose: Yeah, there's no, there's literally no other way to do it. There is no preparation that will allow you to produce. A good first draft, you will have to write a sloppy copy of some kind. First. It can be a zero draft, like not even a first draft. It can be a zero draft, right? Where it's like before the first draft, it's just, a long outline of like, this happens.

[00:25:23] JD Blackrose: And then I think something like this happens. And then I'm not sure how we get to here, but this happens. And then someone says this line, cuz that's good. And then someone says this back and then I don't know what else, but something happens and it ends here. I mean, like, literally that's where you can start.

[00:25:39] JD Blackrose: And, that's the way to do it. So I think, people should understand that that is the process for every single writer out there, whether it's Stephen King or me, or any writer you can think of.

[00:25:52] Spaceman: Think we should do a panel at a convention called From Pantsing to plotting and everything in between.

[00:25:58] JD Blackrose: Sure. I mean, I call myself a plantser. I'm a reformed pantser.

[00:26:05] JD Blackrose: I used to just think like discovery writing, to call it a nicer word, was the only way for me to write like, oh, you just have to let the story come and that's great if you have a lot of time. pantsing is fine and I know a lot of people who pants whole novels and do really, really well because they say like, I can't know the ending, or It's boring for me.

[00:26:23] JD Blackrose: I'd have to discover the story as I go, and that's fabulous. If that works for you, you know, more power to you. But what I discovered is that if I have a deadline, that is not gonna work. So I'd better, yeah, I'd better figure out some plot points before I go.

[00:26:43] Halfling: Well, that, yeah, yeah. A hundred percent we can certainly relate to that. I think everybody deals with deadlines of some sort and writing is certainly one of the ones that are most susceptible to the deadline. Whether you're writing a, you know, book for a publisher or whether you're writing for an editor for a publication or whatever.

[00:27:02] Halfling: So yeah, we appreciate the fact that there are headlines and that that makes a difference. 

[00:27:09] Spaceman: JD was your first article that you had published for pay a Short Story or a Novel?

[00:27:14] JD Blackrose: Oh yeah. Uh, short story. The very first thing I got paid for, I'm trying to remember. Um, I can't remember the very, very, very, very, very, very first thing I got paid for. I can tell you this, I cut my teeth on short stories and I looked this up the other day and it took me, I started submitting, I have a whole Excel spreadsheet.

[00:27:39] JD Blackrose: I started submitting short stories in June of 2016, and I got my first professional rate, not my first paid, but my first professional rate payment in like December of 2019. So it took like three and a half years in like, I don't remember how many, but like a hundred or so submissions before I got to anything remotely, professional.

[00:28:10] Halfling: Well, do you prefer writing the longer, you know, either novels or novels versus short stories?

[00:28:18] JD Blackrose: I love it all. It's all different. They're very different. No, I mean, they're just really different. Writing a short story, you do not have time for a ton of character development or setting development or world building, right? And you gotta be in and out. It's a surgical strike mission. Whereas writing a novel, obviously you have a lot more room for that.

[00:28:38] JD Blackrose: And then recently I just turned in my fourth novel, fourth and fifth installment, but fourth novel on a series. My, the Summoner's Mark series, it's the first book is Demon Kissed. And then I wrote two more novels, Fae Crossed and Hell Bound, and then there's an online only novella called Samhain's Bargain, and I just turned in the next novel.

[00:29:04] JD Blackrose: And, writing a series is new for me, that this is the first time I've really tried to, you know, write a series and that's a its own challenge.

[00:29:14] Halfling: Have you ever done any collaboration?

[00:29:18] JD Blackrose: I haven't, like I haven't co-authored. I have a friend, who writes, all the time. Her name is Joelle Presby and she writes with David Weber, 

[00:29:28] JD Blackrose: and they are very, very successful at co-writing those books. I have never done anything like that. I do write, I have a Monster Hunter mom character. Her name is Jess Friedman.

[00:29:40] JD Blackrose: And, I wrote four novels. They're in a collection called The Devil's Been Busy, and, that is in the, it's a shared universe. So, an author and publisher named John Hartness wrote, Bubba the monster Hunter. And I loved Bubba. I loved Bubba. I have a crush on Bubba, and I do, and I loved Bubba and I loved his universe.

[00:30:06] JD Blackrose: And then John had some other friends, Eric Asher and Gail Martin and some other folks writing, Teresa Glover writing in the universe, writing her own monster hunters. And so I wrote my own monster Hunter for that. He let me play in his sandbox.

[00:30:24] Halfling: Oh, that's cool already had Joelle Presby on the show.

[00:30:29] JD Blackrose: Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. 

[00:30:30] Halfling: Yeah. 

[00:30:31] Halfling: Yeah.

[00:30:31] Halfling: So she was a great, person to talk with and she's actually been one of our, favorite fans as it turns out to be, cuz she has really spread the word about us.

[00:30:41] Halfling: So 

[00:30:42] JD Blackrose: She's great. 

[00:30:43] JD Blackrose: She is great. 

[00:30:45] Halfling: I'm actually reading her first solo novel now

[00:30:49] JD Blackrose: The Dabare Snake Launcher from Baen. Everybody should check that book out.

[00:30:54] Halfling: Yeah, I'm currently reading that now. I plan on starting a blog where I do book reviews from each of the writers that we've had on the show. Just, you know, read something from each writer and then do a review of it.

[00:31:09] Halfling: So that's coming up. I'm just writing the initial post that I'm gonna have it sort of introduce the concept of it. But I'm excited cuz I've already read several books. That's one of the fun things about doing this podcast is you get to meet so many cool people and you can get to know them, but she can also pick up their works like, I'll pick up some sort of yours and, you know, get it up there.

[00:31:36] Halfling: So it's really fun for me because I'm an avid reader.

[00:31:40] Halfling: Um, yeah. Spaceman not quite so much, but That's okay. He does other things. 

[00:31:46] Spaceman: Hey, everything I read is by somebody who's already dead. 

[00:31:52] JD Blackrose: That's very funny 

[00:31:53] Spaceman: look, yeah, Authur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, all that stuff.

[00:31:57] Halfling: yeah. Um, well, I, okay. Getting, getting back to your writing, I read about the concept of the zombie cosmology.

[00:32:11] Halfling: You know that, that yes. That novella series and I also know that you love cosmetics. what, in the world was your inspiration for marrying those two? How did you, 

[00:32:23] Halfling: how did you come up with zombies and cosmology

[00:32:28] Halfling: or cosmetology?

[00:32:29] Halfling: Not cosmology.

[00:32:30] JD Blackrose: You have to picture it. I'm driving to work, great thinking time when I was driving to work, cause I worked in the same place for 13 years. So like, I just drove there on autopilot

[00:32:37] Halfling: Sure.

[00:32:39] JD Blackrose: and I get this picture in my head of a zombie investigator who's like a detective who solves paranormal mysteries for the cryptid community.

[00:32:51] JD Blackrose: And I had this picture in my head of a dead body there and the poor, chief medical officer leaning over it and all of these cryptids jumping out and started pulling at the body, going, you don't understand. He really costs an arm and a leg. So that. That was my, that was the thing in my head, right?

[00:33:15] JD Blackrose: This zombie who literally got paid in fresh body parts. And I could see this sort of running joke about how like, all these cryptids are like haunting the real dead bodies, you know, for the poor human chief medical officer trying to get to the body parts before the body's taken away.

[00:33:31] JD Blackrose: And I just was like, what am I gonna do with this? But the zombie investigator, zombie detective thing has been done really, really well by Kevin J. Anderson. He has a detective named Mr. Shambles and people should check that out. So, I was like, well, what can I do that's a little different? And I mentioned that I have a monster hunter mom, my character that's in that shared universe that I mentioned, I wanted to make her a little different.

[00:33:56] JD Blackrose: So she's a mom of three, like I am. She lives in the suburbs like I do, and she doesn't use guns. Um, she only uses things she can find in the back of a Toyota Sienna minivan or around her house. So like baseball bats and spray and wash and things like that. And the people who love that character tend to love it because of those things, because of the things that I took from my real life, right?

[00:34:25] JD Blackrose: She's a mom of three little kids. She doesn't have guns in the house. She's not gonna pull out like some big machine gun and start shooting down the monsters. That was just not what she does. But she can spray 'em in the eye with like spray and wash or Clorox bleach and man, that's gonna hurt. So I had this idea for that and I wrote that monster hunter mom thing and people liked it.

[00:34:48] JD Blackrose: And the parts they laugh at tend to be the parts, because it's meant to be very funny. The parts they laugh at are tend to be like the realistic parts, like when she's. You know, reaches down to get her water and winds up with a sippy cup of apple juice. Or she, you know, turns in like on two wheels into the daycare because she knows she's late and they're gonna start charging her $10 a minute, you know, for being late.

[00:35:14] JD Blackrose: And moms who read this stuff laugh because like, they see themselves in that 

[00:35:20] JD Blackrose: and I, great. It's real, it's, you know, 

[00:35:23] JD Blackrose: so I thought, you know, and she has to, the whole thing about poor Jess Friedman is that she has to like save the world and still get snacks to kindergarten on time. So I was like, what can I take from my real life like I did with that and put it into this zombie character?

[00:35:44] JD Blackrose: And I have an unhealthy relationship with makeup videos and. I just, I don't know what it is. I like watching people do their makeup and learning about products and, I don't really buy all that much anymore, but whatever. It was sort of a big hobby at the time. I thought about actually becoming a professional makeup artist and then decided that I'd be a writer cuz it was easier.

[00:36:05] JD Blackrose: That's a joke, by the way but becoming your pressure makeup artist is actually very hard. And you have to do a lot of stuff and you have to build out a kit and you have to apprentice and it's actually not easy, but I love watching makeup videos and I like watching people talk about how different ways that they apply their makeup.

[00:36:24] JD Blackrose: And I like different products and it's weird. I don't know, but it's something I enjoy. So, I was driving, thinking about this zombie and something just came to me and I said the words out loud in the car. Zombie cosmetologist. And I laughed. I just laughed. I laughed out loud like by myself.

[00:36:47] JD Blackrose: So I said, yeah, I said it again, and I laughed again.

[00:36:51] JD Blackrose: And I thought, it's funny, right? Like, that's funny. So I thought I could do a good job with that. So I created this character whose name is Whalen Whelan Jennings. Uh, Whelan Jenkins, excuse me, who? It's a play on Waylan Jennings. But, so Whelan Jenkins is my zombie cosmetologist, and he is a makeup artist to the biggest and brightest stars in h. But he is a zombie and the reason he got into makeup and cosmetology and special effects makeup and things is to hide his scars because he has had to replace body parts. And so he learned how to do makeup and hide scars and apply, you know, like fake skin and all of this stuff. But he's not doing it to create scars and turn someone into a monster.

[00:37:41] JD Blackrose: He's doing it to like hide himself. And so he becomes this makeup artist who, you know, these, the biggest and brightest stars and most people don't believe he's a zombie. They think he's just eccentric and, he gets pulled into a murder mystery. When bodies starts showing up with limbs missing, and the local police captain thinks the zombie has to be the perpetrator because who else needs the spare parts?

[00:38:08] JD Blackrose: And really, Whelan is a lover, not a fighter. And he doesn't want any part of this, but he sort of gets reluctantly pulled into this murder mystery. And that's where it starts.

[00:38:18] Halfling: That is just such a fabulous concept. I love it.

[00:38:23] JD Blackrose: Yeah. He's, he's fun. I love Whelan. He's a good, he's a good guy.

[00:38:29] Halfling: Oh, well, I just think it's such a cool concept, so I'm, I'm looking forward to reading some of that.

[00:38:35] JD Blackrose: So there, it's a series of four novelas, but it is in one, there, it's in a collection called, sorry, ahead of time. A Wrinkle and Crime. Because he is a zombie and a cosmetologist, so solving mysteries. But the very first one is called Pluck and Cover. The second one is Hide and Chic.

[00:38:58] JD Blackrose: The third one is Cut and Die, and the first one is Pose and Cons. And I had a very good time coming up with all those titles.

[00:39:06] Halfling: I bet you did.

[00:39:08] JD Blackrose: so it took me a long time though.

[00:39:11] Halfling: You love your puns, don't you?

[00:39:13] JD Blackrose: Yeah, yeah. I do. My, um, Jeff Freeman, the devil's been busy. Those novelas are all, like the first one is called Tweety in the Monkey Man. And then there's like runaway and handle with care and end of the line. And all of those are song titles from the Traveling Wilburys, which ages me tremendously that I know who the Traveling Wilburys are.

[00:39:37] JD Blackrose: And if you don't know who they are, look them up. But, I. Did name, I did use Traveling Wilburys songs for the titles.

[00:39:47] Spaceman: Well, I was gonna say whipper snapper.

[00:39:49] JD Blackrose: Yeah. I like, but the Traveling Wilburys were a great super group and I found that it was fun to use that. And there's a song lyric in each novella, so if you, like the Traveling Wilburys, you should go on the hunt because it's like an in joke Little East Easter egg.

[00:40:05] Halfling: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:05] Spaceman: I don't know where to go from this Traveling Wilburys

[00:40:07] JD Blackrose: Right, It's, it's, it's the showstopper. I've only had one person ever in my life come over to me and look at the novellas and go Traveling Wilburys and I gave 'em a free book because it was the only time it's ever happened.

[00:40:21] Halfling: Oh,

[00:40:22] Spaceman: Right. Well, when you were talking about the puns, you know, I was thinking Piers Anthony, please

[00:40:27] Spaceman: don't 

[00:40:27] Halfling: uh, exactly. Uh, me too. The same thing. Have you ever read any of Piers Anthony?

[00:40:35] JD Blackrose: A Long, time ago. 

[00:40:36] Halfling: Yeah,

[00:40:37] Halfling: Yeah.

[00:40:38] Halfling: oh you talk about the puns? Oh my gosh. But lots of fun. 

[00:40:44] Spaceman: So this is JD's show. This is a Pier's show.

[00:40:47] Halfling: No, no.

[00:40:48] Spaceman: All right. We've talked a little bit about the zombie cosmetologist, although a zombie cosmologist would be interesting. 

[00:40:56] JD Blackrose: too.

[00:40:57] Spaceman: Neil, Degrass Tyson as a zombie. Zombie, Degrass Tyson.

[00:41:01] Halfling: Ooh.

[00:41:02] Spaceman: Ooh. Oh, or 

[00:41:04] JD Blackrose: that's 

[00:41:04] Spaceman: Carl Sagan.

[00:41:06] JD Blackrose: trademark, right? Hashtag.

[00:41:10] Spaceman: But let's talk a little bit about the challenges you've faced along the way and how you were able to overcome them. Because every writer faces challenges. Every creator does.

[00:41:20] JD Blackrose: Well, I mean, yeah, sure, of course. I mean, there's the whole, every time you sit down and write, it's a challenge. Like, are the words gonna come today? Are they not gonna come? I don't know. So one of the biggest challenges for writers, particularly beginning writers, is just simply finishing.

[00:41:35] JD Blackrose: It's a habit you have to get into, starting something and finishing it because it's really easy to go, oh, this is crap. I'm gonna put it away. Or, oh, I have a new idea, I'm gonna write something else and you have to get into the habit of finishing things that you started. It's a, it's actually a big, big, big, like, Uh, I don't know what the word is, but it's a big block for a lot of writers is finishing.

[00:42:01] JD Blackrose: So I try to get writers who sometimes come to me for advice. I try to talk to them about just finishing it, even if it's really bad and you hate it and you're gonna put it away, never work at it again. Still finish it. Because finishing is a habit. You have to create, you have to like cultivate. So I think that's a big thing.

[00:42:21] JD Blackrose: And then of course, you know, everybody has to decide. Are they going to try to get an agent? Are they gonna try? I do not have an agent. I've been published through small and medium size presses and, all of that is a big challenge. Finding the time to write is a big challenge, and these are challenges that everybody faces.

[00:42:38] JD Blackrose: So they're no different than anybody else. They're just real. They're very real.

[00:42:42] Spaceman: Well, I'm going to share a little mark of shame on myself. When I was in junior high school, all my friends were reading the Lord of the Rings, and I picked up the fellowship of the ring and I could not finish it. I just could not finish reading it. 

[00:42:58] JD Blackrose: Yeah, I, I have never finished any of them, so it's not a shameful thing. 

[00:43:02] Spaceman: well, 

[00:43:03] JD Blackrose: I love the movies though.

[00:43:04] Spaceman: well, what happened was I finally got Return of the King, and I read it end to end. I said, okay, it gets better. And then I read the whole series end to end, so it's not just writers that can't finish.

[00:43:17] JD Blackrose: Well, no, I mean, it it's just that for writers, you can't publish anything unless it's, there's something finished. Right. If you DNF a book, you know, you decide this book isn't for me, and you put it down, nothing changes for you, you just move on. But if you're a writer and you're trying to get published at some point someday, you have to get in the habit of finishing your stuff. So it's a significant enough barrier that it's something that I find myself talking to beginning writers about.

[00:43:50] Halfling: Is that something that you still struggle with yourself even though you know

[00:43:54] Halfling: you 

[00:43:54] Halfling: you have 

[00:43:55] JD Blackrose: I, 

[00:43:55] Halfling: this career?

[00:43:56] JD Blackrose: I'm lucky enough to have contracts for everything I'm working on, so, no, because one must finish what one is contracted to write. But sure, I mean, I have a thousand stories in my computer that are ideas, concepts, beginnings, a couple paragraphs, a chapter, whatever that don't go anywhere, sure.

[00:44:19] Spaceman: Taking us off on a little bit of a tangent, who is the person you would say has inspired you the most? Either in the author community or just in general, somebody who's been a big influence on you.

[00:44:32] JD Blackrose: Um, well, I already mentioned Faith Hunter and Patricia Briggs, and from a writing standpoint, those two ladies have really influenced the kind of writing I like to do. I think they're just phenomenal at what they do. In terms of just my life, my mom is a huge inspiration because she has to deal with a lot of health problems and, she just perseveres.

[00:44:53] JD Blackrose: I mean, there's just, just, you know, just a lesson in Keeping on. I don't know else to put it, you know, despite everything, um, she manages to just, even though it's actually hard, literally sometimes to put one foot in front of the other to do that. And I think that's sort of something that I get inspired by. And it's hard to walk. I mean, it's hard to, uh, have enough energy to even get up and, you know, get dressed and maybe do one thing that day and then you're exhausted. You know, it's hard to keep on, but, but she does 

[00:45:33] Halfling: Well, I think that it's good to have people that you can look to. And see, you know, yeah, they have some real struggles, but they're managing, they're going about their day as best as they can. They're accomplishing what they can. And, you know, I think a lot of people just get in these little pity parties because this or that isn't the way they wanted it to be or whatever.

[00:45:59] Halfling: And at different ranges, you know, it could be anything from just small, like, you know, oh, I spilled the coffee on my shirt, you know, now I gotta go back and change shirts too. It's just something huge, like a real health issue. But, there have been people in my life that I have looked to and seen what they have been able to overcome or what they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis.

[00:46:24] Halfling: And, and it, in a way, it kind of makes it a little easier. When I've had my own struggles to kind of look to different people and say, okay, well they're doing it. They're doing it. So, so then means I 

[00:46:38] JD Blackrose: always, there's always perspective,

[00:46:42] Halfling: Right. 

[00:46:43] JD Blackrose: right? 

[00:46:43] Halfling: it, 

[00:46:44] JD Blackrose: is a good, good 

[00:46:45] Halfling: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It is perspective. So, just switching gears again, 

[00:46:51] Spaceman: We're all over the place today. 

[00:46:53] Halfling: We're good for that. Are there any things or is there one thing that you know now that you wish you had known when you first got, you know, started seriously in your writing career?

[00:47:09] JD Blackrose: Hmm. That's a great question. Like if I could go back and talk to myself and say, Hey, you know, um,

[00:47:17] Halfling: Yeah.

[00:47:20] JD Blackrose: I'm trying to think. I mean, I think, well, I, I mentioned this before, but one of the things that I felt when I was really starting to write, you know, in my mid forties, I did feel that pressure that I was behind, I felt really behind. Like I am, 20 years too late. This is it, you know, I'm 20 years too late and I'm never gonna get anywhere because I'm starting out so behind.

[00:47:49] JD Blackrose: And it took a long time for me to understand that that wasn't true and, that I wish I had been able, I wish, like I could have sort of relaxed about that a little bit because that gave me this anxiety and sense of like desperation that wasn't, maybe not desperation, but, just this felt like I was a failure because I hadn't been writing for so long and now I was gonna start, and I just thought, well, I'm too, I'm too late.

[00:48:18] JD Blackrose: I'm too late. This is a waste of my time. I'm too late.

[00:48:23] Halfling: Well, your story just tells us that no, you know, you're not too late. It's never too late for anybody.

[00:48:30] JD Blackrose: And I tell that all the time to people, you 

[00:48:34] Halfling: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:34] Halfling: Yeah. 

[00:48:35] Spaceman: We're, a good decade older than you are, and, you know, we're, we're here doing this podcast, so

[00:48:40] JD Blackrose: Right. I mean, but that's exactly it. I mean, I've done, convention, things like panels on starting writing over the age of 40. And I mean, I have people in there who are 40 and 41, and I have people in there who are 80.

[00:48:56] Halfling: Oh wow.

[00:48:59] JD Blackrose: You know, I tell them the same thing. Write your story. It's the same.

[00:49:04] JD Blackrose: Write your story. Maybe at 81 you've got something really fascinating that no one else would've thought of. Write it. Write your story.

[00:49:13] Spaceman: Absolutely. Speaking of your story, every author has one work that is a reflection of themselves. What work that you have produced to date do you see as the strongest reflection of who you are as a writer?

[00:49:29] JD Blackrose: One piece of work.

[00:49:30] Spaceman: Just one piece of work. If you had to pick, if you wanted to say, if you want to know me, know this work, which work would it be?

[00:49:41] JD Blackrose: so I've gonna cheat. I'm gonna cheat. It's something that I'm in the process of writing. I'm cheating but. I have a contract for my first horror novel, and I am not a horror writer. I do not read horror. I don't watch horror movies. I write dark fantasy sometimes, but I'm not so much in the horror world.

[00:50:01] JD Blackrose: But, I have a contract for a book that, is gonna be very personal. A couple of years ago, four years ago now, I watched a 60 minute segment on this priest. He's a real guy, Father Desbois, who was, going around with a small team around Eastern Europe, uncovering all of the hidden mass graves from the Holocaust,

[00:50:29] JD Blackrose: all of the graves, all of these mass graves where the, when the Nazis came through, they came through all these little towns and they would force the Jews to, and I'm Jewish. And they would dig their, this pit and then they would shoot them all and they would go into the pit and it's, this happened thousands and thousands of times. And this man has spent his son years going around Eastern Europe finding them and documenting these places.

[00:51:00] JD Blackrose: And it, um, it hit me so hard to watch this. If you Google it, you can still find it. It hit me so hard and so it's such a deep personal level and I couldn't get it out of my head, this really happened, you know? And um, so I wrote a story about it called We Dig the Truth, and it's a ghost story. And it's fiction, obviously, but, it's about these forensic archeologists and sort of what happens when the ghosts of the past literally come back to haunt you. And I wrote this long short story, very short novella, around 20,000 words, and it never went anywhere and it didn't, it, I couldn't get it published and whatever, and I let it sort of fall by the wayside.

[00:51:49] JD Blackrose: But, recently I was just very lucky and given a contract by, Falstaff Books for their new horror print called Falstaff Dread, to turn this into something, probably a short novel. And so that will be the most personal thing I have written.

[00:52:06] Spaceman: Okay. We'll be on the lookout for it. You just mentioned your up and coming thing, the thing you're working on, the thing you're passionate, that'll reflect on you, but. Do you have anything else upcoming? Anything else that, our listeners would like to know about?

[00:52:21] JD Blackrose: Yeah, so like I just said, I just turned in the fourth book, the fourth novel in the Summoner's Mark series, which is fun urban fantasy, paranormal, little paranormal Romance. Totally think it's the kind of thing that, you know, you can read and, it's just gonna be enjoyable and I hope people will like it.

[00:52:38] JD Blackrose: The working title, and I think that will be the title, is Wish Magic. And, the whole concept of the series, it starts, the very first one called Demon Kiss starts with a woman whose name is Rebecca. She goes by Becks. Becks is a summoner, meaning she can summon. Powers from different plains of existence.

[00:52:58] JD Blackrose: So if you need her to summon a Greek God, she can do that. If you needed to summon, a demonn, she can do that too. And her role in the sort of paranormal community is to do this and people come to her, when they need something, but all hope is lost everywhere else, right? Because, you don't summon a power with capital P from something unless there is no other way to achieve what you have to achieve, right?

[00:53:26] JD Blackrose: You've gone through every other option and you've exhausted all of them. And as she likes to stay, there's a lot of crying in summoning. When we meet her, this has already happened in the past, she is hiding, bartending in a Fae bar, Fae, f a e, because. A summoning has gone horribly, horribly wrong, and she now owes a demonn a favor, and she doesn't know what he's going to ask or when he is gonna ask it, or what he'll do if she says no.

[00:53:56] JD Blackrose: So that's where Demonn Kiss starts.

[00:53:59] JD Blackrose: And if you want to know what happens, what the, to really see what happens, the when the summiting goes wrong, you can get that a little shameless plug. If you go to slippery words.com and you sign up for my e-newsletter, that's one of the things that you can get is it's called Ball Bars embrace, and you can, get that free.

[00:54:19] Spaceman: And that's one of the things that we were leading into. Where can people find out about your work?

[00:54:23] Halfling: Yeah. 

[00:54:24] JD Blackrose: Yay. Yeah. So slippery words.com is one of the best places to find me. And I am on Facebook as well. I've sort of dropped the big Bird Bluebird social media right now, but, I am on Facebook, and again, my blog site, slipperywords.com. You can follow me on book bug too. Follow me on Amazon. That's something that you can really do that helps writers when Amazon sees people following them.

[00:54:50] JD Blackrose: And of course that costs you nothing. It's just a click. And you'll get notifications when new books come out from Amazon, just to let you know. This author you follow has a new publication. And, those are the kind of things you can do. And it's easy and it helps your favorite authors.

[00:55:04] Spaceman: Yeah, that works out great because the Halfling over here is mostly a Kindle reader now.

[00:55:09] JD Blackrose: Yeah.

[00:55:10] JD Blackrose: Yeah. It's actually a great thing. It's something that Amazon is really looking at now, and of course it works for everybody. You simply follow that author. It's one click. And then, when that author has a new publication, they send you an email and says, this author has a new book coming out.

[00:55:28] Halfling: Yep. No. Well, my, my problem is I like to read so many different authors. You know, I would just start getting bombarded by, you know, this person's just put out this, and this person's just put out,

[00:55:41] JD Blackrose: You are the kind of person who ruins the algorithms, right? Because you read all over the place. 

[00:55:46] Halfling: I, do. I mean, I like to read everything from, you know, police procedurals to, feudal Japanese crime stories where, 

[00:55:58] Spaceman: Feudal 

[00:55:58] Spaceman: police procedural, believe it or not.

[00:56:01] JD Blackrose: sounds 

[00:56:02] JD Blackrose: good. Actually, I 

[00:56:03] Halfling: everything in between. So, I don't intentionally break the algorithm, but, you know,

[00:56:09] Spaceman: So, Halfling, what is the name of that series of books you've been reading with the, feudal Japanese detective and his wife?

[00:56:16] Halfling: well that's Ichiro, Sano Ichiro. Yeah, it literally is a Japanese, he started out as a courtier. But he just through, through perseverance and through going through unpleasant things, he finds himself moving up the ranks. And he ends up having to solve bigger and bigger, crimes and mysteries. He becomes more and more embedded in the political scheme of the time, and it's, I mean, it's very very well done. 

[00:56:49] Spaceman: It's funny. 

[00:56:50] Halfling: Um, 

[00:56:50] Spaceman: It's funny how we found that because this was just a matter of sheer discovery. We were in Seattle and we went to the mystery bookshop in Seattle and just stumbled on this.

[00:57:00] JD Blackrose: That's great.

[00:57:02] Spaceman: Yeah, but see that's the way you discover authors. You know, 

[00:57:05] JD Blackrose: Sure. 

[00:57:05] Spaceman: well, okay. That's one of the ways you discover authors.

[00:57:09] JD Blackrose: Well, I work in a library,

[00:57:11] JD Blackrose: so Yeah. I work part-time in a library, in a local public library. so I find so many authors just by looking at what other people are taking out, you know? So that's great for me. But it makes me very slow at checking books in when, because I'm always like, what is this book?

[00:57:30] JD Blackrose: Ooh, I want this one.

[00:57:33] Spaceman: All right. Well, sorry for the digression on that. We like to, we like to tell our little stories.

[00:57:40] JD Blackrose: That's a good story..

[00:57:42] Halfling: We will make sure to include the contact information in the show notes. And we wanna thank you so much for taking time to talk with us today. We have really enjoyed getting to know you and hearing about your journey in active fandom and, we again just, appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

[00:58:00] JD Blackrose: Thanks for having me.

[00:58:02] Spaceman: Yes. And we want to thank our listeners for tuning in today. We hope that you've enjoyed and perhaps become inspired by today's guest, JD Blackrose. JD, we want to give you a huge thank you and a giant shout out for joining us today. This is the spaceman of the Halfling and the Spaceman over and out.