Happy Saturday!

You're going to absolutely love this. I tried to do one thing and ended up with something so much cooler. Something that you, as one of my faithful readers, will dig the hell out of.

As part of the promo blitz for my new book (don't get excited; I wrote this one for authors), I asked my friend and constant collaborator Sean Platt to join me for a little recorded discussion. The goal was to chat about how we Sean and I had ALWAYS broken rules as a writing team -- NEVER obeyed "the right way to succeed as authors." The idea was to prove that we were "Artisan Authors" from the very beginning ... something that you, as a reader (unless you're also a writer) probably don't care about.

What happened instead was a deep-dive into nostalgia and joy: stories of the early books we wrote together.

​Check it out here and appreciate my best books on a whole new, weird-ass level.

When Sean and I first started writing together, we were young and dumb and wanted to break all of the rules. We were stubborn artists right from the start (I was, anyway, but Sean tolerated it because he loves a good time), and frankly didn't give a shit about the things so many other writers obsess about, like "Will anyone buy my book?"

Instead, we wrote for us.

We wrote Unicorn Western as a joke right after I wrote Fat Vampire on a dare. Then, while most authors were trying to maximize sales by writing similar series in a single genre, Sean and I leapt from Unicorn Western's "The Dark Tower on acid" to its complete opposite: Our complex, layered, and intellectual hard-sci-fi story The Beam.

The Beam did well, although everyone criticized us for daring to charge more than 99 cents for it. People told us to write more like it -- to double down on our big hit and act like proper writers for a change.

So we gave them the finger, ignored even more advice intended to save us from ourselves, and wrote six "fiction pilots" that were nothing like The Beam. They were:

• Chupacabra Outlaw (which is now called Cursed because the former sounded like a comedy and Cursed is NOT a comedy)
• Robot Proletariat
• Namaste
• Everyone Gets Divorced (which was a comedy, along with the following two)
• Greens
• and Space Shuttle.

The goal was to try each of those ideas out as pilots, then pick one to write completely.

Of course, we instead fell in love with every pilot and wrote all six of them.

It went on and on like that. Sean and I ignored convention after convention and instead wrote whatever sounded fun to us -- even if the end product was dead serious, even if writing it made terrible sense from a business perspective. OMG, YOU GUYS, WE HAD SO MUCH FUN BACK THEN.

I'm so thrilled by my chat with Sean. It brought back all of the memories. It brought back all of the joy. I've enjoyed writing since, but NOTHING was as great as that.

Having that discussion made me want it all back. It made me not just want to start a new project with Sean (which happens in just a few weeks), but also to approach it with the old FUN front and center.

If you're a Johnny B. Truant O.G, you're going to love the hell out my chat with Sean. Yes, it began as a discussion of writerly things for an audience of writers ... but it became about the stories behind the stories. It really did become perfect for you, as my very best fans.

You're about to get a rare peek into the joy and backstory behind your favorite books that you might never have seen before. Have a listen. You're going to love it.

​Click here to listen to (or watch) it.

Enjoy!
JT