A Mansion Haunted By a Young Demon (Episode 19) Transcript

The audio version of this episode can be found here.

Hannah: Chickens frantically search for their missing conspiracy, which is in her South Bronx apartment.

Jennie: Somebody write this!

Hannah: Hi, and welcome to Somebody Write This, where we use a random plot generator to give us an idea, and then brainstorm how that could be a thing somebody might want to write. I’m Hannah.

Jennie: And I’m Jennie. And to help us with our brainstorming today, we have a guest, our very good mutual friend Sam Stoddard.

Sam: Hi! Thanks for having me here!

Hannah: Oh, we're so excited that you're on the podcast. We were just talking about this before we started recording, listeners, but Sam is responsible in a way for the creation of this podcast.

Sam: Yeah, sorry.

Hannah: It is through Sam that Jennie and I first met. Sam runs a website called RinkWorks which has a whole bunch of different entertainment-related stuff, and one of the things that it had was a chatroom, where a bunch of nerdy people who liked nerdy entertainment stuff all kind of gathered together. We've had a couple of other folks from there on this podcast before, and we're excited to finally have Sam join us.

Jennie: Yeah!

Sam: Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'm nervous though. This is going to go crazy, I think.

Jennie: Oh yeah.

Hannah: It's going to be amazing. So one of the things that we wanted to talk about was one of the things that we did on this website on this chat room was we had bot games that would run through the chat. We'd be able to play trivia games or party games. There grew to be a huge number of them, and every so often we would schedule some time to go through and play every single bot. We'd play four one night and four the next night and ultimately come out with a champion. And through one of these, one of them actually took on a narrative storytelling focus, and I thought that would be really interesting to talk with Sam about. So, yeah, Sam, tell us a little bit about this particular Ultimate Bot Tournament which was just games and then became a novel.

Sam: It's so funny because people-- I mean, the famous question people ask writers is "Where do you get your ideas," right? And it's a terrible question because most of them can't tell you, and in the rare case where somebody can, as in this case, it's not going to help you. This was such a weird thing. It blindsided me. So, yeah, as you say, we play these bot tournaments and they were nine or ten nights, three or four hours a night or something, huge. And we got up to the third one and I thought, "I should do something a little different for this." So I started improvising dialogue with these fictional hosts. Instead of me hosting, it would be these fictional characters hosting, and over the course of that, I just sort of naturally added a narrative to it. But it was all improvisational, and these characters, there grew to be a great number of them interacting with the players themselves too, so they were kind of in the story. It was very free-flowing, not structured. But it grew into this kidnapping plot and there was mistaken identity and all that sort of stuff. Well, it was so much I wanted to do it again. I wanted to do it again, but I knew I couldn't because the whole fun of it was the spontaneity of it, right? So I thought, "Well, what can I do that would be kind of fun in the same way but wouldn't be replaying it again and doing the same jokes and losing that improvisational quality?" So I thought, "Well, maybe I'll do a murder mystery." So the first night of the next tournament, we could all vote on these pictures of random people that I scraped from the Internet--

Jennie: (laughter) It sounds so creepy!

Sam: They could choose the best-looking ones or the weirdest-looking ones or whatever, and the top 10 were my cast of characters. So every night what would happen, I would have these characters as the people that were isolated on an island, and they start getting killed off one by one, and the players, each night, would vote on the next one to die. So when they did that, I would have to go-- I'd have a couple days to write the next chunk of the story that would include the death of that character and the circumstances would be mysterious and it would have to be its own little Agatha Christie murder mystery, right? But I also had to be developing the other characters and introducing story threads and conflicts and conspiracies and twists and stuff and lay that foundation for stuff later on, but without knowing what characters I'd have to work with later. So I didn't know who the killer was, I didn't know who the hero was, because they might be killed off the next night. I had to leave all that open. It was not--

Jennie: I have no idea how you managed any of that.

Sam: Well, I kind of didn't. I mean, I did, but I had to stop it halfway through. I said, "Look, it's been fun, but, people, I'm locked in now. I know what I'm going to do but I have to stop the voting." That's the only kind of compromise I made. At about three or four people, I had to stop because I was just-- There was no other way to go. It was so much fun. The last night, when all the plot twists are revealed and the mysteries are solved and all that, it's honestly the best time I've ever had in there. It was the best day. People got really into it and they're like cheering for their favorites and laughing in the right places and stuff. It was really, really gratifying to write a story like that. I mean, how often do you get to compose a narrative and get real-time feedback, almost like a play, right? But making it up as you go. So that's really odd. But I fell in love with these characters and I had so much fun and I couldn't get it out of my system when it was all over. I couldn't move on. So I realized I have to do more. Well, what do I do now? Because I can't do a sequel, most of the characters are dead. I can't do a prequel because none of the characters knew each other, so maybe I could pick one or something, but it's not the same.

Hannah: Ten different prequels.

Sam: Yeah, I mean, it'd be weird. It'd very weird. So almost on impulse, I started writing out the story again in prose, but it was great because I could flesh the characters out and explore those things that I actually found properly compelling and get inside their heads and develop back stories. I had some flashbacks that weren't in the chatroom. And now I consider that the definitive version of the story, as much fun as I had in the chatroom. And the other thing is it got me writing again. This is my second novel. The previous one was 17 years previously. I had sort of just gotten out of the habit and thought, "Ah, it's too hard. I don't have the time. Whatever." But I've been writing ever since, so it was really good that that happened. This is what I wanted to do for a long time. But a complete fluke, a total accident.

Hannah: I absolutely love this, because this podcast is in itself a weird way to come up with story ideas.

Jennie: Collaborative storytelling.

Hannah: Having done this strange impromptu prep work for the novel you ended up writing, did the writing process feel different than your 17-years-ago novel because of that?

Sam: Yeah, there were I guess two very different things that happened. One is, I aged by 17 years-- (laughter)

Hannah: So that by itself, yeah.

Sam: I mean, I was 34 when I wrote it, and the joke is when I'm 51, that's when I come out with my next one. Hopefully it's not really that long. But, no, the other thing that was different is I had a starting point in these random pictures, and as creepy as they sound, because they are real people somewhere-- And I found out later one was a celebrity and nobody knew who it was.

Jennie: Oh really?

Sam: Yeah.

Jennie: Wait, which one?

Sam: Julie.

Jennie: Oh wow.

Sam: Nobody knew her. But the other nine are just random people. There was some inspiration there, because I wouldn't have necessarily conjured up the specific images or things they do. Like there's one (laughter) that's just holding an apple for no known reason, and I just used that. I used that. It became a thing. It was just a joke in the chatroom and it actually had some significance in the novel. So there was some inspiration there.

Hannah: I was so excited to be around for this story when it happened.

Jennie: Me too!

Hannah: And then I was just delighted when it got turned into a real story later.

Sam: That's great. Well, thank you.

Hannah: We were just making cracks about-- you know, Tyler with his apple. So that's super fantastic. We are going to jump into the brainstorming section and flesh out this other story.

Jennie: Maybe it'll be your next novel, Sam.

Hannah: This is your novel for 51.

Sam: I hope not, actually. (laughter) 

Hannah: All right, so as a reminder, our plot was "Chickens frantically search for their missing conspiracy, which is in her South Bronx apartment."

Sam: So "her" is the first question. Whose? One of the chickens, I suppose, right?

Hannah: Before I figure that out, I need to know how sentient and integrated these chickens are into the world. Is this a talking animals story? Is this like Bojack Horseman, where the chickens and the humans live together? Is this an all-animals story like Zootopia, where they all live in the South Bronx?

Sam: I got two ideas. One is that, yes, they are real chickens in a kind of chicken world, and if that's the case-- Well, what would the conspiracy be if they were humans? It might be that somebody wants to turn the world into chickens. So maybe in the chicken world, somebody wants to turn them into humans, and they're frantic about this, right? The other idea is that these chickens are coward chickens. They're humans but they're scared of everything and they're scared of conspiracies and the fact that they lost one.

Jennie: This is the phrase that's getting me, is a "missing conspiracy."

Sam: Right.

Jennie: It's a conspiracy but it got lost.

Hannah: Is this a lost memory kind of story? Are they all actual animal chickens but the missing conspiracy that they don't really know about, just that it's missing, is that the world was all turned into chickens, that they all used to be humans, have no memory of that, and so maybe one of them, maybe you have a chosen one who starts having dreams of-- "There's a conspiracy, I'm missing it. I think I used to know this."

Sam: Yeah, so maybe somehow they get the idea that there's a villain out there and they have to chase it down, but it turns out that, "Oh, yeah, it fell out of my pocket in my closet back home." But they have to have this whole wild ride to get there. They get to the bad guy at the end, and it turns out, "Oh, no, you know nothing about what's been going on. We've been tracking you for all this time, going to the grocery store and everything, and you know nothing." But they keep misunderstanding little things that think, "Oh, yeah, no, he's up to something."

Jennie: Going a slightly different direction, where you said chickens as metaphorical chickens, a whole bunch of scaredy people-- And a conspiracy is sometimes-- You know, this is something that might be happening and I'm afraid that it is. So what if there's a whole bunch of people that are scared of something but they don't remember what it is? "We're just scared of something."

Sam: I will tell you, fear is funny and scary at the same time. That's why thrillers work and why people laugh at horror movies and everything. There's a lot of potential actually there, if the characters are scared, because you can do it two ways. You can either make it empathetic so that you're relating to their fear and you're also scared, or you can use it as a comedy and you can say, "Look how the crazy things they're doing because they're scared." Or you could do both. Sometimes you can be-- You've got to be really careful to balance those tones right, but you can.

Hannah: If you're searching for a missing conspiracy, is the solution that you find the answer to everything that's been going wrong? Do you find the thing that people have been conspiring? Or do you solve it? Do you undo the conspiracy? And I'm wondering whether the resolution of this is them-- Whether it's a situation where everything is going slightly off and seems to have weird connections to each other, but they don't know what, they know there's some sort of conspiracy out there somewhere but they can't figure out what the pieces are.

Sam: Well, the question I would ask is, is it real or is it something they pieced together wrongly?

Hannah: Yeah, it could absolutely be that their conspiracy that they find at the end in the South Bronx apartment was not a conspiracy at all.

Sam: "Oh, it was nothing after all, but along the way we've learned to love."

(laughter)

Hannah: You could do something interesting as well where all the pieces that they found together fit in a way that's entirely different from what they thought it was. So they find this conspiracy and it turns out that the actual conspiracy was a different one all along.

Jennie: We've been talking like it's a conspiracy that is missing, so what if we flip the parts of speech so that it's a missing conspiracy?

Sam: A conspiracy about something being missing?

Jennie: Yes. Something or perhaps lots of somethings.

Hannah: Maybe the chickens are disappearing one by one. They're all in someone's South Bronx apartment?

(laughter)

Sam: They're missing just their beaks.

Jennie: Oh no!

Hannah: Oh!

Jennie: Oh, that's horror right there. I'm visualizing that and that's awful. Ah!

Hannah: It brings out the frantic right away.

Jennie: Yes!

Sam: "Aaahhh!" Okay, let's make this less gruesome by saying that the conspiracy is these magic mirrors, and when they look in the mirror they see that their beaks are gone but they're not really.

Hannah: So, yeah, so are we talking that all mirrors are now like... alternate dimension portals to the world where chickens have no beaks?

Sam: I don't know! (laughter) I mean, I just said it, I have no idea what I'm saying!

Hannah: That is the crux of this podcast right here. That is every episode.

Sam: You know what's bothering me is, it's not the conspiracy--

Jennie: The helplessness in his voice!

Sam: It's not the conspiracy. What's bothering me is the lack of a character arc. And I know I shouldn't probably be ascribing that kind of prestige to this premise...

Hannah: That's why I was kind of leaning into some kind of "chosen one" chicken.

Sam: Yeah.

Hannah: Or if we're leaning into fear and conspiracy, maybe more of a leader.

Jennie: I think the main character has to be the ubiquitous "her" who has the South Bronx apartment.

Hannah: And the conspiracy is in the leader's apartment all along, and either they knew about it or they didn't. I don't know which one is more--

Sam: (laughter) It would come down to those two, yes.

Hannah: It would.

Jennie: Or, see here's the other thing. What if the "her" isn't part of the chickens at all? Maybe she's hiding the conspiracy on purpose. Maybe our main character is hiding the conspiracy and the chickens are after it.

Sam: Maybe the main character's doing that because she's the only one that knows it's not a big deal, it's not a conspiracy, but there's some evidence that makes it look like one that everybody's freaking out about, and so this character's like, "You need to settle down. But wait a minute, here's some incriminating evidence," and so hides it away.

Jennie: Yeah, I think the chickens are the antagonists.

Hannah: To me this feels like an ongoing cartoon series, where every episode, the chickens find something that they think is this big conspiracy and they start revving everybody up into a frenzy about this, and she's trying to come up with other, maybe weird mystical answers that will satisfy them.

Jennie: Oh my gosh!

Hannah: That's what I'm getting, wacky cartoon interplay between the chickens who always are on the verge of destroying her work and spiraling it out of control, and her constantly trying to come up with theories that will satisfy them for the things they're noticing.

Sam: I was going to say, I think you're right, it's a series. But the thing is, series these days-- It used to be that you could get away with every story being the same one over and over again, and nowadays there's more serialization. So what's the arc over a season? Is it the character realizing that she either does or does not have to take this kind of responsibility, or is it more like a story about letting go and letting people be independent and freak out if they want to?

Hannah: Maybe the title is going to help us. Our title is "A Mansion Haunted by a Young Demon."

Sam: Oh gosh. (laughter)

Jennie: OK, so she is a demon.

Hannah: She's the demon, yes?

Sam: Or the keeper of the demon, and people are starting to figure out that there's a conspiracy. But how is it missing now? No, no, the demon gets lost, so there's a conspiracy that people have been trying to keep under wraps--

Hannah: Trying to find the demon?

Sam: That there is a demon in this house, but then the demon's not there anymore, and so maybe there's a small group and then they go out into the world trying to catch this demon while it's randomly causing havoc out in the world, and they just barely catch up with the demon and they come up with these explanations. "Oh, no, um, that was me sneezing a lot. That's why there's all this goo on the wall."

Hannah: I love the idea of her being the demon and that-- Maybe the conspiracy, the big thing she's trying to do is, she's trapped here in the mansion. She's trying to get out. She's doing all these rituals to try to get herself out of here. The chickens find her and-- I love the idea of her having all these--

Jennie: Chicken minions?

Hannah: --all these magical-- Well, chicken minions, but also I love the idea of her having all these magical powers and not really being able to use any of them the way that she wants to because she has to keep things looking normal for the chickens and has to find non-supernatural explanations for everything that's going on.

Sam: But it keeps malfunctioning sometimes, so she has to cover for supernatural mistakes.

Hannah: Yes.

Sam: So a few episodes like this in, she gets sick of it and decides the only thing she can do is run away, and then all her helpers realize, "Hey, missing conspiracy... Where is she?" search all over the worlds chasing these other phenomenon that have nothing to do with her and realizing, "Oh, no, you're a fake, you're a hoax," whatever, and finally realizing, "Oh, yeah, she's just in her closet back home."

Hannah: I love this long section in the middle where it just becomes chicken paranormal hunting. (Laughter)

Sam: Sure! Why not?

Jennie: Oh, I love it. OK, so if Act One is the demon trying to leave the mansion and keeping the chickens calm and Act Two is, she finally gets out of the mansion and the chickens are trying to find her, what's Act Three?

Sam: Finding the demon and convincing her that running away isn't the answer because you can't run away from your problems. You just have to figure out how to control it. There has to be some kind of way that the demon has changed in the end, right? So able to control the powers or able to give them up or something like that. Or maybe they just mutually find a way to channel that into a constructive way, like a magic show, and nobody knows how this magic is done because it's actually real.

Hannah: I was wondering if Act Three is she's run away, she's given up on trying to return home, but then something from her past, another demon, shows up and decides to--

Sam: Oh yeah!

Hannah: --rule the world or something, and she and the chickens have to work together now.

Jennie: Yes!

Hannah: She fills them in. They're very perceptive, so she's like, "You are the only ones who know about this. You are the only ones who I can trust to help me defeat this character." And so the third act is our two protagonists against each other coming together to fight the bigger evil.

Sam: So correct me if I'm wrong because the last 20 minutes have been rather bewildering... Did we just come up with about six different ways to tell a story about chickens searching for a missing conspiracy?

Jennie: Yup, we did!

Hannah: We absolutely did.

Sam: I understand how this podcast works now.

Jennie: That is the beauty of this podcast.

Hannah: That is my favorite thing about it, that we end up with several different routes that all conceivably could turn into something.

Sam: So should I announce the next bot tournament, where every night we get a different chicken story?

Jennie: Yes!

Hannah: I want to see all the ways you have to figure out to differentiate the pictures of the chickens (laughter) because if you give me ten chickens, I might be able to differentiate like three of them.

Sam: One is a real chicken, one is like Foghorn Leghorn...

Hannah: One is holding an apple. (laughter)

Sam: Exactly. So this is a cartoon series or a picture book. Pop-up book. Let's do a pop-up book.

Jennie: Pop-up book! Oh my gosh, yes!

Sam: You haven't done that yet on this, have you?

Hannah: We have not. We have not done a pop-up book.

Jennie: What's surprising though is I can see it in this case. I can see this children's pop-up book series--

Sam: Oh, I don't know about children's.

Jennie: --where you open it up and then there's chickens, and then like a ghost pops out of a closet (laughter). It would be brilliant.

Hannah: As a pop-up book, it feels more Scooby-Doo-esque.

Jennie: Yeah, a bit, a bit.

Hannah: Where it's chickens wandering out and things pop out at them, and then at the end they're like, "Oh, it was just the demon who lives in the house."

Sam: "And I would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for you pesky chickens!"

Hannah: I love this weird supernatural element and the conspiracy element, because there are so many ways that you could flip the supernatural explanations for mundane things or mundane explanations for supernatural things and play with those tropes just back and forth, over and over again, and finding new ways to mess with that.

Sam: Yeah, I guess if this were me writing it-- and, by the way, it's not-- (laughter)

Hannah: This is not your novel?

Sam: Not my next novel, no. But if I were writing it, I would definitely want to do that. I would want to turn everything backwards. I love twists, so I'd want to either make a twist that, Oh no, it's not what you thought it was, or maybe it is after all, but I'd want to do something where-- I love genre. This is getting a little more serious now. I love genre, but I also love kind of turning it around, because genres bring a certain set of expectations, and we just talked about cartoons, we just talked about horror comedies and stuff, and I would want to find the things that aren't done in those and then surprise you with them.

Hannah: And if this was like a Cartoon Network series, where you have these little 15-minute episodes, you could absolutely play with so many different horror tropes and conspiracy movie tropes, almost like-- There's that episode of Community where everybody has their own horror story and they're all within a different genre of horror.

Jennie: The potential for parody is almost endless here, with all the chickens.

Sam: I like the conspiracy one too, because some of my favorite movies would be like Three Days of the Condor and all those sorts of things. You could ease off once in awhile on the horror stuff and just kind of replay those kinds of stories too. There's actually a lot here. Why am I saying this? It's a story about chickens.

Hannah: I mean, I think that's what it is. It's a cartoon show with this wacky premise that then, once it gets into it, starts actually playing with genre and playing with expectations, and I think that could be really entertaining and really interesting.

Sam: This podcast has broken me. (laughter) You finally did it.

Hannah: Oh my gosh.

Jennie: There's lots to add to this.

Hannah: There is lots. Write this, draw this, animate this for us.

Jennie: Pop-up book please.

Hannah: Pop-up book. As always, if you do write anything based on this episode, feel free to send it to us or send us a snippet of it. We'll be happy to read it on the podcast, post it on our blog. We'd love for other people to see where you've taken these stories. As always, we like to close out our podcast by shouting out a story that we want other people to check out. So today my story that I'm going to recommend is an old favorite. I'm going to recommend, in the vein of wacky comedy, the movie The Court Jester. This is a movie from 1950s. I grew up with it. It's a Danny Kaye vehicle. The premise is that it's a resistance fighter trying to get the true king on the throne in medieval England, medieval Europe, and he ends up impersonating the king's jester to be able to sneak in and do what he needs to do to unseat the monarchy. It's all kinds of-- multiple plots coming together. There are conspiracies, he is a chicken in the metaphorical sense, so it seems very connected to this. It's one of my absolute favorites. It is available on Amazon Prime, just recently, on Prime Video, and it is one of my go-to feel-good movies any time I need a little pick-me-up, so I highly recommend it. The Court Jester.

Sam: That is an amazing movie. I have to just interject. I showed that to my son who was maybe five at the time. I've never seen him laugh harder at anything. It was deafening.

Hannah: It's so funny. And I've been introducing it to a lot of people-- I wondered for awhile if I just loved it because I grew up with it, but then I've been introducing other adults to it as well, and they're like, "This was really funny. This was really enjoyable."

Jennie: It's a jewel in cinema. It really is.

Hannah: Jennie, you're up. What story would you like to recommend to our listeners?

Jennie: I think I'm going to recommend again an old favorite. You know I like to do the old favorites. I'm going to recommend The Watcher in the Woods. It is actually a Disney film. It is not yet available on Disney+. I just checked. I don't know why it's missing from there. It was one of my first horror films that I ever enjoyed. It's mild enough for children to watch, you know, Disney, but it is very intense. It is creepy. It leaves you wondering what the heck is going on for most of the-- and even at the end, you don't get all of the answers unless, of course, you get the DVD and watch the alternate ending, which, when you do, it's very obvious why they didn't use it. (laughter) And I won't spoil it, but it's about this girl and she and her parents and her little sister move to this big mansion, you know, of course, it's a creepy old mansion with all the ivy and everything, and she starts getting haunted and things keep coming up, and she finds out there's this history between the neighbors and a couple of other people in the village, and something happened when they were kids, and the lady's daughter went missing years and years and years ago. And that's who they think is haunting her, and so trying to figure that out. It's just one of my favorites from when I was a kid. If you find it anywhere, please go watch it. And if you want a laugh, look up the alternate ending.

Hannah: All right, Sam, what would be a story that you would recommend all our listeners check out, from any medium, any time, anything?

Sam: The idea here would be to come up with something people might not have heard of, right? So in that spirit, why don't I pick something by one of the world's most famous authors and featuring one of the world's most famous fictional characters, right?

Hannah: Yes.

Sam: OK. Since we talked about Paradise Island, I've got to give a shoutout to one of the inspirations there, Agatha Christie, and her character Hercule Poirot. But it's a very specific book, because if all you know of Poirot is from the many movies and TV shows, Murder on the Orient Express, and so on, as great as it is, you might be surprised by a book called The Hollow, which is not very well-known. It hasn't been adapted very much, and when it is it's fundamentally altered because Poirot doesn't even show up until the very, very end. Actually Agatha Christie kind of famously said that when he shows up, it ruined the book. She had kind of a love-hate relationship to them. I know what she means. The thing about The Hollow is that-- Well, if you think about a lot of murder mysteries in general, the characters are puzzle pieces and they fit together and they're not necessarily fully living, breathing human beings. When they give them some life, they're maybe quirky to be interesting, but they're still parts of a puzzle, right? Agatha Christie, I think, usually rose above that, but she was criticized for that sometimes along with the other mystery authors of her day. But in The Hollow, they are so well-drawn, these other characters that only appear in this one book. They're so full of thoughts and feelings and self-reflection. They're self-aware. They really think about their independence and their morals and their standing in society and things like that. I wound up caring so much about them that-- Well, first of all, the murder mystery really doesn't matter so much except as sort of a way to get the characters working and interacting, and when Poirot shows up, one of my favorite characters of all time, I didn't really want him to because it seemed to be an injustice to have such strong characters have their problems solved by someone else. I think what Christie did was amazing, because she sort of threaded the needle where she let Poirot do what he does best and still gave the characters the autonomy and the agency they needed to sort out their own problems. So anyway, if you're not really familiar with Poirot or Agatha Christie, don't start there. Start with Death on the Nile or something like that. But if you think you know all about them because you've seen some movies, go to The Hollow and you might find that there's a little bit more to know.

Hannah: All right. So before we go off, first of all, Sam, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. I'm so excited we got you to come on.

Sam: Thanks for asking. This was great.

Hannah: Yeah! Before we go, anything that you want to plug for our listeners for yourself?

Sam: Yeah. I mean, we might as well refer people to RinkWorks, since we talked about it. R-I-N-K-W-O-R-K-S.com. It's nothing to do with skating rinks, but that's how it's spelled. It's just a name I made up for a website that back in the late 90s I decided to put all my creative energy into, so there's a bunch of humor and games and discussions about movies and things like that. And also there's a link to buy The Mystery of Paradise Island if you want to do that.

Hannah: I will make sure and include that link in the show description so you can go over there. If you wander on into the chatroom, you might find some of us there.

Jennie: It's true.

Hannah: Well, folks, that is our episode. As a reminder, you can find us every other Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.

Jennie: Follow us on Twitter @writethispod, and if you’ve been inspired by this episode and have questions or comments or a pop-up book or anything else, email us at somebodywritethis@gmail.com, we'd love to hear from you!

Hannah: We’ll be back with another episode in two weeks. We'll see you then!

Jennie: And as they say, he who goes round the village long enough will either get a dog bite or a dinner.