Meet the Crew (Episode 20) Transcript

You can find the audio version of this episode here.

Hannah: A team of mercenaries is determined to improve themselves while they look for love in a year in which they keep a personal diary.

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 we brainstorm how it 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. Welcome, Presley Thomas.

Presley: Hello.

Hannah: We're so excited to have you on the podcast. You've done some writing yourself. We talked a little bit beforehand about this, the story that you had written and that was out for publication. Tell us a little bit about the story and we'll get into some of the details around it.

Presley: Yeah, this story is called The Explorer. It looks at a college student who is trying to escape his family, who's going through a bit of a marriage trouble. So he goes to work on a farm during the summer. It's sort of inspired by like Flannery O'Connor and her Southern Gothic tales. And then with a little twist that's a little more like Carmen Maria Machado maybe. And I actually wrote it eight years ago, so I've been mostly revising during these pandemic times, and it's interesting to see, I guess, how different I am now to how I wrote then and what was on my mind. Yeah. This story changed my life. Even though it hasn't been published, it's been a way to kind of connect with people. And actually my first landlord read this story, and that's how I met her. So I ended up moving into her apartment and all this weird stuff. So it's been a good story. I just hope it gets a nice home wherever it ends up.

Hannah: I love the idea of this story continuing to make connections for you and be a connector to other people. I'd love for you to to chat a little bit more about looking back on this story and being a very different person now than you were then. Are there pieces of it that as you look back through it and do revisions-- Which pieces of that stand in, I guess, the starkest contrast for you? Which pieces of it do you look back on it and go, "Oh, wow, I don't think I would have ever written that or thought that now if I was writing it now"?

Presley: I think that really most of it, looking back, was really making sure that--  looking at the characters and thinking about is this character too hard or too sharp? Is that really growth or is it more letting them interact and either change or not change, but not seeing them as like only one form or one shape, but having more of a human element? I think I really tended to view people more as I was writing as, oh, they're just this one thing and they're going to react this way and that kind of thing. But looking at revising and softening the characters some and giving them human elements, too, even though they're just words on a page, was kind of a new thing.

Hannah: I'm curious, as you continue to-- You're revising now, but there's other stuff that you've just worked on and written. I'm curious, do you feel like you have a different-- Goal maybe isn't the right word, but a different endpoint in mind for your writing now than you would have then? What are some different things that you're wanting to say or explore with your writing now that wouldn't have crossed your mind back then?

Presley: Well, it's not true for this story. Sexuality isn't a concern in this story. But I'm very interested moving forward in making my work gayer and greater, as I like to say. And I was not inhabiting that fully at the time, but I knew that about myself. And so being willing to project that into my writing and build relatable characters and worlds for them is new for me, and it's something I've been doing in other spaces.

Hannah: How do you think that the changing of or revealing of your character and your person and your identity, how do you think that that changes how you either write or read?

Presley: I think one of the big things in queer stories that I read and then I try to write is like there's a lot more room for what we call camp. So, like, if something happens and it's a little over the top, if it's a queer writer and it's a queer story, I'm going to be like, "That's camp. That's great. Keep it." Whereas I think maybe a straight person reading it or someone not familiar with queer culture might say, "Oh, that's over the top. You should edit that." And I'm just like, "No, keep it." I think the best example we can see of that in popular culture would probably be drag queens and drag shows. So you see, the performer, they've got all this makeup on. It's kind of wild. And I like to see that. I like to see that element in queer art as well. You know, maybe not as much makeup, but other elements of like the fantastic or even just making room for new and different things that maybe don't make sense at first, but are part of the world.

Jennie: Kind of like exploration through exaggeration?

Presley: Yeah, I mean, because part of what I do, too, is I'll review queer YA for another publication and I'll read the other reviews for some of the stuff, and they're like, "Yeah, they'll probably edit that out." I'm like, "Nah, this is culture. This is important." But other reviewers don't really see that maybe.

Hannah: Presley, thank you so much. I'm glad that you got to share a little bit of that revising thought process. I think that's a really interesting thing. We are going to scoot on into our brainstorming and talk through this and see if we can come up with something that works with this. So as a reminder, our plot is, "A team of mercenaries is determined to improve themselves while they look for love in a year in which they keep a personal diary."

Jennie: Well, to start off, looking for love in a year when you keep a personal diary? That's a trope that's been used several times, and that's a structure that we're familiar with. So the part that I'm curious about is the team of mercenaries.

Presley: Yeah. I know in my family, the relationship rider says I need to see all Marvel and DC Comics and superhero movies. So I think a lot of my thought is going kind of towards like the Suicide Squad movie, but maybe instead of them pushing against the police or whatever with, like bomb callers, it would be more like Suicide Squad/Professor X mash up, where there's like this moral ethical leader who's like, "You all need to [inaudible] and write this diary and fall in love. It'll make you a better person. I don't know."

Hannah: The thing that's getting to me is that this isn't just one mercenary doing this, having this personal goal. It's a whole group of mercenaries. And it's unusual enough to have one mercenary keeping a diary to find love, Bridget Jones-style. But for a whole team of doing it... And I like that idea that it is like a group of people who... maybe have some sort of person guiding them through their self-improvement journey.

Jennie: And the idea that it's a singular diary. They're not all keeping different diaries. They're keeping one diary together.

Hannah: I was curious about that, too. I was trying to figure out if this was like, a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants kind of thing. I think they all shared a diary, where they passed it back and forth between themselves, and I'm trying to figure out if if that "a personal diary" means it has to be just one diary or if we can say that they're each keeping their own. I think either one is intriguing to me. How mercenary-ing are they still being? Does their self-improvement lead them away from that or does it make them better at it?

Presley: Maybe they're in one of those dystopian worlds where mercenary-ing is like a marketable skill, so it's not, like, terrible terrible, it's like chaotic good maybe. But part of the building the world back up into a functioning society is to make connections with other people and build humanity.

Jennie: But they have to learn how to do that for themselves before they teach it to other people or something?

Presley: Yeah, they're like the new Adam and Eve or something that are--

Jennie: I'm liking the flavor of this. I'm liking the flavor. This is nice.

I'm wondering  as well, if this is maybe-- You look at this dystopian world, everything's a little chaotic. Maybe the mercenaries have been essentially the ones kind of holding things together by any means necessary. And maybe they're moving toward a world in which they are no longer needed. And maybe that hasn't happened yet, but either they are part of it and part of like, "We're going to make this world better so that we don't have to do this anymore," or they know that the change is coming and so they're all going, "What are we going to do when the skill that we have built our lives on is no longer reputable or sustainable and we have to find new things to do?"

Presley: Yeah, and maybe as the story progresses, it starts out very mercenary. But part of the arc is their actions become less violent and more loving or more caring. And so part of that arc could be that change. And maybe not all of them make it.

Hannah: Or maybe they're running into different things and growing and changing in different ways, trying to figure out their paths forward.

Jennie: Oh, my heart is already hurting just at the potential.

Presley: Well, because you know, if you're writing a series, you need to have a new bad guy by the end of the first book. Right? So this could be a trilogy and be like, oh, by the end we have someone we thought was good who was like the new bad guy and how is it going to unfold and so forth.

Jennie: Oh, like what if one of the team ends up being the bad guy because they were looking for love and didn't find it or got like rejected?

Presley: Yeah, yeah.

Oh, you could really lean into some interesting stuff there, looking at feeling like you're owed or entitled to love. And if you don't get it, feeling like that's the rest of the world's fault and that they owe you stuff. And that could be a really interesting angle to take that character, that that rejection fuels his darker side instead of encouraging him to strengthen himself up and move forward.

Presley: Yeah, and that's a real human feeling, too. You may want a relationship, but there's no guarantee. And then when you think about the spectrum of sexuality, too, they could be straight, they could be gay, they could be bi, they could be things related to gender. So having a whole team of mercenaries really gives you opportunities to explore different elements.

Hannah: Absolutely. I'd be intrigued to have-- You could have an asexual character and aromantic, who is doing this because they feel like they're supposed to, only to find out that that's not really what is going to fulfill them.

Presley: Yeah, or that their love looks different than other people and that's OK. Or they discover what that looks like in the process.

Jennie: Especially in a dystopian, say, future, I'm assuming, is what we're looking at here, when possibly population is an issue, you know, and if you're asexual, like, what's your role in that? When it actually is-- the continuation of the species is in question?

Presley: Part of the attraction for a lot of people in any relationship, whether it's friendship, romantic or whatever, is care for others, so finding those roles and exploring those roles, that's worth doing.

Jennie: My roommate and I have been watching-- I've been introducing her to different TV shows. She's very drawn naturally to realistic fiction, so she likes the crime shows and that kind of stuff. But something I've been explaining to her and that I love about stories is using non realistic fiction to explore our humanity, and I think that's what this story is doing. Let's find a different setting, different circumstances, but explore stuff that we're dealing with now, like sexuality and relationships and the normal everyday human stuff.

Presley: Well, and the beauty of a dystopian model is you don't have the luxury of ignoring people because a lot of times you just got a handful of folks and you've got to make it work.

Hannah: Yeah, you can't lose one of them. You can't discount one of them. Everybody has to be part of this or we all go down.

Presley: Which we're learning today in America.

Jennie: Yes.

Hannah: This is an important thing to consider now. I'm curious, is this hold in diary entries?

Jennie: See, I was wondering about the form of the diary and I was thinking, if technology is still a thing in this dystopian future, is it like a shared blog or something where, like, everybody can read the entries of this group of people? Or is it a more personal thing like a book they actually pass around? I think the format is important here. What do you think?

Presley: I think dystopian, I think less technology for some reason. I know Kurt Vonnegut has this novel called-- I think it was called Hocus Pocus or something. The premise of the novel is it was written on scraps of paper he found while he was walking to and from campus where he worked, and so the novel was sectioned off in places because the assumption was it was pieces of paper. And I wonder, too, about non-traditional forms of journaling. So you've got you know, you've got paragraphs, but you've also got people that bullet journal. You've got people who maybe they use sketches and things in their journaling.

Jennie: Ooh, yes.

Presley: So there are ways that that can be made more interesting. But maybe one way to shore up the structure is to have the notes of, like, the leader who is helping them find their relational counterpoints or whatever would be part of it as well, so maybe his patient notes or something.

Hannah: So we've gone back and forth on whether this is one journal they're all keeping together or whether it's individual. I worry if it's one journal they're all keeping together, we're not going to get any moments where it's clear that characters are breaking away from them or anything that they didn't feel-- so what if it's both? What if this this journey partly requires them to together, come  with a-- keep a log, in a sense, where they gather together, they write down what they've learned, what they've been working on, but that's also interspersed with their own personal entries. That can get really interesting because you can have these characters who you realize are going through something really big or making big shifts in their thinking, and then seeing what they put in the public one that everybody can see and how that's very different. I love Presley's idea of using different formats. That's a way that we could really distinguish the characters from each other and make it much more interesting to read. So, yeah, if you do have bullet journaling or you have somebody who sketches and captions, like his journals are just an image and then a phrase underneath it... You can do some really interesting things with that.

Jennie: I want to read this!

Hannah: Right?

Jennie: Oh my gosh.

Hannah: So we do have a title. I'm going to give you the title. Our title for this is Meet the Crew.

Jennie: Perfect.

Hannah: Like... here they are. Which I think works really well because this is very much a character-centered narrative, I think. It's about all these different characters who are all part of the same crew, all learning about self-improvement and love in some way, shape or form, both as individuals and as a unit. So I kind of really like that.

Jennie: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I don't know who any of these characters are yet, but I'm in love with them already just because they're human.

Presley: You know, that title sets up our origin story for sure. This is at least a trilogy.

Hannah: I think so. How many mercenaries do you think we're following? Especially if we're getting bits of individual people's journals as well--

Jennie: For at least the core group, even if maybe some come in for a little while and leave later.

Hannah: Yeah. How big is our crew?

Presley: It couldn't be too big unless you want like a really big book or story.

Jennie: A tight knit group, like the crew of the Serenity maybe.

Presley: Yeah. I would say maybe like four tops, plus your facilitator.

Hannah: If you have a trilogy, you could also have people drop in and out. Like if you do have somebody who does spin off and decide to go in a different route, morally, you could definitely have them not show up in book two, not be invited back to be part of this, and replace them with somebody else. So you could slowly fold in other characters and bring out ones. Yeah, I was thinking four to six, and maybe over the whole trilogy, you could have like seven or eight who dipped in and out at different times. But I think, yeah, four or five at the most actively involved at a time.

Presley: Yeah, for sure.

Jennie: I want to know more about this facilitator in a dystopian world. Who is this person and how did he or she and the crew get together to-- Were are they looking for therapy or did the facilitator approach them?

Presley: Or maybe we finally abolished prisons, and so the actual treatment was actually more human.

Hannah: Oh, interesting.

Presley: But also, it's harder to tell when you're ready to go out into the world, because it's not like, "Oh, you're in here for this many years." It's like, "You're in here and so you meet this treatment goal or something." I don't know.

Hannah: So what if this group, this particular group-- The facilitator maybe isn't even part of the crew at first. He is the counselor, the therapist or the doctor in charge of their treatment. What if they were all involved in the same-- They knew each other beforehand and they were all involved in something, some some big operation that was both illegal and harmful, as well as personally harmful. So they're working through their own trauma through that as well. I like the idea that it is a prison replacement, that it is people trying to make sure that they're ready to go back out into the world and be safe and be safe for others.

Jennie: I have an alternate idea. Based on what Presley said earlier about-- Maybe they weren't needed anymore as mercenaries. So what if this world is actually on the cusp of being post-dystopian? And so their function in society is no longer needed anymore, but they're still people, so this is part of their their recovery from being mercenaries to integrate into the new enlightened society.

Hannah: Oh, OK. So both of them. What if they are-- They were mercenaries, they were involved in something that got them sent to regular prison. They were just locked up. And while they were in there things changed, regimes changed, procedures changed, and they are now being given this opportunity to instead work in treatment, towards self-improvement, toward healing, toward recovery. And so you could have a whole bunch of them who are really resistant and are like, "This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Why am I being asked to keep a diary? This is stupid as well," as some who are like, "Hey, I'll do whatever it takes if it means I can get out of here." And so you could have these different responses to the diary to begin with, which could be really interesting to explore, and how their views of how things were and how things are... And so not only improving themselves, but improving themselves to function in this new world could be really interesting.

Presley: I'm trying to think. It reminds me of something and I can't remember what it is. It's bothering me.

Hannah: Oh, just trying to remember that story.

Presley: Yeah. Yeah. I like the idea of kind of being able to track the change. So they start one way and go another way. And I think the diary would do that. What if some poor mercenary was misunderstood what the word diary meant and just started writing about the people he had killed as a mercenary?

Jennie: Oh, no.

Hannah: Like a past journaling. You could reveal so much about these characters through their mandated diary entries and especially their mandated diary entries for themselves, as opposed to what they shared with the group. That dynamic really fascinates me. There's the personal and there's the public, and how do those sync up and how do those diverge from each other? And some could sync up more over the course of the course of the trilogy and some could diverge further.

Jennie: Not only what they say, but how they say it and when.

Hannah: And they could be getting, I guess, released, in a sense, at various points throughout this trilogy and let back into the world. And maybe we still get to see their personal diaries, but they're no longer, in a sense, accountable to the rest of the group and sharing what's going on there. And so you could have them-- You know, how does what they did during their treatment affect them when they step out back into the world, trying to continue looking for love and whatever that means for them?

Jennie: I think I want to write this.

Presley: Well, and even if you're in a rehabilitation program, there is like some method of work release, too. So, maybe instead of breaking rocks with chains on, it's like, go on a date with this woman we chose for you.

Jennie: Court mandated dating. Yes! My problem is solved!

Presley: "My Saturday night is taken care of!"

Hannah: Now I want to know about the people who agree to go on those dates with them. 

Jennie: Because that's the other half of the story. If they're improving themselves and trying to find love, the stories of the people they encounter are also important. So, yeah. Who are these people?

Presley: It's probably one of those dating app experiments where they're like,  "We'll pair them with inmates for you if you pay us--"

Jennie: Exconmatch.com.

Hannah: Exactly. That'd be fascinating. We are right around at time, where we have to wrap this up, but I love this story so much. A lot of our stories have this sort of a wackiness to them, which I really love, but I like that this one feels very centered in people and personal experiences, and even though it is in this dystopian or alternative history world, it feels very...of now, which I really love. And I want to write these characters and I want to get to know these characters.

Jennie: I know! Collaborative NaNo this year, Hannah?

Hannah: Yes.

Jennie: You and me?

Hannah: Get a whole lot of people together, do National Novel Writing Month, we're each taking a character, write some diary entries. Oh, I love this. OK, OK, cool. As we close things out, before we do that, let's go ahead and we'll each take a second and shout out a story that we would like to recommend to our listeners. Mine today, actually, I'm going to keep with the diary theme. I have just finished reading The Memory Book by Lara Avery, which is a young adult novel told through the journal of a young girl who was diagnosed with a disease that essentially-- It's going to very quickly bring on dementia and the inability to take care of herself entirely, and it's her wrestling with that and fighting with it and figuring out, "How can I still do everything?" At the beginning she's very like, "I'm still going to go to college in New York. I'm going to make this happen. I'm going to move away from my family." And it's her figuring out what she can and cannot do and and trying to connect with her family and her friends around her and trying to just live a normal life while knowing that she also realistically only has a couple of years left. It's a really engaging story and I really love the characters in it. She feels very, very real to me. And the use of the diary-- She starts keeping it specifically so that she can hold on to her memories because she knows she's going to lose them. It's a really beautifully written book. I really enjoyed it and I would definitely recommend anybody else to check that out who might be interested. I'm going to toss it to Jennie. What story would you like to recommend for our listeners today?

Jennie: The story I'm going to recommend today is a game series called Daymare Town by Mateusz Skutnik. He's known for his highly artistic, slightly creepy Flash games, mostly. I know Flash isn't a thing, but they've all been remastered. Daymare Town in particular, it's all drawn in black and white. You're in this-- what looks like an abandoned city, but every once in a while, you'll catch a citizen hiding around the corner or a pair of eyes looking at you from the darkness. Most of the story element is kind of implied and inferred from the surroundings and what you're trying to do. But it's a really fascinating little point and click game that if you're into those at all, I would highly recommend because it's just beautiful.

Hannah: All right, Presley, if you could recommend a story in any medium at all to our listeners, what would you like to recommend?

Presley: Oh, it's summer, I'm in Houston, so I'm going to represent my hometown with this queer YA book that I reviewed a few months ago called The Gravity of US by Phil Stamper. It is set in a suburb of Houston where NASA is at. And, you know, "Houston, we have problem," all that kind of stuff. It's a young teen who moves to Houston with his dad who becomes an astronaut. And the town is actually-- The way they fund these missions is through a space reality TV program where they follow the astronauts and their families around with cameras and create government interest in exploring space. And while he's there, he falls in love with one of the astronauts' sons and builds his social media platform, moved it from New York to Houston and becomes like a big deal and makes-- to hold NASA accountable and  some of these other crazy groups that are trying to take advantage of these astronauts and also falls in love at the same time. It's really good.

Hannah: All right. Before we take off, Presley, is there anything you'd like to plug for yourself? Any current projects or social media, anything you'd like to share with our listeners?

Presley: I write reviews for Interstellar Flight magazine. They're on Medium. I write on Medium as well, and I'm on Twitter @writerthoughts, so you can find all my stuff there.

Hannah: We'll make sure and include those links in the show description as well so that you all can follow Presley and see what he's up to these days and what he's writing. Fantastic. Thank you once again so much for coming on the show. I'm really happy that we got you on and that you helped us flesh out this really beautiful story.

Jennie: Seriously.

Presley: Thanks for having me. This is my first podcast. I'm excited. Nice.

Hannah: Nice! I'm glad that we could-- Hopefully it was a good introduction. All right, 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 story 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, if the beginning is good, the end must be perfect.