2015.01.07 22:08 araaara Burning Miles & Points
2015.08.25 22:58 mathewryan funkoswap
2011.08.09 23:07 attacksquid Bleach Shirts
2024.05.19 15:23 tr4nner IPL Before Electrolysis?
2024.05.19 15:23 ComfortableTheme2816 Vote so vegan can win Ms hers health and fitness competition!
Hi! This competition is for hers magazine and I’ll get to be featured on the cover and talk about my diet and fitness if I win I made it to round 2! submitted by ComfortableTheme2816 to VeganActivism [link] [comments] I think this could be a great opportunity to reach/inspire others to go vegan! I’ve been vegan for 8 years and an avid runner for 11 and going vegan has been the best decision I’ve made not just for myself but for our environment and for animal welfare! At the least this could help counter the misinformation about the diet not being a stainable source of protein or energy! If you like to vote for me please click the link it’s free to vote once every 24 hours thank you so much! ➡️ https://mshealthandfit.com/2024/kennedy-lewis |
2024.05.19 15:21 Burnbabyburnt My marriage was already on the rocks, and now I'm trans...
2024.05.19 15:21 Woodstovia [Day of Ascension] The beginning of an uprising
‘This is the end of us,’ she hissed. ‘The priest will use us, and then he will destroy us. Or imprison us in his jars and make us his experiments. All our ways, our traditions, our faith. He will melt it out of us. There will be nothing left but his science.’
‘Child…’ Claress repeated.
‘We should flee,’ Davien almost shouted at her. ‘All of us, each to a different hole. We should abandon this city. We should carry our words and our blood to other places. We’re finished here! I’m sorry, magus, I’m sorry.’ And she was simultaneously weeping and incandescent with rage. At herself, at Triskellian, at Claress. ‘I have ruined us! I’m a traitor. Punish me, magus. Destroy me.’
‘You have listened to the lies of the enemy, it is true,’ Claress said softly. Her hand fell on Davien’s shoulder, a husk of a thing, no weight to it. ‘And you may be punished in time, that is also true. But for now, you are one of us, and you must play your part in what is to come.’
‘But it’s a sham!’ Davien exclaimed. ‘It’s some Taskmaster plan, some infighting between them. It isn’t the time!’ Struck by a sudden hope, she searched the old woman’s face. ‘Is it? Is all this… the Emperor’s plan for us? Can it be?’ And before she could hear any empty comforts, she rushed on. ‘Tell me truly, magus. Please tell me.’
The sad calm on Claress’ face was heartbreaking. ‘I don’t know, child. I wish I could give you all the grand certainties in the world. I wish I could give you the words of fire and faith I’d speak in the chapel, of the Many-Handed Emperor and His angels. But that is what faith is for, Davien.’ She sagged, sinking in on herself a little more. ‘Take me to my chamber. I must rest before tomorrow.’
‘You can’t take to the streets, magus. Not you.’
‘I must. We all shall play our part. We shall triumph together, or we shall fall. I do not want to be left alone if my kin are taken from me.’
Davien led her deeper into the maze of cellars. All around, the Congregation were in a frenzy of preparation. The building was haemorrhaging the faithful as they rushed out to carry the magus’ words across all the poor districts of the city. Out there, all Davien’s distant kin would be arming themselves. And the others, all those who weren’t blood but who had suffered beneath the crushing iron boot of the tech-priests, they’d be gathering too. All of them cast against the iron walls of the Hollow Men.
When she had Claress back to the old woman’s bed, she helped her lie down, hearing joints click and crack. The magus lay there, staring at the low ceiling, then shifted her head to look at the painting of the Emperor on the far wall. It was flaking now, half-obscured with grime. A depiction from the time of the Great-Aunts and Uncles, when the blood of the Emperor was stronger in them, so that none of the Congregation could show their faces for fear of being known for what they were. A figure with four arms: two human hands and two with radiant claws like crescent moons. An elliptical head split by a great benevolent smile that was all teeth. The eyes were beatific, murderous, inhuman. Davien had stared at the image often, feeling out its contradictions, letting them speak to the human and the inhuman within her. It frightened her; it inspired her.
‘I hear them singing to me.’ Claress’ dry voice rose to her. ‘The angels. They throng the cold void. And I sing back. I tell them, We are here. We are faithful. We’re waiting for you. And their great wings carry them across the freezing spaces, through the perilous labyrinth of the warp. They are coming, Davien. They tell me, We hear you. We come for you. Only have faith, and you shall become part of us. The Blessed Union, child. Our destiny.’ She laughed softly, coughed, shuddering with each dry convulsion. ‘They came from the stars, our ancestors. The first on Morod to bear our blood was an angel’s child, and so we are children of angels. But weaker, each generation. I lack the strength of the Aunts, the might of the Great-Aunts. I am too human to be truly strong. But I hear them, Davien. They are so beautiful. There is nothing on this ugly world to compare to them. I need to see them with my own eyes, before I grow too old.’
And Davien, one of the diminished survivors of a younger generation still, thought about how thin her own blood was, how little of the angel remained. ‘Do you think the priests’ Ascension Day will be our ascension too? Or will all our blood just end up on the streets and in that priest’s laboratory?’
Claress’ yellow gaze switched to her. ‘Faith is all that we have, when the machinery of this world comes to crush us. I hear the angels. They come to us, but space is vast and the warp is a trickster. All we can do is believe that the Many-Handed Emperor will not abandon His faithful in their time of need. That He is a true divinity, beyond the enthroned corpse the machine-priests worship. Our god lives, Davien. Our god is life, life in all its many forms and guises. Theirs is dust and ancient mechanisms. We must prevail, or we give the universe over to entropy and death. Only by our truths can life eternal survive and spread throughout the cosmos. Do you understand me, child? Do you have faith?’
And Davien thought, We are going to die tomorrow, on the streets and in their arena. This is not the true uprising we were promised, it is some priest’s gambit. But she couldn’t hold to those thoughts against the old woman’s rustle of a voice. It got under her skin. It spoke to all those services in the buried chapel. It spoke to her blood.
Easy to have faith when you were strong, after all. And what was the value of it, then? But they stood under the steel hammer of the tech-priests, and they would rise up nonetheless. Let Triskellian think it was all to his plan. The Congregation would rise because it was their time. Who said that he was using them? And even though, intellectually, she knew the truth, she still felt that fire in her, that burned away all doubt.
‘I believe, magus,’ she said fiercely. ‘Tell me what I must do.’
The next dawn, even as the tech-priests were attending their early Ascension Day devotions, the streets of the South Chasm districts erupted into armed uprising.
Davien saw it from the rooftops, crossing from building to building by the gantries, bridges and ropes that the skitarii periodically brought down but the locals always strung up again. All night the Congregation’s messengers had been running like sparks through the poorer districts of the city, seeing which claves would catch their fires. All of the true faithful rose up without question, of course. Right now she could only see the more inarguably human of them, those marked only by a pallidity of skin, patches of chitinous scales, unblinking yellow eyes perhaps. No unusual traits on as poisonous a world as this. Behind and within the walls of the tenements, though, the older generations of the god-touched would be stirring; would be eager. They had waited all their long lives, after all. They had hidden away as their younger offspring had busied themselves in the world, unable to show their distorted faces. They had known only the burning fire of their faith, and now that faith told them, Rise!
The streets were thronging with people, just ordinary people. And yet, not ordinary, for in many of those bodies a few drops of divine blood ran. But they were not the superhuman figures of Imperial myth. Not the Adeptus Astartes that had been made into little gods; not the tech-priests, elevated by machinery until they had forgotten what it was like to have two living feet on the ground. People, with nothing but their faith, and what tools and weapons they could scavenge or make themselves. And today they would attempt to wrest control of their destiny from those who had ordered and limited their whole lives.
And they would die, she knew. Heavy-hearted she watched them muster, factorum workers clapping each other on the shoulder, hard greetings called across the crowd. There were banners there, and some were of the Many-Handed Emperor Scattering His Angels Upon the Faithful, but there were others, too. Crude standards celebrating this ward or that factorum, this mining crew, even one for the staff of a workers’ refectory. There was an air of festival, just as if they were celebrating the damned Ascension Day after all.
And then the first skitarii came into sight. Davien knew she should be away by now, off on the errand that Claress had given her, but she couldn’t. She had to see if the whole venture would collapse into tragedy.
A wedge of red-clad cybernetic soldiers ordered itself precisely across the street ahead of the gathering mob. Behind them, a pair of dragoons stalked in, towering over the soldiers’ heads. Their riders couched forked lances snapping with sparks, even as the servitor beneath them, merged with the workings of the machine, directed the Ironstrider’s jerky motions. The crowd stilled, seeing all those carbines levelled at them, knowing more would be on the way.
The skitarii alpha called out, voice amplified until it rattled Davien’s skull like thunder. ‘By the order of the Fabricator General, you are required to disperse. There will be no second warning.’
And Claress stepped forwards from the ranks of the crowd, standing ahead of them, raising her staff. Somehow her high, clear voice carried even to Davien. ‘Faith and freedom! Faith for the true Emperor’s blood! Freedom from the yoke!’
The skitarii opened fire.
Davien screamed when they did it, curled away from the blaze and heat of it, knowing this was surely the end even as the uprising began. But in the echo of the shots she dared look, and saw Claress somehow untouched, standing with bodies to her left and right, the faithful who had put themselves in harm’s way. And not so many bodies, even, not compared to the vast mass of humanity that was packing the street. Angry humanity, crammed with grievances.
Claress’ voice called out again, and now she was sounding the charge. Davien saw members of the Congregation break into a run on either side of her, funnelling through the streets in a great rush, wielding hammers and prybars and power-cutters, emptying their shotguns and automatics into the skitarii wedge. The dragoons were in motion instantly, striding over the heads of their human-sized allies, accelerating into a counter-charge with lances lowered. Davien saw the first connect, its huge iron feet sending insurgents flying even as the lance swept an arc through the crowd, charring and burning. Then an eye-rending beam of light seared into it. One of the mining crews had a rock laser set up on the rooftop across from Davien and they drew lines of molten steel across the dragoon’s chassis before striking something vital.
In an instant the walking machine flashed incandescently and exploded, laying waste to the nearest fighters in a horrible toll of shrapnel and shredded flesh. For everyone left standing, though, that was the signal to rush forwards. Moments later the skitarii were giving ground, shooting and falling back. Or just falling, dragged down by the crowd who saw them as nothing more than the tools of their oppressors.
And then Davien was off, roof to roof, eyes open for when the tech-priests’ more subtle instruments decided the higher reaches were their territory. There would be rangers up here sniping down at the crowd soon enough. There would be the murderous rust-stalkers trying to flank the Congregation to bring down its leaders with their blades and claws. She had to be ahead of all of that. She had work to do, a task entrusted to her by the magus herself.
She shadowed the forerunners of the mob until they exploded out before Nilhetum Square, where the rail depot was. More of the Palatium’s troops were disembarking even as everyone arrived, hurriedly evacuating the train and taking up position to defend it. And if the Congregation wished to reach the Palatium, they needed to control the train line, and they needed to take it swiftly before the tech-priests began destroying their own infrastructure to deny it to the rebels.
There were more than just skitarii out there. She saw the low, trundling shapes of Kataphron servitors grinding down ramps from flatbed carriages, armoured human head, torso and arms set into a mechanised assault vehicle that was also their lower body. Davien felt a flare of rage at the tech-priests and their meddling. They took the divine flesh and carved it and pared it down, merged it with their devices. Nothing could be left alone. Nothing had any value until it was incorporated into their machines. And, on a grander scale, no individual lives had worth unless they were components of the wider priestly engine that spanned the human universe and enslaved everything it touched to their cold metal vision.
The Kataphron were terrors, nigh invulnerable to the weapons the foot-soldiers of the Congregation had brought, but by now the rioters had been given the chance to bring in their own big guns. With a choking roar and a belch of smoke one of the big quarry trucks raced out of a side street, already up to its lumbering top speed. It was a heavily armoured Goliath model, its entire front given over to rock-grinding blades that would chew hungrily on skitarii machine-flesh or the armour of the Kataphron. And, in its wake, a flurry of robed figures bearing a banner showing that familiar many-armed figure. The Aunts and the Uncles had come out from their cellars and holes, from their forgotten wall-spaces where they had waited for generations. Even as the Goliath powered forwards, meeting the lead Kataphron head-on and making a jagged mess of its armour, the elders were leaping around and over it, brandishing knives, pistols, or just their own hooked talons. And there was more. Davien felt a voice in her head, then. A singing so pure and beautiful that she thought it must be the angels, come at last. All the Congregation must have heard it, from the way they redoubled their pace and closed joyously with the skitarii and the machines.
A great figure, head and shoulders over the rank and file, had come into the square – a Great-Aunt, one of the true elders, shrouded in streamers and rags of cloth that could not hide the divinity of her form. She sang, and the Congregation echoed her, voices upraised in prayer and praise. In one of her three hands was a banner, not the crude handmade things the crowd had spent last night creating but something ancient, preserved for this day over generations. It showed not the expected Imperial visage, but an emblem with that same long-jawed head and a trailing cog-backed body; a serpentine shape curled in upon itself, one end a hooked claw, the other hungering jaws ready to devour the tech-priests and all their works.
The skitarii turned their weapons on her, blasting away, but the banner had electrified the Congregation so that they were swarming the lines, clambering over the Kataphron, braving the massed fire of their foes. Davien saw explosives go off, mining charges devastating bodies on both sides. She saw brutal knots of knife-work and bayonets and the bludgeoning butts of carbines, no quarter given.
2024.05.19 15:19 ItsssYaBoiiiShawdyy Theories on Theories: Assessing the Potential Magnitude of the May 17th Prospectus Filings, Part 1
TL;DR: After 3+ years of working in near silence, Gamestop has dropped a reverse uno time-bomb nuke on shorts, and I don't believe we have fully comprehended just how big and effective of a nuke it will be. They finally released their plans to end the abusive short-selling once and for all... I believe the details in the filings have the answers. Need more eyes. We just need to HODL and let RC & Team work their magic. This was precisely timed and will be executed precisley. I believe they are about to throw the whole kitchen sink at em. Shorts r truly fuk. To be continued. submitted by ItsssYaBoiiiShawdyy to Superstonk [link] [comments] HEY FAM, This is my first attempt at DD or a Possible DD. I don't really know what it is cuz I'm almost smoother than hedgefund CEO that's short GME. I'm long GME since before the sneeze of 2021, so I am at least marginally smarter. At the end of the day, I'm speculating while offering evidence in support of my speculation. And I remain open to constructive criticism and further insight from others. I really hope this gets more apes digging and in the think tank with me. There's plenty of foil to go around! Nothing of which I discuss is financial advice and not indicative of what you should do with your money or investments. Make your own decisions. I have no idea what I am talking about. Anyways! I am jacked af. And if it was not already obvious to you, I'll try and explain why. Credit to U / Cataclysmic98 and U / Thump4 for their posts that inspired me to go down this little rabbit hole...these posts have probably not received the prase they deserve as of yet... Links: https://www.reddit.com/Superstonk/s/rf8DbYQbWK https://www.reddit.com/Superstonk/comments/1cvc2af/g_m_e_the_green_cashandcriminalsiphoning/ These fantastic, informational posts (and in light of all other prominent DD) got me thinking...there is SO much tit-jacking juiciness packed into the these filings, its not even fair (to Kenny & Co)...What could it all mean? And don't get me wrong, whatever causes shorts to get fukd is fine by me...But I felt all analysis so far is missing the true HUZZAHHH, the spicy MEAT-A-BALL, the true WOMBO COMBO of this saga...and I am willing to bet, what is about to go down is gonna absolutely obliterate all of our minds. So, tonight, I knew I was gonna be up a while...I decided to dive in and actually read these filings...like in DEPTH. I read EVERYTHING...many sections multiple times over. These filings, all the possibilities... are a company's product of the last umpteen years of manipulation, fraud, and deceit... And I think I've got some fucking cool stuff to point you towards...and of course, it wouldn't be Superstonk without gluing some tinfoil to my head and trying to derive meaning from it all. Links to filings: https://gamestop.gcs-web.com/sec-filings/sec-filing/424b5/0001193125-24-141200 https://gamestop.gcs-web.com/sec-filings/sec-filing/s-3as0001193125-24-141159 So, since the Friday morning filings...as I read those posts, and others who have gained popularity...most speculated and mused on what could they possibly do? Wow. They could issue 7 different types of shit and friggn combinations of those types of shit from here on during the next 3 years, at any time, in any amounts they deem necessary... blah blah...So all of us are rightfully like...well which ones will they choose to execute on? If they pull the trigger on any of this, when and how? What will they spend the money on? When will they sell the 45M? Yada yada. We cannot even remotely accurately speculate as to when/how soon because they have 3 years to do optionally do any of this, obviously we hope soon af...but we can speculate as to how they do it and how fast they start pulling the trigger(s) if and once they do. What if they do it ALL? Book-Entry Securities Section of S-3 FormFirst, to clear something up, many apes have (understandably so) confused this use of "book-entry securities" with "book entry as it relates to Computershare". But when I asked Chat GPT 4 to analyze this whole section and break it down, it spat out the following:"Sure, let’s break this down into simpler terms:
Fine, but also notice toward the bottom, they can be issued in "registered or bearer form" and they may be "permanent or temporary". The word "temporary" really caught my eye there. Maybe they intend to eventually suck them back up for some reason? Hmm. So Chat GPT came to the rescue again, assuring that everyone who has a stock, gets the benefits of owning that stock, whether its in your own name or not.
So, that clears that up more or less. It Takes Money to Buy Whiskey: The Warning ShotsWhen you dig deep into these filings, you see patterns, subtleties, specific phrasing, potential omissions, etc...and I am not going to breakdown each filing in its entirety...but I want to highlight and get more eyes on some (what I believe might be) key pieces of info in them and what they might mean.Background/Perspective: In the last THREE YEARS...In addition to turning the company profitable, cutting fat, raising and sitting on $1B, near silence from the company itself as to what its grand plans will be/are... I think Gamestop spent a significant portion of the last 3 years developing a grand plan for shareholders too... They needed a plan that: (in no particular order)
(End of Background/Perspective) The Filings (The Sirens)From what I have seen, most of the speculation offered up by most Apes these last two days usually only included mentioning a combination of 2-3 of the types of securities mentioned in the filings. Or speculation on the impact a single one of them could have...Most seem to view the 45M common stock sale (Filing 424B5) as separate from the S-3ASR filing simply because they are separate filings. But 424B5 is indeed a "supplement" to S-3ASR (in case that isn't known).424B5 is a supplemental filing to S-3ASR I speculate that it all ties together. And by "all", I mean everything...everything all at once. Musical chairs played to a beautiful symphony of Kenny & Co's worst nightmares (legend has it that the music briefly stops every time the stock halts). Who will have the last chair and win the game? (Hint: It's Gamestop) WHAT IF... Gamestop is telling everyone..."It's been long enough...this is what we are doing...but not just some of these things...ALL OF IT...ALL AT ONCE"...? Let's dig in... The Un(known) WingmanSo let's talk about the Depositary Shares section and the "Preferred Stock Depositary" (PSD) that they plan to use to distribute up to 5M shares of "preferred" stock (more on that after)Why no name? Notice how they don't name their "bank or trust company". They say refer to them as their "PSD". There's probably a legal reason fo this but I'll come back to this later too. To me, this is Gamestop saying "by the way, these fractional shares won't be able to be fucked with or shorted because ________(I'm thinking Computershare, of course) is going to handle them, manage them, and store them for us)... Trust services? Check! BUT no one gets to officially know who they are until Gamestop has already pulled the trigger with the related SEC filing :D muhahaha. Also, see that there will be a "deposit agreement" that shareholders will have to agree to in order to exercise their ownership rights and privileges of the preferred stock through the PSD. Cut out the middle man...you get to take direct ownership of this shit just like DRS Book and receive all the rights and privileges of ownership, even if you only own a fraction of one preferred share. Side Note on The Book-Entry Securities Section: https://preview.redd.it/wesqanx3id1d1.jpg?width=1542&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e05c9d166556da4d04817a5b836a3658b50713f4 Now, I don't know if this is unique/important or not...but NOTICE HOW Gamestop doesn't name their PSD, but straight-up names who the depository is, the muthafuckin DTC. Unfortunately, they have to issue to these bastards first. The DTC is then expected to distribute those stocks to DTC "participants" (market makers, hedge funds, brokers, etc.) who are then expected to distribute those securities to the holder of record (you and I)...once you have those securities distributed to you, you can choose what you do with them (DRS anyone?) They also state, in writing now, how they EXPECT the DTC to act (in a lawful manner through and through). Perhaps this wasn't made crystal clear to them before the splividend, so RC made sure they knew what is expected of them from here on out with the issuance of new shares. Anyways, I thought this was a call out in light of the omission of their PSD counterpart. The Kill Shot Machine Gun: Evidence from the FilingsOkay let's keep this party going...Preferred Stock: In the filings, Gamestop reserves the right to issue up to 5M preferred stocks that can be issued as fractions of a whole. (They're essentially gonna take 5,000,000 whole stocks and break them up into teeny tiny pieces so there is enough to go around.) Here is chat-gpt's ELI5 breakdown of the passage in the filing: "Sure, let’s break this down into simpler terms. Imagine you have a big chocolate bar (this is like the preferred stock). Now, instead of giving away the whole bar, you decide to break it into smaller pieces and give those pieces away. These smaller pieces are like the depositary shares, and each piece represents a part of the whole chocolate bar. The wrapper around each piece of chocolate is like the depositary receipt. It shows that you own that piece of the chocolate bar. The company that helps you break the chocolate bar and wrap the pieces is the Preferred Stock Depositary. Just like how you can enjoy the taste of the chocolate by owning a piece, the owner of a depositary share gets to enjoy the benefits of the preferred stock (like dividends, voting rights, etc.) in proportion to the size of their piece. The rules about how the chocolate bar is broken, how the pieces are wrapped, and how you can enjoy them are all written in a special agreement (the deposit agreement). And all these details are explained in a document called the prospectus supplement when you buy the pieces of chocolate. So, in short, instead of buying a whole share of preferred stock (the whole chocolate bar), you’re buying a part of it (a piece of chocolate), and you still get to enjoy all the benefits! 😊" This is great. But what I think is important to pay attention to here is the number 5,000,000...sounds like a lot...but in the grand scheme of things its not at all...our float is ~71M, total DRS shares reported to be ~75.3M, total issued shares is just over 300M (Sixty times 5,000,000), and the company just authorized to issue up to 1,000,000,000 of class A common stock !!! Right?...so 5M is a tiny, tiny, number in comparison. Whether you realize it or not, 5,000,000 is only 0.005% (1/200th..!!!) of 1 Billion. Tiny. And its not even guaranteed they'll choose to issue all 5,000,000 or to what degree it will be fractionalized. Only 5,000,000 issued through a company-chosen PSD that can't rehypothecate them, short them, fuck with them...ladies and gentleman, a commodity with true scarcity paired with high demand has entered the chat. $$$. The preferred stocks come with perks (I will speculate on perks later). So something tells me these preferred stocks are gonna go to apes/holders of record for first dibs, they will be in high-demand, carry exclusive rights and privileges, and you will be able to purchase a given amount of them relative to how many shares of the Class A Common stock you own at the time of the offering... Notice how I said purchase them (this is where "Ape Options" (subscriptions and warrants) might come into play allowing each of us (and maybe even GME employees) to pick up a shit load of common/preferred stock on the cheap yo!) https://preview.redd.it/hyjoaejigd1d1.jpg?width=1300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0a33e9c940d17d8c58af9987ad3a8443c6dbeb44 Here’s how it might work, Gamestop senses volatility, we've seen $80 and I don't think that's all we will see. So Gamestop first issues (sells) more common shares on the way up any given run, simultaneously they give currently shareholders subscription rights to load up on common stock all they want on the cheap during a specified time window.....then, once that window closes, they give us MORE subscription rights (first dibs!) that allow us to purchase preferred stock in an amount based upon how many shares of common stock we currently own at the time of that offering. Talk about insane value! Gamestop knows their loyal retail investor base has poured so much of our hard-earned money the last 3+ years...we've invested so much time and money into this. I believe RC is looking out for us and will offer these subscriptions rights at an INSANE value to us, it won't make logical sense not to exercise them (look how cheap bookstore just offered up their subscription rights shares ($0.05/share) (https://www.reddit.com/Superstonk/comments/1cv6x37/walking\_backwards\_then\_forwards/) Credit to user N4hu1) GPT4 on Subscription Rights.
Opionion: RC won't (and frankly, we won't) allow for much dilution, if any at all. The subscription rights might just be too good to be true and certainly too good to pass up. And everyone who purchases preferred stock receives a "receipt" or receipts for their transaction(s) (i.e. a ledger) There's a record for it all. So, Its past 6am, I've been digging and writing for 7+ hours... and so I am going to call this the end of Part 1...but more tinfoil to come! I look forward to the potential discussion. What comes next is the discussion of Subscription Rights, Warrants, and Units :D...and I believe it all beautifully comes together with the plan for the preferred stock and the PSD...and that Gamestop plans to obliterate the shorts from left, right, above, and below with some type of unfuckwithable mass scale share/security offering that is going absolutely blow the world away. Here's a sneak peak of other juicy bits I want to discuss next: Until we have another plan...we plan to invest...hmm invest where? In what? In the even of a distribution other than in cash...a public or private sale of such...\"property\". Would love to hear your thoughts thus far. More to come and thanks for reading if you made it all the way here! . |
2024.05.19 15:18 microwaved_ice_cream [REVIEW] Back from Ban Island!! Loewe Flamenco Mini in Burgundy + Gold from Hyper Peter
2024.05.19 15:18 fickle_fuck84 Ribble CGR ti
2024.05.19 15:17 Abject-Throat-2298 Downgrading a friendship
2024.05.19 15:16 Bence978_ I went searching for my missing friend in the woods, I finally got revenge, but at what cost?
2024.05.19 15:15 Key_Establishment595 How to be my own dad without being a nuisance for others son development and such
2024.05.19 15:14 Common-Ad-580 how to wipe
2024.05.19 15:08 DoGsPaWsLoVe Saturday 05/18/24: 11 Posts
2024.05.19 15:08 GoroTerror 30 [M4F] Rochester/Online- engineer, looking for someone connect to!
2024.05.19 15:08 GoroTerror [30/M] - Searching for the one.
2024.05.19 15:07 GoroTerror 30 [M4F] New York - engineer, looking for someone!
2024.05.19 15:06 Goteamtom1 Can't seem to upgrade despite getting email confirmation twice
2024.05.19 15:04 Sufficient_Sun_5070 A daughter who has to be strong for herself....
2024.05.19 15:01 ibid-11962 Writing and Publishing Eragon [Post Murtagh Christopher Paolini Q&A Wrap Up #6]
[When I start to write a new book] I have an image. There’s always a strong emotional component to the image, and it’s that emotion that I want to convey to readers. Everything I do after that, all of the worldbuilding, plotting, characterization, writing, and editing—all of it—is done with the goal of evoking the desired reaction from readers. In the case of the Inheritance Cycle, the image was that of a young man finding a dragon egg (and later having the dragon as a friend). [10]
Who's your favorite character to write? Well, for me, it's the dragon Saphira. She's the reason I got into writing a dragon. She came first? She came before Eragon? Like she was the catalyst? The relationship came first, her and Eragon. [33]
I was specifically inspired by a YA book called Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville, which is a delightful book. I just loved that idea so much of finding a dragon egg, I was like, "Well, what sort of a world would a dragon come from?" And I knew I wanted the sort of bond between rider and dragon that Anne McCaffrey had, but I wanted the intelligence of the dragons that you find elsewhere, and the language and the magic. And I wanted sparkly scales because it just seemed like dragons are fabulous creatures and they ought to have sparkly scales. That's the fun thing about writing your own books. You can make them exactly the way you want to make them, and hopefully then that appeals to the audience as well. [30]
All of that kind of was swirling around in my head, and I wanted to write about dragons in a way that kind of combined a lot of elements in a way that, "I like this", and "I like this piece", and "I like this piece", but I kind of wanted to have all these different pieces in one type of dragon, and no one had quite done it exactly the way I wanted. [30]
I live in Montana, and our library is an old Carnegie or Rockefeller library, and especially back in the 90s, it didn't have that many books. So once I read all the fantasy in the library, I thought I had read all the fantasy there was to read. Because I was not the smartest kid in the world sometimes. And I kind of thought, "Well, it's the library. They have all the books that exist, right? All the books that matter are in the library." And I really had no idea what to read after that. So I decided to start writing myself and to try and write the sort of story that I would enjoy reading. And of course, what I enjoyed reading was books about flying on dragons and fighting monsters and having adventures. [35]
Reading and literature was always important in our family. My father's mother was a professor of comparative literature and wrote books on Dante and all sorts of stuff like that. Was the myths and folklore part of your life at this time? Yes, but I should clarify that it wasn't formally introduced to me. It was in the house. People weren't wandering around talking about. It was just like the Aeneid is sitting on the shelf. I would go read things. I have a great uncle. He's 90 now, my mother's uncle. Guy is still sharp as a tack. It's amazing. But he gave me a set of cassette tapes of Joseph Campbell, who did Hero of a Thousand Faces. So that was my exposure to his theories of the monomyth and the eternal hero and all sorts of things like that. That got me very much interested in and thinking about the origins of the fantasy that I was reading because I was reading Tolkien and David Eddings and Anne McCaffrey and Raymond Feist and Jane Yolan and Andre Norton and Brian Jaques, and all of these you know authors who were popular at the time. I was very curious where does this come from. Tolkien, of course, felt like sort of the origin in a lot of cases but then I was discovering that, there are earlier stories that even Tolkien was drawing from. That was really a revelation to me. I really sort of got enamored with it. A lot of fantasy is nostalgic and that appealed to me because I was homeschooled and my family didn't really have a lot of relatives in the area, so I felt very unmoored from the rest of society. I think I was looking for a sense of tradition or continuity with the past and fantasy helped provide that. That's an incredibly articulate thought for a 15-year-old author. Or has that come with age? No, it was something I was feeling at the time. You were conscious of it at the time? Well, listening to the Joseph Campbell stuff, I was looking: Where are our coming of age traditions? Where is the great quest to go on to prove yourself as a young adult, as a man? Where's the great adventure? What do I do in life? Those are all things that are part of the adolescent experience and always have been which is why so many mythic stories about coming of age deal with those questions. I think it's a universal thing. That's why Harry Potter, Eragon, Twilight, all of these have appealed so much because they deal with adolescence. They deal with finding your place in the world as an adult when you're starting as a young adult or a child. [28]
What games have taught you to be a better writer either in creating characters or worldbuilding or plotting even? All of my gaming experience was computer games, video games. One that had a huge influence on me was the old Myst series. Personally I love solving puzzles, so that's the first thing. And also the concept of the series, especially with the second game, Riven, it's all based around people writing books that create new worlds. And you get to go in them and solve puzzles and understand how that world works. And that just tickled every single part of my brain back in the day. Now, I'm going to be slightly unkind here, and I apologize if the author [David Wingrove] is listening to this, but there were a couple of novels based off of Myst. And I was such a fan of the series that I got the books, and I started reading them. And my first thought was, "I could do better than this." And so I decided to rewrite the first Myst novel. And I created a document in MS Word, and I got exactly three sentences into my rewrite. And I thought to myself, "okay, I think I can do this, but I could never sell it. So I better go write something of my own." And the next thing I did was Eragon. So video games kind of had a direct influence on me writing. But actually reading something that I felt was not particularly successful was such an inspiration. Because it was like, "this got published, I know I can at least get to this level." And it was published. And then maybe I can shoot for a little bit higher. [pause] I think some people have had that experience with Eragon. [26]
I had the original idea, the concept of boy finding dragon egg, and I tried writing a couple of very short versions of Eragon when I was fourteen, and none of them panned out so I stopped writing for a while. [28]Real World Version
What do you remember about the early days of writing “Eragon?” Originally, Eragon was named Kevin and the story was set in the real world. But I only finished around 10 pages. [16]Arya Opening Fantasy Version
I wrote three versions of Eragon before I wrote the version that had the unicorn, which was the first major draft. The first version was set in the real world, and that's why he's named Kevin. And the reason it was set in the real world is I was inspired by Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, which is set in the real world. [32]
I was specifically inspired by a book called Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville. By the way, Bruce knows this. If you haven't read it, it's a great book about this young man in the real world who, spoiler, goes into an antique shop and buys a stone that ends up turning out to be a dragon egg. And I really loved that idea of a stone that was actually a dragon egg and the young man becoming joined with the dragon. And so I tried writing the story. And I got exactly five pages or six pages into it and I ran into a brick wall, because a boy finding a dragon egg is a good event, but it is not a good story. And I needed to figure out what was going to happen after that. I didn't know that at first. [36]
But then I was going down the rabbit hole of, "Well, if there's a dragon, where did the dragon come from? What if it were an actual fantasy world where the dragons were native?" And then that led me to then write a second beginning--I didn't get very far with this--that was more of a traditional fantasy story, and it opened with Arya and a couple other elves escaping a dungeon with a big battle, and at the very end of the battle, they send the dragon egg away, and Kevin finds it. But I didn't have the rest of the story, so I stopped writing it in that format. [32]Research Break
So I tried writing a second version of the story. So the first version of that story I wrote was set in the real world. Second version was more of like a fantasy world. [36]
I had the original idea when I was fourteen. I even wrote an early version of the story where it was set in the real world. But I soon realized that it was a lot more interesting to have a dragon in a fantastical setting. [8]
I tried writing before and I always failed because I would only get like four to six pages into a story and then I didn't know what to do next. And that was because I didn't actually have my story. All I really had were the inciting incidents, like a boy finds a dragon egg in the middle of a forest. Great. But that's not a story, that's just one event. What happens as a result? So before starting Eragon, I was very methodical about this. I read a whole bunch of books on how to write, how to plot stories. [35]Unused Arya Outline
I realized I wasn't getting anywhere. And I didn't know how to do what I was trying to do. Now, fortunately for me, my parents had noticed that I was getting interested in writing. And all of a sudden, books appeared in the house. There was no comment, no one forced it, these just magically appeared, and I read them. Some of the books that were incredibly helpful to me were these books that were called The Writer's Handbook, which was a collection of essays published each year by The Writer's Digest magazine. I had one from 1998, and I had one from, I think, 1993, or something like that. And there were essays from Stephen King and John Grisham and I think Ursula Le Guin and all sorts of other authors about what it was like to be an author both professionally and creatively. And that was incredibly helpful to me because again, the internet was not a resource. But the book that really made the difference for me was a book called Story by Robert McKee. It's a book for screenwriters and it's all about the structure of story. And up until that moment, I had never really consciously thought about the fact that stories have structure and that you can control that structure for the effect on the readers. So I devoured that book and I said, okay, I'm going to try this again. [36]
Did you very much sit down and study structure and character development and etc? I did. It wasn't a formal course or anything, it's just that my parents started buying these books and they started showing up. In fact, I still have them here on my shelf. This bookcase to my right is full of research books, technical books, language books. I read a book called Story by Robert McKee, which is a screenwriting book, that was and often has been very popular in Hollywood. It's a fairly technical look at story structure. I would never say do everything he says because of course you shouldn't necessarily follow any one formula, but that book really got me thinking about the fact that stories do have structure, which I hadn't really thought about before that. And that one can control that structure, and that this gives you something to work with. Before Eragon, I tried writing a number of stories and I never got past the first four to six pages, ten pages, because I never had the plot. All I would ever have was the inciting incident which, in the case of Eragon, is a young man finds a dragon egg. Ok, fine, but that's not a story. So when I read that book, then I was like wow, so I can control the structure of this. [28]
The problem with all of my early writing was that I’d get an idea and just start — I didn’t actually have a plot. But I was a pretty methodical kid, so I started reading about how to write. Fortunately, my parents are observant, and these kinds of books magically began appearing in the house. And I read all of them. [16]
So at this point, I was 15, that's when I graduated from high school and I was very methodical about it because I hate failing. So I said, okay, I'm going to create a fantasy world. And I did that. And then I said, I'm gonna plot out an entire book in this fantasy world. And I did that too. And then I said, but I'm not gonna write this. This is just a thought exercise. I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna stick it in a drawer. And I still have that to this day, that world and that story, I still have it sitting in a drawer somewhere. [36]
Then I spent some time and I created an entire fantasy world and I plotted out an entire fantasy novel in that world and I did not write it. I just stuck it in a drawer and that's where it's been sitting for 25 years now. And then I just did that to prove to myself that I could plot out an entire book. [35]
Before writing Eragon, again I was very methodical even as a teenager, I created an entire fantasy world. Wrote pages and pages about the worldbuilding, and then I plotted out an entire story in that world just to prove to myself that I could plot a story, create a world, and then I didn't write it. I put it aside. I still have it all saved. Put it in a drawer. [28]
And then I decided okay now I'm going to plot out a trilogy, because all great fantasy stories are trilogies. I'm going to do it as the heroic monomyth, because that is, at least my understanding back then, is this is one of the oldest forms of stories. I know it works on a general sense. It's going to give me a safety net, and then I'm going to write the first book as a practice book just to see if I'm capable of producing something that's three, four, five hundred pages long. And that's what I did. That was about two and a half months of worldbuilding, plotting, creating this. Then I wrote the first book and that was Eragon. That was my practice book. I never actually planned on publishing Eragon. It was only after I'd put so much work into it and my parents read it that then we proceeded with it. I was aware of story structure. I continue to read lots of books on it. [28]The First Draft
And then version three is the version that everyone generally knows. And that's where I spent the time to plot out the whole series before writing, because having a idea of where you're going seems to help with the writing, at least for me. Usually. [32]
I originally saw Eragon as a practice novel, which is part of why it’s a very typical hero’s story. I knew that structure worked and it gave me the safety net I needed. [16]
The first draft went super fast. It went really fast because I had no idea what I was doing. And I just wrote that sucker. I wrote the first 60 pages by hand with ballpoint pen, cause I didn't know how to type on a computer. And then by the time I typed all that into the computer, I knew how to type. I did the rest in the computer. But this was back in the day when computers were fairly new. We had a Mac classic, which only had two megabytes of RAM. And the problem is that the operating system chewed up some of that memory. And my book file was around two megabytes large. So I actually had to split the book into two because I couldn't open the whole file on the computer or the computer would crash. So I had to open half the book and then close that and then open the other half. [35]
Once I finished the first draft, I was super excited and I thought, "well all of these things on how to write say that you should read your own book and see if there's any tweaks you wanna make." But I was really excited because I was getting to read my own book for the first time, and I thought this is gonna be awesome. And it didn't take very long while reading it to realize that it was awful. It was horrible. And just to give you an idea of just how bad that first draft was, in the very first draft of Eragon, Eragon wasn't named Eragon, Eragon was named Kevin. And there was also a unicorn in that first draft at one point, so you know it wasn't very good. [35]Releasing the Kevin Cut
If I heard correctly as I was reading, Eragon wasn't originally called Eragon? No, in the first draft of the book he was called Kevin. There's a reason! Look I have an explanation for it, okay. The explanation is that my original inspiration was Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher which is set in the real world. The original version of Eragon that I was developing was set in the real world and when I decided that it would make more sense to have a world where the dragons were native to and switched it over to this fantasy world and began to develop that, I just kept the name that I'd been working with, which was Kevin. Naming a main character is hard, especially when you get used to a certain name. I don't want to say I was lazy. I want to focus on the world building and writing the first draft and I'll worry about the name later. [28]
There is an early version of Eragon that no one's seen, that even my editor at Random House never saw. And that was my first draft. And in that first draft, Eragon encountered a unicorn in the Beor Mountains on the way to the Varden. And the unicorn touches him and essentially affects the transformation that he goes under during the blood oath ceremony with the elves in the second book, in Eldest. And his whole storyline with the Varden once he gets to Farthen Dûr is completely different because now he has these abilities and he and a team of people ends up getting sent on a scouting mission in the dwarven tunnels to go find the Urgal army and then they have to flee back through the tunnels to warn everyone of this huge army and I had a underground cave full of lava, and multiple shades, and a huge Urgal army. There was there was a lot of dramatic stuff. Finding the Ra'zac in Dras-Leona was completely different. This is the draft where Eragon was named Kevin. [32]
I haven't thought about that version in ages. I think Arya was awake all the way from Gil'ead to Farthen Dûr in that version. That's right, I had to completely rewrite that. It's an unpleasant ride for her. No, no, no, she was awake and healed. She was awake. That's right, God, I had to rewrite most of the last chunk of the book now that I think back, it's been a long time. [32]
The worst thing is, I think Kevin would actually take a larger budget [to adapt to film]. No, stop. Why would Kevin take a larger budget? Because the battles were bigger, there was more stuff going on. Seriously, there were more creatures, more travel. Yeah, I think Kevin would actually take more money than Eragon. [32]
You said that Eragon's name was originally Kevin. Was Eragon's name originally Kevin? It was. And I really regret I didn't stick with it because I think that as many books as I've sold, the series would have been at least twice as successful if it had been about the adventures of the great dragon writer Kevin. Especially just seeing Kevin on the front cover. Imagine the appeal to the modern youth. Kevin the dragon writer. I mean Eragon, it's confusing with Aragorn. Oregano. Oregon. But Kevin, Kevin stands out, Kevin's original. That's why I had to move away from it. [31]
So do you wanna share some of those drafts with us, Christopher? Just kidding. Well, I actually had a fan reach out to me. He's one of the big members of the online fan community on Reddit and elsewhere. And he's kind of interested in some of these early versions from almost an archivist point of view, a scholarly point of view. Which is certainly an interesting idea. I mean, there is an early version of Eragon that no one's seen, that even my editor at Random House never saw. ... I cannot describe how much the Internet absolutely needs for you to put out an edition of Eragon that just says Kevin. Should this be like Mistborn or Way of Kings Prime? This is the Kevin edition of Eragon. The Kevin cut. Oh my god. It's "Eragon: Kevin's Version". ... We absolutely need Kevin's Version of Eragon. That's something we need. It's bad. It's bad. Look, there are certainly people who can look at Eragon, the version we have now, and say, "we can tell this was a younger writer." I look at it and I can tell. I could do so much more now with the material than I could then. But if you think that about the published version of Eragon, man, if you saw the unpublished version, the early version, it really is the raw writing of a homeschooled 15-year-old, who wrote a 500 page book about Kevin. I don't know, the internet is very unhinged these days. They would love this. It needs to exist somewhere on the internet. [32]
So I wrote Eragon, and then I read the first draft and it wasn't particularly good, so I spent a good chunk of a year rewriting it as best as I could. I didn't know what I was doing but I was trying. I've heard it said that being displeased with your own work is actually a good thing because it means you know what is good work, and if you're not happy with your work because it's not good, it means you could at least have a goal to shoot for. If you read your work and you're like this is the best thing that's ever been written, you're never going to get any better. [28]Self-publishing
But I could see that the book needed work, so I decided to try to fix it as best I could, and I spent the better part of that year revising, rewriting, changing Kevin to Eragon. And then I gave the book to my parents and fortunately for me, they actually enjoyed what I had done. And they said, we think you have something, let's try to take it out into the world and see if anyone else wants to read it. [35]
[We] decided to self-publish the book as a joint venture since we didn't know anyone in the publishing world. That was again a good chunk of a year where we were editing the book as best the three of us could. Preparing it for publication, formatting, I drew the cover. [28]Promotion
Now you have to understand, my parents were always self-employed, have always been self-employed and we were always looking for things we could work on together as a family business. And Eragon was like the perfect opportunity for that. They'd had some experience self-publishing a couple of small educational books my mom had worked on. Because she was a trained Montessori teacher, and so she was trying to use that expertise to write some material herself. But I don't even think we sold 100 copies of those. So we spent another good chunk of a year preparing the book for publication with doing more editing, doing the layout, designing the cover. [35]
The first set of 50 books showed up while we were watching Roman Polanski's Macbeth, which seemed fitting because those first 50 books were all miscut from the printer. And as a result, we had to rip the covers off, send them back for credit from the printer, and then burn the insides of the books. So we had a proper book burning in our yard, and I actually saved some of those burnt pages just as a memory of that event. [35]
Self publishing wasn’t as viable then as a pathway to a career as an author as it is today. Why did it work for you? Everything completely changed because of e-readers. If you wanted to read an e-book, you had to have a PDF on your computer. There were no distribution systems like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Back then, the lowest amount you could print and not have the book be too expensive was probably about 10,000 copies. But we were fortunate because print-on-demand had just become a thing, so books were just printed as needed. Self publishing is a lot easier these days. Of course, today’s marketplace is a lot more crowded as a result. [16]
My family and I were going around the western half of the United States with the self-published edition of Eragon. I was cold calling schools, libraries, and bookstores to set up events. I was doing two to three one-hour long presentations every single day for months on end at various times. You have to understand that because my parents were self-employed, the time they took to help prepare Eragon for publication was time they weren't working on other freelance projects that would have been bringing in money. So by the time we actually had Eragon printed and in hand, if it had taken another two to three months to start turning a profit, we were going to have to sell our house, move to a city, and get any jobs we could. Because of that financial pressure I was willing to do things I probably would have been too uncomfortable to do otherwise. Like doing all those presentations. [28]Getting traditionally published
We were doing a lot of self-promotion. I was cold calling schools and libraries and talking them into letting me do presentations. And that worked pretty well because the librarians could take pre-orders for us. If we went into a bookstore, by hand selling, I could maybe sell anywhere between 13 to 40 books in a day. 42 was like the best I ever did, but usually it was around 15 or so books, which just didn't cover printing costs and travel and food and all of that. But going into the schools, we were doing about 300 books a day, which was excellent. [34]
Can you tell me a little bit about how you and your family self-published the first Eragon book and what marketing strategies you did? Oh, it was all nepotism, you know. I wouldn't have gotten published without my parents. There's nothing as powerful as a publishing company that's four people sitting around a kitchen table in the middle of rural Montana. So yeah, without Nepotism, I wouldn't have gotten published. You have to embrace something like Nepotism if you really wanna succeed in today's world. In fact, people don't realize that you actually get a Nepotism card. There's a secret club. You go to New York and there's huge network opportunities. There's branches of the club everywhere, especially strong in Hollywood, of course, in music. Taylor Swift is an example. So if you can get into the nepotism club, I won't say you're guaranteed success, but you got about 80% chance of actually making it that you wouldn't have otherwise. Do you think your mom and dad would be willing to be my mom and dad? No, absolutely not. No, no. You don't have brown hair, so it doesn't work. You have to have brown hair to be a Paolini. Okay, I'll try to find a different way in, I guess. [31]
So you were very much looking for that partnership? Well we were wary. But the thing is is we were selling enough copies of Eragon that to scale it up we were going to have to start duplicating all the things that a regular publisher does. We were actually looking at partnering with a book packager or a book distributor just to get more copies out. To do everything a traditional publisher could do for me was a huge amount of work so it made sense to pair with Random House or someone else at that point. But it was still nerve-wracking because the book was being a success and then handing it off to another company, we didn't know if it was just going to end up in the remainder bin two weeks after it came out. [28]Gaining Confidence
People in the book world were starting to take notice because of course, if you've been to public school, you may remember the Scholastic Book Fairs and all of the Scholastic reps in the different schools were seeing me come to the schools and selling these books and hearing the kids talk about it. And it was getting attention. So we would have gotten a publisher, I would have gotten a publisher eventually. [34]
The book sold enough copies and bounced around enough that we'd heard that Scholastic—because Scholastic does all the Book Fairs in schools in the US—was interested and that we might get an offer from them. Before that happened though... [34]
Eventually another author by the name of Carl Hiaasen ended up buying a copy of the self-published edition of Eragon in a local bookstore. Which now that I'm older, I'm rather shocked at because it takes a lot to get me to buy a self-published book. It's got to look really good. [35]
Carl Hiaasen wrote the young adult book Hoot as well as many adult books. He comes up to Montana, I think he's got a vacation home here in the valley, but he was up here fly fishing and he bought a copy of Eragon for his then 12 year old son, Ryan. And fortunately for me, Ryan liked the book and Carl recommended it to Random House and it sort of bounced around among the editors for a couple of months before my editor-to-be grabbed it and said, "Yes, we will. I want to take a chance on this teenage author and we're going to offer him money for a trilogy that only exists in his head and see what happens." [34]
How did you find an agent? We had the offer from Random House, and like two days later, we had the offer from Scholastic. And so we knew we didn't know what we didn't know. My dad participated in some online self-publishing forum sort of thing. So he posted up a question and said, look, this is the situation we're in. Does anyone have any advice? And another one of the members said, "well, I was just at this publishing writing conference and there was this young agent there and I was really impressed with his presentation, or him talking about the industry." So my dad got his information online and did what you're never supposed to do, which is he called the agent directly and left this long rambling voicemail message because it was lunchtime in New York and you take your lunch breaks in New York. And only at the end of the message did he say, "oh, yes, and by the way, we have two competing offers from two publishing houses." And when I asked him, I said, "why did you do that?" He said, "well, because if he's any good as an agent, he's going to listen to the whole message before he deletes it." And we found out later that he nearly deleted the message. Because my dad started off like, "I got this teenage son, and he's written this book", and yeah, that, OK. So it was like two hours later we got a call from Simon. And Simon said overnight me a copy of Eragon and if I like it I'll represent you. And Simon has been my agent for 21 years now. [34]
It was a big risk for Random House. And it was a big risk for me because the book was successful, self-published, and we knew that giving it to a publisher, you lose the rights to a degree, and most books don't turn a profit, and it could have just ended up in the remainder bin. So what really worked in my favor is that Random House, and specifically Random House Children's Books, and specifically the imprint of Knopf, which is where I'm at were looking for their own Harry Potter, essentially. Scholastic was publishing Harry Potter. And Scholastic also gave me an offer for Eragon, but I could tell that Random House was the one that really loved the book and Scholastic was doing it because they thought it was a good business opportunity. Scholastic actually offered more money than Random House. But I went with Random House and it was the right choice. And I found out after the fact that Chip Gibson who was the head of the children's department at the time basically chose to use Eragon as sort of something to rally the troops and put the entire children's division behind it, and I was the very fortunate recipient of that love and attention. Which of course would only get you so far if people didn't enjoy reading the book. But fortunately for me, they did a great job marketing it and then people actually enjoyed the book. Which is why when people ask me how to get published, it's like, what am I supposed to say? The answer ultimately is you write a book that people want to read, and that's a facile answer, but it is true. If people want to read it, it makes everything else easier. The agent wants you, the publishers want you, and ultimately the public wants you. [34]
And I didn't realize how much was behind that email, because large publishers do not just casually say, "hey, we want to publish your book". There was a whole plan there, and they had a plan. And so they did. Eragon came out and then I had to figure out how to write a book with everyone expecting the sequel. [36]
So you kind of went and peddled your books at schools, as I understand, right? It seems to have paid off though, because it eventually landed in the hands of bestselling author Carl Hiaasen, but not right away. First, your book got in the hands of his stepson, and the kid liked it so much that he told Hiaasen about it, who then got Eragon fast-tracked with Penguin Random House. I really admire the way that you went for the weakest links, manipulating the minds of our youth and using them to shill your book for you. It's a tried and true marketing strategy from Girl Scout Cookies to coupon books, and I applaud you for your ingenuity. My biggest question here is, do you pay Carl Hiaasen's stepson the agent royalties he so rightfully deserves? He tried to collect one time, but I had to hire a couple of guys to drive him off. But, no, you always go for the weakest link. Back when I was self-published and all that I even tried to get Eragon reviewed by Entertainment Weekly, so I called up the subscription number on the back of the magazine and told them I'd made a mistake and asked them to transfer me over to corporate, and managed to get right to their book reviewer and tried to talk him into reviewing Eragon. So you always go for, as you said, the weakest link. Which is corporate. Ryan, Carl's son, though, yeah, I probably owe him a ridiculous amount of royalties. I'd say so. He made you. Oh, he did, absolutely. Without him, I'd be nothing. I guess the lesson here for aspiring authors is that it's not really about finding your target audience, necessarily. You just have to find your target prolific author's stepson and let the kid take it from there. Yeah, absolutely. As I said, that's part of the nepotism package. The sort of networking inside the industry. This is the stuff that you can never access otherwise, and you'll never get published otherwise. So it's not like you can just grow up in the middle of nowhere in Montana, self-publish a book, and then just become a success, by promoting it. You have to have connections. That's genius. I think you could have had an incredible career in designing loot boxes for mobile games based on how good you are at manipulating the world. Absolutely, microtransactions are God's work. [31]
Was anxiety something you felt moving to this deal with Random House? Was that quite pressuring? Yes, it was a big change to go from writing for yourself as a teenager, homeschooled, living in the middle of nowhere, to knowing that there was a large audience for your next book and that they had expectations. I got criticized quite a bit, critiqued quite a bit when Eragon came out for, shall we say, my lack of experience on the technical side of things with the writing. I'd say some of those were certainly fair critiques. The great advantage of youth is that you don't know how difficult things are and you have a lot of energy. The great disadvantage of youth is you don't have experience, and there's no fixing that aside from time and effort. All of that was definitely in my head when I really started work on Eldest and it was pretty nerve-wracking quite honestly. [28]
When you finished the book, I mean your parents believed in it obviously. Did you too? Or were you like, "You know what, maybe the second book, maybe go all in on the second one?" I didn't feel like I was actually an author until my third book was published. Because the first one, well, that could be a fluke. Well, the second one, yeah, but you know. But once the third book came out, then I was like, okay, maybe I'm actually a writer. But even then, even after I finished the series, I still felt like, okay, now I have to write something that's not Eragon, just to prove that I can. So every book has been its own challenge and has been a way for me to keep feeling like I'm growing as an artist and learning to become a better and better writer. [2]
It took me, I wanna say almost 10 years to feel like I wasn't an imposter and that it wasn't just gonna get yanked away. You know what my dream was when Eragon was was going to get published by Random House? Like this was my pie in the sky because I didn't think it was going to happen. But this was my dream. I did all the math and I was like, man, if I could somehow someday sell 100,000 books, which is impossible. But man, if I could sell 100,000 books, that's a darn good living. Man, I could really make a living off that. I could support a family and 100,000 books. Man, that'd be amazing. And then it kind of took off from there. [33]
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