Cultivating the Fertile Mind with J Daniel Sawyer // Ep 209

Longtime podcaster, full-cast audio pioneer and independent filmmaker, and author of 30 books, J. Daniel Sawyer hosts the daily writers podcast The Every Day Novelist dedicated to creativity, process, writerly discipline, and cultivating a fertile mental life.

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TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

book, people, podcast, nanowrimo, pandemic, years, worldview, everyday, talking, novelist, life, interesting, grew, read, thought, recorded, held, listen, writing, questions

SPEAKERS

Kevin Tumlinson, J Daniel Sawyer

Kevin Tumlinson 00:01

Hey everybody, thank you for tuning in for sticking through the intro. I'm not even sure what I said in the intro, but I promise I will, I can guarantee at least I was interested in it. So thanks for tuning in and playing along. So today we're talking to Jay Daniel Sawyer. Now I'm going to read his bio here because it's it's got some great details for you but longtime podcaster full cast, audio pioneer, and independent filmmaker and author of 30 books. Jay saw your hosts the daily writers podcast, the everyday novelist, dedicated credit to creativity, process, and writerly discipline, and cultivating a fertile mental life. That's the part I wanted to get to in your bio. I like the idea of a fertile mental life. How's that? How's that shake out? And welcome to the show.

J Daniel Sawyer 00:52

Hi, Doug diggin Kevin. Yeah, you were on everyday novelist. What about it? But two years ago, I think

Kevin Tumlinson 00:58

Yeah, a little bit. Doesn't seem like that long.

J Daniel Sawyer 01:01

I guys been crazy packed two years and like, every sense. Yeah,

Kevin Tumlinson 01:06

yeah. I feel like I've done a billion podcasts and webinars and live stream since then. And that's just this week. Oh, no. Yes. And I, you know, and I told you this before we started and I'm, I'm going to apologize to the rest of the world. Because if I sounded all frazzled, or off my game, it's because we've had so there's that on top of a pandemic, and I don't know when you're listening to this, it's probably a little bit in the future for sure. Maybe things turned out all right. And if so, thank you world for playing along. But uh, you know, things have been a little crazy. In terms of stuff we're doing with DDD, we got these spotlights, we're doing like every day, and then my buddy here pops in and I for some reason, I thought it was one of my author consults. So So I'm off base. I'm off kilter man. We're gonna get back on track

J Daniel Sawyer 02:04

so I think we'll do fine.

Kevin Tumlinson 02:06

How is everything in the James J Daniel Sawyer world man Tell me a little bit about what you're doing right now.

J Daniel Sawyer 02:12

Oh well right now I'm stuck up in the backwoods I moved up to the backwoods of New England for a week in order to help my parents relocate a year ago It turned out that their their retirement house needed some renovations. So Oh, got stuck here. And just as we were getting ready to leave the quarantine comes down. So I might be stuck here another year. So there's a lot of interesting refactoring going on.

Kevin Tumlinson 02:36

But that seems to be the way that works out. I mean, we we were we moved out of our apartment and moved into our in laws place for a few days, quote, unquote, and then 14 hit and we're like, well, they're gonna hunker down anyway. Go ahead.

J Daniel Sawyer 02:54

Yeah. But yeah, it's it's good. It's, you know, we're on we've got 50 acres to play with. So there's a Lots of good time for outside notice and using the opportunity to resurrect my fiction podcast and get some work ahead done on the homestead we're building on the other side of the country. Right? So it's, it's gonna work out

Kevin Tumlinson 03:15

what kind of work ahead can you do if it's on the other side of the country?

J Daniel Sawyer 03:18

There's a lot of design stuff. Yeah design, designing and costing sourcing stuff for the first buildings figuring out order of operations for at what stage we do the well when we do the catchment, what's the priority of how much electrical build out because where we are, it's a quarter mile beyond the last electrical pole. So it's 20 odd thousand just to bring power in. It's actually a lot cheaper. Even though we're in an iffy climate zone. It's actually a lot cheaper to go solar. So, right. Yes, that's a whole new set of things I've been learning about and

Kevin Tumlinson 03:53

Oh, man. Yeah, you're talking to the right guy. Cool. This is I have to so you know, You know that we're getting into an RV full time again? Yeah. So the the two biggest problems, the three big problems. One, the two are bigger than the third. But internet is the biggest challenge. You know, power isn't such a big challenge unless it's going to be hot. And then we have Eric. Right. So, yeah, so solar power and generators and alternative energy are all in my mind. I'm thinking about installing something on the wheels of the camper that as we rolling in generates power.

J Daniel Sawyer 04:36

I've been studying doing that kind of stuff. It should be pretty, pretty simple.

Kevin Tumlinson 04:40

Yeah, man. Yeah. by simple, you know, that's a relative term.

J Daniel Sawyer 04:44

Well, it's a relative term. But the question is, would it be more efficient than just putting a bigger alternator in the truck? Yeah. And then, and then routing it to the chargeback.

Kevin Tumlinson 04:55

That's something else I I've considered. Well, yeah, whatever. This has been alternate energy talk everyone.

J Daniel Sawyer 05:03

So, well, you know, we were talking about a fertile mental life. Yeah, exactly. I mean, one of the one of the things about creativity is it's nonlinear, you can't reason your way into what you have to do is you have to create a broad, a broad base of knowledge and experience and interests to pull from. And so, you know, one of the ways that I keep myself Spry is by picking interesting stuff that's not related to anything else I'm doing and finding a way to get interested in it because I always get story ideas out of it.

Kevin Tumlinson 05:35

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's interesting. And that and so that's what you mean by by fertile mental life?

J Daniel Sawyer 05:42

Well, partly, I've just finished a book called The autodidact Bible, which should be coming out. I think we've set the publication date for early July. Yeah. Which is a basically a comprehensive toolkit for teaching yourself how to self educate, eat, whether you're self educated. With philosophy or with carpentry, and everything in between,

Kevin Tumlinson 06:04

man, I gotta tell you, though, hmm, you should call it a fertile mental life. The other didactics Bible. Thank you.

J Daniel Sawyer 06:11

I've been looking for a good title for it because the working title is a bit wonky. Yeah, so I'll write that down.

Kevin Tumlinson 06:20

I think that's gonna work. I would buy that book. All right, I wouldn't buy the first one.

J Daniel Sawyer 06:25

right because it sounds really technical. It

Kevin Tumlinson 06:27

sounds like it's gonna Yeah, like, I'm gonna have to read this with like one of those clear rulers. Oh,

06:35

I lost I lost your lighting

Kevin Tumlinson 06:36

just went away. Yeah, well, good thing nobody everyone listening is doesn't know that.

J Daniel Sawyer 06:41

Yeah, speaking of off grid power,

Kevin Tumlinson 06:44

no joke. Now, I'm not really sure why that happened. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna let that charge up while I'm on with you. Okay,

J Daniel Sawyer 06:52

both backlit, so it's sort of fair. Exactly.

Kevin Tumlinson 06:57

Things things like this are always happening to me lately. I don't What's going on? Um, so yeah, we'll get off that see this one talking about some I get off track just

J Daniel Sawyer 07:09

because I'll just chase whatever and that's okay. you stumble onto

Kevin Tumlinson 07:12

you know, I studied improv and you know, you roll with whatever is gonna come at you. Yeah,

J Daniel Sawyer 07:17

yes, yeah, yes and or no but but never Yeah.

Kevin Tumlinson 07:20

So, uh, I, let's talk a little bit about your well wouldn't talk about your book. Do you want to talk a little about your book? I was gonna get off on your podcasts

J Daniel Sawyer 07:32

there. Let's get off on the podcast. They're related. They're

Kevin Tumlinson 07:35

related, okay, who partly out of the other. So tell me. How did the show get started? Like what made you decide to do it

J Daniel Sawyer 07:41

back in? I think it was 2006 Yeah, 2005 or 2006. I went to a write in for NaNoWriMo at Central Park in Berkeley. And Chris, whatever his name is the guy that started NaNoWriMo was there and so I got to talk to you too. Like, why'd you know why did he do this? I'd never done it before. It always seemed kind of silly to me. And he said, Well, I wanted to be a writer and I couldn't motivate myself. So I decided to pick the most difficult month in the year and intentionally write a book there to prove to myself I could do it. Yeah, I thought that was kind of a cool idea. So I wanted to trying to do NaNoWriMo that year and I completely failed. But the the lit the minor features of the conversation like going in the direction of greatest difficulty in order to build up your writing chops, really sunk in made a big difference to me as a writer to my productivity and to my general approach to all things writerly. So, I had in mind always want especially once I started podcasting, I always thought it would be fun to do sort of a walkthrough of NaNoWriMo for the newbie who'd never written a book before. Okay, and about 2016 I had the free time. So I sat and did it. And I got to the end of this 30 day walkthrough, which has since evolved into my book becoming an everyday novelist. And I started getting emails from people saying, Please don't end it here. We've become dependent on it. And so I, I went on pod and I read a couple of these. And I said, Okay, so look, here's the problem. It took me, God, you know, God knows how many untold hours to work out the program for this 30 day walkthrough to put things in the right place to write the copy that whole bit. So if you want me to keep this going, you've got to make it easy for me send me questions or something. Yeah. And I thought that was gonna be the end of it. But they sent questions. And they kept sending questions, and they kept sending questions, and it's now four plus years on and we're just creeping up on 1000 episodes now, and they're still sending questions. Occasionally, a question will spin off and I'll do a special series or or I'll have a guest on every once in a while. Then about about two and a half years ago, I wrote a I cracked the formula for hemlines juvenile books. And so I wrote a Heinlein juvenile and did a walkthrough of how to write a headline juvenile interesting and you know, some other stuff like that. But as the years have gone on, the questions have gotten more and more interesting. We get into history in psychology and philosophy in general auto didacticism and mental health management and physical health management. And the reading list that I refer people to keeps growing and growing and growing.

Kevin Tumlinson 10:41

Yeah, was what puts you though, on that specific course like you are? Well, I guess more the more important question is like how are you answering those questions like where are the answers come from?

J Daniel Sawyer 10:55

Well, I read the questions when they come in and then about one second Good enough to do a block I record 15 to 30 episodes in a day. Yeah. And do it all off the top of my head. Okay, I'm, I'm Constance I grew up in I literally grew up in academia, both grandfathers are cattle ranchers and then my father is a theology professor. So I grew up idolizing my blue collar grandparents and hanging out in the college where my father taught. So I was like, auditing classes when I was six, seven years old. Just Yeah, I thought it was cool. Not realizing I was picking up useful stuff. Right. And I've just always loved learning and hated school. So I've become the I quit. I dropped out of school at 15. I started working full time and going to college on the sly. And just read, read, read, experiment, learn, do a bunch of different stuff. I've, I've run a courier company. I've run a couple of publishing companies. I've been in the tech world. I've run a music company. or not, that was music services company like MC live sound mixing and doing videos, that sort of thing. And over the years, I've built up this toolkit for how to navigate any situation and come out of it. Come out of it, learning a lot about it. That's crazy and how to cross apply those things to other areas so that you can bootstrap on multiple fronts at once. Yeah. So when someone comes in and asks a question, and I'm really I'm always really careful to separate my opinion from the state of the art in a given field and what the state of my knowledge is, and then, if it's something that's, you know, socially controversial, or that's fraught in the field, I refer to sources that contra counterbalance each other and when it's when it's something more historical, I just didn't refer to a couple of good books that are they give more depth on this. subject that I'm able to give. We've done deep dives on the history and background of the writing of certain influential books, you know, that kind of stuff.

Kevin Tumlinson 13:09

Yeah. And you're cataloging all this somewhere so that people can can access Yeah,

J Daniel Sawyer 13:14

yeah, there's a there's a on the website at everyday novelist calm there's a reading list of basically every book we've ever recommended on the cast. Do you album,

Kevin Tumlinson 13:25

are you monetizing that somehow? Are you you know, people got paid?

J Daniel Sawyer 13:30

Yes. No, no, well, it's, it's free. Listen, I've got Patreon subscribe star and the gumroad subscription feed all currently doesn't bring in very much but yes, for me, it's kind of a pay it forward thing I need to figure out how to monetize it a little better, because that's taken ungodly amount of time.

Kevin Tumlinson 13:46

That's always a challenge too. Because, you know, you like me. I mean, I I've lost track of how much I've put out there. that's meant to help the community but you know, at some point you do have to make a living. Luckily, my books make money. Living. So that's great. But he put in all this time and energy, you feel like there should be some sort of monetary reward.

J Daniel Sawyer 14:09

Well, people who listen to this, if you come over and listen to the cast kick $1 in here and there or buy the books through the Yeah, the site that really helps out a lot. One of the lovely things and you'll know, that's one of the lovely things about being sort of off the beaten track, whether you're in an RV or going or we were in an RV for a couple years or going off to the middle of the woods, is you have the freedom to live on quite a lot less than everybody else does. Right? So it doesn't take a whole lot to meet your monthly bills. So you know, we don't make a lot it really does help with the budget, but genuinely, every dollar helps us both nice and a little bit of a downer.

Kevin Tumlinson 14:49

Yeah, well, but I guess if you really think about it, that's just gonna be true no matter what I mean, you. Yeah, I mean for most people, for like, we'll say 90% of people. That's probably going to be the truth.

J Daniel Sawyer 15:01

It's got interesting. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting watching what kind of long term effects this whole. This whole endemic pandemic adventure has on people's determination to work from home and other things over the long term that could seriously change the shape of the way things work.

Kevin Tumlinson 15:18

I predict that I honestly think we're, we've just we just witnessed, like a leap forward in the evolution of a civilization. As you know, everything we understood has come to an end. And we're now going to reinvent ourselves.

J Daniel Sawyer 15:35

That's a lot more true than you might realize. Because it's not just the social changes that this is forcing. But there is another set of social changes that was waiting in the wings for coming to three years from now when the boomers hit mass retirement that this has accelerated. Yeah. And that is that because of the global demography, the demand driven economic expansion that started With the Black Death just ended, right just ended. Right? That's 500 years of political, social, and economic and ethical systems all premised on the notion that things would continue to grow at a moderate rate forever. They don't work anymore. Right? I'm planning on editing an anthology later this year dealing with potential new ways to do things where growth is not an embedded obligation of the system. Figure science fiction needs to get back to hardcore speculation. So

Kevin Tumlinson 16:32

I think we also just witnessed the opening of a whole new door when it comes to intellectual property and the way culture reacts with it.

J Daniel Sawyer 16:42

Yeah. Very interesting.

Kevin Tumlinson 16:44

Yeah. I'm real curious to see what happens. Because you know, you think about everything we've seen of late like all the little sessions where people do like, you know, oh, sorry about that. No problem. You got to clean anything up. You Good.

J Daniel Sawyer 17:00

No, no, I just wasn't my reflector wasn't backed by a strong enough, strong enough Wait,

Kevin Tumlinson 17:05

all right. You know those all those videos and everything that have popped up like nurses and doctors singing or high school kids singing something and performing something, you know, all that stuff is out there, it's getting a lot of attention. And some of it is easily even sort of inadvertently monetized. And but nobody is having to secure the rights to that stuff right now. So

J Daniel Sawyer 17:30

I'm curious to see what happened has to be some there's gonna have to be a new new compulsory licensing scheme, like happened in the 20th is when radio came in?

Kevin Tumlinson 17:39

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know that there's a whole thing going on with this has been in discussion for years really, because this is why the Creative Commons first kind of came on the scene, but, you know, can you really truly own an idea and is it beneficial to society for you to own the idea Yeah, and we need to make a living as content creators. But do we, you know, how far does that extend in terms of ownership? So, you know, I'm, I kind of am on in that boat of, you know, ideas want to be free, like the guy who created Yep. Was it Oracle? No, it was a Linux, creator of Linux. Yes. But at the same time I make my living from my ideas. So.

J Daniel Sawyer 18:30

Oh, no, it was, it was it was it was a bill, what's his name from Sun Microsystems said that.

Kevin Tumlinson 18:34

Okay. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. No, no, probably. Yeah. No, I

J Daniel Sawyer 18:39

yeah. No, I'm the same way. I've quite a lot of my stuff is creative commons license. And I you know, I've interviewed Cory Doctorow years ago and yeah, and, and the greatest The greatest enemy of any new artist is obscurity and not piracy, all that sort of stuff. Yep. totally on board with that. And on the other hand, the yeah The rationale for copyright law is that the for the civilization to benefit from the culture, people have to be incentivized to make it. And when everything was expensive to publish, that was very easy to that was a very easy line to draw, but it's not anymore and we've delayed rethinking that seriously. years and nobody has put Yeah, I think you're right, that dam just broke.

Kevin Tumlinson 19:27

Yeah, I absolutely think it has. And, you know, of course, one of the things that's that's been happening since since the pandemic started almost hesitate to talk about the pandemic at all honestly, because by the time this episode airs we should hopefully be out of

J Daniel Sawyer 19:45

don't bet on it. I'm expecting that I'm expecting that there'll be a sawtooth quarantine for

Kevin Tumlinson 19:50

we'll see we'll see if you're right if this good when this goes live, we'll see if that things change. I don't know what but whatever

J Daniel Sawyer 19:57

I'll on record. So if my prediction everyone laugh

Kevin Tumlinson 20:00

at me gonna be a transcript and everything, man. Absolutely. So I think, you know, right now I know from, from my experience with drafter digital and in my own personal experience that ebooks, ebook sales have been just going through the roof. You know? And I mean, we've we've seen, like a 45% increase across retailers, but like 175% increase with libraries. So people are out there. I

J Daniel Sawyer 20:27

got my book library sales have also gone way up. Yeah. Yeah. It's, so I seem to have the greatest penetration in libraries with my audiobooks. So

Kevin Tumlinson 20:37

that's interesting, though. That's interesting. Because most of the time when I think about audio books, I'm thinking like people are getting them to listen to while they drive into work or something. I would think so too, but

J Daniel Sawyer 20:49

that maybe, you know, while there would be out everybody taking walks or Yeah, or cleaning the house, and if you're living in the house, you have to clean a lot more often.

Kevin Tumlinson 20:59

So how are you Balancing the podcasting and everything else you're doing with the writing, like how you keep on track.

J Daniel Sawyer 21:08

I tend to batch a lot, current. So like right now, it is called the everyday novelist because I usually write everyday but the last few months, because things have been so weird, it's been a little bit different. So I've currently got four books that I'm redlining. And the podcast is actually as much time as it takes sexual easy because I can batch it. So I'll just say okay, at the end of the recorded buffer is coming up, like when we're recording this, I've got another recording session tonight, because my buffer just ran out. I say at the end of the recorded buffers coming up, take one night to record them all. Then take a day to edit them all and post them and then that's that and but I do a lot of stuff with batch work. So I let you know enough of a pile pile up that I can do it as a project because With the exception of getting in a groove and writing every day, almost everything else I either get bored of or get. It starts to grind on me if it's a chronic thing, but if I have projects I can get through, then that Jazz's me up. So

Kevin Tumlinson 22:16

yeah, so that's it, you know, are you how much production goes into each of your podcast episodes?

J Daniel Sawyer 22:25

For the everyday novelist it's about a it's about a two and a half to one timewise. As you can tell, as we're talking here, I have a bit of a scatter shot. I tend to circle a topic before before angling in on it and sometimes there's a lot of stumbling associated with that right right. I like what I'm doing the everyday novelist because it's all improv I like to to narrow the stumbling down as much as possible. So right, it takes about twice as long to cut every episode as the final Listening length winds up being. Okay. So overall, I met including the recording time at about two or three to one production ratio.

Kevin Tumlinson 23:10

Alright, well alright, that's that makes sense. That's about what it what it takes for me so that I feel a little more comfortable. I am actually because I've been doing some other stuff recently live I'm actually considering shifting the model of this show to being a live format, essentially producing it on the fly. Yeah, it can be fun. It's a little tougher to get certain guests on. But you get the benefit of you know, the production is is done that day.

J Daniel Sawyer 23:42

Yeah, absolutely dead set out. And I really, I dig doing interview shows that way. When I'm, when I'm doing monologues. I like to massage the timing a lot because that that really helps with the delivery. Yeah, when you've got a conversation going on. The timing emerges from the interaction so you can avoid the editing if you want to.

Kevin Tumlinson 24:03

Yeah, that's exactly yeah, I like that part where everything is done for me automatically.

J Daniel Sawyer 24:10

Oh yeah.

Kevin Tumlinson 24:12

I started my I started this thing called the Kevin show. I don't know if you've seen any of those and they're ridiculous I haven't seen that yet. They're not right.

J Daniel Sawyer 24:20

They were your YouTube channel. Yeah, yeah. So I started I've got a tab open, but I haven't watched any of them yet.

Kevin Tumlinson 24:26

Yeah, well, I'm just gonna warn you in advance don't go there hoping for writing wisdom.

J Daniel Sawyer 24:34

But I figured it's us so it's probably gonna be like RV weird DIY stuff. And strange. There's gonna be all kinds of stuff.

Kevin Tumlinson 24:41

Yeah. So it started literally that show. So yeah, okay, I'm gonna bring us back around to what we're discussing here. But that show started as me and Nick factor. I said to Nick, you know, when I was so stressed out from the moving from the pandemic from, you know, just being inundated with things So you know, what I would love to do is just do something stupid fun, no agenda, no plan and call it I could call it the Kevin show, because that's ridiculous. And just put it out there live and have fun for 30 minutes, distract people. And he, he said I'd go on that. And so within an hour, I had designed that entire show, from the graphics to music to a video intro to booking my first guest. And the next day it went live. And I've done one every week since so that's dad said, to bring it back to the important thing of this interview, which is you that shows I think that process of the fertile mind, you know, the the fertile mental life that you are, that you are focused on, or would you would you disagree with that? kind of put you on the spot?

J Daniel Sawyer 25:56

No, no, I think that's a great example to the brain. branching out. It's Oh, I'm trying to think of something pithy to come back to that. But yeah, I think you've got it exactly.

Kevin Tumlinson 26:07

That's something.

J Daniel Sawyer 26:09

Life is chaotic, interesting and complicated. And it doesn't easily fit into any of the categories that anybody likes to impose on it. Yeah. And I can't remember who I ran into from it might have been, it might have been something out of one of two labs books. But I came across this idea of it's better to have strong opinions loosely held. Yeah, then then weak, then weak opinions strongly held. Most people have weak opinions strongly held. They have ideas that they like, they can't really support them in in the face of a monumental challenge, but they'll hold on to them for dear life because they're identified with them.

Kevin Tumlinson 26:50

Exactly. Sort of. Yeah,

J Daniel Sawyer 26:52

I like that core way. I prefer to be able to articulate what I'm thinking in a very useful strong way, right and be comfortable enough with my own level of ignorance that I can change my opinion when something challenges it and it doesn't, in my opinion doesn't stand up in the teeth of whatever I'm engaging with. As a result of course, I've had multiple interesting worldview shifts over my life. I've been all over the political spectrum. I've had three different religions. And but, but it's but the reason is that, that I'm more interested in figuring out what's actually going on and engaging with life in a in a deep way. And if that's my priority, then what's expendable has to be my determination to cling on to the things that might otherwise make me feel secure.

Kevin Tumlinson 27:54

Yeah, okay. That is I Exactly. I love the way you have Put that if that is an actual quote, I need to go find it about strong or strong opinions. Loosely held. Yeah, yeah, that's I feel like that's me. And I think I think the danger is people hear strong opinions and then decide. That's where you stand. And so the idea that you might change your mind from a strong opinion, and pivot to a new worldview is is completely foreign to some folks. But I think that's that's the right way to be personally, I like that.

J Daniel Sawyer 28:30

Yeah. And I do and I mean, one of the things you're, you're like me, you're, you're a little bit north of 30, at least. And one of the things by the time you hit your mid 30s, you realize that whether you want it to or not your worldviews gonna change. Yeah. Because the cumulative experience you build up, gradually goes out of sync with your ideology, whatever ideology that is, because ideologies are models that we build to deal with the world. They're not the world itself and any model is going to have holes in it. Yeah, and the. So when you're in your 20s, it's really easy to righteously hold on to everything because you are fighting for the good. But the older you get, the more that instead of that makes you look, instead of making you impassioned, and a person of great conviction, makes you look kind of stupid. Yeah, because you're not you look vapid and hollow? Well, yeah, because what's happening is while your practical worldview is changing, and you can always tell by the evidence of someone's behavior, rather than what they say, what you believe is reflected in what you do not in what you say. And as you get older, if you're holding on to those, to those early convictions that tightly, the gap between your behavior and your speech will grow. And if you look in the mirror, and all of us eventually do or at least most of us eventually do. You notice that disconnect and that's when you have the existential crisis, who,

Kevin Tumlinson 30:02

yeah, if you've ever read Carol Dwight's book about my called mindset, it talks about exactly you should tell you, that will probably end up on your list of recommended books, because it talks about that very idea. And it's the closed mindset versus the open mindset, you know, and we tend to look for things that become part of our identity when, especially when we're young, especially when we're vulnerable. Like we're, you know, the bullied high school kid, you know, can say, Well, people pick on me, but at least I'm really good at math. And so if you identify with that, and then you fail a math test,

30:40

you're crushed, suddenly, yep.

Kevin Tumlinson 30:42

Your whole identity was just taken for you were murdered, you know, in your, in your own mind. And so you start to think if I don't have that, what am I? Who am I? So anyway, um, so, unfortunately, we are we're closing in on our time

J Daniel Sawyer 30:58

on the end,

Kevin Tumlinson 30:59

which was is really unfortunate man I always I dig talking to you we know when am I coming back on your show man? I know

J Daniel Sawyer 31:13

whenever it's good for you let me know I would love to have you back on especially now you're working with Jeff to digital. I'd like to Yeah,

Kevin Tumlinson 31:19

cuz i don't think i was last time was

J Daniel Sawyer 31:21

last time you were last time you were

Kevin Tumlinson 31:25

completely independent.

J Daniel Sawyer 31:26

You You were just leaving your first stint at draft to digital I think it was

Kevin Tumlinson 31:31

no it would have been because I was still Oh yeah, so I was working for DDD, but I

J Daniel Sawyer 31:36

stayed with a different position. Oh yeah, I was.

Kevin Tumlinson 31:39

I was getting on the road though. That's the only guy that would have been. So okay, yeah, so I still fresh it D to D Really? Because that happened like right after. Okay, there we go. That's the you have

J Daniel Sawyer 31:50

this. this. Yeah, the stuff you guys are doing over there, especially now that marks on the team and whatnot has gotten a lot more interesting. I keep signing up for the meetings and then not making them because Everything else in the world that's there recorded I really want.

Kevin Tumlinson 32:04

I'm gonna have to look back through from my recorded pop into your YouTube channel. Okay, which is officially youtube.com slash c slash draft to digital everyone. And while you're there, look for Kevin Tumlinson and you can tune into the Kevin show xo into plugs but tell everybody the more important URL is where can people find you online?

J Daniel Sawyer 32:30

You can find me at everyday novelist calm that's for the daily podcast. You can find a whole bunch of my other stuff audio books, full cast audio fiction podcasts, my rather scattered and sometimes very dark musings on the universe on my blog, and a complete list of the books that are available for purchase at the moment as well as my autodidacts reading list at WWW dot JDC. All your.net and I just want a very, very dark take on some of the stuff we were talking about earlier about the changeover and ages. Check out my blog post. The Abyss stares back.

Kevin Tumlinson 33:12

Yes. Excellent. All right. Well, you heard him everybody. Make sure you check that stuff out, buy his books, go see his stuff. Listen to his podcast. There's a lot you can do to keep him going throw a buck or two his way on Patreon. Let's let's make sure we're taking care of our own here, man. So Jay Daniel Sawyer, sir, thank you so much for being a part of the word slinger podcast.

J Daniel Sawyer 33:34

Thanks for having me on. It is a delight.

Kevin Tumlinson 33:37

Everybody else right now. Right now you're probably hearing the groovy bridge music. You may dance in place it will and if you stick around, I am sure to say something profound on the other side, and if I don't make fun of me, see you next time.