S1 Int10 - Interview with Grigory Lukin

Dear listener, I'm so glad to have you join me for today's interview with Gidegoody Lukian. In today's interview, Gidegoody and I discuss after you catch them all, which was story number 4 of season 1. After you catch them all, is a darkly comedic story in which a pompous and ego-maniical planetary administrator gets a little too excited and carried away with his assignment to exterminate all invasive life on a planet he is charged with governing. It's a deliciously slow-billed in which our planetary administrator is given numerous warnings and chances to save himself and his people, but the man's pride blinds him until it's too late.

If it's been a while since you have listened to after you catch them all, skip back to episode 4 and give it a listen. Gidegoody Lukian is an award-winning filmmaker and an internationally published author of fiction and nonfiction. He's also a vagabond with three passports and far too much free time. His writing has appeared in Fano, the colored lens and multiple anthologies. He enjoys pastries, museums, and hiking from Mexico to Canada. His secret layer is in Montreal.

And now on to our interview. Thank you so much for joining today. And we'll get right off with our questions for you, Gidegoody.

“My first question for you today is, can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to begin this story?”

Was there a character or image or a question that kind of seated this? I know you said that a sound of thunder was part of the inspiration here, but how did it all come together to kick off? So I am a writer and I always want to improve my craft. There's a quote one of the Austin Powers movies, relentless self-improvement.

And it's always important to try to find new tricks and tips that basically develop in any way possible.

And I was interested in some of the old classics, including that story by Bedbury, a sound of thunder. And I had read it before, but just as a casual reader. And this time around I read it as a writer. And it was quite surprising because the story changed the world with his concept of butterfly effect. But the story itself is only eight pages long or so.

And it's very compact. There isn't a single wasted paragraph or sentence. And so everything in the story has this job and it doesn't stop really, really well. And so it doesn't think that I could maybe write an homage from a different perspective.

And I mean, I'm not readbury. I will never be a readbury.

But I kind of use that as a blueprint and there is just two characters stuck in and discuss it and make a watch for the situation. And then something else I admire. And the rest was history. I mean, I guess you could say that his story itself was a kind of butterfly effect.

“It has spread throughout the world in its own way, right?”

Would you say that there's any element that popped out at you when you read it as a writer that you didn't see or that you may have seen differently when you were reading it just as a casual reader? The title itself, a sound of thunder. It repeated, I think, a couple of times throughout the story. It was a key part of the very last sentence. And yeah, I rather enjoy that. And I tried to mimic that particular element with describing the robots voice when it identified the cat and then, well, when the end of the album just in case somebody is watching this video before this podcast.

I kind of like it contented less. And yeah, it's just a repetition. And with short stories, it's always important to wrap things up and do the other sentence by ending.

And one of those one of the ways to do it is to refer back to an element that will grant you very carefully the very early tail. And so that's what I tried to do here. Perfect. Yeah, and it sounds like it worked pretty well. It worked very well for me. I love that ironic sort of encompassing that you created.

“So when it comes to writing for readers writing for the general audience, was there anybody that you had in mind any specific kind of audience or reader that you wanted to reach with this story?”

Not a person. I don't know Stephen King writes me, see if he's wife in mind that he's a reader. I don't have a wife. And yeah, so I don't really have an ideal reader. I mostly write the kind of stuff that I wish I would have read when I was once much younger. Because as a kid, I basically implemented on a show burn and very pressure, very pressure. And that was abs. And those were my key influences. And there were never enough some sort of sci-fi stories for me to tell.

And I think that really dovetails perfectly with the goal of biome to have more short stories out there available and accessible to everybody. So definitely grateful for you to be part of that journey.

“Was there anything in this story that you were nervous about trying out or putting on the page any topic theme or technique that you weren't sure was going to work, but you tried it anyway?”

Not to say, although I know that a lot of readers/ listeners would be not big fans of what happens to capture animals, especially with Rao, seeing where the poor Davi gets captured into an unbreakable net. And then we know exactly what's going to happen to the Davi. And it's all off screen about this described earlier in great fail, which I did to make sure that the character is pretty awesome, but maybe if they have some little strength of goodness somewhere within them, that is not shown in the story.

And so it's basically this balance that we have to show that your feelings and our feelings work is very, very amoral. And at the same time, it might alienate some readers.

Like, I don't use beta readers because I'm paranoid about AI and everything. So I don't know how, for example, you can people would react to that story. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And I know that as I was reading it, I thought to myself, one of the things that this story makes very clear when it comes to living beings. I mean, this story puts people in the same boat as living beings similar as a cat similar to anything else around us.

“So I think while the characters are not sympathetic, the story itself is sympathetic to sort of all living beings that are featured there. And I think that was very beautifully done.”

And then going off of the part about what you may be nervous about or what you tried. Was there any scene that you found difficult to put on the page? Was there any part of this that you kind of struggled or went back and forth on maybe rewrote a couple times? Not really. That made that idea in my mind the whole time. It was just some part of the story are slightly funny by design and it's a very, very dark market out there for funny science fiction. And kind of a pendulum and right now the pendulum is on a far side, it was Adam's cat died way too young. And so you know, he had stuck around for a couple more decades to stay fresh and the world would be a much more fun place.

But yeah, so I basically had that idea in my mind the entire time and I am a punter. So I write an outline and then you add flesh to the skeleton.

But yeah, I had to try not hard, but I had to put some effort to make sure it wasn't like a ha ha campy story. And as some of my stories are more of a dark story, the elements of levels.

“Yeah, I guess I just have to ask, you know, is is comedy and humorous elements something that you try and include in a lot of your stories or is this kind of an outlier?”

No, that just comes to me naturally because I like to say that Joel Verne, Douglas Adams and Terry Preciy, they were my holy sci-fi gym music.

And Joel Verne is not necessarily funny guy, but his books are never exactly just 100% serious.

For me, when I consider sci-fi concepts, I always see humor in them. Like right now, a whole bunch of stuff with headlines about AI. I mean, they're just hilarious to react. And yeah, so whatever I envision a new technology or whatever is going to happen in the future, then I always try to think of the unintended consequences and just how much more I'm using that would make for those lives. You know, absolutely. And I think that another element that's definitely very present in this story is sort of using the absurd to underline the horror.

It almost accentuates the horror in a certain sense. And so it sounds like you're very much in that lineage of using absurdity and the humor inherent in that absurdity to really hold out the deeper themes of a story. It's a fun spice. And not a lot of my experience, not a lot of writers use it. Like I said, right now the bamboo was swinging toward the serious deterioration, which is fine. Yeah, absurdity is a really great angle to use when brainstorming gots up to you. Well, I'm glad that you included the levity there. I know that I've gotten feedback from several listeners that they enjoy the fact that this is kind of a piece that makes you think, but it also is something that'll make you smile.

Now, you kind of hinted at this earlier, but my next question is, did you ever consider any other endings or did you consider sort of changing it after you wrote it down or was it there from the beginning?

The cats, the goats, and everything. And part of me always wondered if they were going to finish off with, you know, a deporting themselves, you know, just to round the thumbs up. As far as the ending just go, it's one of the most recently populated parts of the world. And yeah, so it's one of those things where the careful way to respond. Yeah, and I think that's a relatively common theme in a lot of science fiction, but this one explores it from the perspective of a different planet and maybe new technologies.

“A new perspective on that, which I think is really great. All right, so I think now we'll move on to like a flash round. I'll just ask you some really quick. This or that question. Are you ready for it?”

So normally, I would ask you if you're a plotter or a pantser, but you already told me that you're a plotter. Is that always true or is that usually true or 50/50?

I don't know, that's always true, even though I write a very short piece of flash fiction, so less than 1,000 words, I help the concept in my mind, then exactly why it's going to end. And then it's just that I'll season down and give it to them. And what do you think would happen if you were told to sit down and write it without a plan? There would need to be a very big bag of money involved.

“All right, well we'll see what can make that happen for you. What is your preferred power hour or time of day when writing happens? Do you write in the morning? Are you a night owl? Do you do it after lunch? When is your most productive greenboard?”

Well, right now, I'm traveling. I'm recording this from Hashi, New South California, but when I'm back in Canada, it's very bad for my health, but it's important. Extra large black coffee and tools, their delicious donuts, that combination of caffeine and sugar complete overload, it's best creates people like that. Doesn't matter what time of day, it's a lot of my short story scheme out of that. Okay, I think it was at Balzak who just overdosed on coffee and wrote for binges of 48 hours at a time. I think a lot of them did that. I think they are a whole day or just one thing. Nicole, a Tesla once tried to read all the full there and then he complained that that guy had an intimate splash.

Yeah, no, some of those folks in the 1800s really pushed push things to limit.

“All right, you're drafting vibe. Do you like to play music or do you like to write in complete silence? What's your preferred mode?”

No, it's for me personally that is distracting and yeah, I just sit down and ideally in silence and just I don't know. Okay, and the surrounding environment, does it also have to be silent deeper for like a sound room or is it cafe? Okay, so I used to work in the food industry and the inserts industry and so I'm always anxious that people to kind of counter with hate me if I just want to like a pay dollar copy and a comfort and just occupy their stays for an hour and a half. I've written stories in the most fundamental environments, airports and airplanes, well, walking through a small store, a lot of them in the comfort environment.

Right now, I am in the middle of the first thing to press change, I'm still writing the story, one story for a week, you know, I'm sticking back for some depth.

And I answer, I don't think the environment matters so much. Well, that's great because it keeps you productive wherever you are. What is your favorite tool of choice? Are you a keyboard warrior or are you married to the pen or do you kind of switch it up and you do both long hand and digital? It's nice to write on a laptop is a keyboard and all, but for the last eight months I've been writing pretty much exclusively on myself on important not to get married to one specific medium because George R. R. Martin blames his ongoing writers attack on a fact that he can only write in his little.

And you know, essentially he's one base and only on the prehistoric length of eight years computer whether it's true or not is up to him, but you never want to get caught into that kind of over specialization like a koala bear. And you know, it's you know, once you're definitely.

So basically what you're telling me is you do not want to be the next George R. Martin.

And I'm already a filmmaker on the side, so you know, I had my share of red carpets and even the opportunity comes to the HBO and we're not all considered. Okay, all right, well, HBO, if you're listening, you know what to do. All right, final lightning round question for you, you get to have a literary dinner an hour and a half with any living writer or historic when you get to have a wonderful dinner a wonderful conversation. Who would that be and why? The questions, the questions.

Yeah, let's go with us all burn because he had had a lot of ideas for a way ahead of his time.

I'm centralized the nuclear submarines to robots for the normal.

“Perfect answer. Well, good to go. Thank you so much for taking the time.”

Thank you. Sorry.

“Next week's interview with Toshia Comey will be released as a written exchange exclusively on Patreon.”

The interview will be available for free, but I hope you consider signing up to support buy-home so I can keep sharing amazing stories and interviews with you.

But for now, dear listener, farewell, wherever the days take you. (Music)