living room deansgate

all right this is this is a little weirdbut here we go hang on let me confirm that everything is going according toplan okay i am informed that we're live ican't actually watch the stream on my computer or we get like some weirdfeedback so this is gonna be a little odd this is a new format for me becausenormally i'm either talking to someone or just like giving a lecture but now ifeel like i'm talking to a chatroom and staring at my camera so it's a littlestrange so i hope everyone kind of bears with me hi my name is django wexler i'ma fantasy author here in seattle in the united states i'm the author of thethousand names which is a military

fantasy and the forbidden library whichis a middle grade fantasy i see the done live from the chat roomhere if i look down it's because i'm looking at the computer here so this isa little strange for me so everybody say hello in the chat room and you can shoutout questions i will try to go through the questions in like chronologicalorder and we'll see how many we can get through before my voice gets out orsomething like that okay so here we go on questions it's great to be here bythe way thank you to campus society and to jenn for setting this up all right andyou know feel free to ask whatever you guys want you know if it's something ifeel like i can't answer then i'll just

hide it in the corner um okay i got ascroll up in this too not so that i can see okayrashid asks what was the feeling like when your first book was published it'spretty good i can't deny that you know it's it it's a very long process ittakes forever when thousand names came out i think itwas probably 18 months from the point at which i submitted it to the point atwhich it actually like came out and so itfeels like you're just like finally like you go to the store and you're like whoathis book is actually here after spending so long kind of working on itas like this imaginary thing it's like

real so that's a little weird but in agood way jay asks what writers would you say yourmain inspirations for your writing style it depends on the book for the thousandnames which was my first book which has now led to a series of five books thefifth one comes out in january in the uk it's from head of zeus so i encourageeverybody to check that out that's kind of the main thing i've been doing andthe biggest influences were probably george rr martin and sm sterling stevesterling in particular i read george martin's books and i really liked theway he brought he brought sort of a knights and castles fantasy back to it'smore historical roots and that kind of i

really wanted to do that but with adifferent period so i ended up in the napoleonic wars after reading a book bydavid chandler called the campaign's of napoleon which is fantastic and ithought doesn't make a great story so that was like the closest like directinspiration although of course i've read million billion books um i was tough tosteve sterling and david drake wrote a series called the general which i reallylike it's basically a retelling of the campaign's of belisarius in a sci-ficontext that i really liked that idea scrolling down a little how does it takeyou to write your first book um it's a tricky question because i was writingbooks long before i was published i

wrote probably 10 books before i waspublished i were fan fiction for a while i wrote just books that i knew weren'tgood enough to be published and the time buried a lot depending on whether i gotstuck or what other things were going on in my life when i was in college i had alittle more time when i started working full-time wasless the the thousand names which is my first published book took me about ninemonths probably to write um i was writing i had a my schedule blocked outfor about an hour a day in the morning before going to work and then that wouldgo into work i worked at microsoft here in redmond um and so i get up at 7:00and i've you know right from 7:30 to

8:30 and then i go off to work and soabout nine months at that pace and then a little bit longer to edit it and thenof course you know after we sold it then there were more edits with my editorsand so on i've gotten that down pretty significantly because i'm now writingfull-time for the last five years and so like the fifth shadow campaigns book which iwrote earlier this year took about three or four months of full-time work butthat was pretty fast for me once you get to the fifth book everything is prettywell planned so it's kind of like i kind of know what i'm doing um let's seestill scrolling down favorite nonfiction i've ever read that's tough um i reallylike economics and economic history so i

recommend i'm gonna pronounce it wrongbut liaquat ahamed's lords of finance which is about central banking in afterworld war one and kind of explains the great depression that is just soentertainingly written if you like the military stuff i recommend chandler'scampaigns of napoleon it's one of these like giant tomes but chandler's such agood writer it doesn't really feel like it so that's good robert massey alsowrites a really good history he wrote a book called dreadnought which was aboutthe first arms race between germany and britain before world war one the thebattleship race and that it's really good and his sequel castles of steelwhich is about world war one naval

action is also really good he's a goodwriter and basically anything by robert massey also adrian goldsworthy writesreally good ancient history so he's done a whole bunch of stuff on rome that ireally like what is your favorite character you'vewritten i don't know if i can choose that one it's like asking someone tochoose their favorite children like i love all characters and in some wayshape or form jenn asks how do you stay focused when writing a book do you arethere some stories you lose interest in writing i mean it's hard it helps tothink of it as a job which is weird because normally when you think ofsomething as a job it makes it kind of

suck but like you know you can't you getup in some days you just don't feel like doing it and you do it anyway isbasically what it comes down to just like if you were a plumber or computerprogrammer or whatever you know you get up and you're like i really don't wantto go to work today and then you do because that's you know what it takes toactually be professional so it's you know it's just a matter of sticking toit and there's always this worry that like oh man i just kind of grind it outis the result gonna be any good like is it gonna be good as as art as a book andthe answer i found is usually yes you know when i'm writing i have good daysand i have bad days but like when i go

back and read the book i can't tellwhich was which my subjective impression that the time that i'm reading is veryunreliable or rather at the time that i'm writing is very unreliable soknowing that and keeping that in the back of my mind always helps polly sayswhat would you suggest is tips for someone writing their first book ipersonally find i have a plan but i'm nervous to actually start the firstchapter that's hard i mean putting putting pen to paper or computerkeyboard or whatever we call it these days is is always hard and there's noway to get around that the answer is you just have to do it if it helps try toremind yourself that your first book is

probably not going to be great i knowpeople have this weird idea that you know because writing you know you canrevise it that you're gonna get it perfect the first time and it never everworks that way you know just think of it asyou know if you're a painter and you do a painting no one's gonna expect theirvery first painting to be like a great masterpiece so think of it as a learningprocess the only way to get there is to just write a lot over and over and overagain anushka writes what does writing full-time entail and is it toughthat just basically means i don't have like an actual job anymore like a dayjob i used to work at microsoft i have a

degree in computer science and so i justthought i was going to be a computer programmer for a living and so i wentyou know i went and did that for 10 or 15 years and then at some point i wasmaking enough write money writing that i could be like well i'm gonna quit thisjob and just live on that and it's great you know if you know getting there ishard and i feel really lucky to be able to do it it's really not common and youknow it it helps that you know it depends where you are in your life idon't have kids so things are a little cheaper for me but like you know i'mlucky to be to be in this position so i tried to take advantage of it so for meit usually means i spend i don't know

two to four hours a day doing writingand then probably a bit more doing sort of writing adjacent stuff like publicitylike this or like emails or setting things up for a future stuff so it's apretty good job you know as jobs go i like itlet's see when did you first realize you wanted to be a writer it's tough istarted writing when i was in my teens first i was a gamer i was a dungeons anddragons gm like enormously i was like i was and am a total nerd but like wheni when i was a kid i was like a super turbo nerd it was crazy and then istarted writing because it was more satisfying but i didn't have an ideathat i wanted to be like a writer

like capital w writer probably untilmaybe the last couple years of college where i was like i'm always gonna tryand sell stuff and make some money at this so about that so by the time i realizedi wanted to be a writer you know i've been writing for years and years am i aseahawks fan you know i guess nominally excuse me i don't really follow afootball though i mean if i was gonna root for a team it would it would be myhometown team but like i'm not i'm not an american football guy i'm not reallya sports guy in general and my family that was always my brother he's thesports guy but we do i understand have a

soccer slash your guys's football teamhere in seattle and we're that that's quite good and very popular you seethere they're posters everywhere and we're like one of the few americancities that actually does like to know my jenn asks would like to know mythoughts on automation and ai can i used to work on ai that's a very long andcomplicated topic my like 30 second advice is take anything with a grain ofsalt because ai is really really hard and so it's easy to do things in the limiteddomain like i'm really impressed what they're doing with go because i playgo and it's it's hard and it's traditionally been hard for ai and nowthey're they're doing really well at it

but general-purpose ai is really hardand we're not going to get there for like a long time let's see how manyhours of writing went into your latest book i'd go with i don't know maybe i'mcalculating three or four hundred probably you know i my my last book orthe book that's coming out in january the infernal battalion is about twohundred thousand words and i usually write about a a thousand words in anhour so and then there's probably as much again in editing and revision andother stuff like that let's see jay asks is it difficult after acertain point to edit your own work yes the answer to that is 100% yes a goodeditor is kind of worth his or her

weight in gold and the same goes forjust like beta readers like friends of mine who who just read my work and giveme feedback copy editors the publisher has copy editors and they they setthings up so the answer is you have to at some point get outside feedbackbecause as you say the the work exists so much in your head that you can't evensee the words on the paper anymore there's all kinds of tricks like i tendto print things out and then kind of read them aloud because it helps meactually read what's on the page instead of the like perfect version that's in myhead but it's really hard so there's no substitute for like a good editor togive you feedback jenn asks how do much you

write that doesn't go into a book do youwrite stories about characters to try to flush them out a little bit i would saya lot of that stuff i don't actually write down i have it in my head for themost part so i think about these things a lot i think about characters and ithink about what their lives are like sometimes i take notes to remind myselflater i usually don't write all that stuff outas like a fully fleshed out story it's more just kind of backstory i have donesome short fiction to go with my my novel so like if you look on amazon forthe penitent damned is a short story that is kind of a prequel to my seriesand you can get it for i think like you

know $0.99 or whatever the equivalent isin in the uk so that's a good thing to check out if you're if you're sort ofcurious as to what that's like but and i've done a few for anthologies i havestories and you know sometimes they come and ask me you know hey can you write usa story about you know assassins and rogues and so i wrote the story thatwent into the an anthology called black guards which was a lot of funlet's see clara asks do people you know serve as inspiration for your charactersthat's a good question the answer is like not to directly iwould say i there's not a character who's like oh yeah that's bob from mywriting group like i'd worry a little

what happens when the book comes out andbob is like uhh django why'd you do that but i would say it's like you combinelittle bits and pieces of people you get like a like a you know a person's youknow verbal tick here and another person sort of the way they react to asituation there and also just people from fiction like you know i'm alwaysseeing characters not like i read i'd love to do a relationship the way thosetwo characters have their relationship you know that kind of thing let's see neilasks who is your favorite author and why oh man that's a hard question i can'treally say i have a single favorite because man there are too many goodauthors as i said i really liked george

rr martin's books i hope he finishesthem someday that would be great i'm a huge fan of terry pratchett hishis books are wonderful and those were things that i read when i was a kid andyou know i think i've read every single one of those books multiple times um ilike joe abercrombie's books a lot if you're in the sort of grim dark mode heyou know his first law series is wonderful his why a series is wonderfulalso and doesn't have isn't quite as dark i guess although maybe it's still alittle still pretty dark i'm probably leavingout dozens of people on the sci-fi side i really liked peter hamilton's bookshis his commonwealth series the void

trilogy are both really good his bookthe great north road is really good so you know it's all all over the placetom asks how do you overcome writer's block it's kind of a cop-out but i saythat i don't like really believe in writer's blockto me it's kind of associated constantly talking leaves me a little dry so writer'sblock i feel like is associated with this idea of writing where you're like ihave to wait for the muse to strike me and you know it's all high art and it'slike that's not it's hard to do writing that way maybe you can do poetry thatway or short fiction but when it comes to a novel there's just so much workinvolved that you're not always gonna

feel like you want to do it right you'renot always gonna be at a point where you're like oh man i'm excited to do itso you just have to you know sit down and do it it it feels like do otherprofessions get blocked do you know electricians getelectricians block i'm not sure it works that way so yeah i mean the answer issometimes it sucks and you do it anyway what is your favorite book to movieadaptation hmm that's a good question i mean the lord of the rings is hard totop you know peter jackson had such a love for that material it was clearly apassion project for him and it's so rare that a project like that and gets youknow the millions and millions of

dollars that it takes to actually becomereal you know that that might have to be ityou know there are there are others on tv there are a few good ones you knowi'm watching the american gods adaptation right now and it's pretty goodi'm really excited about that and i'm glad they're doing more seasons i knowwith movies it would be easier to list the bad adaptations frankly the goodones it's it's hard to translate a book to a movie i do love the game of thronestv show you know not to harp on the george rr martin theme but but it'spretty great you know it has its ups and downs like any tv show but i love it i

don't know i jenn asked what the bad onesare but i'm not sure i can tell you know i try to maintain in public and attitudeof like not you know saying bad things about people because you never know whoyou're gonna work with and yeah it's it's hard there are some only a fewthings that i'm willing to say bad things about in public like maybe thefirst three star wars movies that i didn't like the the prequels or the thesecond two matrix movies i'm willing to come out and say that those wereterrible polly says i need a shirt that says thebook was better on it yeah i think that probably exists the the internet beingwhat it is i feel like almost any

t-shirt that you can possibly imaginethey exist somewhere just like type it into googleit'll be fine all right let's see there were a couple more questions in thecomments for this post here so let me go look at that what am i reading at themoment oh well tom asks if django wexler is my real name the answer is yes i'mnamed after a jazz guitarist named django reinhardt from the 30s and 40sand he my mom read about him and really liked the name so i have it so you knowi get people telling me a lot like oh you know you got a you have the best penname and i'm like it's not a pen name but so you can thank my parents i guessi didn't really pick it what am i

reading at the moment i just finished abook called the grey bastards by jonathan french which is really goodit was self-published and i think it's coming out officially or not officiallybut from from a big fat publisher or sometime next year and it's about halforcs on giant hogs defending human kingdom against orcs it's really good ijust started a book called the tethered maids which i'm enjoying quite a bitthat's that's new i have like a huge stack of books you can't really hear i'mgonna turn the camera so if you if we look this way we can probably see myminiatures painting area and then behind that is the giant stack of books to readso you know i pick pick one off the top

i've got the new philip pullman bookwhich i'm i'm excited to be seeing do i like the film django unchained yeah whatwas pretty good definitely people know how to pronounce my name now which isgood sometimes i get people asking me if i've named after the movie and i'm likehow old do you think i am like ten and someone asked am i doing nanowrimo andthe answer is like not officially but i probably will be starting a new bookactually soon so you know if i could get 50,000 words in a month i'd be prettyhappy you know that so so that seems like it'd be a good it'd be a good goalanyway see alright i think i've reached the bottom of the chat man that was fastor have we stopped updating someone say

something so i can make sure this isstill working this is such a weird format i feel like people should be talkingback to me but they're they're kind of not thank you jennare there any films coming out soon that you're excited for well star warsobviously i'm super into star wars and so i'm really hoping the new star warsmovie is good i really liked force awakens that comes out in december thenew star wars movie i'm probably gonna go see the new thor moviethis weekend which i think is like already out in the uk because people myuk friends have been telling me that they've seen it already and liked it soi'm excited to go see that um you know

i'm kind of not excited for the justiceleague movie because i think it's gonna be bad i'll probably see it anywayi mean wonder woman was really good but batman vs superman was really bad somaybe maybe i'm not super excited for that rashid asked if i've ever been tolondon the answer is yes i i went when i was a kid just very briefly but morerecently a couple years ago you guys had the world science fiction conventionworldcon in london and i came out for that which was great my editor at delrey kind of met up with me and and helped guide me around the city andhelped me not get killed at traffic crossings which is always a difficultyfor americans and then i sort of had a

mix between sort of london touristystuff and you know the con which was out of the excel centre that was a ton offun that's probably worldcon is in different cities all over the place thatone but the two that i've been to that have been outside the us which are thatone and this year's which was in finland have probably been my favourites toattend so i like those a lot but yeah london was i was a ton of fun and iwould love to come back tom says how did you first get published umi had as a book with a small press which i just you know i have i had a book imean now it's probably a website i mean i know it's a website actually um calledwriter's market but back in the day in

2003 it was just a book like a big thickbook of and it's like a list of agents and publishers and so i went through andi made a list of all the people who i thought would like my book and then isent them queries which is like a letter plus some sample pages they have like arequirements that say here this is what to send usand one of them said oh we want to publish your book and that was great umyou know it didn't didn't pay very well because it was a small press but it youknow we've got my book on bookstore shelves which was kind of exciting andthen when i you know that was around 2004 2005 and then i put that on holdfor a while and then after i moved out

here to seattle i kind of got back intoit and so then i needed a literary agentbecause you basically need a literary agent to sell to the big five publisherswhich is in the us uh all the big publishers are in new york so it's thenew york publishers and so i did basically the same thing although now ofcourse it's on the internet so i went to a website called agentquery.com andthey have just a list of all the agents and i made a list of about 50 that ithought might like my work and i sent them all queries and i think of thefifty maybe two of them liked me but it's only takes one so i got my agentwhose name is seth fishman and he's

amazing and he sold the book almostimmediately and that that's how i kind of got started um let's see what does myfamily think of my writing they're actually super pleased with it likeeveryone has been very supportive and encouraging which is great i have kindof a my family has a history of like like weird career choices and pursuitslike my dad for example was has been in his life a math teacher a opera singerhe sang at city opera new york and then a computer programmer and then a bankexecutive and so you know going from computer programming to creative writingis like small potatoes by by comparison and so they've all been super good aboutit and yeah i you know it's been great

um let's seetea or coffee i hate coffee so it's got to be tea i'm not really a huge teaperson i honestly it's mostly like diet coke ican't i can't lie that's where i get my caffeine these days pineapple on pizzaoh no wait sorry poe or lovecraft i would say if we're talking about theactual work i would say poe like i love especially the poetry like the raven isamazing lovecraft has created this universe that has produced a ton of coolstuff there's all kinds of great love crafty and stuff like charlie strassewrites the laundry files which are these

great sort of spy lovecraft books whichare just wonderful i recommend but like actual hp lovecraft is pretty hard toread and also like super racist and sexist which makes it a little awkwardnow so i'd say i love the lovecraft universebut i honestly can't recommend actually going at it reading hp lovecraft umpineapple on pizza yes or no nooo for me i like basically meat on pizza so ifwe have like pepperoni and bacon that'd be my pizza or actually the pizzaplace near me does a ricotta and meatball pizza which is amazing had thatyesterday um i like to read economics which school do i favor eg chicago keynesianto austrian if i had to pick a

descriptor for myself it would probablybe something like neo-keynesian i mean the the sort of traditional keynesianeconomics ran into some road blocks in the 70s and chicago school kind of got alot of credibility for a while but i feel like a lot of that credibility isthen pretty much blown away by recent history and in the meantime the keynesian's have kind of you know amended their theory to deal with like newevidence which a lot of the economists on on the more conservative side havenot really been very good at and so they're definitely the most convincingbunch these days let's see best harry potter book and best harry potter filmactually i think the best harry potter

book is the first one i reread all theharry potter books when the seventh book came out because i was like i gotta rereadit's been a while um and i really feel like the the first one has the bestwriting um you know it's hard because later on of course we care about thecharacters more but like you know i always felt a little bad for jk rowlingbecause she you know i mean obviously who can feel bad for jk rowling but likeshe she worked amazingly hard on that first harry potter book and put in youknow it's clear in the prose and i feel like later in the series it just startsto feel a little rushed and it's hard you know i think of her you know imagineher typing away and then standing behind

her as an editor with a huge bag ofmoney saying you done yet are you done yet how about now you know it'ssomething i wonder about you know when you get really successful there's alwaysthis this you know all the pressure gets hard so i really like the first onemovie wise they definitely get better as it goes on probably the fourth movie isthe best i think but you know it goes it goes a little better what do you thinkmakes a good story um that's a little vague i mean basically good charactersand conflict are the things that make a good storymy particular bugbear is agency i like to have i like to have my characters bedriving a story rather than be subject

to it but their decisions need to be thethings that actually make the story move forward it's really easy to do a storywhere things just kind of happen to a character rather than having themactually you know make the choices especially in fantasy where there'salways like prophecy and destiny and sometimes it's like oh as this characterjust kind of along for the ride so i try to avoid that that's like my thing without going too political do you like trump think he is horrific or somewherebetween i think he's horrific that's a pretty widespread opinion inthe places where i live i live in seattle it's like a super liberal townso that's not a controversial opinion

around here but no and you know i don'tthink of myself as like particularly left-wing but like i feel like thingshave gone a little crazy here do you think the fantasy genre has shifted withthe development of technology and if so is this a positive thing i feel like alot of fantasy dystopian books have similar storylines sometimes i meanthings obviously change with technology i mean the relationship between fantasyand science fiction changes science fiction in the 60s was this sort of likebig optimistic you know star trekkie thing because it kind of felt like thatmight actually happen like we're gonna go out and colonize the universe andnow it feels like oh no that's not

realistic and so science fiction is kindof like it's more like neuromancer and cyberpunk and biotechnology and all thiskind of like weird disturbing stuff which is it like a different kind offiction and so like fantasy in reaction to that like obviously modern technologydoesn't play into most fantasy but it changes the big change in fantasy thoughi feel like fantasy lived in the shadow of tolkien for like a really long timeand you know i don't want to disrespect tolkien but like people were justbasically copying his stuff for like decades and we are finally getting tothe point where people like oh you know you can have a fantasy that's not set inmedieval europe in the 12th century or

whatever you know it doesn't have to beknights and castles it can be other things it can be i mean my fantasy hassort of muskets and sort of napoleonic war stuff in it but it's it's not somuch that specifically but that it can be set in other times in places oranalogies to other times in places so there could be roman empire there couldbe you know ancient mongol there could be you know muskets there can be worldwar one there can be whatever you want you know all that you have all historyto draw from and so i think we're seeing a lot of new fantasy books that are alittle less in the kind of standard mold which is which is a goodthing for me i really like this

obviously jennifer asks what advicewould i give to students who want to be writers but have lost motivation that'stough because motivation is is really hard i mean you have to connect withwhat made you enjoy this in the first place i would say the key is that youhave to enjoy it you know nobody goes into writing to get rich because if youdo it's a real bad plan if you want to get rich go be a merchant banker orsomething very few writers actually make any money and and almost nobody getsrich and famous you should do it because you like itand it's it helps to have a realistic plan you know don't think i'm just gonnapublish my novel and then i'm just gonna

like live the glamorous life of anovelist because first of all it's not all that glamorous and second of allit's hard you know it took me 10 12 years to get to the point where i couldbe a full-time novelist and and that's lucky you know i'm lucky to be there soi would say you know be realistic about your life plan and try to find you knowa day job that's not gonna you know break your soul something that you canmake a living at and that'll uh and then but that also lets you write like youknow i at one point i thought i wanted to be a computer game person so i wasgoing to go into game design but then when i realized writing was reallyimportant to me the problem with

computer game design is it often peoplework really long hours and i wouldn't have time to have a writing career andbe a game designer and so i you know i went to work for microsoft in a prettystaid industry part of that that industry microsoft is huge and has amillion different parts because it meant that i could go home at five o'clock andyou know i had time to do the writing i needed to do and you know so you maketrade off like that but like getting a plan and having it be realisticalways helped me kind of maintain my motivation because then it's everythingfeels a little more achievable neil asked would you narrate your own audio book and do youlike audible.com i love audible.com

i wouldn't narrate my own book because ii'm not actually a great reader i tend to like skip words and fumble things ihave a lot of respect for people who are good readers so but all my books areavailable on audio i love that they are i love the readings that people do i getto talk to the narrator's what it is always super fun and they ask questionsand i have to tell them how to pronounce all the ridiculous names that i made upbut and i love audible i i go through a lot of audiobooks i paint miniatureslike sort of games workshop style miniatures and i always have an audiobook long while i'm painting so i go through a lot of books that way orexercising or driving blah blah blah so

between that and podcasts that keeps mepretty busy kindle versus paperback it's hardbecause like i'm a pretty techy guy but like i still do paperbacks um you know istill like just carrying around a regular book partly i know it'ssomething about the screen it doesn't quite work for me excuse me if itraveled more i would be more of a kindle guy because man is it a pain to have to haul around five or six books if you're going to be somewherefor a long time but when it's just me here in the house it's mostly hardcopybooks have i ever read any bizarro fiction probably i read um i mean i readthe book of fight club and some other

chuck i don't know how to pronounce hislast name palahniuk books i've read chinamieville books can be often thought of as asbizarre oh i guess so yeah i like some of that stuff it can be a little weirdlike sometimes you get beyond having a point and get intokind of like look how weird i am and that's not as interesting but like chinamieville for example it always feels like he has he has a point that he'strying to make so i really like i really like his books how regularly do you readjust for pleasure or not your own i never read my own books like afterthey're published like because like i

always find something i want to changeand then i couldn't change it i read all the time is the answer every dayi go through a book maybe every three or four days probablyi read fast you know i always have and they're always sending me books so ihave a big stack of books to get through and then i have audiobooks and all thatstuff so the answer is constantly about i don't know probably 75% fictionscience fiction or fantasy and then 25% nonfiction usually history or economicsor something like that favorite book quote and why i don't know howmany quotes i could do off the top of my head it would probably have to besomething from terry pratchett probably

something from death in terry pratchetthe has so many so many good bits there's a whole conversation i'm i don't know ifi can quote it verbatim but in in sorcery where death is talking to thesorcerer and he just has all these wonderful snappy comebacks the sorcererasked what would humans be without love and death says rare which is i just lovehis writing is so clever all right looks like we're wrapping up so maybe lastround of questions which is good because my voice is going and i need to go get somelunch you guys probably know is it dinner time over there or supper time whatever you call it i it's funny looking at the copies of my books thatcome out in the uk because they have to

have someone go through and change allthe spellings so you know the price of valor turns into the price of valour witha u lunch today is probably ramen there's agreat ramen place i love to go to i love ramen i'm a big i have like ajapanese culture interest so i watch a lot of anime and i study japanese inschool and i love japanese food and other things so today feels like a ramenday yes as a student as a student i ate a lot of very cheap food let cheap ramenthe classic food for college students here in the us at least is like the bulkpacks of top ramen which you can get for about 4 cents each and so we'd go out tothe the the bulk store and and load up

and then come back and that would beanother month of food i haven't eaten mac and cheese jenn asked if i still readthe instructions on the mac and cheese boxi haven't eaten mac and cheese in years at least not like the box kind i mayhave eaten it at restaurants these days like at home i eat like sandwichesbasically that's like is boring but like i just you know i need something that'squick and easy for the most part unless we're cooking like actual food but likeif it's just me making food then it's like i've got turkey i've got cheese orget you know condiments i make the sandwich

all right well i feel like we've run outof questions and we're about at the right end of time jenn shall we call thata day what's what's the worst book i've ever readi don't think i can answer that question someone might be mad at meno i first of all there's a lot of really bad books but but no i try youknow authors we had there's like a sort of certain freemasonry among authors yourun into people at cons and stuff and so you don't you know you just don't talkbad stuff about other people everyone tries to stay nice we're all in ittogether okay last question can writing feel lonely if you're working from homeso much the answer is yes my girlfriend

lives with me now which is great but shedidn't when i started um i have cats i have two cats here and they keep mecompany but when i quit i told my friends you know if you come over to myhouse and i've acquired like another hundred cats and i become the crazy catguy maybe you should stage an interventionor something so i try to go out and meet people for lunch that's like my myremaining social and not becoming a crazy recluse all right guys this hasbeen super awesome and thank you so much for having me and thank you for all thegreat questions and i hope i wasn't like too awkward i am going to click thebutton to log off this but um thanks

again to campus society and jenn forhaving me oh if you are looking to get in touchwith me um i am @djangowexler on twitter just like my name probably thebest way to get in touch with me or if you go to djangowexler.comit's my website and it's got links to all my books and places you can buy themand excerpts and all that kind of stuff so i hope you guys check that out andenjoy and you know feel free to if you have any questions that you missed feelfree to there's a contact on my website or you can send it to me on twitter andi will definitely get back to you alright i'm going to click the buttonand log off

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