John David Mann, best selling author of The Go-Giver and co-author of the Chief Finn thrillers, sat down last week to discuss writing fiction from inspiration to publication, the locus of meaning in author and reader, the relationship of music and fiction (JDM is an accomplished cellist and composer), and his favorite writers, to include the best book he’s read that few of his friends have heard of.
It’s a wide-ranging conversation between a new novelist and an accomplished mentor to writers about the craft and experience of imaginative fiction. I highly recommend it.
You can get a free subscription to ‘Teller Talks’ at its Substack home site and sign up for the monthly muse-letter that Mann sends out about writing and writers (‘Mann’s Search for Meaning’ — the profiles of writers he adds as an addendum being both a challenge and a delight without fail). I’m very much looking forward to Zossima’s next interview and hope you will be part of the audience as well!
Having just finished the month-long Lake and Shed celebration of J. K. Rowling’s opera omnia, my dominant feeling is one of pride. Recording somewhat over 31 hours of video, mastering (or at least becoming competent) in video editing for the intro and getting to grips with the technicalities of rendering and uploading the content to Substack and You Tube, all within a month, was a challenge that I wasn’t sure I could pull off. Twenty-five episodes were dedicated to individual works of Rowling, and in each episode only a single example of lake inspiration or shed artistry was explored. The mine is so rich that we could easily produce another hundred and twenty-five episodes and still not exhaust what J. K. Rowling has achieved.
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