So tell us a little bit about second person, please.

Yes.

Okay.

So I love using the second person and that is just a character quirk of mine because I hate writing the first person.

I love writing the second person, but I try to keep the second person to places where it makes sense because the second person in my opinion is such a weird point of view that unless you are using it for specific deliberate purpose you are just going to alienate the reader that being said if your desire is to create a sort of like alienated intimacy and you want to create that strangeness it works incredibly well so that's why I used it for a lot of the sections of sublimation because In sublimation, every single time that a instance, quote-unquote, like one of the split selves is talking, it's from the second person, as if it is...

As if things are very strange, and as if it is a memory that the completed person is viewing later.

Meanwhile, a person who has been reintegrated is from the third person, because I wanted that from the reader's perspective to read much more cleanly.

Um, What can you tell me about your routine? How is that? How do you approach writing in your day to day?

I think for you as someone who really did go through that pipeline, what were your thoughts on building your career through short stories, and did you find any advantages or even disadvantages from that?

Okay, so I'm gonna speak to the audience first and say you do not need to write short stories to get published with a book or to do self-publishing or to do trad pub or anything.

Short stories are at this point in history an optional digression.

Um, they are often...

They can be a digression that has benefits, but it is really, don't feel like you need to do this because you have to.

Do it because you want to.

The chances of anything positive coming out of it if you don't want to do it are s- slimmer than you'd expect, and like, like it's the same with all writing.

So if you're an author who has a story ready to go or you see a call go up for a specific type of story from a magazine or an outlet or something, how do you actually go about selling those short stories? Do you need an agent, or can you really do this on your own reliably?

So can you tell us a little bit more about how the book got picked up and how authors can navigate a situation like that where they might have multiple bids from multiple publishers on the table?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, um-Okay, so context for how this book got picked up is that basically a couple of years ago now, I went, like, I wanna say, I would call a science fiction viral for a short story called Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole? And if you haven't read that, go read Ursula K.

Le Guin's, um, the ones who walk away from Omelas first and then read this.

But that went science fiction viral.

But can you describe these characters a little bit more and, and talk about their splits essentially? Like, what kinds of tensions can arise with these different characters in their particular circumstances?

I'm just kidding.

Like, the, the central tenet of, like, effective altruism is basically, um, you should do as much good as possible in the most effective manner, and, like, sometimes that is, like, earning to give, where you make a bunch of money and donate it, or, um, and rationalists are very much like, um, how should I say this? My read of them as somebody who has observed their practices since I was 14 is that they love to, um, invent philosophy from first principles, and they want to have a perfectly objective view of reality.

Um, this c- all of this kind of merges together into s- a sort of like, um, quasi-religious sort of, like, group-like thing, which, um, has, um, created both, um, OpenAI and also, like, the Zizians and the murders related to the Zizians.

Um, I'm not gonna explain that one.

And then I-

Yes

... and so this was bait for me specifically because every chapter was truly about some dude who, like, like, some parcel of, like, um, the, the movement that goes from, like, the extropians to, like, you know, the current, like, rationalist movement, and the guys surrounding this that me and Amanda have talked about, and who suck, and we know they suck, and we know too much about them, and describing what they've done, and then my blood pressure is rising, and then you kind of just, like, puncture the balloon and go like, "Here's why they're wrong," and it's like, "Oh, thank God."