You now you've made money and you're rich, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that that idea still persists.

Um, I, I got an MFA in fiction from the university of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Um, and I remember I had a classmate who kept saying to me like, oh, I need to, I need to sell my book so I can make some money and do, and I was like, man, if that's what you're banking on you know i think it is really hard now to earn a living and a career on just writing you know most writers i know have a day job whether they're teaching or working communications or or doing whatever um yeah i think that is a misconception very few people get the big advances um and even then you know you think about say you got a six-figure advance from one of the big houses uh that's typically for i don't know four or five six seven eight nine ten years of work so if you're if you're you know uh looking at it over that span um so i guess the takeaway is you really have to love what you're doing because the tangible rewards if they are there um are pretty fleeting um so we talk about that a lot on the podcast um The good news is I think most writers enjoy what they do.

It just means you might have to find some more intrinsic motivation for what you're doing.

I

Well, Jeff, as a writer yourself, like what's your relationship with the Wisconsin Book Festival and knowing your podcast is so locally focused on Wisconsin writers?

Well, I love the book festival so much.

I think for writers in Wisconsin, it is like Christmas and Fourth of July and the Super Bowl all roll into one.

You know, it's one of the few places you can go where writers sort of feel like celebrities and you're among your people all weekend.

And so, yeah, I've been going to the festival for as long as I've been in Madison.

I serve as a volunteer ambassador for the festival, which just means I help spread the word.

This year, I I'm always happy to do the task.

What's on deck for this season?

But can you talk about how is the warming waters affecting those fish, like our classics?

Sure, yeah.

So it's really, you think about climate change, you think about warm water, you think about summer, it's really about the winter.

So like something that's happening is ice is happening later in the season.

And then it's what we call de-ice is coming, yeah, earlier in the new year.

And so that's really screwing up spawning patterns and survival rates of fish like perch, which...

Granted, the Lake Michigan perch fishery has been in decline for decades now.

Can you share a little bit more about the economic impact of these shifts that you observed? And also, are other people even noticing? Like you notice, like, is this something like, hey, fish fry is changing? You know, is this something other people are talking about? I know, like you said, this is an invitation, but will this impact fish fry? You're saying it won't go away, but yeah.