Beth Barany is a science-fiction and fantasy writer as well as a writing coach and non-fiction writer. We have a fun chat today about here winding path to success, niching down as a writing coach and more. Want to find out more about Beth? Go here. (http://bethbarany.com/) Want to listen to her podcast? Go here. (https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012061)
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Find out more about Kat at katcaldwell.com. And get the transcript at pencilsandlipstick.com
TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE:
Kat
Hello everyone. Welcome back to Pencils and Lipstick. I was just talking with my guest Beth, and I believe this was episode 152. My guest today is Beth Barany. Did I get that right or not?
Beth
Barany.
Kat
Barany. Dang it. Hi, Beth. How are you?
Beth
Hi, Kat. Thank you for having me.
Kat
Thanks for coming on. You have a ton of things that you do. You’re an award winning novelist, a master neuro-linguist, programming practitioner, which I think we have to talk about that. You have a podcast, as well. You coach, you teach fiction. So before we get into all that, would you tell us just a little bit about where you’re from, a little bit about Beth? Who are you?
Beth
Sure. I grew up in Northern California, so the wine country, Sonoma specifically, and pretty much the family hopped around in different towns, inside of Sonoma. But I spent the bulk of my childhood in the outskirts of Sonoma, and I even rode my bicycle 5 miles into town, 5 miles back for middle school and for high school, a little bit.
Kat
That’s a long way.
Beth
It is a long ways. And by driving, what is that, like ten minutes or something? But for me, it was really a wonderful way to start my day. I didn’t know it so much then, but I was a kind of kid who grew up running around playing hide and seek with my siblings and neighbor friends, and love it. Climbing trees and riding my bike in the little subdivisions, they’re building behind our house. Running around in the vineyards, which you were not supposed to do. Eating wine grapes, which we were not supposed to do. And playing in ravines. I don’t know if you know Northern California. It can be a little dry up here, and we’re about 45 minutes to an hour inland from the ocean. There’s these incredible ravines, and as kids, the creek beds would be dry, and we would, like, run in them and pick blackberries and, kind of kind of a wild childhood.
Kat
Your childhood sounds wonderful.
Beth
Yeah, a lot of run around time. I really loved it. Of course, I also had my nose in a book ,a lot of the time. Loved libraries from, like, age seven, I think the librarian was so annoyed with me coming in, like, maybe every day. I don’t even remember. She’s like, come here, let me teach you how to use the card catalog.
Kat
Stop bothering me.
Beth
Stop bothering me. Stop asking me for stories about magic. Let me show you how to find them.
Kat
Were there a lot back then? Did you read them?
Beth
I probably read them all. I was reading a lot of folk tales, a lot of fairy tales. Yeah, I pretty much read through all of them. By the time I got to middle school, there were the kid’s stories about adventures and solving mysteries. I love those. And Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern was there. Thank God. Yes.
Kat
It helps you survive middle school.
Beth
Totally. That in all the amazing children’s books. I would walk to the local library, after school. It’s just, like, three blocks away. I would pull out of the picture-book section, like, five books at random. I would sit on this amazingly plush, blue couch, read those children’s books, and, like, kind of relax, decompress. And then I would go and find a table, and I would do my homework.
Kat
Nice. I like this, I like that. I remember reading all the books that I was interested in, in my grandfather’s library, and that I didn’t know what to do anymore. Already read all of these books?
Beth
Yeah.
Kat
So I started reading biographies of 1930s Hollywood stars.
Beth
Wow, that’s so interesting.
Kat
My grandfather was all like, Well, I don’t know. You can’t read what I read because it has sex in it. So I was like, okay, these mysteries are not for you. So I don’t know. So the biographies of the Hollywood stars were not exactly PG-rated. Not that he knew that, though.
Beth
That is hilarious. I started reading Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. The selection for kids was limited. It wasn’t yet, this is now, we’re in the early 80s, no YA section yet. So I jumped to the adult science fiction and fantasy and a lot of it didn’t speak to me. But I did find Isaac Asimov’s short story collections, which were amazing. And for some reason, at 13, I decided I should read Les Misérables. I don’t know where this idea came from. And I’m sitting there at my little desk at home. I have Les Misérables, which is like four inches thick, and then I have a dictionary, which is also four inches thick, and they’re side by side. So that’s the only way I could get through that book. And I did it. I felt proud of myself. I learned the word physiognomy, I remember that. I love me some words. And I was writing, I was very studious. I had a little list of vocabulary.
Kat
Look at you. Did you, like, want to be a translator or did you want to be a writer already at that point?
Beth
Yeah, I want to be a writer from about age seven or eight. Yeah. And I remember writing a story about our cats, with my brother, who’s a little over a year younger than me. And then I have two younger siblings that I grew up with. And I remember writing it and illustrating it with him. And then I remember hand sewing the binding. Because a finished product was very important to me and obviously still is, but, yeah, I can’t find it. I’ve never found it again. But my dad did give me this cute little square book that I made with my younger siblings. So my first anthology, and you can tell that we’ve all scribbled and drawn in it. And it was to my dad for his birthday. And it’s stapled. The binding is stapled. And he gave that to me some years ago, and I have it on my shelf. I’m like, oh, my first anthology, because I’ve done a few anthologies as an adult.
Kat
I love that. That is awesome. So you decided, I mean, you wanted to be a writer. Was that something that you pursued actively once you got into college?
Beth
No, I mean, it’s still hard at that point.
Kat
Right. Young people today have no idea.
Beth
Okay. So I have artists in the family, and my great-grandmother was a writer. And I knew this.
Kat
She was published?
Beth
Yeah, she was born in 1900s when I’m a kid. She’s like in her 70s. And she’s been rediscovered by the feminist movement by then, or I should say discovered. But she’s been writing about women and people who are workers, and she was a communist, and she was very much about the earth and corn and the feminine experience from a very earthy perspective. So we all knew she was a writer, and she was admired by everybody in our family. And my mother really admired her. It was my mother’s mother’s mother, my mother’s grandmother. And so my mom could give me a little bit of advice from great-grandma. And I knew great-grandma was a writer. She wrote children’s books, also. Like she has one biopic about Abraham Lincoln, one by about Nancy Hanks, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan. So I was like, I want to be a writer, like great-grandma. But I didn’t pursue it in college because I knew from about teenager time. I loved popular fiction. I loved science fiction and fantasy. And school was all about the classics. And I was not into the classics. I read them for school. But I didn’t want to pursue an English degree cause it felt very much like, oh, I’m going to just tear apart manuscripts, books. I’m going to tear them apart. I’m going to critique them.
Kat
And pretend I could have done it better, I guess.
Beth
I don’t even know. And I’m going to lose my love of writing and reading. Mostly my love of reading. So I ended up taking, like, a rhetoric class, which actually was a really good move, I realized later on. And I ended up being an interdisciplinary major at UC Berkeley. And I also ended up dropping out of school, moving to Paris, coming back, finishing, but not quite.
Kat
As a writer should.
Beth
Yeah, that’s right. And actually in Paris is where my writing career started, because I was taking care of a little boy, and I tried to get published, like, five times. I sent in a query letter, like five times to this free English newspaper, called the Paris Free Voice, and nothing came back. They didn’t even send me a rejection letter. They just didn’t reply.
Kat
Straight up, ignored you.
Beth
Just ignored me. And then finally my job circumstances changed, and I was able to walk into the editor’s office. Hi, I’m Beth, and I want to write for you. So I was thinking, what about this idea? And I just pitched him to his face, and I could see his expression, and he was like he didn’t seem that impressed. I’m like, Well, I’m poor. I don’t have a lot of money, but I love going to exhibits. What if I did a little write-up of a free exhibit? And I think there was like a Walt Whitman exhibit in the center of town, that was free.And he’s like, sure, go. It’s like, finally to get me out of his office. Yeah, if you wanted that badly, go. And so I did. I probably wrote, like, 300 words and sent it to him, walked it in, and he’s, like, rewrite. He marked it up right there. He’s handed it back to me. So I went back to my little Garrett room and I rewrote the thing, turned it in, and that was, like, really painful, but super instructive. And that was my first pipeline, and I was hooked.
Kat
That’s awesome. I mean, the audacity of youth, right? Like, well, if they’re not going to answer me, just walk in and at 40, you might not do that, but at 20 you might do that.
Beth
You might do that. Although I’ve learned that I have a skill, looking back, you’re like, oh, what worked, what didn’t work. What works is when I meet someone and I can talk to them, just like we’re doing now, you know, like, that is a strength of mine. That’s a joy of mine. I like talking to people. I like meeting them, and I can meet people very easily. And that’s how I get things done. Yes, that human connection. And I know now that that’s really the way to get anything done, for me. That’s what works well, as a writer, as an entrepreneur.
Kat
Yeah, I mean, there’s something to that, because when we’re texting back and forth, I mean, just you and I, when we’re trying to schedule this time. Wait a minute, because I said move up, I think wait, move back. If you could just do that in five minutes on the phone or in front of somebody, you can understand these misunderstandings. I think we use emojis just to make sure people know, I’m happy with you, because you never know how to interpret different. It’s a real crutch to just be on text. Like you said, you could see his reaction and be able to pitch something else right there, whereas an email would be like, no.
Beth
I mean, this is like, 1990, and I’m sending him a letter, through the mail with every pitch. Well, that was taking months. And so, yeah, I could run through multiple pitches, right there and see his reaction, and it would be hard for someone to kick me out of the office. You know, here I am, I’m wanting to write for you, you know, fill some space in your free magazine.
Kat
Yeah. And he can see how much you want it. Is this kid going to actually show up? She might actually show up. Okay.
Beth
Yeah. Proof is in the pudding. Yeah.
Kat
That’s awesome. So after that, were you hooked on magazines for a while, like, writing for that, sort of, media?
Beth
Not really. It was actually like it was a monthly gosh, I guess it came out in paper. It was a very cheaply made little thing. When I came back to the States, I took a journalism class. I wrote a few pieces for the class itself, and then I worked for a monthly newspaper in Berkeley, the Berkeley Psychic Institute’s paper. And I actually, because of my arrangement with them, I was there every week, and I started learning from the ground up. And that was great. And my boss, who was my age, but had gone to journalism school, she’s the editor, and she trained me. She’s like, here’s the editing marks and go, you know? Oh, you want to do some writing? Okay, start with 500-word book reviews. Okay. Are you ready to write a longer piece? Okay, now do a 1000-word piece, now do a 2000-word piece. So I got a little bit of mentoring from her, which was fabulous. And eventually I got to be an assistant editor there and manage eight pages of that monthly newspaper. A very specific section, with a specific mandate, and I got to wrangle the whole thing and get other writers writing for me. Yeah, it was great. So I learned hands on, I got that experience. And then when I finished school, I did a little bit of freelancing for a few local publications, but I also had started writing fiction. And I hit a crossroads because a few things happened. One, I didn’t get into journalism school, and I’m like, let me get a Masters in journalism. And I didn’t get into journalism school. And that was a big blow to my ego, and it made me reconsider what I really, really, really, really wanted, which is truly the right fiction. I had been dabbling ongoingly since I was about 18-19, but never super seriously. It always felt like very far away, some big dreams, some way up there, above the cloud line.
Kat
Yeah, it’s still really hard back then.
Beth
Yeah. I mean, even now, I notice. I mentor young people. And even though the internet exists, it is not easy for people to find the right information for them at their level, at their skill set. They still need mentors, they still need teachers, which is partly why I’m in business as a teacher and a coach. People want to have tailored support, because the World Wide Web is quite vast and very confusing, especially at the beginning stages.
Kat
And nothing ever expires. I love it when you come across the article that’s going to answer your question. You’re like, 2017, who is like 100 years old in internet years? It can be completely worthless. What’s Amazon doing now? Well, I need like yesterday’s news.
Beth
I mean, there’s some evergreen stuff, and I focus on that in my teaching. It’s all the evergreen, craft-oriented things. Yes, it’s hard to keep up with all those changes. And that’s why I always tell all my students and clients, like, join a writing organization of some kind. Be in community. Everyone is passing news around inside the community, right? Oh, did you hear? Amazon made this change. Duh duh. Oh, Instagram made this change. Oh, wow, the authors union just fought and got for this thing. Or, oh, check out what this is going on in copyright law or whatever. Like, we’re all passing it around and that’s great. And then that’s how you stay up to date. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Join a writing community, an organization association, in your genre or in your region. And it’s multiple. I belong to several organizations, so that I can hear the news from different perspectives. And some organizations are better at keeping up. Like, if you write romance, at all in, any form adjacent or direct, join a romance writing community.
Kat
They know everything.
Beth
They know everything. They are up to date. I’ve been part of the romance writing community for quite some time, almost 20 years now. They know the news first. They’ll tell you the news first.
Kat
Yes. Even if you don’t write their genre, you just go to them, what are we doing?
Beth
That’s right. What’s going on?
Kat
What are you all doing? Yeah, what’s going on? Is that what you did? Did you join a writers group, when you really became sort of serious? I mean this is the 90s, so did you decide, I’m going to see if I can be a writer full-time right away, or are you still working?
Beth
Yeah, I’m still working. I had a part-time job in an office in downtown Oakland and was like, bing, I am serious about being a fiction writer. OK, now what?
Kat
What does that mean?
Beth
Yes. Well, I asked myself, so now what? I’m like, well, Beth, you learn really well in groups. You have been a good student your whole entire life, and you love learning from your peers. So I went to the local library, pre-internet. I went to a bulletin board, a real bulletin board, not an internet bullet board. And I found an announcement in there on the bulletin board looking for members for a critique group. So I joined a critique group. Actually, right before I joined that critique group. First, I found a group that just would get together at the local cafe and write. They’re like, hey, choose a prompt. Let’s go writing, time to writing. And that was how I, sort of, stumbled on and wrote something that I decided, well, this is going to be my first novel just for the experience of writing a novel. I knew about training wheels. I knew about like, it’s okay, I can write a piece of crap, but I want the experience of writing a novel. So I started there. I found the book. So here’s where books can be your mentors, too. I found the book, the Weekend Novelist.
Kat
I heard of this one.
Beth
Yeah. It is geared towards literary writing because he teaches you how to write a story using the 6 or 7 main plot points. I don’t even know if he uses the word plot points, but he has you brainstorming, and then he has you deciding the six main plot points, and then he has you starting to write content for them. And it is designed for people who have a day job, and want to work on the weekends. And it was perfect. That was my speed. That’s what I gave myself that. I started doing that. And then I realized, oh, I need feedback, because I knew, that’s how I would learn. I don’t know how I knew that, but you know, from all the years of schooling, right? You get feedback. You’re like, oh, okay, I can do that better. You need people to help guide you, people who are more experienced than you. So I joined this critique group in March of 1998, when I was just about turning 30. And it was great, it was great. People in there were 15-20 years older than me, more experienced writers. And the way they had it set up is that you are going to turn in pages, every time you met, which was twice a month, two writers were featured. So one writer got to have their 30 pages critiqued, and another writer got to have 15 pages critiqued.
Kat
That’s a lot!
Beth
Yep. That’s three chapters. Usually two to three chapters. And when I joined and I said, yes, I’d like to stay, they’re like, okay, this is how it works, in three months, it’ll be your turn. They have a little schedule. They gave me time. In three months, you’re going to turn in 30 pages. And at that time, someone would, like, drive them to different people’s houses because, again, pre-email as a thing for everyone. Somebody else would photocopy them. I didn’t even have to photograph them. I could just get them to the one person, and that person would photocopy them, drive them around the local area because they’re all local. And that is how everyone got their pages at first.
Kat
That’s amazing.
Beth
Yes. The things you do. And I remember when I was up, the very first time, I turned to my pages, and I come to the group, and one person starts. She says, Beth, your writing is really lovely, but you need to have conflict. I was like, what? I have to make bad things happen to my dear characters? Like, it was a personal affront, you know, that I had to do that. It was a great beginning, because I struggled with how to put conflict in my fiction for quite some time, I mean, years. It took me a good I don’t know, four or five years, actually. It took me about five years to figure that out.
Kat
It’s not that easy, because if you think of the books that we read in school and stuff, even there’s a couple of classics where there’s not a whole lot of conflict, because the protagonist is just telling you things that are going on. And so we leave school, I think, a lot of times, where we’re just like, so I guess that’s what a story is. We’re just going to tell you what’s happening to this person. I guess we could point out, like, modern movies or whatever, but that’s not where we got our formal education. Our formal education is like these kind of novels that don’t pertain to real books anymore.
Beth
Absolutely. 19th century language, 19th century storytelling styles, oh my god, dickens. I mean, I grew up reading Dickens and being enamored by his work and everyone holding him up.
Kat
Fitzgerald? It’s great to read The Great Gatsby, but it’s hard to point out the conflict of the actual protagonist. Like, OK. He’s talking about Tom and Daisy. Is that what it is? Somebody is going to get me for that? I think it’s that. He’s telling a story that doesn’t really happen to him. Nothing really affects him.
Beth
I mean, look at Moby Dick. The main character is not the narrator. So that’s a 19th century style storytelling.
Kat
Yes, it is.
Beth
Even the Dracula book, it’s telling a story of, oh, he’s going around Europe having experiences, but really he’s telling you a story about somebody else.
Kat
Right. He’s nice and safe. So I’m not surprised that we all struggle with this, like, bad things must happen to your protagonist, because now all of a sudden, we need to be in that closeup point of view. Right? That we call it something else. Deep point of view, and it doesn’t come easy.
Beth
No, it’s not instinctive. We don’t learn how to write fiction in school. Generally, unless you go to a really awesome creative school or you’re homeschooled. I teach my nephews how to do fiction, but I’m their auntie, having to teach them. I’m always creating stories with them. Yeah. Learning fiction was, like, harder than any of the other skill sets I had to learn in writing. And maybe it’s just because I hadn’t ever been taught. I’m pretty much self taught. I don’t have a degree. I just have a school of hard knocks. And I have the education of my peers really. I learned so much. So much. And I’m still in a critique group. I’m not in that same critique group, where in fact, I met my husband. He also joined that critique group. And we were buddies, we were critique partners for months before we ever started dating.
Kat
That’s a romance novel, right?
Beth
There it is. We joke about how the conflict lasted, like, 24 hours. It wasn’t a lot of conflict.
Kat
We’ll have to make more conflict. Somebody gets published and the other person doesn’t, that’s enough conflict.
Beth
There you go. We pace off of each other. Like, I was the first one to finish a novel. And then he’s like, oh, I want to do that too. Because when I met him, though, he had like 100 short stories written. He’s very prolific. Yeah, he’s a prolific, and he’s a singer songwriter, so he had like 200 songs written. He’s just insta-creative. It just pours out of him. And he had some really good early childhood training and reinforcement and awesome.
Kat
That’s cool, though.
Beth
As much as I had creative parents and creative background, I didn’t have any direct modeling. Like, I didn’t grow up around my great grandmother, so I didn’t see her sit down and write. I heard that she did that, but I didn’t see it. And my parents were busy supporting four kids and doing all that, and they didn’t have an artistic discipline, even though they were artistic, in so many ways. So learning even just how to sit down and write every day, I already had sort of an instinctive understanding about it, but it took me a long time to develop the skill set and the whole process, the whole ritual of it. Took a long time.
Kat
Did you start writing science fiction right away, or mysteries? Or is that a whole different person?
Beth
Fantasy first. Well, I should say my first novel, that experiment, that was historical fiction, which was just an arbitrary choice because I love Paris in, like, 1850s Paris. Why not? I love the city. I love that time period. It’s when the city was being redesigned, to be the modern city it is today. And then my husband wanted to travel when we started dating, he’s like, well, I might go on the Peace Corps, or we stay together, because if I go on the Peace Corps, we’re going to probably split up. But if we stay together, we have to go overseas, because I really need a life change. Oh, no, Mr. Bell. Because I already lived in Paris once, in Quebec, also when I was in high school. So I’m like, sign me up. So we went to Paris for two years. And all of that to say there was a reason I was saying that.
Kat
Oh, you chose historical fiction.
Beth
I chose historical fiction because I already was in love with Paris. So we get to Paris, I finished my novel, took me five years, this experiment. And right away I write, basically, a romantic adventure, time travel to the future. I write that when we get home in six weeks. The first one took me five years, the second one took me six weeks. And I discovered the Christopher. No, not Christopher. The Writer’s Journey. The book the Writer’s Journey, where he models the story process on top of the hero’s journey. I stumble on that. I use that as my guide, and I write this new manuscript in six weeks. But it was all over the place, and I had joined the Romance Writing Communities group, and it was so much fun. And I discovered a lot about myself through that process, but it didn’t quite gel. It was just like, it was a new experiment in writing fast, following my instincts, following the hero’s journey. And then when I was done with that, and realized I just couldn’t sell it. And it’s hard to edit, because I didn’t know what it was. It was a big light bulb after that, when I cast it out for my next book, I realized, oh, I love fantasy. I’ve been reading folktales and fairy tales since I was a kid. Remember those, magic? I know. I will pick up the story I wrote when I was 20. That was three pages long. That was the start of an adventure of a young, heroic woman called Henrietta the Dragon Slayer. I’d written three pages when I was 20, in this little writing class I took outside of UC Berkeley, at the Little Junior College. But I could not finish it. I had no idea what to do next at that time. Okay. Yeah. So now here I am. Fast forward. I’ve written two manuscripts. I understand now a lot of the story structure, the macro story structure. I also kind of start to understand conflict, a little bit more, because of the inherent part of what the hero’s journey is doing. And so I take those three pages of Henrietta the Dragon Slayer and I start and I write the novel. I can do it now. I’m, like, 35 by now. So 15 years fast forward. I can write it. And so that’s the first novel I ended up publishing. Took me about ten years to, like, learn how to polish it and everything. And I published that in 2011, January 2011.
Kat
Which one was that?
Beth
Henrietta the Dragon.
Kat
There she is.
Beth
There she is. And now I’m also working on the next batch of stories for her.
Kat
Did you know that it was going to be YA when you started writing?
Beth
No, I did not. I had to decide. I figured that out, made that decision in edits. And I had to really think about it and study it and, like, okay, she’s 17. She’s trying to figure out what to do with her life. I think we can put this in YA.
Kat
And that was, like, early 2000,
Beth
2011, I published it.
Kat
YA was really was that a stable genre at that point?
Beth
Yeah.
Kat
I think that’s awesome. I love that there is actual YA now, because when we were growing up, there was this okay for children to read. I don’t know. I read so many books that probably weren’t okay for children to read. The 80s parents were just like, hey, she’s reading. Yeah, whatever. So that’s awesome. So Henrietta the Dragon Slayer, was that the first? You didn’t ever end up publishing the other two?
Beth
No, no, the other two are published. Okay. Yeah. Second one is Henrietta and the Dragon Stone, and the third one is Henrietta and the Battle of the Horse Mesa.
Kat
Oh, the trilogy that one. But your first, like, your first historical fiction and your time traveling..
Beth
They’re over there. I lost part of the time travel story, which is too bad. But that story, it’ll get written eventually, because a lot of those elements I had a space station in that story. I had a time travel element that was based in science, because my husband is a high school physics teacher, and by then, within the first year of meeting him, he was, like, diving into physics as a hobby at first. Then eventually, he became a teacher. So we were talking about what could make time travel really happen if, you know, XYZ was true.
Kat
I feel like you guys have really interesting conversations.
Beth
We do. We’re either talking about science or story or publishing or editing or how to teach a certain concept. Yeah.
Kat
So you hit the publishing world, like, right when the Kindle was coming out, the ebooks were okay. Did you go traditional or did you go self?
Beth
I’ve been self the whole time.
Kat
What made me decide that?
Beth
Failure.
Kat
It’s too hard.
Beth
No. Never getting a bite. I mean, I queried hard. I queried Henrietta the Dragon Slayer hard. And I was getting rejections that were saying things like, this isn’t for us, but what else you got? Do you have any romance? So I was querying agents that represented abroad, romance, plus fantasy, plus this, plus that. Because I was in the romance writing community, and I was trying to write romance, and there are romantic elements in everything I write, and I didn’t know it at the time, but they were really saying, Beth you’re good enough, give us something we can sell. But I was married to my fantasy. I didn’t have romance shops yet.
Kat
But, that’s also hard, like, write something else. I got that advice. My husband actually served Orson Scott Card one night. I didn’t know who he was. I was 19 year old, and he’s like, I met this science fiction writer. You know, he’s Spanish so I’m trying to do his accent. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. So I told him a story about how, you know, I basically got scammed selling my manuscript to Publish America. I didn’t know what was happening. They sent me a contract that was all cool, whatever. His advice was, write another book. And I was like, dang it, I just want to sell this one. So it’s hard for them to be like, just write another book. Write a romance, please. But I mean, 2011, Harry Potter is huge. The vampire guy. What was those? What were those? Wolf. I’m going to slap myself and I can’t remember what it was. They were like this big trilogy of yes.
Beth
I don’t remember.
Kat
Anyway, they were big. Fantasy was, and kind of still is huge. That kind of surprises me that they weren’t looking for more fantasy.
Beth
Yeah, maybe. It’s a crowded marketplace. So I love NaNoRiMo National Novel Writing Month, and I used it at the beginning, and then I would start to deviate and just use it. Be a NaNo rebel. So November of 2010, I sent out a query letter every single day of November. Just made that NaNoRiMo. And so I started getting bites in January of 2011. But by then, I had decided to self publish, and I had published toward the end of the month. And then, like, in the beginning of February, I get a really lovely, like, oh, I would love to represent you. And I had to write her back and say, I am already published. Would you be willing to represent a self published author, because agents were experimenting. And she’s like, well, I already have one indie author. I don’t quite know how it’s going to go, sorry. And I’m like, all right. But I’m not that sad, actually, because this has been so fulfilling. And I already self published three nonfiction books by then, I think, like one anthology and my first How to Book the Writers of Edge Guide and my first ebook only Overcome Writer’s Blog. So I’ve had three publishing experiences through the indie process already. In the first anthology I did, I shepherd the whole thing. So, I love getting the books out in the world. As you can see from my early childhood experience, if I can’t sew the binding on the book that I want to be able to, or staple it.
Kat
Find Beth in the factory.
Beth
That’s right. I love POD because actually my first anthology was before PPD, and then when POD, print on demand came out, I was like, score. Oh, I love this. I can create a professional looking book that I don’t even have to ship and someone can buy it. As you can see some copies behind me, I have a little shelf over here of our books. And I love it. I love it so much.
Kat
Yeah. For anyone who doesn’t know that you used to have to buy a certain amount of books, 2000, printed, 2000 books and they would just be in your garage. And I remember asking my parents if they would help me do that and divorce started happening and all that stuff. And they were like, no, because 2000 books was a lot of books back then. I can’t even remember how many thousands of dollars it was to see. Imagine these days if you sort of mess up the formatting or something shifts, you can upload it right away and change it, no big deal. That was not how it was.
Beth
Oh, god, no. You had to make sure it was all the way you wanted it. Check and double check and triple check and quadruple check. Oh my god. Get a lot of pairs of eyes on things. Yes, fantasy. And then by the time I finished the third fantasy novel, I’m just looking on my shelf. It took me maybe that was about a ten year span, I can’t even remember. I lost track. And then something shifted and some of my critique partners challenged. I came up with a really fun, silly idea for a romance story. And then they said, well, why don’t we all write gargoyle romance stories? Yeah, exactly. Because I had traveled in France, I saw this amazing gargoyle sitting by itself on a church. And I was like, that is weird, right? Because usually gargoyles have the spout, and they’re on the edge, and they’re like perched, and they look a little menacing, but this one was like on a wall right next to a church, not looking menacing at all. I’m like, what’s the story? Because I love cathedrals. I love France. So my other two critique partners were like, let’s all write novellas. Beth, you’re going to write a novella? Because I hadn’t yet written a full romance story yet. And I was ready by then. And I did, and we created a little anthology. We each write different stories. And that became the first story of my little five touchstone story books, stories, novellas that are kind of related in these interesting ways the way romance does it. And I’ve even written a full length romance novel, which romantic suspense, which is unpublished, but it will come out at some point. Yeah. And then I was casting about for something to do in 2016. I’m like, should I continue with the romantic suspense, paranormal romantic suspense? Or I have this other idea, this like, space station investigator idea. I don’t know. And so we went on a road trip to a screenplay conference down in LA. Because I’m up here in the San Francisco area. We get there, I go to a talk by how to write the science fiction screenplay in. And he’s like, and I’m going to get you to pitch. So he teaches us the little pitch. Like when something happens, then bad thing. You know, that’s not exactly it. Kind of, right, when so and so has this situation, they are forced to do blah, blah, blah. So I take up the challenge because I always do and things like that. And I write something down and I raise my hand and I say it to him. And he’s like, oh, CSI in space. And he’s like, there’s your high concept. I’m like, thank you. Yes. And that was such a gelling moment, having to write the little pitch, getting that high concept from the teacher. I’m like, that’s going to be my next stories, batch of stories. And that was in 2016.
Kat
And that’s Janey McCallister.
Beth
Janey McCallister, space station investigator.
Kat
I love how you’re still putting your French, though. Bijou de Latois. You know, French will probably be the last one to die, just because they hold onto that language so much.
Beth
Very good point. Oh my god. Totally.
Kat
We will all be speaking it anyways.
Beth
That’s right. Maybe like a French-Spanish thing, because Spanish I’m using Spanish a lot in my stories, and French. I throw in some other words. I’ve had to look up things, because I have stories taking place on space stations. So there are these international, international casts of characters. And now in the book I’m working on now, which is book five, they’re in a place that has its own patois. So I’m totally mixing languages. And I haven’t quite figured out what the base language is going to be. But people are coming in from everywhere. So I have people speaking little words of different languages. And a lot of Spanish, because I think Spanish is an easy language to learn, and so it would make sense that it would be easily spread around, and it’s pretty fun.
Kat
How do people respond to you having other languages in your books?
Beth
Nobody said a darn thing.
Kat
Really?
Beth
Yeah.
Kat
Okay. So almost every single one of my books has other languages because I study linguistics. I love languages. I lived in France for a while, and I have two reviews and like, we get it, she speaks Spanish. Excuse me? She doesn’t just speak Spanish. She’s Argentinian. They’re all different nationalities. But I just find it funny, some Americans really struggle with it.
Beth
That’s so interesting. Yeah. I even hired a sensitivity reader or more of, like, an exchange, who is an immigrant from, I’m gonna get this wrong, but from a Latin American country, and she’s an immigrant lawyer in San Francisco, and she was very kind and pointing out some things that I could do better, including, don’t italicize your foreign words, at all. And so I didn’t and I always provide the translation in the thoughts of the character. Yeah. I made up a lot of words for my fantasy, but not heavily so, I don’t know. Nobody says anything. And maybe because it is like science fiction and fantasy, where people are expecting different words for things, I make up a lot of words for the tech I use.
Kat
You got to make it up. Sometimes just sit at the screen like, what are you doing? Trying to think of a word to name this thing.
Beth
Let me do some research.
Kat
My husband always makes fun of us English speakers because he’s like, what’s the name of this? And I was like, what does it do, honey? He’s like open cans. Can opener.
Beth
Good, right.
Kat
I figured out that we pretty much name it what it does.
Beth
What it does. We’re a very practical language. English is such, I don’t think English will die either. It’ll shift, I think. Oh, what’s your take on that? What do you think English is going to do?
Kat
Is it going to shift?
Beth
It’s already shifted.
Kat
There are tons of different Englishes in the world. I always pay attention to the new words that the Webster Dictionary puts in. I should have prepared for this, had I known we were going to go down this. But they put in some funny words this year. Some of them had to do with COVID, but some of them are just like, well, wasn’t that already a word? Dang it, I wish I could remember.
Beth
We’ll have to circle back. So by looking at the words that are being integrated into Websters, and I suppose we could also look at the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. What does that tell you about where we’re going? English-wise, language-wise, or do you assess it more from, like, a cultural perspective?
Kat
Well, American-wise, I think that we’re just going cultural-wise, but you’re right. American versus England versus France, it’s all very different. The French, they have a much more formal way to keep their language structured. Hold onto that.
Beth
Yeah, they’ve got their whole Académie Française.
Kat
Oh, my gosh. My kids went to one of their schools. We’re just like, did you study linguistics? Did you ever do any formal study? The linguistics community is like, language is alive and it will change. Yes. Janky is now a real word. Yeet. Yeet is now a real word.
Beth
How do you spell that?
Kat
Y-E-E-T, that’s the children, that’s the youngins.
Beth
I have not heard that one.
Kat
Because you don’t have a nine-year-old in the house.
Beth
I do not.
Kat
Ask your nephew.
Beth
My nephew is nine. I will ask you. Okay.
Kat
This is what caught me off guard. Cringe, how is that not a word yet?
Beth
Right. But maybe the way it’s used, did they add a definition?
Kat
Embarrassing, awkward.
Beth
Yes. That usage is different, I think.
Kat
Yeah, I think it’s a verb. Right? When we were kids, yeah. We actually cringe, and that is okay. Baller is now a word.
Beth
Okay.
Kat
Did you ever watch MacGyver?
Beth
I love the modern MacGyver, but not the old fashioned.
Kat
Okay. I watched it when I was growing up. MacGyver, is slang now to make, form, or repair something.
Beth
Well, you know that’s, of course.
Kat
MacGyver something.
Beth
We have been MacGyvering things ever since what? The 80s. It’s my dictionary. I do remember watching the show, vaguely. Nothing specific, but the concept, actually, I consider my heroine, she MacGyvers all the time. I love that aspect, cultural aspect.
Kat
Yeah. False negative and false positive are now in the dictionary.
Beth
Interesting. I mean, those are in usage, but I think they have very specific meanings now.
Kat
This is the one that I didn’t know, pumpkin spice.
Beth
What? What is that doing in the dictionary?
Kat
That’s not a word! It’s even two words. Okay. I don’t know why this has to be in the dictionary now. It’s like you take one word and you take another word anyway, and mojo. So mojo now means, what it is, is Spanish. That’s mojo. It’s a sauce marinade or seasoning. So mojo, you get your mojo back. Then this is mojo.
Beth
What does it mean?
Kat
But they don’t have the like, on their website. They don’t have the pronunciation. But just going from what it is, what the definition is.
Beth
What’s the usage now or what do they say the meaning is?
Kat
It says a sauce marinade. So it must be the Spanish one, more mojo. That’s not mojo. Mojo is like your groove, your confidence. I think, for writers, how do you spell mojo versus mojo? it’s spelt the same.
Beth
It’s spelt the same. Well, we have so many words in English like that, right?
Kat
Yeah. It’s just a usage. Yeah. You’re just going to have to figure it out from the sentence. That’s what people are talking about. I mean, America now has a lot of Spanish.
Beth
I grew up with Spanish. I grew up in wine country. I didn’t study linguistics, although I was almost an anthro major, but I did teach English to foreigners and I speak French fluently. So those two things combined have made me very aware, sort of, the mechanical aspects of English and the way it can be put together and taken apart. And I have to also say, I listen to French radio almost daily, and they are using a lot more English words in spoken French, than when I lived there in the 90s, even when I lived there in 2001.
Kat
Yeah, they are breaking down. Do you listen to the French radio or the French podcast?
Beth
French radio. I’m listening to France Inter, which is sponsored by the French government.
Kat
That is interesting.
Beth
And listening to comedians and listening to them talk about culture. The comedy is teaching me a lot. And of course they’re bringing in Arabic words, all the time, into their language and it is shifting. I wonder how the Académie Française is like, dealing with that.
Kat
Anyone who hasn’t lived in France is like what? They’re so proud of their language. I really think America and French, we have this sort of love-hate relationship and I think it’s because we so individually love our countries. We think we’re right, all the time. We come against each other and we’re like, no, we are right.
Beth
Cousins or siblings, I suppose. Yes.
Kat
As we should. Go ahead.
Beth
Well, I was going to ask you questions, but I wanted to know, from your linguistics background and perspective, as English changes as a writer. Because I’m finding myself teaching, writing to people who are coming from formal education or even business backgrounds, and then learning how to write fiction. It’s like they have to relearn that English is way more flexible than they think it is.
Kat
That’s true. Yeah. I mean, I really do believe that language is alive, and that we can only harness it for so long. I studied in California and then in Madison, Wisconsin, and there was a lot of work with Native American languages. They had to get to the point where they accepted that the language shifted a ton, you know, between the generations, because of them living in America, the kids learning English and just everything just almost became a whole different language. Right? And I assume that all of our languages will do that very soon. I just don’t think that we can hold on to our same language. I mean, I didn’t realize being an American, until I moved overseas at 19, that things like Moccasins and what is it that my husband all the jewish, the Yiddish words. People don’t know those. That’s part of our culture. The bar mitzvah.
Beth
So much of Yiddish from the Germanic, Eastern European Jews, which is my background, actually. My father grew up around that. Yeah, it’s just in the normal zeitgeist, there’s a German word.
Kat
Oh, there you go, like mazeltov. So remember when Black Eyed Peas had that song where they said mazeltov, and my husband, for the longest time that they were saying muscle top? I was like, that’s not, no, but he didn’t know what it meant because Spain kicked all the Jews out in the 1600s.
Beth
There you go. You missed out.
Kat
You missed out on the culture. Bye, guys. So, I mean, I think America’s always been more open to that, and I love seeing it in literature. I love it when people bring in their cultural, I guess, linguistics or their dialects and things. I personally love seeing that.
Beth
Yeah, I do, too, if I have.
Kat
To look it up and be like.
Beth
Wow, that’s so cool. Yeah. And I think as writers, if we can make it clear to the reader, then ignore the haters. Okay. Just ignore the haters.
Kat
Yeah. If people can write dialogue really well in an accent, that’s difficult. It’s very difficult to do it and not be like, too much for the reader. But I love trying to hear what people sounds like. That’s why I love audiobooks, too. I haven’t gotten my books out in audiobooks, but I love that it’s becoming a big job, where people who can do different accents, give me those people any day.
Beth
So talented.
Kat
It’s so talented. I heard one woman do a Welsh accent and then a British accent. I was like, oh, my god. I just geek out over that stuff. People are super talented. So when did you start you had nonfiction books up, where you already were you teaching people before you came out with fiction books? Like, how did you get into teaching? Were you just like, I learned how to do this, and I want to help you not have to go the way I did.
Beth
Well, I was helping writers before I realized it was a thing. Like, my friends were asking me for help on their papers when I was 19. And actually, when I was 19, I worked at the tutoring center, at UC Berkeley. And then, like I explained, my husband wanted to go overseas when we met, so we got married in 2000, and then we both got trained as English as foreign language teachers in one of those intensive four week programs where they throw you a little bit of theory, and then they literally put you in front of students by the end of week one. So you’re like, how do I teach these absolute beginners some thing in English? I mean, they taught you some very simple, very solid structural ways to get students practicing English even when they’re beginners. So there I was in the year before we traveled to France. I was teaching at Parttime at a school that taught English to foreigners. People are coming in for a week, a month, you know, a short stay. I’m teaching 16, 1820 year olds, 30 year olds who are here for the summer, a little intensive program to learn English, to polish their English, even to pass the TOEFL, which is what people have to take to go to universities here in the US.
Beth
So I was teaching all levels. So there I was, I was teaching. I was teaching beginners, intermediate, advanced. And at one point, the coordinator, she’s like, Beth, you have to teach short story writing to our advanced students. They’re fluent, they need something new. And I’m like, no, I can’t do it. And she’s like, Why not? You’re writing a novel. And I’m like, but I don’t have an English degree. And she’s like, who cares? You’re writing a novel. You can do it. And by then, I was on Henrietta the Dragon Slayer, I was on my third novel, and I was in it, and I was committed, and I was excited. I might have even started editing it by then. So I pulled all this awesome curriculum, some from that book, the Weekend Novelist, some that I had just created on my own that helped me, and I taught people how to write stories. That was my first. Yeah, it was so fun. And I would wrap little grammar lessons in there, like, we’re going to teach you how to do Future Perfect, right? Because that’s a very advanced grammar thing. Like what? Future perfect. So I could wrap it into the storytelling process, right? I’m going to teach you character development. All right, everyone open their pockets. I was inspired by Tim O’Brien’s the Things They Carried, which is a fabulous collection of short stories and a fabulous story itself. So that was a great way to illustrate characters, for example. And it’s still an exercise I use today, and it’s in my book, Plan Your Novel Like a Pro, because it’s just a fabulous exercise. So I started teaching then, and so I was, what was I, 30, 31, 32 years old? Yes, 31, I think. We go to France and on the side, so I get a regular job, because we’re allowed to work inside the system. But then I also started tutoring English to people there, mostly Chinese and Japanese people, not the French. I don’t really get along with the French, I just don’t. I can speak their language. I can appreciate their country.
Beth
They’re special.
Beth
I can appreciate their espresso. So then when I came back home, I had office jobs and stuff for a few years, but then I fell into creativity coaching, someone introduced us writers. A creativity coach came in to help people overcome their anxiety around pitching to agents. And then he’s like, oh, and by the way, I teach creativity coaching. Come be a guinea pig client, or you can join the training. So I first was a guinea pig client. Then I joined the training, and then I quit the office job. So I’m like, I realized I didn’t want to be supporting anyone else’s vision anymore. I wanted to be supporting my own. I wanted to be writing more. And I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I knew I was like, I want to be a teacher. But I also knew I never wanted to be inside of anybody’s organization. My husband was pursuing high school teaching. He’s now been teaching high school physics for years, for 16-17 years. And during that whole time, I’ve been running a business, teaching writers and coaching writers. So I love that. I love being outside, just making up my own things and helping people and traveling. I’ve taught overseas. I taught at conferences.
Kat
That’s cool. So before, the internet was like, we kind of forget. Like, there were forums before 2010, we had all those forums. Remember our first taste? Did you do local first?
Beth
I started local. I made a beautiful flyer. I paid a flyer service that would put it up from that end of town, from the town next door to my downtown here in Oakland. And that was like $120 or $150, whatever. And so I could announce I’m having a six-week class or whatever it was. I can’t even remember. It was in my living room, and I banned two of those.
Kat
And you just opened your doors to strangers. Very Californian.
Beth
I am very Californian. The first time I talk to them on the phone. I can vet, somebody who wants to write a book it’s not going to, and they’re paying you me not, to be some crazy person. It’s very super niche. And then after that, I started I think I started going to other, like, writing groups here. The Romance Writing Wommunity. The California Writers Club. Those are my new places where I would do a little free talk, little book fairs, conferences. I gave my first talk in 2006 or 2005, I can’t remember, at the Romance Writers of America in Washington, DC. And they picked my Talk Writer’s Adventure Guide. So I had to hustle and get that book done in 2006. That was my first big book. And then I started a group over the phone. I did teleconferencing as a teaching method, also before video teaching. And I started video teaching eight years ago. Yeah.
Kat
Skype?
Beth
No, I never used Skype.
Kat
You never used Skype?
Beth
No, I use Zoom, actually. I’ve been using Zoom for quite some years. Yeah.
Kat
Interesting.
Beth
I did use Google Meeting or something.
Kat
My first coaching call with a coach was over Skype, and it was interesting.
Beth
Yeah, I never used Skype. Let’s see, when did I start? I started the current version of the group. I have a group program for people who want to edit their manuscripts, and I started that on Zoom about seven years ago. I think. It’s hard to keep track. Yeah. And before that, I had an earlier version that was over the telephone. That was for fiction and nonfiction. So I specialized about seven or eight years ago into fiction and genre fiction. And now this year, just recently, because of my podcast and everything, I’m now specializing in science fiction and fantasy. Even more super niche.
Kat
Yeah. I think what this tells people, there’s still a lot of people out there. If you want to teach writing, there’s a lot of people who want to learn from you, right? You just sort of have to put yourself out there and start, and be okay with starting small, you know, coaching someone yesterday, like, just start in one little spot and then go bigger and bigger. I think because we have the world web, we think we have to go out into the universe.
Beth
No, you don’t have to. You don’t have to. And actually, that reminds me. I had a meet up, and I would meet at my local library, and I would run a meetup every month, and I did that for easily a year. I also joined a local networking community. As soon as I started my business, I knew I needed, again, a group, just like I did with writing. I joined a local networking group. That met every week. So I had a place to go and learn how to do the 30-second and the 60-second spiel. That was all new for me. And learn how to do networking and learn how to represent, how to talk about what I do. It’s not easy. And I was just talking to a colleague of mine, who interviewed me for her podcast. She’s up in, like, Nova Scotia or something, and she went into her local library, and she pitched them some ideas, and then she got a series of workshops, and that is how she’s starting her business, fabulously. I saw what she’s teaching us, looks awesome. I mean, who doesn’t want to be in a room, an actual room with a writing teacher and learn. Also, in the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s a lot of stuff. So, like, I went to this place called the Writing Salon, and this was before I had any published curriculum, anything out. And I asked to teach there, and they said, well, do you have a book, anything published? And I was like, no, but I’m a teacher. And they’re like, sorry. So I, like, volunteered, and I went to a class, but I didn’t have the cliche, or not cliche, cache. There we go. I didn’t have the cache. Yeah, I mean, now I could if I wanted to, right? So there’s other ways you can network with other teachers. You can, I mean, I’m mentoring folks now. So anybody has any questions, I’m happy to talk to them.
Kat
So now you do group coaching or do you do individual as well?
Beth
Yes.
Kat
Okay. But you’ve niched down to fantasy and science fiction?
Beth
Yes.
Kat
Is it niched even more, like Ya fantasy or fantasy romance, but it just has to have fantasy or science fiction elements?
Beth
Yeah, it’s kind of almost happened by default. 90% of the people I’ve been attracting have already been science fiction fantasy writers or urban fantasy, or one of my clients is writing an animal fantasy, all talking animals. Another is doing an epic fantasy. Another is doing like a mashup with thriller and suspense. I write mystery science fiction. So, I love mashups. Oh, bring it on, the stranger the better. If you don’t know what genre you’re writing that has elements of science fiction and fantasy, bring it to me. I’ll help you figure it out. I’ll help you hone it down. And to make it sing and be its unique thing, it’s becoming something new. Maybe you’re inventing a new genre. I love that.
Kat
Yes. I love that you say and admit that sometimes we can write things and we don’t really know what it is.
Beth
Not at all. Not at all. I mean, I didn’t know when I started my Janey McCallister series, what it was or like, what it wanted to be. Is it science fiction with mystery and romance, or is it mystery first with the sprinkled in? And also there’s like, what does it want to be and what do I want it to be? And there’s that dance. And I realize, well, I would definitely want it to be science fiction. So I had to work harder to bring in all the things that gave it science fiction. That answered the question, could this story happen somewhere else? If the answer is yes, you need more. You need more of the things that make it unique. Same with my YA fantasy, with everything I write, I’m like, how do I make this truly be embedded in its time and place and culture and assumptions? And I love that, I love it so much.
Kat
Yeah. I think anyone who’s, even if you’re not new, if you’re going into fantasy or science fiction, it definitely has tropes that if you want it to be very successful in that genre, you need to understand those things, right? Like you said, I mean, somebody who’s writing something about science fiction might not know that. If this could happen, if you take what Elon Musk or whoever, Bezos is doing right now and this could happen, it’s not enough. Like, you need to get even further into that. So where can people find you if they are like, oh, well, maybe I need to figure this out before I take it out into the world?
Beth
Sure. So really the best place is to go to my website, bethbarany.com, so that’s bethbarany.com, you can also find me anywhere using that name. No one else has that name on Twitter, Amazon. I have a blog which I am going to say it’s, writersfunzone.com Go. There lots of resources. And yes, reach out to me if you want to chat. Also, can I give a little plug to my podcast?
Kat
Absolutely.
Beth
So my podcast is called How to Write the Future. So you could also go to howtowritethefuture.com. I am catering to science fiction and fantasy writers and offering up tips. And I’m bringing in the tools of, not only the tools of storytelling, but also the tools of foresight and futures planning. I’ve been trained now in strategic foresight, which I just adore, I love so much. So how can we tell positive stories? That’s really my not utopian, but positive stories about the future. How do we do that? How do we do it in a way that’s convincing and delicious and readers are like, oh, I want that? So that’s what I’m attempting. You can decide whether or not I’ve done that. It’s not perfect, the worlds I create, but I think it’s important for us also to take a positive stand in the world. So that’s what I’m doing with my podcast. And I’ll be inviting guests in soon. But now I do invite writers. If you want a story success clinic interview where I will help you on air. And I do this little coaching call, part of the podcast, to help you showcase myself as a teacher and a coach, and help you along the way. That’s what I’m doing at howtowritethefuture.com.
Kat
That’s awesome. I think that’s an excellent resource for people to get to know you even better. I think you can learn a lot from listening to other coaching sessions and then signing up for your own coaching session. And see, I’m trying to convince all my listeners, you don’t have to do this alone. There are people out there, we can get together. But I think you’re a perfect example of going out, finding that writing community, and learning, and then teaching right, like back and forth always.
Beth
Yeah. And it sounds like that’s what you’re doing too. That’s wonderful.
Kat
We’re trying, we’re talking about language.
Beth
We love language.
Kat
I’ll have all your links in the show notes as well, and people will be able to click on those and go, see you. But thank you so much, Beth, for coming and talking to us today.
Beth
Thank you so much. This is so much fun. I loved it.
Thanks for the article!