The Future Lab with Lee Schneider

Sue Toth is a book editor and coach who specializes in romance, mystery, and thrillers. She keeps writers inspired, helps them work through writers' block, and helps their books be born into the world.

I asked Sue about the special challenges of writing climate fiction, and she offered to have a conversation on the show about how her developmental editing work with thrillers could apply to climate fiction.

Creators & Guests

• Lee Schneider - Host
• Sue Toth - Guest

The Future Lab tells the stories that shape the future. It’s where thriller, science fiction, climate fiction, and fantasy authors discuss how we shape the future with the stories we tell today.

If the interview coming up with Matt Gemmell has a theme, I’d say it is, when writing long-form fiction, don’t follow templates. Instead let intention guide you.

Matt is the author of four books of fiction, including the popular KESTREL techo-thriller trilogy. He has also published four nonfiction books, and six collections of short stories about the supernatural. He’ll send you a free short story by email if you sign up for his newsletter. All the links are in the show notes, and you’ll find Matt online at mattgemmell.scot.

Matt was once a software engineer doing design and user experience work for companies like Apple, and he approaches writing with an engineer’s mind combined with the improvisational approach of a session musician.

Here’s a quote from our conversation: Matt said: “There's this sense of being so engrossed and encompassed in the work of an actual book that I only learn the lessons of it and improve after a major piece of work."

I take that to mean that it’s by doing the writing that we improve, certainly, and we learn by a kind of spidey-sense to hone everthing down to what is absolutely needed. Writing along the path of your story becomes like muscle memory.

You get to know your characters so well that you could drop them into any scene, even an outlandish one, and you would know how they would react and what they would say. You cultivate a deep intentionality that shapes your creative spark.

As Matt says, “You will always, always, always get better results in anything by doing it deliberately and for a reason."
Toward the end of our conversation, we talk about Matt’s writing setup, why he likes mechanical keyboards, and the pleasure he derives from a good e-ink tablet.

Find Matt online:

Website: https://mattgemmell.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MattGemmellAuthor
Mastodon: https://mastodon.scot/@mattgemmell

Creators & Guests

• Lee Schneider - Host
• Matt Gemmell - Guest

Tory Stephens works at Grist Magazine as their climate fiction creative manager and uses storytelling to champion climate justice, and imagine green, clean, and just futures. He's going to tell us about a climate fiction contest, called Imagine 2200, that he says changed him and challenged him on a personal level.

It also inspired thousands of writers to explore what it would be like to write hopeful fiction about the future.

Find out more about Imagine 2200.

Creators & Guests

• Lee Schneider - Host
• Tory Stephens - Guest

We all consume media entertainment. How does that entertainment shape our perceptions of women and people of color? In today's episode, you'll meet Dr. Nicole Haggard, who is an award-winning instructor, speaker, and published researcher with 16 years of study about the intersection of race and gender in American culture. In 2018, Nicole co-founded the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment — CIME — an organization dedicated to advancing representation.

CIME’s primary goal is to transform our collective relationship to the stories we are all watching. In conversation with Lee Schneider, Dr. Haggard discusses the data behind CIME’s ideas, how it uses pop media culture to get the ideas across, and the audience it is working to reach. On screen, only 33% of the characters in speaking roles are women. And behind the scenes, only 17% of them are women in key production roles. Dr. Nicole Haggard discusses how representation behind the scenes drives representation on screen, what needs to change, and how CIME, the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment, can make change. She also has some best-practices suggestions for movement building online.

Red Cup Agency produces the FutureX Podcast for FutureX.Studio. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and join our newsletter, 500 Words. Give us some stars and post your comments on Apple Podcasts and we’ll give you a shout out on the show.

Learn more about CIME: https://www.cime.us

Creators & Guests

• Lee Schneider - Host
• Dr. Nicole Haggard - Guest

Ever Gonzalez, a self-described filthy capitalist with a hippie heart. Ever is the Founder of OutlierHQ, a media and events company. He hosts the popular Outlier On Air podcast and runs Founders Weekend and the Outlier Podcast Festival. Ever has been pivoting his events from pandemic-times online events back to in-person events.

He has a micro-event plan for you that makes that pivot easier for you. You’ll hear what you’ll get out of hosting a micro-event and also what you’ll get as a guest at one. You'll get a sense of the value of small, manageable events that will get you back in front of your people as a speaker or organizer, or get you back in circulation in your community. Get info on the Outlier Podcast Festival: https://www.outlierhq.com