Transcript interview with Simon K Jones
Transcript interview with Simon K Jones
Author of Tales from the Triverse and No Adults Allowed.
You can listen to the podcast post and book review here.
Nat: Welcome everybody to my first-ever podcast on Plotted Out. My name's Natalie Phillips and for my guest today I have Simon K Jones, who is the author of no Adults Allowed: a fantastic futuristic book, and also the writer of the Substack: Write More with Simon K Jones. He writes a fantastic blend of sci-fi and fantasy and I can't wait to get dug into the details.
Simon: I'm looking forward to it
Nat: Simon, thank you for coming on to the show
Simon: No thanks for inviting me. It's very exciting. I spent a long time producing a podcast where I talked to other writers, so it's quite a privilege to come on and talk about myself.
About Writing
Nat: Okay, so just to tell us a little bit about you. You've been writing fiction for about eight years. How did you get started and what led you to the sci-fi world? Because I know your first book was actually a fantasy book.
Simon: Yeah. So I mean, I'm one of those people that kind of always wanted to be a writer. So from like when I was a child, I was like, wow, I want to write books and that's the thing I want to do. And then I spent like 25 years not really doing that and sort of faffing about. I dabbled in loads of things. So I was sort of flitting between like, oh, I want to try and do a comic, oh, I'll try and do a computer game, let's make some short films, and none of them ever really went anywhere. And for a while, I thought I was going to get into the film side. But then you kind of hit a weird barrier with that, where you bump up against budget restraints and like, if you're not able to leap up to the next budget, your films are always going to look like low budget, cheap things basically.
And then my son was born and then you don't have any time either, and the idea of trying to sort of logistically wrangle a film shoot is just so hard. And then I was like, oh, I could, I could go back to writing books because then you don't need to organize anyone, you could just do it by yourself. It's like really simple. You sit down and write some stuff and you can squeeze it in around like any, any tiny moments you have in between, like trying to sort out a baby, that kind of thing.
So that's kind of pushed me back in that direction. It was kind of the only thing I could do, I suppose.
So I think it was 2015.
I started writing properly, I'd say, by having done bits and pieces here and there, and that was also when I started writing in a serial format, and so on.
Back then it was on Wattpad and it was kind of an experiment.
I was like, oh, this could be quite fun, like writing and publishing a thing every week. What I didn't expect was that it was going to be a really essential kind of part of how I do it. Previously, before I started writing, I write a chapter and then publish it in the same week as I go. I don't write the whole manuscript ahead of time, which a lot of people think slightly mad, but it's the way my brain works.
So previously I did do some writing in my 20s, but it'd be like I have like a really intensive month where I'd write loads and then I'd get distracted and wouldn't do anything else for six months and it would mean that nothing ever got finished, nothing ever really went anywhere. It wasn't a productive, useful way of writing a book.
But as soon as I switched to this serial model where I was just sticking something up on Wattpad every week and you do that week by week and then after a certain number of weeks you all of a sudden you've got a book and it's like oh okay, how did that happen?
And it inflicted a little switch in my brain where I was able to then be consistent with what I was doing.
And that's what I've been doing ever since on various different projects.
About Sci-fi and real-life viewpoints
Your other question was science fiction specifically, and that was actually something I loved from when I was a kid. I've kind of veered away from fantasy for a long time, but I think I was a bit of a genre snob as a teenager. I was like no, I like science fiction because that's the realistic one. I don't like fantasy, which is basically I'm not like that anymore.
I've got better and, yeah, I think I like it because you can have lots of fun, you can do all kinds of styles and tones within that, but you can also address complicated issues, but with a certain distance, like there's a little gap between whatever themes you want to be exploring and the reader.
So if I sat down and was like, right, I want to, I'm going to write a book about immigration, like immediately, there's a whole lot of people who just aren't going to read it because this is something they either are not interested in or they have a very fixed viewpoint on on that subject already, like across the spectrum.
You know, as soon as you transpose it into like a science fiction or fantasy context, you can present that story as being a cool adventure with dragons and magic and whatever, and then in the course of that story, you can then pick up on some of those themes and that's what like great science fiction does.
So you still end up raising loads of questions and the reader gets into that kind of stuff, but it's sort of a less aggressive way of dealing with some topics that would otherwise be complicated to get into. That's kind of what appeals to me.
Nat: Yes, absolutely. You only have to look, for example, at the advent of romance, for example, gay romance, and the way that people are now looking at the intersection of race to see how we've managed that into the realm of fantasy. One of my favorite quotes is: it’s science fiction if you do credit, but fantasy if you do coins. Otherwise, you do have the same idea of either magical science solving a lot of the background problems or sometimes you can create in them.
So, going back to your scheduling, I have to admit that when you said, oh, I just hammered out, you know, a series across a number of weeks and just literally threw out an extra chapter, the writer part of me just went ‘twitch’ - like that.
Did you find it terrifying at first showing it to the public? Like that, you know, literally throwing out the extra chapter. Too much oversight, maybe no editorial stuff, and of course, on what had people can comment as well. So you have the audience interaction going on.
Simon: Yeah, no, it was. It was quite scary at first, I think because I was doing it that the way I saw it in those early days was this is an experiment, so if it doesn't work it doesn't really matter and I'm not really doing any writing anyway, so let's just do this because it'd be a bit fun, and if after a handful of weeks, I don't like it, I can just stop and it doesn't really matter. And because of that, it wasn't like I was presenting something really precious that I was going to be nervous about in that regard.
But at the same time as you get inevitably closer to the work, so when the experiment turned out to be quite fun and it was working for me as a writer, then you start to be like oh, I actually want this to be good as well.
So the initial book, I did on Wattpad, I wasn't particularly bothered about it being good, I suppose, because at that stage in my writing, I wasn't writing regularly.
I never really finished a project, so the idea of writing a good project was completely theoretical because I couldn't even write a bad one if you say that.
So step one was can I write a book regardless of how good or bad it is, I think that having that attitude helped a bit at the start. And then, as you go on, you're then like okay, I've proved to myself that I can write the thing.
So the next challenge is to try and make it good. And that's the point when I was like okay, this is a little bit more, a little bit nervy, because I want it to be good and I want people to like it.
About WattPad v Substack
I'm on Substack these days, I still cross-post a little bit over to Wattpad, but my experience with the Wattpad community was always entirely positive and lovely. I think the people that go to places like that, they go there because they want to read. They don't want to go there to be mean, and that there's a slightly higher barrier to entry.
So you can go to YouTube and click on a video and it's a very passive thing, and then it's very easy to go down to the comments and be a horrible YouTube commenter, whereas going to a site that is all about literature and words and reading, that requires more concentration and a bit more time in the first place, and I think that cuts out a lot of people who are just going to be there to cause trouble and hassle, and the people that are left are there because they like reading it, like the amount of effort required to read a book in order to then be like a hater it doesn't work out, you know, whereas you can jump on a video and be mean very easily.
So, yeah, my experience was always really positive, which helped. If I'd got a load of horrible comments then I imagine it would have been very different, but as it turns out, it all kind of went okay.
Nat: And obviously, after WattPad had those two novels, you went on to publish No Adults Allowed on Amazon, and that is available with a link on Simon's Substack. I really recommend the book.
What was your experience here compared to Wattpad?
Simon: Yeah, so yeah, it's a complicated one, I suppose, because I was on Wattpad for a while.
So I did A Day of Faces, which is that first book, which was the experiment and it's like the roughest one I've written, I suppose, because I was still working out one that I was doing. Then I did The Mechanical Crown, which was this massive fantasy epic that took almost three years, I think. So that was just enormous, as well as things where if I'd known how long it was going to take at the start, I probably wouldn't have started it.
And then No Adults Allowed did actually start on Wattpad, so that went out on Wattpad before then turning into the book like the paperback that you can now get.
But then the move away from Wattpad it was kind of, I think it's an overall shift in online behaviour and the way creators want to do stuff.
So Wattpad is very much like YouTube for books. In the massive platform there's millions and millions and millions of people there. When you publish work on there, there's the potential to have thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of reads. It's like a massive scale type thing like YouTube, but you don't own your reader list. You don't have any real control over that.
It's hard to know why a book succeeds or doesn't succeed because it's very algorithmically driven. So the platform is designed for Wattpad, the company and for readers. It's not designed for writers in that way.
It's hard to build something. So with each book like A Day of Faces did really well. And then with the next book, it felt like I was starting from scratch. It didn't seem like that gave me a leg up or anything. And then, with No Adults Allowed, that also felt like that as well.
So each book, it kind of felt like I wasn't really progressing anywhere in terms of being a writer. And that's when I was poking around wondering what other options there were, and that initially was looking at other things that are a bit like Wattpad. So I was looking at Inkitt and Royal Road and that kind of thing. I'd look at Patreon to see if that would work and all these various different options.
Patreon was a really interesting model. But then I ended up discovering Substack and thinking, oh, this is kind of like a blog and Patreon all rolled into one, and also I don't have to bother with my Mailchimp newsletter.
I can kind of pull it all under one move and yeah, that's kind of how I ended up doing that At the time, I don't think I expected to kind of move away from Wattpad quite so decisively.
I thought it might be something that pointed people towards Wattpad maybe and then over time everything's kind of gravitated in the direction of the Substack and that is like the central point.
Now I've got a website somewhere but it's never been particularly useful and now it's just all pointing everyone towards the Substack because it does everything I needed to do.
I can put out the silver fiction, I can do some fun blogging about writing, find an amazing writing community, which I didn't expect and which wasn't really evident when I joined Substack, but it has exploded in the last couple of years.
I mean just you know, finding your stuff (Plotted Out) and talking to you now. That probably wouldn't have happened in a WattPad kind of scenario.
But the main thing is the at any point, if something weird happens, I can just export my data and go somewhere else. So it's, it's a zero-risk platform to use in that regard.
Anything I build, any kind of success I have now with the book I'm doing at the moment it feels like it's mine, I suppose, and you know I hopefully can stick around on Substack, it's great.
But if anything weird happens, if some super-rich billionaire buys it and goes mad Like it doesn't matter, in the same way that if you've built up a following on, say, Twitter, just you know, just to pull one out of the air, and you're left wondering what you've been doing for the last 10 years.
About The Triverse and plot-culture
Nat: And that happily moves us on to the next subject, which is your Tales from the Triverse. You kind of drew me into this epic multi-fantasy sprawling universe, which does a really good job of blending sci-fi and fantasy together with a Palinor that’s got it’s own magic.
And then you've got our own planet in the middle, and then a very hard-bitten almost 1950s universe going on at the other side and you can just dip in and out as much you want.
It feels like a bit like Netflix, being on your Substack, in that you can nip in and out of episodes. You've literally set it up like a series and done a huge amount with it - and I dread to ask this question - but would it ever go into book form and if so, how?
Because it feels more like a comic book for me, almost like you get In a weekly instalment as Spiderman or Superman.
Simon: Yeah, it's, that's a really good observation. I mean, I think in terms of structure, that is what is pulling much more from TV than it is from novels and prose fiction.
Like my previous serials were probably more literary in that way, in you could, you could extract a day of faces and no doubts, no, that's allowed and mechanical crown, and just you could stick them in any book or something and it would kind of work, I think, like whereas try versus much more focused around the idea of being episodic and serialized and you know it's kind of like runs of like four or five issue little stories but they all combine together.
So yeah, in terms of putting that into a book, that's a really interesting question.
So, like paid subscribers get any book so that they can catch up easily, like if they've just arrived and they're like I don't have to click through like 70 Individuals Substack posts, that's gonna be really awkward.
They can just get the eBook that way and I, a couple of people have sort of binged it in that way to catch up or reread it and I think it worked for them.
But yeah, it must be a very different experience, but I guess it's the difference between the TV show that goes out once a week and then when you buy in the old days when you buy like the DVD box set or something or these days you watch the whole thing on Netflix or wherever, and it's the same show but you're getting yeah, well, I remember getting VHS tapes - collecting just like hundreds of VHS tapes of shows.
That's part of the influence, I think, because that's the style of storytelling I grew up with on television, that kind of more long-form, episodic kind of approach, which you actually don't have so much these days in the streaming age, because you tend to get like an eight-episode Netflix show that is like one story Just runs throughout that and then stops and yes, it's slightly different to how it used to be.
Nat: Yeah, no, I do love it when I see the resurgence of things like Star Trek. I do love it when you have the miniature stories going on for almost the secondary characters in the overarching story, which obviously has a satisfying conclusion in the finale, and that's always been my favorite type of arrangement.
Simon: Yeah, well, that's the thing, because I think everyone got excited about the idea of the streaming type show, where it's you know, eight episodes really focused, like the Game of Thrones thing, where it's just like pounding through the plot of the episode after episode.
But you get a lot of shows these days that kind of sit in a slightly odd place and that they feel both a bit belabored and too slow-paced, and yet at the same time they feel slightly rushed. It's a very weird position that they can get into, and I think part of it is because they end up being so plot-focused.
It's like it's all about the plot, whereas back in the old days I don't understand like an old far here, but like when shows used to have, say, 22 episodes in a season they could breathe a little bit more so they could have episodes that were about the main story.
Then they could have like just a comedy episode, or they could do one where they just try something completely wacky and it's a musical and they could try out all these different things.
That actually gave it a bit more variety, and you don't have space to do that these days.
Nat: Yeah, and I agree I mean to be fair the late Star Trek one, I think, Strange New Worlds did do that. They did a crossover episode with Lower Decks and also the musical.
However, it does require the studios to give the writers the space to breathe and come up with those ideas.
And when you're on a fixed budget (and we've heard how terrible the studios are treating the writers over on the MGA strike), when you don't have the options to breathe and to make a better show, then it all goes downhill. It's amazing how much thinking time is required to make a good story.
So, like I said, the fact that you have continued to do The Triverse each week for these all these years blows my mind. The amount of output you've got going on and because this is a quality as well.
So, listeners, if you do get the chance we haven't done so yet please jump over to Simon Substack and take a look. I guarantee you'll come up with new ideas and at least one favourite character.
Simon’s thoughts on No Adults Allowed.
Nat: This is a very nice opportunity for me to segue into No Adults Allowed, which I have been binge-reading. Just to explain No Adults Allowed is described as dystopia and it's based upon young people under the age of 16 in a world where, quite literally, there are no adults.
All you have is this AI trying to look after them and this village where they've grown up. At the same time, however, it's remarkably joyful. It's very upbeat.
When I was reading it, I thought, ‘Simon, you've just pressed the reset button on our world, haven't you?’
And then, you know, throwing a couple of kids in the mix and see what happens. It's odd because it felt like almost like the Garden of Eden. Was that what you were aiming for?
Simon: Yeah, yeah, I'll go with that. That sounds good.
Yeah, it's a weird one because I wanted it to be a very optimistic story about the power of young people and the future and the positive impact that younger people can have on the world, basically. But at the same time, the setup for the story is really dark.
The rationale that enables the story to happen is horrific, but it's kind of not about that. It's about what happens next.
So the idea I'd had for a while, but it kind of all coalesced around 2016, which was when there was a range of political events that I found quite challenging to deal with, and there's a general sense that, to me anyway, that adults just weren't doing a particularly good job at looking after the world and running the world, whether it was culturally or from the environment, or politically or whatever. It all just seemed to be a complete mess.
And at the same time, you had a lot of youth activism going on and interesting movements that were being really powered by younger people, and I was like, oh, this is really interesting, because they seem to have all the good ideas and all the old people are the ones getting in the way and created all these issues.
So I wanted to find a way that I could have a story where all the adult rubbish that was accumulated over centuries could be wiped away and then see what would actually happen.
So if all the children didn't have all the adults whispering in their ears and just causing general trouble, what would actually happen there? And that, again, that's what we were talking about earlier.
That's the power of science fiction and fantasy, because you can sort of just do that in a way that in a more modern, realistic story you couldn't really do that.
So actually, I mean, Lord of the Flies has been mentioned a few times and that does have science fictional elements, but that was a way to find again stick these kids on an island, wipe away all the grown-up influences, what happens next, and it was very much doing that both from a different point of view.
Nat: I have to say that one thing which intrigued me, both in Lord of the Flies and, to be honest, Lord of the Rings, girls don't really get much of a look-in.
Simon: Obviously in Lord of the Flies that's deliberate.
Nat: It was a boys school, so it was deliberate. But one of the ways you modified the story was by having girls there they almost diffused the power of the boys going off against each other, butting heads, for example, between Tommy and Henry.
They were also distracted and modified by the girls. Actually, I was surprised at the lack of sex. I know Tilda gets pregnant towards the end of the story - trying not to give anything away, but I am surprised because she wasn't on the radar from a much earlier age and they have this very big, innocent, this idea that you don't have to worry about it. No one knows what baby looks like and you don't have to worry about how it goes out.
Obviously, they have some kind of sex education going on because the temple educated them. The temple - by the way - is how the AI algorithm communicates with kids and basically looks after them. But still, it's one of these crunch points where we've transitioned now from children to adults.
And yes, it's going to involve sex, it's going to involve death, it's going to be unpleasant.
You have all these adult things coming in and the way the kids have to try and deal with them without any preconceptions because there are no adults that can tell them about it.
It's like you put them in cotton wool. You're like, okay, I'm going to tear this away now and see what happens.
Simon: Yeah, well, I think the other thing that the book is about is parenting. I wrote this when my son was about six or seven, I think.
So I was kind of obsessed with parenting styles at the time and you know that continual fear that you're just going to mess it up and be a bad parent in some way and trying desperately not to be. But then in trying not to be you can actually mess it up.
You know there's all these conflicting things where you want to protect your child but if you protect them too much they're not going to be independent and you want them to do really well, but you don't want to let go of them, all these like massively complicated feelings as a parent that you have and the AI in the story is basically me exploring lots of different parenting styles.
So in terms of, like Tilda getting pregnant and their innocence in the village, that's very much that kind of wrapping in cotton wool and giving them information but restricting it, and the whole idea there is that the kids aren't really in control of their bodies, really understand what's going on, like the AI is just handling it for them.
So it's all lovely, like they're all having a lovely time, it's all having lots of fun games and it's all great and there's no threat and this kind of stuff.
But actually, it doesn't prepare them.
And lots of space and all about some plenty of food.
They're not given the information that they need to have, they're not allowed to make the decisions themselves, and then, once that kind of control mechanism goes away, it's then okay.
How do they deal with it from that point onwards?
And yeah, it was very much me like looking at helicopter parenting and parents that just won't let their kids just get on with it, and like exploring that in a big sci-fi thing with a murderous AI.
The AI road trip with Erik
Nat: It's interesting, though, because the AI itself is innocent.
And there's that moment, that wonderful moment in the book, when the AI in computer language goes oh crap, I've got this wrong, I've messed up.
That's that moment and you almost feel sorry for it, even though this thing has literally wiped out our world and it's going to do so again, and it's like; ‘how do I fix it?’ So thank you for that, Simon. Believe it or not, it was one of my favourite characters. What was your favourite character?
Simon: Yeah, it's really hard to pick one, but I think like, in terms of writing, I really enjoyed writing Erik. Who's this like six-year-old that tags along, so like the structure of the story is it's kind of a road trip where you get this little fellowship gang like classic, classic, like going off an adventure, like comedy, is like five or six of them or something.
Speaker 2: But one of them is a six-year-old which, when I was plotting out the story, I was like do I really want to put a six-year-old into this?
That's going to be really difficult in terms of events that happen and just dialogue and like how's that going to interact with everyone else?
And I'm really pleased I did, because I mean, the story is all about being young and going from being a child to being an adult in various ways.
So Erik isn't there yet. He's by far the youngest, but that also means he's the one's the most independent minded of a lot of them.
He thinks differently.
When I was writing it my son was about that age as well. So some of the things he says are literally lifted from stuff that he's said.
But that kind of weird mix that six, seven-year-olds have where at one minute they're talking about like poo and bums and it's hilarious, and then they'll suddenly make some really prescient observation about the world and you're like, where did that come from?
Nat: You know Erik's there to undercut some of the seriousness, but also he's the character that you assume is the weakest and the most useless.
Simon: He's like the member of the party that can't really fight, can't do anything, it doesn't have any experience, but actually he's going to be the pivotal person that everything shifts around.
Nat: It does and, to be fair, you do a very good job using Erik who, I might add, is a very irritating six-year-old really on the money there, it's because I have one of my own. He does a very good job of illustrating all the other strengths and flaws, the way they care for him, and explains stuff to him.
What next?
Nat: So that leads me to my last question today on the podcast have you had a sequel to No Adults Allowed? What would you explore next in that?
Simon: Isn't that a really difficult question actually? This might sound a bit too pretentious, but part of the point of the book is saying that adults have continually got things wrong.
And then, not only have they got stuff wrong, but they've then passed down their biases and prejudices to their children.
A lot of problems in the world historically come from something like resource problems, but then often the root cause of an issue kind of goes away over decades or centuries, but adults maintain them. They get passed down hereditary in hereditary ways, so that we retain all these prejudices and problems.
And the story is about, like, what if you get rid of that and let the kids figure it out by themselves?
But because the main theme is giving the young characters agency to do that, I kind of feel like as a 42-year-old, if I went and wrote a sequel about what they did next, it would be sort of betraying the concept a little bit, because as a 42-year-old I inherently can't do that.
Like, if some young fan of the book wanted to go and write a fan sequel, that would be better than me doing it.
In a way, I think I could do a prequel cover what happened in the lead-up a bit more, perhaps, or something, but if I wrote a sequel that specifically put in stone what they did next, that would be the opinion of what a 42-year-old thinks the society should be that they build, and that just feels like it would be the wrong way to go.
Nat: It would actually be interesting to see what happened if you did collaborate with, say, a 16-year-old, and see what it came up with.
Simon: Yeah, I think that would be more interesting.
Nat: What are you working on now?
Simon: Yeah, so the moment I'm writing the thick of Tales from the Triverse, so I've been.
Well, I realized this month actually it's the two year anniversary of writing it.
So I started writing that two years ago on Substack.
That's still going out every week.
Again, it's one of those things where if you sit down and think, well, I'm going to write this one thing for several years and put it out constantly, that sounds really intimidating, whereas if you look at it as just writing one chapter each week so that's really easy, like just doing a little chapter you can accomplish that and then almost accidentally, it kind of combines together into something much bigger.
So I've got probably another year left.
In that I thought then that will be wrapped up, so there's a definite ending that it's heading towards, and then after that we shall see.
I'm aware that I've got this kind of back catalog of things I did on Wattpad and most of them are kind of still just on Wattpad.
So it could be that I bring those over to the Substack, because actually that would, doing that, it would then give me a bit more space to prepare some other things in the background while re-serializing one of my older books.
But yeah, but for now it's all, it's all Triverse all the way.
Nat: That sounds absolutely brilliant, and long may your genius continue.
So thank you very much for sharing your thoughts Simon and giving us a hint where you're going next. Goodbye, everyone, and good luck.