All right, it is 2.03. So why don't we go ahead and get started? Welcome everyone to Making History, a panel discussion about writing and publishing history. This event is part of the San Francisco History Days, which is an annual event that highlights local history and connects the public with independent historians, local organizations, and the wider historical community. History Days has a full slate of fun and informative programs that has been scheduled for this entire weekend. So please check out sfhistorydays.org for more information. Many of the events that happen on Friday and Saturday are recorded and so you can catch up with those events that way. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco who is hosting this event in partnership with the San Francisco Writers Conference and the San Francisco Historical Society. For those of you unfamiliar with Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, a culture, we're also a cultural event center and a world-renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. Now, right now due to the shelter in place, all of our activities are virtual, virtually all of them, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year, and with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. So we have a great lineup of professionals in the history biz to talk to you today. Let me introduce them briefly. Their longer bios are on the event website, which I will add to the chat space, and then we'll get started. So first up we have Lee Bruno, who is an author and a journalist with two history books under his belt. He is currently a developmental editor with the Collective Book Studio and Cameron and Company. Then we have Lana Costantini, who is director of education and publishing for the San Francisco Historical Society. She is the editor of the Argonaut, which is that society's award-winning history journal and its newsletter, The Pannerama. Then we have Frances Dinklespiel, who is the author of two best-selling history books and the co-founder and executive editor of Berkeleyside, which is an online news site in Berkeley, California. And then we have Chris Gruner, who has been involved in the publishing industry for most of his adult life. And since 2009, he has been the publisher for Cameron and Company. And then last but not least is Laurie Krill, who is the West Coast Acquisitions Editor for the History Press, which I'm sure you're all familiar with it, but it's a publisher that specializes in local and regional history and really culture from coast to coast. All right, so each panelist will speak for a few minutes about themselves and their publishing experiences and then we'll take questions from the audience. So please post them in the chat space and we will try to answer all of them because I think with this panel that the conversation is really gonna be the exciting part. All right, thank you so much for coming today and let's go ahead and get started. Let me introduce Lee Bruno. Hi, Lee. Hi, Taran. Thanks again for doing this panel and inviting me. And it's interesting, I'm wearing the same shirt that Chris Gruner is, so I guess I'm in line with the publisher that it's one of those hot days. So my background was early 1990s, I went and got a master's degree in journalism. I was actually working in a research laboratory doing bench science before that, but I needed, I just had this compulsion to go and get a master's degree and I got it with a concentration in science journalism and then the ascent of the technology industry was underway and so those jobs paid pretty well. So I found myself sort of following that path or all the way through the dot-com boom and bust and thereafter and it wasn't until after my great, my grandmother died that I came across a really interesting letter that had been sent by my grandfather to his father-in-law, RB Hale and this is a very simple letter and I kind of talk about it in panorama but it really kind of made me scratch my head and ask questions that I, at the time I couldn't ask my grandmother because she was already passed and we hadn't had those kinds of conversations. So I started digging into letters and books that I could find, not as a trained historian, but just trying to get to some of the sources and I found a large amount of great material at the California Historical Society. So dug into letters and speeches and over some sort of a broken period of eight years that wasn't really all working during that time but really was able to come together and create a series of stories. I think there was probably the core was somewhere around 10 to 12 but the first one really out the door was to try to sort of capture what did my great grandfather do as a director of the Pampas Civic Exposition Fair of 1915 at San Francisco's kind of officially first international fair. So that really began, you know, the research and sort of the curiosity and then at the urging of one of the editors that I was working with, you know, she said, I think you have what, I think you have the makings of a book here and I think you should pursue that. Well, that was a long odyssey and so it ended up that I ended up getting in touch with Chris Gruner through a friend that we both know. And so that sort of coincidence of kind of going all the way out to all these different publishers and then coming back into your backdoor to Petaluma was quite a quite, you know, I don't know, it's like it was just, it was just a wonderful sort of experience to be connected with somebody locally. And that began, that became the first book, Panorama, Tales from San Francisco's First World's Fair. That's probably not the sub-headline, but anyway, I feel that one of the things that I think I learned and I continue to kind of like pay attention to is really, you know, follow your curiosity. If you have something interesting, don't give up on it, keep hacking away at it and really try to find the essence of the story. I think it did help for me to have a journalism background into some writing experience, but, you know, not as a trained historian, I need to run things by historians and the other part was taking a couple screenwriting workshops, sort of to understand how to set scenes and try to do narrative journalism. I think, you know, those were some of the tools that I think helped, but I have to take my hat off to the Mechanics Institute for the great librarians and also just opening up and also at the California Historical Society in Vancouver for, you know, all their efforts in opening up a treasure trove of material that I don't think I would have been able to unearth on my own. So that's kind of my overview and intro and I'll switch it back to Taryn. Thank you. Thank you, Lee. All right, let us talk now to Lana. Okay, hi, everyone. It's Lana Constantina here from San Francisco Historical Society. Thank you all for coming and thank you, Taryn, for hosting and for including me in the panel. So I got my start in publishing actually through Creative Writing. I have an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Montana. The problem with that was that when I started looking for writing jobs in Creative Writing, they really weren't there that I could find. So my other love was education and for me, educational publishing was sort of the perfect meeting place of publishing, writing, editing and education. So I was in educational publishing for about 25 years and all kinds of capacities from writer to editor to project manager to business owner to director of product development. So I sort of seen all the sides of this and I guess one of my messages to you who are interested in publishing in the history space is that educational publishing has a lot of opportunity in it. And I'll explain a little bit about what those opportunities are. There are major publishers in the United States like Pearson, McGraw Hill, Hogan Mifflin Harcourt, Discovery Education, Pearson and they create massive social studies programs on a cycle of a new one, every say five to eight years. And when they're embarked on a development cycle, it's usually a two year or three year cycle for a program that would be a K-8 or a K-12 or some subset of that and they need content and they need historians to write that content. And the challenge there is that a lot of people who are professional historians who have the knowledge and the skill don't necessarily write for kids because to write for kids is a whole different thing. They're unforgiving audience and if they're bored, they will let you know. So it's sort of like learning to write with a bit of a twist and getting some more engaging stuff in there so that you can hold the younger audience's attention. So some of those opportunities include either writing articles for a series or oftentimes they'll hire people as content developers and editors for that whole two to three year period as a freelance job. So there are some opportunities there that are, and also you get your name out. You get listed as authors in some of these programs and it can help boost your profile in the world. In addition to social studies programs because cross-curricular content is so big now in education, history, history articles, primary source materials have made their way into all the other curricular areas. English Language Arts. If you read a typical English Language Arts book today, you'll find a lot of history. You'll find science. You'll find all kinds of things that you wouldn't have found 25 or 30 years ago. So that's another opportunity. And then there's the world of children's magazines and I've worked for a number of them too. Some of the ones that are big, now or at least big when I was in educational publishing, cobblestone magazine, cricket magazine, reading rockets, National Geographic Explorer, which is their kids' magazines. So they have kids' magazines in both science and social studies and I've written for both of them and they pay pretty well. And again, they're always looking for content. They've got all these magazines at different grade levels and so that's a place worth looking similar to that. They're websites. Right now we've got a lot of websites, PDS, Time for Kids. I mean, the list really goes on and on and they need content and that's not really written content. It's more, it's the content you find on the web, but they still need somebody to conceptualize it and write the scripts or write the content for it. Who knows what they're talking about.  And one, what other is adult magazines. I did a quick look before this call on the internet. There seem to be 50 or 60 solid history magazines published today around the country. And one of those is The Argonaut which I've been editing for about 15 years. I think historical journals are great in a lot of ways. One is that you can get published in there if you haven't been published in a lot of other places or maybe you haven't been published at all. A lot of the larger trade book publishers look for people who already have a name, they're already a published writer. But like The Argonaut, it doesn't really matter to us. I mean, we're really looking for original writing and research on aspects of San Francisco history that have been either not explored as much as they should be explored or what's been said is wrong or just, there hasn't been extensive research done. For instance, our last issue of The Argonaut that a really great article in the history of Germans, the German community in San Francisco, very, very scant had been done about that. So it's really great to find somebody who's got a passion in that, who's willing to write for The Argonaut. And then once you've got a couple of articles, you can use those to move forward with larger things. For instance, we had an author, Jim Hass, who used to be on our board, who wrote two articles on the history of Civic Center and two different issues of The Argonaut. They were both long media articles, but with professional editing that we provide and professional design and a very nice published piece, he's able to take those two pieces to publishers and say, look, I've got these and they're great and they've been well received. And he actually, about a year ago, published a book on the history of Civic Center. So there's just a lot of different ways to get into it. And I mean, we'll talk and share later about self-publishing as an option. If what you're doing doesn't necessarily need to go through a traditional publishing process. But, and I guess my main message is there's a lot of different ways to get your work out there in front of people. And a lot of them, everything I've mentioned, they're not super money makers, not like if you wrote a big, big, best selling, but they could be a source of income, especially if you get hooked into a, like a children's magazine, they'll call on you again and again to write as often as they can. So anyway, that is what I have to offer. Thank you. That was wonderful. Let's go through the alphabet. Francis, welcome. Thank you. So I just have to respond, Lana. I love that article on the Germans in San Francisco. I read it by myself when I was eating dinner one night, the whole thing, it's very long. Excellent. Thank you. But, you know, my book about Isaiah's helmet, he was a German Jew and there was a very strong German Jewish community in San Francisco. So it was very interesting to learn about other aspects of that. And I also just have to say, Lee, like I could just go ditto what you said, and that is my own personal story, which is really funny. And another thing about how small San Francisco is, I know you wrote about Hale in Panorama. Well, my relatives also served on the PPIE board. And, you know, so there are always connections when you're doing history and you've learned so much about the place you come from. So my story is that I was a history major in college and when I got out of college, I started to be a newspaper reporter and I was a traditional newspaper reporter. I worked at the Mercury News for a long time and I started to want to try to do some longer pieces at a certain point, especially after I'd started to have children. And I decided I wanted to write personal essays as a way to do that. And I started to do that. And I realized I didn't know much about my own family history. I'm a fifth generation Californian and I knew my great-great-grandfather, Isaiah Hellman, had come and had been involved with Wells Fargo Bank. And I want to learn more. So like Lee, I went down to the California Historical Society and thought I'd just poke around and find a couple of anecdotes that I could read into some personal essays. But the archivist, when I asked to look at some papers of I.W. Hellman said, which box would you like to look at? We have, you know, 40 boxes of his documents. 50,000 pages. And so I didn't know what to say. I said, you know, how about box number one? And he bought it out to me and I opened it. And the first thing I saw was something that was like a report card from Germany in the 1850s. The next thing I saw was something, was like a land contract from Los Angeles in 1860. And the third thing was a letter from a guy named Herman to Isaiah's Hellman talking about he was living in Wilmington, Los Angeles. And it was so boring. And he thanked his brother for sending him a book cause he finally had something to do. And like these were three documents that I had no idea what they meant, but, you know, they immediately caught my attention. And I want to know more. And I found myself going back to the California Historical Society day after day, whenever I could to go through these papers of my great great grandfather. And, you know, the more I read, the more excited I got cause I felt like I had, I had a story in those boxes about a man who'd come to California as sort of a penniless Jew, settled in Los Angeles, moved up to San Francisco, had along the way been involved in about the creation of eight different industries in California. The last one probably he's most famous for for is being president of Wells Fargo Bank. And so I decided I want to write a book about this, but likely, you know, I was a journalist like, you know, the inverted pyramid is my form of writing. So I actually had to teach myself a lot how to write a narrative nonfiction book, a book that had characters that had narrative arc that had tension that had drama, all these kinds of things in order to make somebody really want to read a book. And it took me about 10 years from the idea to the publication of the book. I did have children in between. I had been working at the Mercury News. I eventually left that job. And my first book was called Towers of Gold about Isaiah's Helman and the creation of California and the role that Jews played in the creation of California, which was a very under discussed issue because when people think about the Jewish settlement in the United States, they often think about the factories in New York City and people living in tenement houses and stuff. But what happened in California was very different. From the beginning, Jews were embraced and accepted in California. They were actually considered white being in California, whereas in Germany and Central Europe, they were considered other. And so after that book came out, when you write a book, there are always certain things that remain in your mind. And one of the things that I found out about was that Isaiah's Helman in 1901 had purchased a big interest in something called the California Wine Association, which was a monopoly that controlled about 80% of the wine production and distribution in California for many years. And I had never heard of that. And I was really intrigued by that. And then one day, so Isaiah's Helman was also involved in making of wine. He bought a rancho in Cucamonga in the 1870s and he made wine from there. And one day there was a big warehouse fire in Vallejo that destroyed four and a half million bottles of wine. And some of the wine that was destroyed had been made by my great-great-grandfather and my cousin had put it there or someone had put it there for her as a storage place. And when I discovered that there was this wine arson and it had destroyed this wine by a W. Helman, I remembered the California Wine Association. I thought, this is my opportunity to write a sort of a story that has some crime in it and has a lot of California history and I can talk about the California Wine Association. So that led to my next book, Tangled Vines. And I just wanna say that the thing I love the most probably is the research. There's something called research rapture where you just can't stop researching because there's so much fun things to find. I love going through those documents at the Historical Society. When I was doing Tangled Vines, there's a big murder in there and there was a man in the 1870s who kept a set of journals and he had documented that murder and I went to the Bankcroft Library and I was able to look at the journal he had created with the newspaper articles of the time and his hand drawn maps and all that kind of thing. And I just was like shivering in my seat, thinking I am connected to this past through this document. And that's really what I love about history, writing history is trying to connect today to the past and do it in a way that's interesting and that people want to read about. So that's really my story. So, oh, but I'm still a journalist so I haven't had time to do as much history writing as I'd like. So, thanks. That's wonderful. I remember years ago you must have been working on The Wine Book but I saw you at the California Historical Society in the library and I had just finished reading Isaiah's Hellman but you were deep in rapture and so I didn't want to bother you. All right. Hi, Chris, there you go. Can you, am I here now? I can hear you. All right, hi everybody. Thank you, Taryn for the invitation and nice to hear everybody speaking.  I just like to publish books and you guys are writing them making beautiful things and telling beautiful stories but just for a brief introduction, my name is Chris Gruner. I run a company here in Petaluma called Cameron and Company. I've worked in publishing my whole career after a brief stint of teaching high school English down in Los Angeles. Quickly lost that bug and had no desire to do that anymore. Figured I'd chase the big cash of book publishing. The big reward there. So I danced around with different publishing companies and distributors for several years, always here in the Bay Area. And then in 2009, my wife and I got the brilliant idea to take over her grandfather's business Cameron and Company which he had started back in the 60s. Her grandfather was Robert Cameron and he published a book in 1964 called The Drinking Man's Diet which was sort of on a whim and turned him into a book publisher basically overnight. Once Herb Cain wrote about it and sort of put him on the map. And as I say, the rest is history. He sold two and a half million copies published in 13 languages. And then he wrote that way for a few years and then in 1969, he published his very first book of aerial photography about San Francisco, which he did with his friend Herb Cain. And then went on, many of you maybe have seen his books over the years. He did Los Angeles above New York, above Chicago, Paris, London, always partnering usually with some sort of renowned sort of the face of the city. And oftentimes that wasn't historian of some sort. So he worked with Alistair Cook, Pierre Salinger and then of course in the San Francisco books. He worked with Arthur Hoppe after Herb Cain and then kind of fast forward and I'll come back to this but then a couple of years ago, we had the idea of publishing a 50th anniversary edition of Above San Francisco, which I have behind me here if you can't see. And that was with Carl Nolte providing the forward for that book to kind of bring a full circle and tapping into San Francisco sort of at least from the chronicle standpoint their history expert in-house. So anyway, in 2009, when we took it over we moved it up here to Petaluma where we had settled, started raising our children and just kind of decided to go bullish on book publishing which not a lot of people were doing in 2009. There's a lot of talk of the death of Prince and we just naively kind of just decided to give it a go and think what could we do in this 21st century that would be fresh and unique and what works and what doesn't. Obviously we've hit some bumps in the roads and taken a while to figure it out but really what we have honed in on for us at Cameron & Co. Company is this tagline that we use called books that need to be books. And that can go both ways. That could be about books that need to be physical books like books that really don't translate in the digital space because obviously there's a time and a place for digital books. If you're going on a vacation or you need to be mobile but the types of books that we publish tend to be those that are visual and illustrated type projects that really don't translate the same in that digital space but also just books that need to be books in the sense that these are books that canonize a moment in history or they put in the archives forever some point in time that wouldn't otherwise happen if it weren't for a book. And digital feels a lot more ethereal much less permanent obviously whereas a book and I know I'm preaching to the choir here so I won't lament this too much but the book holds a special place in capturing a moment in time like nothing else really can and it's a better technology in many ways than all these high tech companies think they're working on. So anyway, we've been publishing books with Cameron & Co. for 11 plus years now had a great fortune of connecting with Lee and I love how Lee and I met he didn't give the specifics but our mutual friend is this woman, Patty Norman who is a good friend of ours and Patty Norman is the children's book specialist at Copperfield's books in Petaluma and also a part of the swimming club that Lee is a part of in San Francisco. And so I just love how things kind of connect that way. And then so Lee kind of pitched us his book called Panorama about the 1915 exhibition and we also had a good fortune of, you know here in the Bay Area obviously we're rich in history but we also have people who are patrons of the arts who appreciate the arts and preserving history in a way that, you know, maybe wouldn't happen otherwise if it weren't for their support. So Lee and I connected with a wonderful company here in town who are here in San Francisco who just really loves to support the arts and support San Francisco specifically and Northern California and generally with history books and so we've done several projects with them as well and that's been wonderful. So with Lee we've done Panorama, we did Misfits Merchants in Mayhem, which is another beautiful book. I know that Show and Tell isn't usually great on Zoom calls but this is another fun project we did with Lee. And then just the beauty of publishing and networking, you know, Lee connected us with a gentleman, Jim Shine who with his wife run Shine and Shine. I think it is a map store in North Beach. Although I think I just heard from Jim that they're moving things up to Sonoma just recently with all that's going on. But we did a book which I don't have here at home and I feel bummed about that. It's a beautiful book called Gold Mountain, Big City, all about Chinatown based on this map that Jim has by this wonderful, not very well known San Francisco cartographer back in the 40s called Karen Caskart. Oh my gosh, I mean, Karen's got a book there. That's great. It's really a beautiful book. And it was fun just because this map tells so many stories in and of itself. And so we just use that map as a jumping off point to tell the whole story of the book. So you know, there's so many fun, interesting, fascinating, sad, dark, heavy, as you can imagine stories that come out from this map. But it's beautiful. And the book includes a foldout map of course as well. So as you can see from some of these books too, we're big on production quality. We love, you know, bells and whistles. We love using foil, the foldout map in the book, you know, a special paper that's probably 20 cents too expensive, but we just do it anyway. And, you know, just sort of focusing in on that has been our joy. And then just recently, so we focus on visual books. We do have an imprint called Roundtree Press, which is a little bit more of a hybrid publishing model. And we have done some text-driven books there. We did a book about the Stanford Men's Basketball Program, which was a history book in a way, of course. And then we did a book with Lowell Cohn, who's a sports writer, all of the texts. But anyway, just earlier this month, and we're sort of fresh on the heels of it. So we actually just got acquired by a company called Abrams Books in New York. It's a wonderful art book publisher who's been our distributor for the last few years. And we're really excited about that because they see in us this West Coast presence. They love that we're in the San Francisco area. They're investing in us. And I bring that up because I think that one of the things they like about what we do is that we're, you know, with feet on the ground and we are privy to what's going on regionally here. Again, it's such a rich region that we're living in. And there is a future for regional publishing, which, you know, in a way is shocking. I think in this, you know, 15 years after people started predicting the death of the printed book, now people, you know, there's companies that are getting venture capital to support their micro regional book publishing program, which just seems like shocking to me, but also very exciting and encouraging. So, you know, one of the things that Abrams saw in us and bringing us on was the fact that we publish in this space that we're aware of what's going on, you know, in areas that they're not because they're in New York. And so we're excited about the future of it, excited about publishing more books in this space, a ton more books with Lee, hopefully. And yeah, we're in a good spot right now. We're very excited. So thanks again for having us. You're very welcome, Chris. And I just, both Lee's books are very, very beautiful, but I think you really topped it with Jimmy Shine's book. And I just wanna tell the audience that I hosted Jim Shine on Friday for a talk about his beautiful book, and I'll include the, oh gosh, I haven't actually processed the video yet. The video will be available on our YouTube channel, the Mechanics Institute's YouTube channel, shortly. It's been a busy, busy history days for me. All right, so thank you, Chris. And now I am thrilled to introduce Laurie Krill. Take it away, Laurie. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me. I am the West Coast Acquisitions Editor for the History Press, which is under the umbrella of Arcadia Press, which you've probably seen everywhere. They're the CP atoned picture books with the history attached to them. The history presses are more text-based imprints. So we do a lot of longer books with, yes, there they are. And we have about 15,000 books in our back catalog. So we've done quite a few. Those are mostly those CP atoned-covered images of America books. So the History Press was acquired by Arcadia in 2014, and we do more of the narrative-based side. So we look for books that are more text than pictures, but we still use illustrations and photographs, usually historical photographs, as an important part of the narrative in our books. And we're really focused on the regional and local aspect of all of our books. We do have a lot of different, what we consider a series, that each city kind of fills its own niche in that series. They're all very different from each other, but they're all about the same topic. Like we have a series, American Palate series, that all covers like regional foods or restaurants in a particular area. So we do try to find regional themes that work nationwide to kind of tie all of our books together. So I know that a lot of times, when people come to me, they have a really great idea that is a very big idea that we have to kind of make sure that we're focusing on their community. And I know that sometimes that can be a little difficult to kind of find the sweet spot between just talking about a family history and then talking about a national era that happened. So we're kind of the publisher that looks for the book in between those two kind of books, those kinds of history books that more of a community narrative and community memories that bring other people from your town into the book and help them understand more about their own local history. I have been working for the History Press for about four years now. I'm a graduate of the Denver Publishing Institute and before that I was a police officer. So my personal preferences tend to lean towards true crime, but there's tons and tons of really interesting other series that I really enjoy. I just really love working on those ones in particular. I've gotten to work with a couple of judges in California who had some really great old cases that they wanted to write about and that's always a lot of fun for me. But I love learning about where I grew up in California and then all the areas around there even though I'm out here in Charleston now. But I know you guys have a lot of questions and I think probably you don't need to listen to me talk as much as maybe have some of these questions answered and talk to some of these great panelists. So thanks for having me and now I'm happy to answer any questions anybody has. Well, thank you so much, Laurie. I have to say I am fascinated by your background. Do you ever employ your police training when working with authors? No, luckily. Luckily, there's no need for that now that I'm working in editing. I was an English major and I was only a police officer for five years. So it's just kind of more of a diverse kind of background that I bring into it. It's fun to work with ex-cops or retire cops or retired judges because I can usually tell when they're pulling material directly from a police report because the language is very, very specific and I always recognize it. And I'm like, can we make this a little less police report and a little bit more conversational? That would be great. But other than that, no, everybody is very well behaved. Well, I'm glad to hear that. I know us authors can get a little excited sometimes. All right, well, why don't we go ahead and take some questions? There are a lot of goodies here. Let's see here. Nicole asks, and if you just want to unmute yourselves then just go ahead and jump in. We'll answer questions as, you can each answer a question if it appeals to you. So Nicole asks, says she's an aspiring long format writer with lots of articles under her belt. And she's curious about where she should start if she's thinking of a bigger, I assume she's thinking of a bigger project like a book. Well, I guess I'll start. I mean, you have to have a topic or a subject. You have to decide if you have something that is sufficiently interesting that it could actually be a book topic. And you also have to figure out if you have something that is sufficiently interesting that you don't mind spending five to 10 years on. That's very, very important because writing a book takes much longer than you ever expect. It's much, much harder than you ever dreamed. And so you have to make sure that you really have a topic that you're interested in. You also ask this question down below about how do you take large subjects that might be dry and make them approachable? I think I would give some information about that that is also relevant to your first question. I think learning to be a long form writer is definitely a process. And when you start to write a book, you don't always know what you're writing about. And you might have a lot of different themes or historical moments or different characters. And you're trying to figure out how to put something together in a coherent way. And I think a very helpful thing to do when you're starting a project is to write every scene you can think of. If you're writing about some architectural history, you could write about the origins of a building. Who, what was the personal life of the architect? Who was the person who hired that person to build that building? What was the economy like? What was the society like? And you just start writing things down that are specific and that are rich in detail. And sort of by doing that, you start to better understand what possible book or larger project you have. And writing is so process driven and you have to let the process work. You can't just go in saying, I wanna write a book and expect that it's gonna happen right away. It does take a lot of learning. Yeah, and just to comment on that, you really have to make sure that you have the primary sources to actually make a story. You know, if you only have a handful of letters, you're gonna have to do a lot of digging in order to have enough skeleton there in order to put your scenes on. Well, thank you for that. Anyone else have any further comments on? Yeah, I just wanted to say that we work with people who actually are often a community like newspaper journalists, local paper, who actually have written hundreds of articles and usually about their local history. And we structure our books in a way that a lot of our books are about one subject, but a lot of our books are actually kind of like a compilation of articles. Every chapter is about a building, for example, and then the next chapter would be about a different building in your area. So you can take your library of past articles and come to us with a very strong idea of what your favorite thing to write about is. And we can often figure out kind of how that might fit our particular press because we do so many different topics within the regional history framework. Then a lot of times we're able to come up with something that can be a lot of fun for the readers that might not be about one person or one building, but it might be about a collection of people or buildings that all have a very similar background or same era, something along those lines. So it's not necessarily a huge jump from being an article writer to being a long form writer on our end. But you still have to have kind of a concrete proposal, idea, ready to publish your. Yeah, it's always really helpful. I give feedback on tables of content sometimes. So if you think that you are close, I've often brainstorm with authors to kind of figure out exactly where they might fit on our list. And that's just something that I do with a lot of my current authors also. I work with a lot of debut authors as well. So it's not necessarily a roadblock to me if you haven't done a long book yet. Or to any of my colleagues, we work with a lot of different people who this might be their first book, even if they have writing experience. Here's a question that I'm sure you all have a little bit to comment on. Do you recommend going through an agent with your proposal or do you think it's better with history to just propose directly to the publisher? I can sort of jump in on this one since it's so interesting when Chris was talking about regional publishing because at the time, so when I was putting together my book proposal for my book about the Pampas of the Guest position, it was really pegged to the 100th anniversary, which is coming up in 2015. So I knew I kind of had to rush. And as it turned out, there were already some books that had already been started or had been sort of committed, the publisher had been committed to. Heyday had already made their commitment to it. So this point about agents is, I think it's better to really learn how to write a very short proposal and very much get at the essence of what the book is about. Like what Francis said already, I think it's just that it has to be compelling and it has to really feel like there's something, there's layers to it. It isn't just a single magazine article, it's something that has more complexity and layers. I mean, this is something Taryn can talk about. She's been researching a particular Mechanics Institute founder for years and it just, she keeps turning up more and more interesting things. I think making sure that you have, can put together a chapter or 2,000 word essay that just really gets people excited to say, I want more. I think that's really where to focus. And if that piece of writing is good, a publisher is going to find, is going to want to engage because it's the writing, it's the subject matter, it's the way that you're coming at it. Those are the things that will put you apart from others. I'm not saying that isn't good to get an agent but I think so many people worry. The funnel for the major publishers is really, really skinny and you're competing against a lot of other people for the agents as well. If you have an agent that you know or you can work with and they will actually review your material and tell you where it is or if you have people that are great readers that will go after your material and not be frank and being honest, not brutal and really help you kind of get that material into really good shape. So I really highly recommend working with an editor. I worked with Laura Frazier who helped me with just getting some of my essays off the ground and I think editors are really helpful in that way because they allow you to, they just give you a different perspective and they examine it as a really, really good reader with but they give you the instructions to kind of say, okay, this is how you have to set this up because you're mixing this with this and it's just not working. So anyway, those are just a couple of points I think might be helpful. I'll speak to this really briefly. I agree with what you just said Lee. It really depends where you're seeking to publish. If you're seeking to publish with one of the big five publishers in New York City, you have to have an agent and it's daunting to get an agent but we are blessed in the Bay Area to have so many excellent writing conferences and places like the Mechanics Institute that have writing conferences where agents come and they wanna meet writers. I mean, one of the things about agents is they need clients. So I would partake of San Francisco Writers Conference has like a meet and greet. I know women in publishing does. I myself met my agent. I went to the community of writers at Squaw Valley and I met him up there and getting an agent can also be like building a relationship. It doesn't necessarily happen immediately but I think the best way to get an agent and the best way to get published is exactly what Lee says. You have to produce some compelling writing and working with someone like Laura who's written a couple of amazing books herself or you have a writing group. I personally have a writing group. We've been together for 15 years. Like I really trust what they say. You need to surround yourself with people who give you good feedback to make your writing the best it can be before you go and try to sort of sell your work to agent or publisher. You gave some really great references. I'm just gonna put the Women's National Book Association link to the San Francisco chapter in the chat space because they host meet and greets all the time and the San Francisco Writers Conference does as well and Mechanics Institute hosts all kinds of events with agents, with editors. So at least you can get some names. So I'm gonna put all that in the chat. Did anyone else have any comments about agents, editors? One thing I'm curious about is, let's say, do you consult an editor before you finish your book proposal? Do you send that draft proposal to an editor or do you just go for it, send it to a publisher and then work with an editor after that? I'll take that one. I work with authors who do both. We actually have our own proposal form. So when an author sends me a proposal that's already finished, it's very easy for me to see how they could slot that into what kind of information we need to get the book approved. So that's always really, really helpful if you have a very strong idea of what you're looking for. I really encourage authors to have, as was mentioned, a writing group or some kind of person that they can work with while they're writing. We do a lot of books per year, the history press does. So we're not able to give a lot of really super one-on-one personal attention, even though we would love to. It's just not something that we have the time for. So it's always good to have a secondary person as your eyes on that. We rarely work with authors who have agents. In our press, it's just kind of a smaller press. So we just don't end up with a lot of those agented authors, but I have in the past worked with agents as well. It's not required for us. So most of the people that we work with don't have one. That's great advice there. And that's heartening too, because it's kind of stressful to consider. Not only do you have to get yourself all gussied up to meet an agent, but then you also have to, you have to woo the publisher as well. And I know that's the agent's job, but it's all pressure for the author. Okay, let's see. Let's ask another question from the audience. CJ Verberg asks, are any of you involved with historical fiction or specifically historical mysteries? Is that part of your purview? Not mine really. No, we don't do any historical fiction or historical mysteries. Really, we're very nonfiction true crime in that genre, if you're looking at that. Now, Lanna, here's a question for you. How, if one has an idea for an article, do you require a proposal of some sort or are you a little more free form or tell me about the acquisition process for the Argonaut? That's really the San Francisco Bay Area's, if you're an aspiring author, I'd say try to write an article for the Argonaut because it's easy and fun. So we do want a written proposal. It doesn't have to be a really elaborate proposal, but it has to be enough to give us a good sense of what you wanna cover and that you have the background that is needed to cover it. It's also helpful to have a little bit of text, even if you do an introduction and a few hundred words, just to give a sense of the writing. So put that together in the process is there's a committee that reviews proposals that come in and that committee is me and Charles Frockia who's the publisher of the Argonaut and Lori Angareti who is an editor. Basically we will take a look and the criteria again is really, it's gotta be San Francisco focused and we like articles that are approach topics that haven't been overdone by so many people that everybody will know. So it's really the notes and the crannies. So I would say the quick answer is yes, a proposal and a sample and that's all what we would need. Great and touching on that also Chris, can you describe the book idea, the concept that really lights your fire because the materials that you've produced with Lee's two books and Jimmy Shine's book, those are just the ones I have on my shelf but it looks like you really go for books that have potential for beauty. Yeah, I think for us again with Cameron and company specifically, it's visuals like a story, obviously it needs to be a great story but our books tend to be driven by the visuals. So if it's a history book, the countless hours I know that Lee and our team put into scouring the archives of Mechanics Institute libraries throughout the Bay Area. If you have that supporting work and also looking into what the costs are for those assets, sometimes there's some hefty licensing fees or just scanning fees, which add up if you've got 150 photographs that you're scanning. But really, I don't have a magic formula by any means. Obviously doing your homework when it comes to what we call comp titles, so comparable books where you can really convince the publisher and say, hey, this book did well and I think my book sort of falls in that same category. Obviously not, it doesn't have to be a perfect comp because then you probably shouldn't do it if it's the exact same book but something that had success where we can look up the numbers and then get some feedback from our sales team and say, hey, this book sold quite well and we think this book will do similarly. And then it goes without saying it's sort of frustrating, I know, but anytime you can get some kind of big name blurb or endorsement or forward or preface, that always helps. It gets a foot in the door at places that helps book buyers at our local bookstores, raises their eyes like, oh, this is a debut author but they have somebody of notability or notoriety endorsing the book, that certainly helps. So yeah, there's no, obviously not a perfect thing, we're small. And so sometimes it just has to catch my eye or catch somebody on our eye. And I will say just on the agent thing, we work more and more with agents but obviously it's almost as hard to get an agent these days as it is to get a publisher. And so I think from a business standpoint, agents can be extremely helpful in letting the writer be the writer and let the agent handle sort of the business side of it so that you don't get bogged down in that. So we personally, a camera company, almost, you think it's the other way around but we tend to prefer working with agents just so we don't have to educate an author every time a clause comes up in a contract that they're nervous about or things like that. So agents certainly, good ones really are worth their 15% but again, it's hard to get there. So maybe you get published and that will help. My first job in publishing, I was an intern for Amy Renert who's a wonderful agent here in the Bay Area. She's based in Tiberon. I was in charge of the slush pile. I was killing everyone's dreams left and right by sending rejection letters. So sorry if that was one of you. But it's a lot and she was getting gods and gods among them. And I imagine she's getting probably 10 times more now just because it's mostly all digital. And so it's so much easier for people to email manuscripts than it was to mail them with a self-addressed stamped envelope. So anyway, that's just my two cents. So sorry, I don't have a perfect response for what we're looking for but those are hopefully a couple of tips that might help. Well, sometimes you don't know what the secret sauce is gonna be until you taste it, right? That's right, yeah. I do have a question about your philosophy regarding comp titles because as a librarian I get a lot of questions from writers who are struggling over this aspect of their proposal. Sometimes you hear that the comp title should be books that are similar but different, like where your book would be on the shelf in relation to these other books. But maybe it sounds like you want a little bit more publication data behind the titles that you submit as your comp titles. Yeah, I mean, I think if you can point to two, three, even four books that you feel like are really in that same, it doesn't have to be, again, it doesn't have to be the same genre necessarily, but something hitting on a similar story, subject matter or maybe a geography, a region, you know, right now we're looking into doing a Warriors book about the Golden State Warriors and there isn't a perfect comp for the book that we're working on, but there are other, obviously Warriors related books, maybe a Steph Curry biography or something where you can show that, man, the same market, the same target market that's going to be interested in your book would most likely also be interested in this book and like, wow, they sold 30,000 copies of that book so that can convince an acquisition team that there is a broad base of people who are interested and that's what's shocking about the regional side of it, which has taken me a little while to wrap my brain around, you know, Bob Cameron who started our company made his business on just regional publishing and you think, oh, you're selling yourself short by just doing a book about San Francisco when you're not gonna sell books outside of San Francisco, but obviously, again, most of you probably know this, but when there's a book about a specific region, then you're automatically, you know, elevated on the radar, you're getting great merchandising at bookstores, you're getting faced out, you're getting the attention of the local stores and that can then obviously bleed into, you know, outer geographies at the same time. So yeah, hope that sort of answers your question, maybe not. It does, it just provides a little more anxiety, that's all. Yeah, sorry. That's all right. Hey, Richard has a question for the historians here. Can you offer any tips to researching and publishing eventually about your famous relatives without offending their direct descendants, especially if they are on the wrong side of the law? Obviously, you can't use a pseudonym for them. So yeah, that's always, it's almost like a memoir question. I mean, I think people who are writing memoir are grappling with this all the time and I think it's really a delicate dance. You have to, I think chances are good you could offend your relatives. I think the thing that I would do would be to alert them that you're doing this and this is the point of view you're taking and this is the information you've discovered and you plan to publish it and give them an opportunity to give you some feedback on the work you're doing. You don't want to give them permission to sort of say you can't do the project. But I think if you have material that reveals something unflattering about somebody in your family, you just gotta go with the truth. I mean, if you're writing a nonfiction book you have to go with the truth. You just have to think of a way to delicately involve your family so that they feel heard. You don't have to do what they said but you have to make sure that they feel heard. That would be my advice. I would agree with Francis. It often comes up in even in Argonaut articles that people are talking about their families and somebody was arrested or somebody made a bad business deal or they went broke or they maybe killed someone. I think that's partly the role where the editor comes in because the editor can sort of help you to use language that is truthful but isn't offensive. You can tone it down a little bit. So I think between contacting the descendants and relatives and making sure that they're aware and making sure that you're talking about it in the best possible way, I think that's about all you can do. Well, you can always get legal advice and sometimes that there's no way around that. Paying for an attorney for an hour is a lot cheaper than getting sued, right? Just to chime in a little bit on that. I mean, I didn't encounter that issue when I was going through the letters and material of my great-grandfather but it is kind of interesting, that's a great-grandfather. I had around family members and everybody surviving, to that extent, great license to kind of go and do this. I mean, I wasn't telling people that I was doing this book before I did it. However, once it came out I was just like, there were so many things that people learned from the family that they never knew and they would never know. And so I think exactly what Francis says it's that tapestry of how the truth fits in. It has a way of actually exercising some of those demons. I mean, to a certain extent, my great-grandfather was an anti-progressive in where it put him in a certain camp but there were certain aspects to him. I mean, I didn't even get into all the political aspects of his, how he ended up working through some of these big issues around the fair, the commerce, with some of the powerhouses of the day that were like Hearst and Spreckles. I mean, it's, so there's certain things that you can never get to in historical nonfiction because you're not in the meeting room with where they were and you can get hints from letters and whatnot but I think as you relate to that as the writer, I mean, you are doing a service. I mean, I really do believe that that's an important point of how you undertake this. Cause if you are sort of gun-shy about undertaking that then you should probably think twice but I do think it serves future generations and your family. So that's my idea. Thank you for that. And let's answer, let's ask one last question from Mary. Do people, maybe this is directly to Lana, but do people ever write the whole article or do they, do you prefer that they send a proposal and then you work together to actually finish the article? So sometimes people write the whole article and it's also happened that sometimes an article that's been printed in one journal we want to repurpose in the organata. They'd liked it, maybe expand a little bit on it. So yeah, that happens too. And it's not that that shouldn't happen. I mean, if somebody has a, if they've gone to the trouble to write an entire article and they've got it and they want to pitch it, they should certainly do that. But what I would, one of the word is is somebody had high hopes for getting something in the Argonaut. And instead of running it by the committee, they took all the time to write it and it wasn't really right. So that's the reason for doing the proposal first. But yeah, somebody's got one that's written. Great. Let's heartening. All right, we are bumping up on time but I want to thank Laurie and Chris and Lana. All three of you have made your respective publishers so much more approachable to us aspiring, emerging authors. And Francis and Lee, thank you also because you have such experience under your belt that you can, that I really appreciate you sharing because it puts our, again, emerging authors, our struggles in perspective. Everyone has these struggles. So thank you all for attending and sharing your knowledge with us. I really appreciate it. And the thanks are coming in through the chat space. Of course, you can see it too. Thank you, Taryn, for organizing it all. Awesome, Taryn. Yeah, thank you. Really well done. Thank you, Taryn. One last thing to say, I would just say, and it goes without saying, read, read, read, buy books at your local bookstore so you can see what selling and what book buyers think is going to sell and usually what they face out will sell and so just visit your local bookstore all the time. And read Publishers Weekly, that's what I tell people to do because it's so interesting. Little tidbits and yes, it's all, it's directed towards, it's about the publishing community, but you need to start thinking about that even though you're lost in the rapture of research, you have to always be thinking about what the product is that you're actually working towards. All right, thanks, you all. Hope you stay cool on this hot day and thanks for tuning in, Lori, from Charleston. Thanks for having me. All right, bye, everybody. Bye, boys. All right, bye, bye.


So every time I use MX Linux, I come away from it more and more impressed because honestly it's such a it's a Distribution that doesn't get a lot of credit It gets a lot of flak because it's ranked number one on Distro watch it gets a lot of flak because it's just another debbie in distribution When you think about it, it doesn't get enough credit for what it actually is and like I said every time I use it I like it more and more and honestly if I wasn't such a AUR guy, I would probably use MX Linux as my daily driver. It's that good So what I thought I'd do today is instead of going through the normal Distro review Which I've already done a Review of this current version of MX Linux I haven't done the AHS version, but there's nothing much there other than like more hardware support What I thought I'd do today is go through five or six of the MX Linux specific tools That I think would be fantastic on other distros because there are some really cool custom tools that come along with MX Linux That would just be So good if they were like Linux wide like every single Linux distribution should have these or a version of them And I don't know why they don't because it's obvious to me every time I use MX Linux that that just the devs behind this distro take a lot of care and They also have a very good focus on not only Creating tools that help new users, but also creating tools that are really good for power users So that's what we're gonna take a look today six tools that I think would be great everywhere So the first one is I'm gonna start out with is gonna be the only tool as far as I know That's gonna look different depending on what desktop environment you install So MX comes with XFC KDE and flux box and depending on which one of those desktop environment slash window managers that you install MX tweak is going to look different. So this is what MX tweak looks like on plasma and there's not a lot here So it's not as impressive here as it would be elsewhere And I'll show you that in just a second But here in plasma you can control where the placement of the panel is you can enable single click right from here You can reset to the defaults and then you can also enable mounting of internal drives from non users That's pretty much it here But if you were to install say the XFC version It would look something like this and it gives you a lot more options You can control the theme from this panel. You can control the compositor the configuration options where the panel is Several different things right? It's really good if you're on XFC It's one of my favorite tools because it allows you especially with XFC in Traditional XFC E land if you want to customize all this stuff, they're kind of all over the place now There is a central settings manager in XFC, but still it just opens up another panel So all those separate panels appear in your menu and they're like said They're kind of all scattered all over the place with MX tweak you can go through and take care of all that stuff from one place it's really cool and It's not something you really get on other distros like if you want like a tweak tool for anything based on GNOME or GTK you have to install it separately and it's hacky and it's not great This is nothing like that Honestly, they may want to call it something other than tweak because it kind of gives that For me it has the connotation of GNOME tweak tool and we all know that GNOME tweak tools not officially sanctioned And it's kind of hacky. This is nothing like that But anyways the MX tweak is the first tool on the list Personally, I think every single distro should have something like this where everything is is in one place now Things that run on plasma kind of have that with the with the plasma settings But the plasma settings is so Overwhelming like for new users if you're going to use plasma and you get into the settings app You're getting lost really fast. I mean, it's not a bad thing necessarily because it gives you License to go through and explore things and mess things up and Customize things to your heart's content and it has a lot of options stuff, but it can be very overwhelming for normal people Who are just getting into Linux? So I like I said, I think every Linux distro should have something like this. This is really cool Anyways, that is MX tweak tool. Okay, so this right here is my favorite tool of all the ones I'm about to show you now most people don't change their Linux distro a lot they usually they used it until it breaks and is not fixable and then they knew can pave and either go to a different distro or reinstall what they had before and That's what most people do They maybe do it once every couple of years if they're doing it for maintenance or they just do it when it breaks, right? for me I do it five or six or seven times a year and It's less Lately like the last couple years. I've found myself distro hopping less But when I first started using Linux, I hopped all the time Right and I was reinstalling I was breaking stuff all the time a tool like this would have been really helpful So what this is called is MX snapshot and what this will do is it will take everything in your root and home direct home directories and Compress them all into an ISO so it basically creates you a bootable ISO of your current working system and that means you can put that on to a USB drive using something like DD or etcher or something like that and You can go through and reinstall your Linux distribution using that ISO From a you know a known working position now It's kind of like a backup But also if you say if you let's say you have your computer right here in front You've gone through and you've customized it to your heart's content. It's exactly the way you want it it's perfect and You have a computer behind you like me and you want to Recreate your perfect system that you have here on your system back there Now you could go through and do it the normal way or you could use this tool create your stuff an ISO hop on over to the standing desk behind you and Install the exact same system on this that computer back there and you'd have two identical systems That's really cool. And as far as I know, this is the only tool That is comes with a distribution that does this in that way. It's Fantastic and I want it everywhere like I want this in every single distro I that's out there. I would love to be able to install this on Arco and just use it It'd be so good. I would use it all the time So good. Okay, so that is MX snapshot. The next one is called MX boot options Now a lot of distributions come with grub Customizers like Arco has a Arco Linux tweak tool that will allow you to customize grub and it will all you do a lot of stuff So if this here isn't as unique as the other ones But I still feel that this is one of those tools that every distro should have something like this because this is a power tool This isn't something that new users are ever going to want to tweak, you know, deal with but for power users Especially if you have multiple partitions or multiple distros so you're dual booting or something and that grub menu that comes up That almost disappears almost instantaneously is if always a pain in the ass because you already got to press a button Then you know navigate through things if you if you're not quick enough it can go away With this tool here you can change that you can make the menu time out You know 10 seconds or more if you want to you can also change what the default boot option is So if you have multiple kernels You could go through and do that here you can change the theme you can change the background You can change the messages and stuff like that It's really good if you want to go through and customize your grub menu now. I'm not sure I'm they're using grub I was gonna say I'm not sure if they use grub or not if they use system D But it is grub and if you want to go through and customize grub This is a good way to do it if you're on MX Linux Unfortunately, not every distribution comes with something like that Like it's not that you can't do this stuff in other distributions, right? Like everything that I've shown you so far can be done in other distros But MX comes with the tools to do those things for you that makes it a lot easier For people who don't want to go through and mess around with their grub configuration files So that is MX boot options. The next one is MX clean now This one here is not a unique thing at all There's a ton of tools out there that you can download that do the same thing So things like stacer things like bleach bit, which don't use bleach bit It's you're just gonna break something using bleach bit Especially if you and you use it using root print glitches You're just gonna delete something you need But something like this is good and it's kind of like stacer but for MX and it does a ton of stuff So you can go through and clear your clean folders You can clean your app cache a you can delete many of the logs that Linux constantly is creating you can empty the trash You can also what's really cool is go through and schedule this so that it does this Either daily, weekly or monthly I'm assuming what it does is it creates a crown job in the background and then it will run Whatever script it's this is a front end for in the background and do all the things that you want to be done It also it also has a tool for analyzing disk usage So probably a graphical front-end for du or something like that That will allow you to go through and see where your biggest files are and if you can delete some of them to clear disk space Disk space good Lord. That was a hard word to say You can also do it from other users So if you have other users on your system and you have root privileges, probably you need those You can go through and do it for other users as well. So that's really cool and it comes pre-installed on an MX Okay, so the next one like I said, I'm pretty sure I ended up with six maybe even seven tools here I'm Counting was really not my priority. So this one here is really cool Now all the stuff here that I'm gonna show you can be done in the terminal really easy And that's how I'd usually do it and that's probably how it would still do it in MX If I were to use MX as a daily driver, but if you Want to create new users or add users to groups or do any of that kind of stuff a lot of times There's not a really good gooey option for that to happen now I'm not sure if things like GNOME and KDE have user management things in their settings panels I'm sure they probably do But you can tell how often then I use them like anytime I needed to use it at a user if I needed to add a user to a Group I just did that from the command line with MX They've pulled that stuff out of the settings panel which is always buried in a weird place if it even exists and they've put it all here in one place and Usually the if I remember right the group the user managers management stuff in system settings for GNOME and KDE That's just creating new users if you want to add thing the if you want to add that user to certain groups You have to do that from command line here in this tool, which is called MX user manager You can create new users you can change passwords if I wanted to change the password for my math account I could go through and do that. I can also go through and alter some settings like restoring to default and changing autolog and settings I'm not sure what this copy and sync thing here is I'm pretty sure that what you could do what it's for is to go through and Copy home directories into a file that you can then take to another computer That's kind of cool If that's what that's for It'd be neat because it would allow you to then do something What you do similar to the that iso tool was for but instead of taking your entire root prediction as well It would just take the home directory stuff and move it over This one here is probably the coolest part is you can go through and create new groups. You can delete groups. You can also go through and manage group memberships so For specific users add them to the group. So if we go through and select my name here It'll show me all the groups on the computer And the ones that my username is a member of so if I wanted to say enable ssh I could do so if I wanted to add the printer one Never remember what the printer one is I never print anything But you get the idea you can go through and add things Add your user to certain groups now. This isn't something that you'll need to do all the time I think probably in my entire time of using Linux I've only had to add myself to groups like five or six times and usually it's for setting up something like Plex media servers or something like that where you have to have that user in a certain group in order for things to work So that is really cool. So that is mx user manager Okay, so now the last one is the nerdiest thing I've ever seen in my life. So and it's This here is probably the least probably the tool that is the least useful for pro users because This is going to be for a User who is comfortable with the terminal Right if you're comfortable with the terminal, you're going to alter your bash config In the bash rc file That's just the way you're going to do it because you're comfortable in the terminal. That's the way you Going to find all the tutorials of how to do that kind of stuff if you want to change your prompt You're going to google how to change your bash prompt and it's going to tell you to alter your Bash rc file, right? That's how everybody does it That's how you probably should do it because that's how you're learning how to interact with bash and all this stuff However in typical mx fashion, they've gone through and created a GUI for you to do that It's called bash config and it will allow you to go through and create aliases For your bash shell It'll allow you to create new prompts The cool thing about this is that you can create multiple prompts, right? You can go through and create several different prompts and it'll remember them And then you can go through and switch between them. So you can get the default Prompt the fancy prompt or a custom prompt and then you can just add one here, right? And it kind of has a like a prompt builder tool. So it's really I mean, it's so good It's kind of like if you've ever used power level 10,000 Which is a plugin for like zsh and oh my zsh and all that stuff They have a wizard that you can go through in the terminal and it will create your prompt for you, right? As you go through the the wizard. I mean, it's like a it's like a windows 98 wizard I mean, we call these things wizards, but that's what is basically what it is And it's kind of like that only this is done on a GUI and it's for bash not zsh And you don't have to have any plugins or anything. It's really really cool So that is that and you can also go through and change the history length and Also add things to your path. So if you have a like a script folder Instead of doing like what I do I always every time I install linux I go through and transfer all of my scripts from the script folder that I need Into an actual path that already exists here You can go through and just add your scripts folder to As a path as one of the system's paths and you can do it right from this GUI. It's amazing Okay, it's also like I said the nerdiest thing ever so That is Those are the tools that I like the most now as you can see if we go here To the mx tools there are a ton of different tools the mx comes with just awake Let me actually change my can here go to the other side You can see there's just a ton of them that I didn't even go through and cover that there's a network manager There's mx data time for managing the data time. There's a conchi manager So you can you know control the conchi that it comes with There's a tour. There's a tweak tool. We already did the tweak tool. There's um, uh, the remaster cc This one here is something that will allow you to It's from what I can tell I'll never use this will allow you to go through and actually run an iso like Through a network install. It's I know it's it's confusing, but it sounds cool. Uh, whatever it does so Like there's things here like I have no clue what they are But and and the thing about mx linux is That every time I use this There's more tools, right? There's I mean there's more here now Then there was the last time I did a review of it and that was like Four weeks ago like maybe maybe a month ago Like these guys are always creating tools and it's Awesome, I like I love it so much I mean it's just I mean half the stuff I have no clue what it does And I'm gonna go through and after this video and go through and find every single one of these things and just explore them because It's like candy. You like it's you know It's like christmas morning because you go out you go install mx linux And you always find a brand new shiny toy to play with And that's one of the reasons why I love mx linux like It's not that it's the most unique distribution ever. It's really not it's just a it's a it's a debbie and stable distro like there's Four dozen of these things out there. There's sparky There's you know just a ton of them that are all really good to varying degrees, right? Or you could just use regular debbie and also good to varying degrees depending on whether or not you can find that I so the thing about mx is that you can feel The passion that the devs have for this because they go through and they they're trying A lot of times when I install a distro and I install I think why does this thing exist like this is just arch with Kd slapped on top of it with a with a calamari's installer. That's all it is like that's I mean create the distro you want to create but A lot of distros really don't have a reason to exist You don't you don't feel that they're putting any effort into it beyond making it installable, you know Once you've installed it You have a they're putting all the responsibility for everything back on you like you There's no good reason for you to ever come back to this distro because you're really just making it your own afterwards And there's nothing wrong with that Right, I mean that's one of the reasons why a lot of people like arch link because they're just building it themselves But one of the reasons why I like arco linux is because arco linux feels like they have a vision And their vision is to have all the window managers and all the desktop environments out there And to have the most support, you know, you could possibly have right mx is kind of like the like that where you can feel that the the devs just have A ton of interest in making their distro As good as possible Not only for new users because a lot of these tools aren't going to be anything new users or even ever going to look at I mean there isn't I mean By the time they get to like the iso tool or the the boot repair tool or something They've been using linux for a while and and they're looking for tools like they're exploring You know, so but not so not only for new users, but also for power users that I mean things like that iso tool Things things like the user manager, uh, you know the job scheduler things like that Are all power user tools. It's fantastic. So it's kind of like a debut distribution for everybody. All right Okay, man, you can stop gushing about it now because it's it's a fantastic distribution I'm sure that there are flaws. I mean, there's no perfect distribution out there I'm sure there's things that would drive me nuts if I daily drove it And I think that after I'm done with fedora I am going to use mx linux on on actual hardware For a while and see if I can't find some flaws with it because there has to be something there that I just can't stand There has to be so they'll be coming up next make sure you subscribe to see that one that eventually drops So that is it make sure you leave a comments in the comment section below If you've used mx linux before if there's mx tool that you particularly particularly like You can leave those in the comment section below make sure you like the video that really does help kind of Hack the algorithm if you will you can follow me on twitter at linuxcast You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go That's taking one thing of my current patrons Devon chris east coast web gen 2 is fun too patricle primus marcus maiglin jackson i've tool steve Isid a mitchell art center merit camp joshley j dogs the bsc's rock and peter a Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time


What did you eat? The brown stuff? What did you eat?  For more Optin! It's so juicy Oh, you know it juicy lady It's his daughter A little weird Gotta admit, he did that on me I didn't even know what was happening Today's going to be a really fun video We've done a snack and a dessert Indian snacks and desserts video But we're done playing around Please check those out But today, we're getting serious We are trying the main courses Very exciting I would like to say something first One, we would love to visit India and actually try the cuisine there That's where you actually get authentic food Unfortunately, that's a little expensive So, know that Second, if and when I end up not liking something I am not disrespecting your food or culture I think you know us well enough If you've been around for a week We love you and respect you and honor you and don't want to do anything offensive If you don't get that People have different tastes That's called being a human Here we go Not quite sure We don't know what these are They just gave them to us It looks like a chip It's kind of a chippy pita thing There's a seed in there I have no idea what that is It has a little spice to it I don't know what it is It's good I like it It's so mysterious I've never actually had anything like it Yeah Garlic naan Smells so good I'm sorry Garlic smellgasm It's one of the few Indian things I've had before I've never had garlic naan I've had regular naan and it's amazing Look at how romantic that is Mmm Oh yeah I want to rub this all over my body I do That's amazing Can you smell that? Smell it Come on because Holy cow We'll just be here for the next 10 minutes eating this Yum Naan is amazing Chicken samosas So we've had samosas in our other video I think it was a veggie one And Samosas were probably our favorite thing in the snack video They were tasting Cheers Also they hate it when we smell stuff See Eating is a full factor experience Stop smelling stuff I'm like why? Is your curry in there? It's yellow on the inside It's the curry And the chicken is super super super Granulated It's glorious What does it taste like? It tastes like chicken Don't make mouth sounds I think it's like Chicken and rice casserole It has that consistency to it It's a very white thing to eat That is a very white thing to say The curry is obviously there and the chicken is there But there's a whole lot more going on in there It's kind of like that bread we don't know what it's called A minute ago there's just a lot going on that's a mystery That's amazing I don't know Mango lassi So juicy This looks like a protein drink that they drink on Mars Star Trek fans Love, love and prosper Wow Geez Is this what we had in the last video?  The brown stuff? What did you eat? Oh you got the pickled stuff Did you do the carrots? Was it the carrots in here? Oh Corbin Okay I know his heat level Like you need to know this Oh god When Corbin and Stephanie come over And we do like chips and salsa The rest of us have normal salsa with some spice I get the mild salsa For Corbin and I put wimpy salsa Because This is not that hot This on a heat level of 1 to 10 5 I think I'm dying Do you want to taste? I think this is like the jalapeño Oh I'm not sure it's anything Jalapeño, oh that's got some heat That would have killed you I know, I think I have heartburn Sweet Are you supposed to eat non with it? I don't know It's kind of like barbecue sauce It's like a sweet barbecue kind of a thing there That's tasty You're fine It's not heat, it's definitely more of a Almost like a bear day sauce Right?  You try that first I'm not going to try that You need to know something, Corbin's never had Indian food Like ever So Tandoori chicken I've had this, I don't know how many times I've had Tandoori chicken It is glorious And I'm sure this is going to be glorious I know what it's going to taste like You're fine, you need to tell me if it's spicy You'll like it, it's not It's red as crap Just because it's red Indian food Just because it has color doesn't mean it has heat It has flavor, you're going to love that, eat it Oh it's nice and moist Good job Come on now, that's good That's good Tandoori chicken Can get really dry Yeah that's good Yeah that's tasty And now you do some of the onion On the outside you should curry I don't know what they do to make it glorious And look at the little burnt edges on the tips of it Like that I love you I love you Or there's burnt tips On the edge of it That's good So I I don't know if this is like Indian fried rice Right? But I do love fried rice So let's see, what is this again It's a chicken rice thing Barsami or something like that Origami, chicken under hand done What does that smell?  At least three It's Indian food I love all kinds of cuisine It tastes like a gingerbread man I love all kinds of cuisine Indian food man is the most Complex Who's that? Indian food man? Is that a superhero? It is, Indian food man I want to be him Indian food man Not spicy That's tasty Tastes like mango I was just making me so happy Did you know in China If you belch repeatedly It's a compliment to the chef That's disgusting I know, but that's truth I don't know anywhere else in the world that they do that Because it's rude in America Chicken tikka masala Ting Holy cow I actually have feelings of love That does inspire feelings of love See, I think the issue with Indian food Is you make it look really scary Only to you Everything has this orange and red That's because it's the passion man Haven't you seen all the colors flying everywhere?