Hello everyone, welcome to the final installment of the retrospective interviews for KD goals with me is Alex. Hello. How are you? Hi Adam, how are you? I'm great. Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Sure My name is Alex Paul. I am from Barcelona and I have been developing KD for the better of the last 15 years I have been working in KD also professionally through blue systems, but then I've also been doing it a bunch beyond. I am from Barcelona and I am also the KDV president which the KDV being the organization that helps the KD community and attain its goals And you're also the current champion for the apps goal, right? Yeah, that's correct. One of my tasks in KD nowadays is to lead the KD. KD is all about the apps goal. Can you tell us why apps are the focus for KD? Sure. I mean for me apps have always been very important. I joined KD through an app which was and is algebra but then it's also part of involvement that many of us have with KD. Apps are very direct towards what you do in your computers and I think that this is a very important aspect. It's also very important that well apps as a concept have been evolving a lot over the last decades and it was about time that we pushed it a little bit forward to and catch up with well how everyone else have been doing it. This goal was obviously by the way started and led originally by Jonathan and I only took over a little bit over a year ago or maybe not even a year ago. Yeah. And what changes have been made during the time you've been the champion for the goal? Well, like I said Jonathan started he did a whole lot of work on the website on app.satk.org making it much more direct directly available to the users to learn about all of the cool products that the KD community puts together. From my perspective I've tried to juggle a little bit both my hands of the KDV and and the KD goal leader to try to make sure that this happens in the best of the ways possible. So for example one of the things that we are doing and this is just starting right now is the the app source positions that we've just opened from the KDV. So if you want to work professionally developing better infrastructure for KDE for distributing its apps this is something that you can do right now. We can consider this as part of the KDE is all about the app's goal. Although obviously it's coming from two slightly different fronts. Something else that we've been doing has been working with the Linux Upsummit. I have been organizing the the conference and working with several no members to put together this this event that helps us putting common a lot of the concepts that are always floating for apps in Linux and it's it's not trivial. Yeah, this has been a good amount of work as well. And then finally I've been trying to work with the different sub-communities doing apps to make sure that they can do what they want to do sometimes with better success than others, but that would be like the Windows team, the Mac Android teams as well as the people doing Flatpak and SnowCraft. Yeah, you mentioned the position for the different app stores. I guess we'll see the fruits of that initiative in some time. Are there any other things that we can look forward to? Regarding the app's goal? I mean with app's goal or not, Katie will be putting forward amazing apps. Many of them that I'm sure that a lot of you will be using on a daily basis and this is always something to look forward to. Big part of the reason all the Katie is all about the apps is that we need that infrastructure that is not in the forefront, that is not direct to what you experience every day.  What I can tell you is that we are working towards making it possible for everyone to get their Katie apps in the best of conditions possible. Speaking about the goals initiative and goal champions in general, can you tell me in your opinion what makes a good goal champion? So maybe a way to answer this question is to think a little bit why we started doing the goals in the first place. The goals are a good way for people within Katie to coordinate at a horizontal level. Otherwise, and up until then Katie had generally only coordinated at per project level, there was the plasma team, there was the Katie Edu team, if you want or even like more specific, like the Chigong pre-team or Krita, etc. This works fine, this works well because it has a very specific product in mind and furthers it. But then there's a lot of shared problems that we get to address or that we can't address had we have tried to address through this goal. Or through all of the goals, for example, the Weyland goal could think about how does it affect the Krita people, how it affects the Chigong pre-people, how it affects the Katie Edu people, and then put the biggest prioritizing different aspects and solve the most important ones. And thus making the wall a little bit better for us in that aspect. The same applies to us and to consistency, etc. Therefore, Katie Gold Leader needs to be someone who is interested in talking to the different teams and seeing what their problems are, their concerns are. And putting all of this together and then coordinate with the other people who have the technical ability to solve these problems and put them at ease. It doesn't necessarily need to be somebody who can solve the problems themselves. In fact, it wouldn't be a goal, then it would be an Haleish goal, right? I mean, I do have my own goals, but if we're talking about the Katie goals, it's about how to make it possible for the people in Katie to solve the problems that all of us would have collectively. A good goal leader needs to be someone who can talk to others, prioritize tasks and manage them into solutions. So it doesn't have to be the best programmer in the world or the best designer? No, hopefully the best developer in the world and the best designer will be part of the goal team to help the goal further. And we have amazing designers, we have amazing developers in Katie who can help you do that, right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, so you outlined maybe what's a good goal champion, but overall what sort of themes would be good ideas for goals, what makes a good goal. I'm asking because very soon the process of selecting the new goals begins and maybe people are thinking about submitting their own ideas and can you share your thoughts about what sort of things or what kind of goals should be submitted? Looking back, I think that goals, the most successful goals that I can think of have been good in two different fronts, one in getting new people involved and give them an outlook of how to interact with Katie and expose them to it. And on the other hand, like I was saying, solving problems that are structural somehow and need addressing at a horizontal level. Interesting topics are maybe personas of our products that we're not covering right now, like a product saying let's care about people with specific accessibility needs or even more specific, right? Like let's improve Katie software for blind people or let's improve Katie software for helicopters or let's improve Katie software in cars, right? Something that makes us all look in a certain direction but not at a very specific problem just in a general direction so that we can go all in parallel towards the same goal. I think that this is the most important part. Okay, so basically to look at use cases for specific type of users, is that what you're saying? Type of users or generally use cases, right? Like you can be Adam and care about Katie software in a car or maybe you're blind, right? It's not different kinds of users, it's just different situations or perspectives, problems to tackle. Currently Adam is interested in having lots of apps on the Steam Deck. Well, Adam must be very happy then. Yeah, and yeah, of course, Steam Deck running Katie has the discover store available. The app's goal is important also in that way, a different device to be used for consuming Katie software. Not only Katie software of course but anything from there. Yeah, for sure. And for example, the Steam Deck case is probably a success story of us by looking in a certain direction all together. We were working on some in some ways things that as soon as the Steam Deck arrived, they just started piggybacking on what we were working on, right? Like when we started putting our software in FlatHub, we didn't know that a big company like Valve would say and let's start using FlatHub right now. But all of a sudden all of this work was as valuable as ever just because a ton of more users are starting to use it and enjoying it. So maybe a good defined and well run goal might lead to a big thing such as the Steam Deck for the community. Not promising anything but basically why not? Sure, that's the kind of thing you have to say. But it's all a matter of understanding our users and in practice all of the users that are coming through the Steam Deck product are users who would have been very interested in a lot of other things that we've been doing as well, right? So it's not the chance that we were thinking about apps for example. Do you think a good goal topic would be something that a person just thinks it's important for them? Just for them and it so happens that it's also important to a lot of other people. So they're just looking at their own experience and the needs and use cases. It all depends on how well people can extrapolate their own problems and understand how they affect the general user base, right? For example, whenever somebody tries or requests to join Katie and ask us how do I start? The thing I generally tell them is just find somebody that is bothering you and address it and then find something else, right? Like you could also say let's solve somebody else's problem, but then this also has the issue that you cannot really care that much about it. Whereas if it's something that you really needed, you really wanted, it's something that you will be more interested in tackling and spending your own time to address it. That said, if you are bothered by having a button at the top right corner in Krita or whatever, then that's probably not worth a goal, right? That it's just a pet peeve or call it what you wish needs to be something that people can empathize with. And in practice that's back to the reason why we need to vote for the goals, right? It needs to be something that people decide to care for all together. And my last question is you already mentioned that you've been the gold champion for this goal only for about a year since Jonathan was the champion previously. But maybe even in this shorter time you have some experience and some tips for people that might think about becoming the next champions. I think that embarking on a goal is not all that different than embarking on a different endeavor. If anything, it offers a possibility for somebody with a less technical perspective to take leadership on an area without, well, straight away. Tips would be think about the user, think about what it feels for them like to use any of our software and think about how we would be in a better world if. After a solution is put in place. From there, if you're in an open mind and willing to work with others, I think that there's not much that can get in your way of having a successful goal. Talking to others, seeing how they feel about your idea, sure, a good thing. Looking at aspects of the community as it is set up right now, seeing what people are working on and saying, well, if we did a lot more of this, it would be in a much better position. That would be something that I'm sure a lot of people would get them excited if it's framed properly. And it can bring a lot of smiles to our users. Thank you very much for the tips and also thank you for the interview. That was the last question. Thanks for your time and I guess see you later. Yeah, thanks for the chat, Adam. It's been a pleasure. See ya. Bye.


Hey friends tonight. I'm going to Epcot to meet up with some friends and kind of just hang out and relax watch Epcot forever It is seven o'clock. The park closes at 10. I just got out of work. I rushed over here I parked at the beach and yacht club and hopefully it's gonna get me into the park quicker So let's go do this Seeing them may be a challenge though. It looks very busy Looks like they're queuing up people to the ones that want to get in the Rosencrown because right now they are full This party happening over here I do want to get over to my friends because they're probably waiting for me We're heading right on over to Mexico because that's where my friends are at and My friends aren't in Mexico anymore. So they're on the other side of Mouse Gears, which means we're gonna walk through Mouse Gears Which is equally awesome Look at all this stuff Isn't it neat? I've been actually eyeing up this Epcot hat. I really like it, but this Is something that I'm definitely interested in getting. Wow. Oh, I like it a lot. How much is this?  Oh boy It's gonna happen though because those are my favorite types of shirts I actually had an Epcot one just like this, but it wasn't Epcot forever. I like them a lot One thing that I've been wanting to try is the donut beer that they actually have here It's the central 28 beer company Boston cream donut ale for four dollars and fifty cents. So we're doing it Wow, the smells that are popping out of this donut box phenomenal They're just handing stuff out. I'm just gonna take it Look at those donuts and look at that beer Thank you And I found my friends or friend My corn fritters Corn fritters Jackie super enthused Fantastic and we're gonna enjoy some donut box. Yeah, I know there's no good lighting here We're going in again. Cheers Hold the phone hold the phone There she goes There she goes again Don't get me wrong about the donut beer it is a good beer, but it's not really donaty If that makes sense. I mean there's nothing special about it. Sorry about the noise We're going under test track. You know how that is. Oh The dance party is popping Well, not really. Where's the characters at though? That's my only question There they are. It's a meal Where's your buddy? Oh, there he is. There's Remy. Oh Wow, Ram Ram Look at that Since we are in future world might as well go for a ride on spaceship Earth Look at that big beautiful miraculous spaceship Earth just what I needed to make my day a little bit better a little spaceship birth and Rome burning English Jackie's rose gold ears are really sparkly at this angle Seated your time machine Please remain seated we'll resume our journey shortly. Thank you. Thank you There it is go ahead breathe it all in Crumple still skin Now we're off spaceship Earth. We're gonna head back over to world showcase and get ready for Epcot forever Probably get a drink and probably just chill out for a little bit Honestly all of these stands over here I have not eaten at any of them except for when I got the chocolate over in the chocolate stand That was very good actually, but I haven't seen or explored. I know they have the cheese, but shocking Thing right here guys. I Don't like cheese. I'm sorry. I know I know how could you not like cheese? I just I don't like cheese So where we decided to fly into ourselves is at the Rosen crown, but we're not going inside It's way too busy for that. We're getting our beers outside I'm gonna get a harp my friend's gonna get an innocent gun. That's the beer that I tried I think the last night of illuminations and it did not go well for me Not well at all did not like it Just in case this vlog comes up before Jackie puts hers out Just a glimpse of what you're gonna see right here We decided to take our beers into the back of the United K Pavilion because it's actually normally very quiet back here Not much going on and you kind of just have wide open spaces You're not running into a whole bunch of people and bumping shoulders, so I like it a lot Hey stupid Well, it was quiet over here But now British Revolution is coming on and it's nine o'clock Because the park is open later and Epcot forever is at 10 p.m They put on a later show so it's gonna get very crowded over here shortly But they started out with the little Queen and that will get people here Actually will probably be gone when it comes to the new Epcot who knows or actually yeah It's gonna be cherry tree Lane, so it's gonna be fun, but I'm gonna be a little sad Celebration of Epcot yesterday and tomorrow Turning on Can be experienced from all around the world showcase So tonight is actually Jackie's first night seen Epcot forever I was here for the first night and I haven't been back yet So I'm excited to come and see it and we got the fast pass spot. So should be a good view hopefully 30 minutes until 10 o'clock and there are still plenty of room So I'm happy. We're not all crammed in here like I experienced the last night of illuminations and probably what it was Like here for the first night, but the first night I think they only had Disney Park streaming from this angle. So that's why I think it'll be a good spot. I Stepped away to get myself some drinks before Epcot forever and then stumbled across This pretty nifty photo pass and I want to get my picture taken because look at the background Beautiful Two minutes to go and the show will start. I'm not gonna show you guys the full show just little tidbits of it But this is absolutely a very good viewing area and there's not a lot of people actually here I mean, it's still pretty open.


Hi, I'm Janelle Wellens and I'm an engineer at JPL. I'm Mike Gregglich-McKean and I'm a space weather forecaster with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Hi everyone, my name is Inessa Paramos. I am the Data Manager for Exports in Sivas at the Ocean Ecology Lab, NASA Goddard. I'm Armeen Sarushan. My name is Mamta Patel Nagarajah. I'm Jore and I'm the Live Producer Director for NASA headquarters. Hi, my name is Nisu Okan and I work on the Mars Perseverance rover. I'm Seth Neoy and I work at NASA JPL as a Mars Curiosity rover driver. Look, you can even see a small eruption that's going on as we speak. And I couldn't get away without mentioning my very pal Luna. I cross the house as my co-worker who's busy playing toys most of the days. So this is my desk setup. I am in my loft working on a yard sale table. I am monitoring the social media accounts for the Nancy Grace-Romance Space Telescope, while also making some edits to some possible social pieces. I would like to give you a quick tour of virtual exhibits. Here we are at the lobby of American Astronomical Society. In the kitchen is my second co-worker who's busy on a Zoom meeting. At JPL I work on the autonomy for multi-agent systems, like these small scale rovers called puffers right here, which work together as a team to explore the moon and other places. Normally we would be at JPL testing out in the Mars yard, but these days we're testing right here in my backyard. We can do all of our robotic test planning from right here in my kitchen with some fun decorations. And you can see while I'm working from home I do have some new co-workers. There's lots of dancing, lots of laughter, sometimes crying, theirs and mine. But we're getting through these times. Hi. To do operations remotely we wear two headsets. On one ear we talk to the other rover planners, and on the other ear is the rest of the uplink team. LA seems to like my new look. The pre-planning was done from right here. And this is my home office. It's also my personal creative space as evidence is one of my things. I'm going to keep my voice down a little bit because my other co-worker is on a telecon. Working from home is definitely different, but at least I get to enjoy small perks like getting to wear my gaming headset each day. It's been a challenge working at home. It's been different.  But I have more duties at home as a father since we don't have daycare anymore. So it's a little bit more challenging to do my work. But it's all fun spending time with this little guy. I am outside enjoying the nice weather with my new co-worker who is cleaning a little bit. And while I work with some data for CVS, here's some of the data I'm working right now. I'm making sure the data is clean and ready to be archived. I do long for the day for when we can return to normal, but for now we're persevering through this pandemic and working hard to ensure the success of our launch. But that's it. So I'm looking forward to working with everyone in person again soon.


Good afternoon everybody. I'm Betsy Peck-Learned. I'm the Interim Dean of the Library here. Some of you have heard my spiel before, so I apologize for that. I wanted to welcome you to our first spring semester talking in the library series here, and featuring Derek Nikitas. And Adam Braver, our writer-in-residence, is going to introduce him. But I just had a couple things to talk to you about today. One is, I wanted to mention the other two talking in the library events that are coming up. One is the fiction writer Greg Jackson, and he'll be here on March 29th. And on April 11th, Claire Massoud will be here. She'll be leading the Vermont Fellowship Workshop for some of our creative writing students, students that have applied for the fellowship. And she will be speaking on April 11th at Rogers Free Library. We're trying to get some collaborative events going with the Rogers Free. So keep those in mind and you'll be seeing posters and all kinds of them. So today we're meeting in this Mary Teft White Center's new instant theater. And Mary Teft, or Happy White as she was finally known, was an alumna of the university. She earned her degree very late in life. I think she was in her 70s. And she visited the campus often. And it was her generous endowed gift that allowed us to create the original Mary Teft White Cultural Center which was this whole area without the glass walls and the fancy furniture a decade ago. And her hope was that this series would introduce students to professionals and faculty and accomplished individuals who could share their professional and personal goals. So that they would inspire and motivate students to pursue their careers. And we are also grateful to her son John Hayeson White Jr. who was here this fall. He spoke and I think he was the first speaker in our series in the fall. He is continuing his mother's legacy through supporting the transformation of this room. So he donated funds in order for us to be able to create a really high tech space here. And there is abundant technology. You can just see the displays around the room this is really kind of a state of the art room. And it can transform. The reason it's called instant theater is it can transform from a presentation space to like this to a student collaborative space. And if you come here during the day you will see lots and lots of students studying in this room. It's a little warm today but normally it's a nice space to work in. We think we need a mural though. What do you say? Especially when the screen isn't down it's pretty bland. So I'd like to introduce John Braver. He's going to introduce Derek. Thanks for coming out. It's especially on an icky day. I know some of you are out here with guns in your backs and stuff but either way I'm glad you came out. So and I also want to add the Greg Jackson that Kevin Marshawn has a lot riding on Greg Jackson being here. So you guys have to make sure you put that on your calendar. It doesn't have egg on his face. In my field meaning the arts almost inevitably the question of what makes something literary or serious writing versus popular writing. I'm almost inevitably the question of what makes something literary or serious writing versus popular writing and vice versa always comes up. When I teach summer workshops rarely is there a time when the issue isn't raised. To some the answer comes in a distinction between the character-driven work versus the thought-centered work. For others a difference lies in genre. Each would be a perfectly fine answer I suppose if expedience was an issue and a simplified answer was all that anyone had time for. If only it were that easy. If only the great detective writer Dashel Hammett or the legendary pulp writer Jim Thompson didn't write works that were every bit as literary as contemporaries such as Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West. And if only television the ultimate lower form. Didn't in fact have some of the most artful and innovative writing currently seen on any screen. And then of course there isn't the addition of YA to the conversation. Literature or literature in that kind of way for young adults perhaps the answer to all these questions lies somewhere in the notion of the artful. That is how the work is constructed and approached from an artful position in terms of notions of structure, language, depth of character, intent, metaphor, etc. My experience in working with students interested in genre writing is that even when their resolve remains steadfast about their particular genre thinking about it as a piece of art rather than just a story almost always makes it better. I'm really glad we have Derek Nikitas here today to among other things hear him help us parts out these distinctions. And I can't think of a better person to bring into this conversation. Putting aside for the moment his MFA in fiction and his PhD in English and his professorship at URI, we will look to Derek the writer. Derek's first two books the Edgar nominated Pires and then the second book the Long Division were quote adult thrillers while his most recent extra life is a YA sci-fi thriller. There are also allegedly some zombie stories. Derek is someone who sees and understands the artful yet also will speak of the liberation that so-called genre writing allows. He is someone who is thought considerably about the relationship of the forms both as a scholar and a writer. And Derek is someone who can contribute perspective to this ongoing discussion. Derek Nikitas. Okay, can you hear me alright? Hopefully my voice will hold up. Hopefully my voice will hold up. I'm on the tail end of a cold here and a little concerned about it but I think I'll be okay. First I'd like to thank the Dean of the Library and Adam Braver for inviting me here today. I'm really excited to be part of this conversation when I talk to Adam about what I should do for this. He did mention some of the things that he talked about in his introduction just a minute ago and the idea that many of you might be interested in dealing with or thinking about the distinctions between popular fiction, literary fiction, young adult fiction and all those things in between. I'm not sure that at the end of it all I'll be able to clarify anything for anybody because these things continue to be questions that I ask myself a lot but they do keep my process of writing interesting to me and exciting to be thinking about with each new project what different approaches I can take and how I can keep changing what I'm doing. One of the most common pieces of advice that I hear from other writers has to do with this notion of finding your voice. You heard this before, it's so important for the young writer to find his or her voice and I've always thought that that was an odd thing to say because I haven't, I've been working at this since I was a teenager and I still haven't found a voice. I'm just interested in using different voices from time to time in each subsequent story or each subsequent novel so I've always, you know there are certainly authors who have a distinctive voice and you see it over and over again in all of their work and that can be really interesting but at the same time there are other authors I think of folks like Michael Shabon or Juliana Baggett, Joyce Carolotes, Jonathan Lethem who keep changing what they do from novel to novel and keep negotiating the boundary lines between what's considered art or literary fiction and what's considered popular fiction or whatever you want to call it. So I figured that's what I'd talk about today and I'd do it by way of giving you a little bit of a background in my own experience as a writer and my own negotiation of this question. So as Adam mentioned a minute ago I got my MFA in creative writing back in 2000 at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and so I went through a year three year program that was very much focused on teaching me how to be a literary writer and that means specifically teaching me how to be the kind of writer who would be published in who would be able to publish short stories in literary magazines university literary magazines or small presses and things like that and I, you know embraced it almost entirely. I did have the pleasure of having a couple of classes with some different kinds of visiting writers who had a somewhat different approach to what I just mentioned that gave me a different perspective especially because I think like a lot of people I made my way into, I was a very early writer I was very interested in writing even before I was ten years old and the models that I had at that time were things that would have been interested to a kid growing up in the 80s so there was a fantasy, YA as we think of it now didn't really exist you know you had a wrinkle in time and things like that and the schools would assign to you but nothing that seemed marketed directly toward kids and so most of my reading material was you know Dean Coonson, Stephen King and Anne Rice was a little older than ten my parents wouldn't let me read that stuff until I was a teenager and you know big fat fantasy novels by Terry Brooks and Tolkien and stuff like that so I came into creative writing as a genre or fiction writing as a genre from that perspective and it took me a couple of semesters to embrace the idea of working on the sentence level you know the artistry of the sentence, the artistry of the character and interiority and all of those things became especially important to me and I tended to embrace writers who kind of skirted a line between the two like I remember being pretty obsessed with John Irving for a while he seems to write the same book over and over again these days so I'm a little less interested in him but he was one who had sort of a popular repeal at the same time that he took his art very seriously and it wasn't until after I graduated with my MFA that I and I was on my own that sort of terrifying period of time soon after the MFA when you no longer have workshops with peer students you know for example I remember specifically he still this fellow writer is still a good friend of mine so I don't mean any ill will toward him at all but I remember submitting a story for workshop in which there was a gun and his comment in workshop was it's kind of cheesy to have a gun in a story at all it doesn't even get fired it's just the idea of doing that made it pushed it into the seedy realm of genre fiction and I thought that was a pretty odd comment but that was kind of the exemplary of the world that I was in and so when I graduated I kind of had to think about how I wanted to negotiate this myself and I published a number of short stories in your traditional literary magazines but I also was having a lot of trouble with it you know I totally embraced the idea that you have to keep submitting things over and over again and I compiled my massive rejection letters that all my professors told me that I would have to compile before I started thinking that I was a real writer you know that sort of thing but it still seemed to take me 25 different times sending one story out to different magazines and getting nothing but form rejections until I started submitting to magazines that were considered more obviously genre magazines especially Ellery Queen Mystery magazine I don't know if any of you are familiar with this thing but it's you know it shows up in I would say Borders and Barnes & Noble but they don't have Borders anymore so you know it's Barnes & Noble and some other grocery stores I suppose from time to time it's a very old fashioned Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen there's two like old fashioned mystery magazines and I thought I didn't really have much of a chance there either because I wasn't writing old fashioned Alfred Hitchcock kind of stories but I submitted one story to them and they accepted it within a week and then I submitted a second one and they accepted it within a couple of days and then I started thinking what's going on here is something is off and it wasn't that it wasn't that Ellery Queen was you know some kind of low rent venue it was very popular and very widely known and still is and so that started to clue me into the notion I was pretty thick about it for a while to clue me into the notion that maybe I wasn't the kind of writer that my MFA program was expecting me to be and it kind of groomed me to be then I started because I was getting interest from agents one of the things I learned along the way is you know if you publish stories in high profile literary magazines sometimes the agents will come to you which happened a lot of times they'd always come to me and then I'd send them something and they'd say actually on second thought I forget so that happened a lot but I did eventually find an agent with my short stories and he started helping me out with his short stories as any agent that I've ever heard from will tell you you know once they get a hold of you they sort of say enough with the short story stuff let's get a novel going here and that's what I did so after about three or four years out of my MFA I started working on novels and you know started a lot of them and would get feedback from my agent at the time telling me things most of which had to do with the marketability of the book because I happened to choose an agent who was interested in you know selling to a major New York press instead of small presses who'd be less interested in marketability and more interested in artistry and you know to me growing up on Stephen King and Dean Coons and all of that other kind of stuff I was still wanted to you know have I still wanted to work in I still wanted to have that kind of wider appeal I suppose so eventually I put together finished a draft of this novel Piers which is which does something that I've always been really fascinated with not just writing in a genre but blending genres bringing genres together I think of Game of Thrones for example takes a fairly classic fantasy medieval kingdom kind of idea and combines it with a political thriller so that it has all of the tropes of a political thriller at the same time that it has all of the tropes of fantasy and it's through that combination through bringing it's basically like fusion in restaurants right like bringing Italian and Korean food together suddenly you have some new and interesting thing and so I love the idea of that kind of fusion you know going all the way back to Star Wars which is you know people call it science fiction but it's not it's a fantasy mixed with a western mixed with Japanese samurai stories basically and a bunch of other things but I think those are the three prominent ones and of course Star Wars was hailed as something very original when it first came out but really what it was was a combination of things and so I was interested in doing that so I took a fairly straightforward mystery who done it you know there's a murder and somebody has to figure out who did it and put it together with a fantasy story that was kind of bringing in these magical realist elements of Norse mythology and all that other kind of stuff and you know people thought it was crazy for doing that sort of thing the agent that I had said this is like the fifth time said this is completely unmarketable no one will buy this and so I dropped the agent or we sort of mutually agreed that it just wasn't going to work out because I couldn't I couldn't reach that level of writing something that's just absolutely popular fiction for him so then I worked on the novel a little bit longer I got another call from an editor at St. Martin's who said I really enjoyed your story in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine do you have a novel and by the way the I've been I was taught this in my MFA program by a professor who was mainly worked in the business from a publishing background more than a writing background he had a sort of weird storied history he was Jack Kerouac's agent and also a producer for Fragile Rock later on so that's how varied his resume was but one of the things that I remember distinctly him saying is if an editor calls you up and says do you have a novel the answer is yes and then when you hang up you hurry up and finish it or start writing it you don't say no so luckily I was pretty far along the way but I wasn't finished yet so I said yeah I have a novel and he you know after a couple of months I finished it up and sent it to him and he wanted it so I had to find it this is the backwards this isn't how it's supposed to work at all he's supposed to get an agent first and then the agent chops the story around or the novel around it gets it finds a publisher for you hopefully but in this instance it went the other way around I found an editor first and then I needed an agent to broker the deal so to speak and that's what I did I got a two book deal with a class that in St. Martin's called Minateur which is specifically geared toward the mystery and crime noir genre they publish a lot of books in crime noir and things like that and so the book came out as a crime noir book and I still hadn't hit me entirely that that's what my genre was nor had it hit me that the expectation would be that the second book would be also in crime noir genre because this is a thing that happens you know you publish a book in a certain genre and if it does okay which this one did because it had the I was really lucky to get nominated for an Edgar award which is the big prize in mystery writing in the United States and so there was a certain degree of exposure because of that and that made it that sort of pushed me into that position at a much smaller level than what Stephen King did early on in his career but if you read about his first couple of books he talks about the same thing after Carrie was published and did so well many many many times better than mine did did so well then he's then he got a lot of pressure to he didn't consider himself a horror novelist he just considered himself a writer but he started to get a lot of pressure to submit horror novels he had actually two novels ready to go after Carrie and his agent told him to go with Salem's Lot and that kind of sealed his fate so to speak from time to time he does publish things that are not horror but for the most party sticks with it so once the second novel came out something interesting happened which was that it didn't do very well it was I guess a much more conventional crime thriller I was doing some weird things some kind of experimental things with the structure that didn't quite hit exactly right and so when my deal with St. Martins was over I was thinking about doing various things none of which were really following it up with yet another crime novel because I didn't feel like I felt like I was kind of done with it I felt like I'd said what I wanted to say and didn't want to go there again and that period was especially strange and I kept having a lot of false starts kind of thinking about what I was going to do sometimes I thought that I would just try to write another crime novel and see what would happen but at other times I'd have these other ideas because I was much more interested in dealing in messing around with genre I'd have fantasy ideas and science fiction ideas there was a back in 2008 I had an idea for a zombie novel and I actually started writing it and I sent it the first 50 pages to St. Martins and they were like remember this was 2008 they were like well it's good but zombies I don't know it's sort of way old fashioned isn't it I excised part of it for a short story that appeared in a zombie anthology but I never went back to the book and now it's too late so I was a little bit ahead of the curve on that one and should have stuck to my guns I guess and seen what happened so eventually I came around to the idea of writing a young adult novel partly for commercial reasons partly I wanted to see if I could really write a novel that was geared toward a specific audience that had a mass appeal and to see if I could actually do it because I was actually doubting that I could do this thing that my first agent kept telling me that I couldn't there was always that itch to get it right at the end of it all I'm not even sure if I did get it right or not but you know I tried so I had this idea I've had this idea floating around for a long time about this very specific kind of time travel situation which is more like where it's one day and the character keeps going back in time so it would be kind of structurally interesting because the characters would keep going through the same time period with things changed and so forth so it was a little odd structurally and I don't remember exactly the moment when I decided that this novel should be a young adult novel other than this feeling that I had I tend to get ideas plot ideas first and then decide what kind of character would best fit into that plot idea and for years I'd had ideas about putting an adult character into this situation and it just wasn't working until I decided to put a young adult the 16 year old into the situation and then suddenly the idea of a like a control free 16 year old who wants to you know be a filmmaker and all this other kind of just gelled together with this idea and so I was able to bring the character together with the story idea itself and put together this YA thing. So having absolutely no experience in YA other than having a lot of students over the years I used to teach novel writing courses when I taught at Eastern Kentucky University for a while you know I had like three novel writing courses and invariably most of my students or at least 50% of my students wanted to write young adult novels and I felt ill at ease advising them on how to write young adult novels because I was not a writer of young adult novels and I knew very little about it so I sought to fill that gap in my experience and see what I could figure out. What I discovered was you know I did the research to find out what constitutes a young adult novel, what makes it different from an adult novel and I read a good number of young adult novels. The most popular ones I guess this is probably true in all cases but the most absolutely popular ones like Twilight and Hunger Games I found awful. You know Twilight is just unbearable but Hunger Games is a little bit better but the character is so bland and uninteresting that I just couldn't get into it at all and then I had a friend who had read all three of them and I said you know I got through the first one is there should I read the next two and he said no all she does is fall unconscious a lot and then all of the interesting thing happens while she's unconscious and then she wakes up and it already happens so it's really not that interesting. But I did begin to find young adult writers that were very interesting to me. The one exception I think to hugely popular being terrible is John Green. I think John Green's work is both popular and pretty darn good especially The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska and so reading John Green was really sort of an eye-opener to see that yes you can kind of have it both ways you can write something that is artistically fulfilling to you at the same time as angling a story toward a certain kind of audience but of course John Green writes realism and my interest was in science fiction so there's a few other authors like Joe Schreber who wrote this little book called Aurevoir Crazy European Chick which seems ridiculous but I read it and it was the sort of fast-paced thriller novel that really opened my eyes to how to structure a novel like the kind of novel that I was interested in. So I want to stop here for a second and make this a little bit more collaborative because I've been talking for too long and ask you the same question I asked myself when I sat down to write this book what makes a young adult novel? What is a young adult novel that an adult novel isn't or vice versa I suppose? How many of you are taking creative writing classes? So a good number of you. Is it a question you've asked yourself before? No? I'm looking at it more and I see a lot of young people in stories but I don't think that necessarily makes it young adult because younger people want to know what is going to be in that kind of thing so I'm trying to figure out like is it the character? Does the character have to be young and naive or can it be older and just have that more naive look at it? Yeah and so that seems to be the first and most obvious area that you'd inquire about is the age of the protagonist and I think one of the very few things that we can say for sure about young adult novels is that the protagonist probably needs to be a teenager. I'm not familiar with too many young adult novels that would be about adults or having adult protagonist but then obviously as you insinuated or said outright there are a lot of novels for adults that have teenager protagonists or young protagonists to kill a mockingbird for example and so the question becomes even if you have a young person as the protagonist what other qualities have to be in place for it to be considered a young adult novel? Yeah palatable that's a good word, I like it I did read a lot about exactly what constitutes a palatable and where you should be on that line and then you start thinking about what kind of compromises you might have to make as a writer to to angle this novel or the story toward a young adult and in one respect you might consider that selling out or pandering or whatever but it's not that much different from the very same thing that we do to ourselves no matter what kind of piece of writing we're doing we create boundaries for ourselves in all of our writing we decide to write in a certain point of view for example or we decide to write in a certain time period so we are always creating these I don't think very many of us ever come to a piece of fiction with absolute open mindedness we're always giving some boundaries to ourselves about this so this boundary, the boundary of palatability was perhaps something slightly imposed from the outside but at the same time I saw it as a kind of challenge so I guess the next question becomes what do we mean by palatable and what makes some novels palatable for young adults and some not I guess there are some dark themes that are the most popular I'm not so sure of tragedy and tragedy here you want this, that's not really the task of disappointments but maybe I actually spent a lot of time thinking about that as well and I noticed something very interesting, my presupposition my presupposition was very much like yours that if it was going to be young adult fiction so the first two novels that I wrote were frankly really dark they were crime noir from time to time I still get reviews on Goodreads and stuff and the last one the last one that I got was in French so I ran it through I don't know French so I ran it through Google Translate and at the very end it says that Nikitas removed a piece of my heart by the end of the story it was a good review and I thought man is that a mistranslation or what, so there's this so my experience and some of the things that have been said about my work is that it is incredibly dark especially the second novel is very downbeat and so I thought if I'm going to write a young adult novel then I really need to make sure that I do something a little bit more upbeat and life affirming and I ended up doing that I mean the novel that I did write is far more it still has dark themes but it's far more upbeat and life affirming so I did do that however one thing that I did discover is that my presupposition about young adult novels was just not the case there are some really dark depressing young adult novels there are a lot of dark depressing young adult novels with very little life affirming qualities to them and I think the distinction is between what we now consider you know you can go back into the 80s and mid 90s and all the way back through the 60s and find novels that are considered you know Judy Bloom and you know folks like that you can go back and find those and nowadays those novels would definitely be considered young adult but the young adult market up until about the turn of the century just maybe a little bit before the turn of the century was filtered through the schools so the books that would reach the hands of young adults were books that were kind of sanctioned by the schools and vetted so that they did have life affirming qualities and often were connected to something like Johnny Tremaine or something you know often connected to some kind of historical event and so they were very much connected to the schools but so I don't you know enough research to know exactly what happened here but some time around Twilight and so forth the publisher started marketing directly to young adults rather than through the schools and so that barrier of vetting work and making sure that it has life affirming qualities and making sure that it has some degree of quality at all kind of fell away and it became more about what do teenagers want and what teenagers want a lot of times is really dark and depressing stuff like one of the most popular books of the last ten years or so was Jay Esher's 13 Reasons Why which is a series of cassette tapes that a girl who commits suicide leaves to her friend to explain why she killed herself so it's a 250 page novel that's just a long explanation of why this girl killed herself because of all the horrible things that she went through not exactly I mean maybe there's an uplifting ending I don't remember but not exactly a life affirming situation so I was surprised to discover that some suppositions I had about about content were really no longer true which was freeing but also surprising you had your hand people the advantage that the strength of the younger generation is the ability to relate to the reader and at that point the the younger reader is usually in high school where there's a lot of stuff to do so they usually want to start to relate to that something with the rebellion and stuff like an hunger game and a rebellion against the capital and stuff something that I'd really like to tell you again how usually they have issues with like how they're going to tell you what to do and stuff yeah it's no surprise that we have so many of these young adult novels about totalitarian governments the analog for parents is just so painfully obvious but you know at the same time there are these reoccurring themes that I think we need to think about and address if we're looking at young adult you always have to be careful about how you say this because there's always exceptions but there's a more limited scope I suppose of areas of interest for young adults and so you are confined a little bit in that regard you can usually find metaphors like totalitarian governments for example to get at what you're trying to address with young people other ideas that you have about young people feel like they don't have very much control so in young adult novels it seems like something always happens to them they might not go out seeking for a change or something but it comes to them and it might result in them gaining more power on their own once this thing happens to them but they never had control of the first thing at the beginning the agency of the protagonist he doesn't go out seeking for the letter to Hogwarts so you mentioned Harry Potter which causes me to pause and perhaps make a further distinction because one of the things I learned very quickly is when we talk about I have a colleague at URI who talks about my children's book and every time he does I'm like it's not a children's book exactly but you can't get there somehow but there are just you know there are children's books there are middle grade books which I think is what Harry Potter is and middle grade is a specific genre than there's a young adult and more recently there's been this tentative nod toward what they're trying to do a new genre called new adult you heard about this it's very much like young adult but it's usually undergraduates you know college age people usually very realistic fiction you're not going to find a lot of horror or science fiction usually pretty sexy not a young adult novel but a new adult novel but from what I have been able to see it doesn't seem to have really taken off I think because perhaps you guys, you college students have a lot of other reading that you have to do and so maybe new adult isn't catching on like they expected it to but there are further distinctions between middle grade and young adult that we often times have to address one of them being I think that middle grade still very much is vetted through schools and through publishing companies like Scholastic who pay minds to the to the thematic issues and whether or not their life affirming and uplifting etc and of course the protagonist is going to be a little bit younger and the reading is going to be a little easier other observations? it goes toward this and you mentioned Kilmahkiller and I think of books like a separate piece or Catcher and the Ride had the category a young adult existed at the time they would for marketing purposes maybe going straight there I wonder are there any authors maybe Green or others you might think of who are almost being denied a broader readership because the marketing mechanism drives them toward young adult because of their young protagonist and the kind of life situations I just wonder if that category is almost too restrictive for some writers I don't think so and part of the reason is that when you actually look at the sales records most people who buy young adult fiction are adults about 60% of the purchasers in their 30s or older and so there really isn't that boundary line where you would think if John Green were only marketed to adults and adults would buy his books adults do very regularly buy his books in larger quantities than young adults do I think the reverse is probably more true I have an author friend Megan Abbott who writes these crime thriller novels about her last few have been about young women in high school in these bizarre sort of context so one is called dare me which is about she calls it cheerleading meets fight club so it's about the cutthroat world of the very dark and cutthroat world of high school cheerleading when there's body dysmorphia and injury and all this other and peer pressure and all this other stuff that happens it was it did very well but it was marketed to an adult audience and I don't know that I don't know that it would have done even better if it had been marketed to young adults as well I don't have a clear answer for you but certainly I do think that young adults has not for the most part been an impediment to getting adults to buy books in fact adults who there are a lot of folks who are not necessarily readers Lee Child the thriller writer Lee Child published something in The Guardian last week about this about the fact that Amazon is creating brick and mortar stores and he published a piece about that but an ancillary issue was how many people actually go on Amazon to seek out a book digitally virtually versus people who are impulse buyers at grocery stores and the vast majority of books get bought on impulse at grocery stores they don't actually get mostly bought on Amazon because most people don't go on Amazon and find books that they want you know like seek out books that they've heard about they usually just stick with the authors that they know and they all that person James Patterson has a new book out I'll buy it today I didn't even know that probably seems weird to most of us because we live in this little bubble of people who go on Amazon or wherever you know go into bookstores and seek out books that we want to read but that's sort of the majority of people and so a lot of the authors who do well are young adult authors who are in that kind of category whose books get picked up at the grocery store and so forth I forget where I was going with that but it's an interesting piece of information well here's a couple of other things that I noticed along the way what was the word that you used? I picked up this word from an essay that I read which was impatience I think it's a nicely neutral word for the most part to describe certain things so there's a couple of things I think that readers of young adult novels whether they're adults or not are slightly impatient about one of those things is extended passages of interiority or going into the character's head for a long long period of time that's more of what you'd find in adult novels or literary novels and so one of the restrictions that I knew that I had going from writing adult novels to young adult was being more conscientious about the economy of the interiority that I use this was the first novel that I wrote in first person but which lends itself even more to interiority in some ways but I had to be careful about exactly how much I included because I knew that the story you know interiority has many important qualities but one of the things that it does is it tends to slow down the forward momentum of the novel so that's one of the reasons the other thing that it is said that young adults have a little bit of impatience for is poetic language right or lyrical language the kind of thing that takes a little bit longer to understand perhaps or to parse out all the meanings of if you're reading you know you can spend 20 minutes on a Melville sentence if you want but that Melville wouldn't be a good writer of young adult fiction maybe so I had to think about that as well that was really the toughest one for me because I had grown up or I had been through the MFA program and I'm very attached to lyrical writing and beauty on the sentence level and so to be hamstrung a little bit in that regard was tough at first but once I got used to one of the things about putting it in first person was that I had to be bound to the way that a 16 year old would express himself and so that helped me get over that hump a little bit that some of the things if I wrote too lyrical a sentence it would be showing off it would be the author showing off and it wouldn't be true to the character and therefore I would have a good reason to revise it and rethink what I was doing the other thing that I'd say the other two things have to do with the narrative perspective one of which is an almost total lack of retrospective if you talked about this at all in your creative writing course is retrospection the idea that especially when you have a first person narrator even in third person sometimes the character may be the character who's going through the actions in the story is much younger than the character who's telling the story if there's a great degree of retrospection almost all stories have a little bit of a degree of retrospection because there's always some distance between when the story is being told and when the events of the story happen there's some span of time but young adult novels are impatient about extended degrees of retrospection they want the narrator to still be a teenager so probably the most retrospection you can have is a year or two if you go any further into that and you start writing a story from an adult perspective looking back on the childhood then you have that issue of how well can an adult writer reader connect to a character like that who has a great degree of retrospection so that was difficult that's why a lot of young adult novels are in present tense I don't know if you've noticed this but it's a weird device because it makes no sense whatsoever I think the Hunger Games is in first person present tense so if you think about it it presupposes that Katniss is telling this story at the moment that it is happening to her while she's trying to defend herself from being killed by other teenagers on the battlefield it doesn't make any sense she would have to have told the story after the fact in retrospective so there's a bit of a I mean we're used to it because it's a convention that we accept but it's weird when you think about it so there does have to be certain retrospective even if it's in first person it's a bit of a cheat but putting it in present tense is a way of signaling that you're really not considering retrospective at all and then the last one is sort of connected but it has to do with nostalgia and so Ernest Klein published a novel a couple of years ago that was very very popular called Ready Player One and it was mostly a pop culture novel with a slightly post apocalyptic elements to it and the protagonist was a young person if I remember and it was there wasn't a lot of interior it was very easy to read every sign pointed it to being marketed as a young adult novel as far as I could see but the one thing that made it different is that the main characters whole story arc has to do with being nostalgic about all of these things from the 80s like Back to the Future and early Atari video games and all this other kind of stuff story elements that would really not be of interest to most young adult readers and so that was the one that nostalgic sense or looking back to an earlier period of time was the one element I think that made a difference for Ready Player One it did very very well regardless of how it was marketed but it was one case where I think that one extra element of nostalgia made all the difference that doesn't mean that you can't write a young adult novel that's a period piece and a number of successful YA period pieces from Libba Bray's The Diviners which I think takes place in the 30s or even earlier than that I don't remember exactly when and that's okay as long as the author does all the work to situate the reader into the time period and makes a real effort to show the young adult reader that young adults in the 1930s were dealing with the same sort of issues that you are now and there's really no difference it's not nostalgia so much as it is bringing the reader into that time period so that was that was it those were the elements that I thought about those were my kind of guiding principles for writing the book and this is what came out of it and that's my spiel so to speak I don't know I suppose I should open it up to questions if we have time we were talking about how you had to set those brand over the audience I was thinking about like how maturity plays into things and that maturity is very different for every young adult and every person in general and so how do you think about tone and dialogue so that you don't feel like you're excluding or talking down to the audience in an attempt to make it something very local John Green has said a lot about this because he gets slacks sometimes for the way that his characters speak reviewers will say these people do not sound like they're 15, 16 years old they sound like they're 35 with master's degrees and his perspective is always that one thing that we do have to accept is when you write a young adult novel you're not marketing to all the young adults you're marketing to adults once again as I mentioned earlier but you're also marketing to a specific subset of young adults who are readers and so that presupposes a certain amount of interest and all of that kind of stuff and so I tend to air toward John Green's perspective on things which is that there's no reason to talk down to aside from the issues of impatience that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago then in terms of dialogue or the complexity of a character's emotional state or something like that there's no reason to talk down to a young adult audience and most audiences will appreciate if it didn't seem like you were pandering to a less intellectual audience does that cover it? I'm wondering also on another level you can get how much that's changing now in terms of the situations and often might write about still not run up against that betting process you mentioned earlier one of the first concerns I had, we didn't even get into this, was content like if there were ratings for books what would the book be rated and much like I was surprised to discover that many young adult novels are pretty dark I was also surprised to discover that many young adult novels are pretty racy and pretty violent the only thing that I can really see is you know they don't want you to swear a lot so you have to find ways to get around that within reason if it's ridiculous to, I actually had an early reader who read one draft of this book who saw me like bending over backwards to try to avoid having my character swear and she was just like come on I mean it's obvious that what this person means to say here so just go ahead and say it so most of the time I didn't worry about it too too much mainly because I didn't create characters who were going to swear all the time but in really high intensity situations maybe they would but I have read passages in young adult novels that in terms of sexuality it made me blush and in terms of violence are just as crazy as a Quentin Tarantino movie and so I think part of that part of that shift from marketing through schools and directly to young adult audiences has gotten rid of that boundary line in terms of content so there's very little that I see that would be restricted which creates an issue I think for parents who don't because movies and video games have rating systems and it's always been sort of the idea with books that you know it's mostly your imagination interacting with the story so you can only be as bad as your imagination is I don't know if I necessarily agree with that you know it does create a situation where parents don't really have a clear sense necessarily of what are in some of these books which is why you have these situations of banned books somebody usually you know in the Midwest or something somebody will read their kids book and discover oh my god there's this passage in the book that I think is going a little too far I think it probably does have to be some interaction between the kids and the parents about what's in the book so writing, times of the day do you write in an environment that's for you to do something do you write a computer, do you hand write okay so when I'm working on a project I write every day I won't pretend that I write every day in between maybe a couple months we'll go by in between projects but when I do start a project I think it's vitally I'm not the first person to say this but I think it's vitally important to write every day at the same time for the same period of time so that you train your brain to be prepared for that moment and not get ready early in the morning when all of the trials and tribulations of life have yet to seep into my consciousness is the ideal time to do that because that's when the subconscious is most available and again I'm just reiterating things that I've heard a lot about the writer say that I firmly believe because they have been true for me so for the most part I do write every day especially when I'm writing the first draft of a project it does get a little spottyer once I start revising I'm a planner which is another thing that really set me apart from most of my MFA peers and professors most of the people that I talk to in academia in literary writing talk about you know the the freeing way and the process of discovery that happens when you just let the work take you wherever it wants to go I know that that must be true and I absolutely believe that it is true for people but for me the end result is writer's block and so I pretty meticulously plan the work that I do you know ultimately I think it's the same thing I don't we all at some point freely brainstorm are writing it doesn't you know but for me once it comes down to writing the story on a sentence by sentence level I want that brainstorming to be done because I want to have my mind free to write this paragraph and write the sentences I want to know what I'm doing but in the process of writing the outline then I'm completely open-minded and free as to where the story goes but once that outline is solidified I stick to it pretty well that doesn't mean it doesn't change here and there and little bits and pieces but for the most part I stick to it it wasn't something that came to me I didn't know and I do this to my I used to do this by the end of the semester they know the whole process is not to convince them that planning is the right thing to do the whole process is to put them through it to see if they discover for themselves that it's the right thing to do or if they discover for themselves that it's just the wrong thing to do for them unfortunately the ones who discover that it's the wrong thing to do have probably killed a project in the process but at least then they know that it's important to try all the different strategies for writing and some of them they learn that they are planners and they swear by I think most people don't try it until they're forced to and then the ones who take to it very well discover a much less laborious process another thing I remember from my MFA program was how long my professors would talk about their 25 drafts it took me four years to write this short story I just sit there thinking I don't you know one life to live man I don't have time I don't have time to write 25 drafts so for me one of the one of the good things about planning ahead of time is that my first couple of drafts are that outline and it's obviously a much much shorter draft of something than the full-fledged novel and so when it comes time to revise the novel I'm only looking at it again hopefully only like five or six more times thanks for coming out


and basically take care of the bookkeeping needs for multiple companies with that version of the software and not even have to update it and whatnot. Now, obviously on the intuit side of things, you can imagine they wouldn't like that because if they're trying to support multiple versions of the software, that's gonna be more difficult on their side. So what they did is they moved even the desktop version to a subscription model so that you kind of have to update it each year. Now, you might still be able to buy QuickBooks Desktop somewhere before the date that they switched to the subscription model, in which case it'd be good to practice with that kind of software, if nothing else, because it's still good, I mean it still does all the basic kind of things, and you can practice with it, but going forward, it looks like everyone's gonna be on the subscription thing. Now, you would think on the other hand, on the other side of things, you would think that after changing to the subscription model, intuit, it would be easier for intuit to keep the desktop version because now they don't have to deal with supporting all the prior versions, they can just update everyone the same way they do online. So will that impact them as to whether they're gonna try to remove the desktop version, not for the enterprise, they're probably gonna keep that, but just for like the pro, I don't know. So multiple company files for one purchase, on the desktop versus only one company file per purchase for the online. Now, obviously in certain areas, being able to have multiple company files with one purchase of the desktop, even if you have to pay annually in a subscription model is beneficial because for example, if you're the type of bookkeeper that has multiple companies that they do bookkeeping for with one accounting software, then that's great, right? That you're gonna be able to do multiple company files and only pay for the one software because it's kind of like using Microsoft's Word, for example, you can make multiple Word documents and with one file, the Word documents being equivalent in this analogy to the company files, whereas with the online version, you have to purchase a new online company file, a new online company per new company, so you can see what the advantages would be. Now for into it, of course, you can see why they would want to have and force everybody to purchase a new company file if you're gonna be starting up a new company. So I would think that would be possibly one of the tension areas where you have a lot of bookkeepers which are saying, hey, look, I have a business model that works with what I'm doing right now with the one company file and online saying, we wanna have everybody who starts a new company file to pay for a different subscription. Also, the fact that you can have multiple company files is great for practicing and testing things. So it's great for us from a student standpoint. So if you're just using this to practice with, having multiple company files that you can open is really useful because then you can open a company file, you can practice a certain thing and then you can open a different company file and practice something different. And even if this was your own file, for example, for your company, if you wanted to test something out, like the bank feeds, for example, or test something out like a software integration, it would be great to have a sandbox to do that with before doing it to your actual company file. If you back up your company file, make a separate company file and then test these things out, it's a great tool, whereas that's more difficult to do with the online version. With the online version, I can't really just make a separate company file as easily and play with it. There are alternatives. They have the QuickBooks test drive and stuff, but they don't have as much functionality and you don't have as much customization than if you were to make your own company file. So static backup files versus data stored on secure server. Now there's two main things that come with this backup files. When we have backup files, traditionally we think of those as we need them so that we don't lose our data. That's one use of them. But another use of them is that we can use the backup files to restore our data to a prior point in time and we can use the backup files to set up separate company files so that we can practice with having a sandbox to kind of practice with. So first, if we think of it as just having secure data, the argument from into it is the online version is actually better. They say because your data is stored on the into it servers and the into it servers are being triple backed up and everything. So the servers should actually be more secure than your computer. And therefore the online version is more secure than the desktop version. Now that may be true, but I still think the desktop version can be pretty secure if you properly do your backups, very secure if you properly do your backups because what you wanna do on your backup files is back them up to a separate drive or online. In other words, you could set up your backups to basically do automatic backups and back them up to say an online cloud or at least a separate external drive so they're not on your hard drive. And you have a pretty, you have a very secure, I would think backup system. Now the other thing that's a benefit with the static backups on the other hand is that I can make multiple backups. So if I'm backing up every night, now I have a nightly backup which allows me if there's a problem to restore to any point that I want. Now the online is trying to implement some of this ability to restore to a prior point. And if you get the advanced online, I think they have the ability to do that but it's still not as easy


Oh, what's good? This is Don't Flop, Sunburn, Vol. 2, we are here.   Big up every single MC today and on Friday night as well. Sunday is about to be a classic, this is the final, so first, even, Main Event of 2 of the day. Let's get straight into the battle.  And my man Tony D, make some noise.  Make some noise for Raptor, let's go. Don't Flop, shop.com, please, please, please. This is actually a judge battle, this could have easily been a promo battle.  They picked five judges off camera, we're both happy with that, but it doesn't matter that it's judge. Please log onto Viewpoint, search ViewpointDF on Facebook and leave your opinion on that in the YouTube comment as well. And that is about it. So, Raptor won the flip, he wanted Tony to go first, but it's round number one, Sunburn 2, my man Tony, let's go. Hey you, Sunburn, we in it? Yeah! You think you can win? From, I need you to know you're wrong. I do not care, they call you top 10. You're not near me, you don't belong. What's my motivation? What am I supposed to focus on to build the hype when they killed the guy that they cloned you from? A manhandled, they witnessed how manhandled and saw off shotty. Both barrels, how manhandled and saw off shotty. So how was manhandling me, you saw off shotty? We already saw off shotty. It'd be absurd not to rap about the shotty angle. Sham, you've even turned your cap around to the shotty angle. And I'll be here. So naturally they wonder how you got here, and how you went from not on my radar to the target in my crosshairs.  Hands on, it's easy to get squeezed on and popped there. If it's not clear, I'll let you know. And just to tell you the facts, Noep's, Flex Blissett and EURL scheduled a match for him. Had to feel when he appeared where heroin wraps. They was enticing and inviting, trying to get him on smack, but I couldn't make it. That's my bad. But I disguised it as a blessing, because they was talking contracts, and that might have staffed with his progression, so I stopped him getting hooked on smack. And with your drug problems, that was a timely intervention.  That's not a part of a man's master plan. So yeah, I left him hanging. But the sway did it to himself like Sandra Blank, because you are real. There ain't even a boys fan base. So really, you touched the bullet there. Just to come in, catch one a point, blank range, let's bang that. Reptace now your tongue, tone sprays from such close range that your clothes stained with powder burns. You buy some that. I can teach you a thing or two. I'm sublime with a punchline. This crunch time on Columbine.  That title so I could pick and choose. So had my thoughts been on track, I'd have skipped you again like an interlude. But it's a colorful matchup. But it'll be a colorful matchup, they said.  For that green, I run it red. He sing the blues, this where the kid eludes.  I ain't even champ no more. I'm on the bigger move. You sing me. So the simple truth is you getting slewed by that old drunk light-skinned guy that does the interviews. Yo. I see you really didn't deserve to be the champ of Britain. I mean you're good Tony. Just everyone you've battled isn't so you beat them. Mix it, eyes and token. But then lost to him and blamed it on a bad decision. But then bounced back. Back to business. Two massive victories, yeah.  Really think about it. Think about it. He got his title shot from beating our cake.  So did scissors DK. Yo. I said he got his title shot from beating our cake.  So did scissors DK. U9 and villain. But the problem was they didn't fit the staff description of a champion's image. I'm at his wreck from Poisonous Poets. At the time he was the ideal man to give it. Just for you made to look up by the wacky spitters in the league of the Rammy gimmicks. Bitch, you didn't deserve that shot. Your title match was practically given. I can't respect the guy that defended his title against Ampic's opponent. Especially Drafted Bride Rowan.  He knows any actual battle. Rapper will toast and you've seen it. Shot he clips in on wacky looks. Smoked him.  That can't handle the weight stacked on his shoulders and facing international opponents. You gave UK rap its most embarrassing moment. When our champion gave a champion showing showing up in Canada talking.  I don't talk with any man in his moment.  He's too happy relaxing and coasting his way through Barley. Nobody's analysis. Don't give me this battle. I'll take the rocket. The one still burning in the game.  I'll bring the twist to the plot. Like a dead guy turning his grave. I'm out of killings free. Stacking heads like totem bolts for you. This is certainly a space. So when I land the headshot, heads off you. The kerg into the stage. There can be only one. Now, just because I told you I don't re-box. And then you box smile.   I'd read people to see if they authorize them. You say I'm book smart.  You read books to see it through the author's eyes. I'd read people to see if they authorize them. Street smart. You read books to find bars. I'd read books behind bars. So something like, you read books to find bars. I'd read books behind bars. So something good in a TV star. But I forgot. This is don't flop.   Would he fuck?   He's going to be able to turn in the first two rounds by a rapper, take a serious breath. This is Dive Flop, Sunfire number two, it was Raptor vs Tonya D, please make some noise for the MC. So I just want to say, before I announce the decision, I want everybody to please participate in the room, I want a moment of silence for every single refugee who has lost their lives trying to provide their family with a better existence. Alright, thank you very much, I appreciate that. We're back from Raptor vs Tonya D, there's a three to split, Tonya got three, make some noise. So I'll let the D-E-Vote in and grow that, when you were kids, you were blind like that. Because after this battle, you're going to be our biggest fan. When I let the D-E-Vote in, he was our biggest fan.


Hey what's up coaches welcome back to the channel. Now in today's video we're gonna be on the whiteboard here and I'm going to break down how to take your training business. If you are a skills trainer, if you're looking to grow your business, if you're looking to have a six-figure business, watch this video. I'm gonna teach you how to do this piece by piece. Make sure you're taking notes, make sure you're paying attention and let's dive right in. Alright now as you can see here we have path to 100k per year and from my experience right there are three things that we need to pay close attention to when you're looking to grow your business to 100,000 or more per year. Now the first is the average client duration. Now what this means is you need to be able to track across all of your clients on average how long do they stay in your program. Now if you're getting paid cash, Venmo, check, any of that stuff it's going to be very hard for you to track that. So this is why I've always talked about on this channel why you need to have an automated payment system so you can actually like log in see when people pay, see how long they're in your program and you need to know that number across the board. So every client that you have you need to see how long they're in your program and what I see is coaches that can extend the average duration of their client make way more money than coaches who don't do that because if you have clients sign up for like packages of sessions or they're coming in and they're coming out of your business that is not in my opinion that's not a real client that's someone who's just casually training with you they're not getting the best results they could so you want clients that are committed for six months up to a year. A lot of coaches that we work with they have clients that stay with them for years so the average client duration that they have is probably 12 months minimum right so when you understand that number on your end when you increase that right by maybe six months or a year automatically your business makes more money right so how are you retaining your clients how are you billing them how are you making sure that they're enjoying your program that they stay and they refer other people that are like-minded that is number one we have to dial in what is the average duration per client so the next is average client value that means over the course of 12 months how much did this client pay across the board so this way we have an average amount of what each customer pays and when you know what that amount is then the math is there you can realize all right if I want to make $8,333 per month which is how much you need to make to make $100,000 per year right then you know how many clients you need to have based off of the average number of how much your clients are actually paying you all right now this is why it's important to actually dig deep into the numbers in your business so you can see across the board all right here's exactly how much these clients are paying over the course of the year and I think that number might shock you you might see some clients are paying you only a couple hundred dollars you might see some clients that paid you thousands of dollars you have to be able to track that number and when you know what that number is and you know what this looks like the duration all right as long as you increase those all right you automatically make more money without adding any clients right and that's the kind of crazy thing about this business is you might have you know 10 to 50 clients right now if and you might be thinking well I have to add clients to make more money well the reality is you might just need to keep your clients and longer to make more money right and that's why if you have a client that stays with you for six months or a client that stays with you for 12 months making twice as much money if they're staying with you for 12 months right and that way you're not having to replace customers all the time and lastly here this is kind of a little bit more in depth but you need to understand what are the average sales that you make per month per week and per day now in our program that we have we have like a map where coaches fill it out and understand all of these metrics so they know when they look at their day they're like alright here's how many sales calls I need to make and here's how many sales calls I need to make per month per week and per day to hit this goal right this goal here comes down to math it's purely math because when you understand how long your clients are in your program and we have that dialed in and that number goes up alright we understand how much people pay and if they're in your program longer alright they're going to end up paying you more alright or if you just raise your pricing alright they're gonna end up paying you more alright next is how many sales calls do you actually have how many are you making and from there what's the percentage of those people that become clients now when you reverse engineer this process alright let's say you start here if you know you have let's just say your goal is to make a hundred thousand dollars alright and let's say this number here the average client value is 2,000 which is less than it's less than two hundred dollars per month alright here and let's say your client stay with you for 12 months well here alright when I look at this number that means I need to close around one person per week into the program to make $8,333 per month alright because I just did the math there if I have one close here per week which is so doable alright a lot of coaches that work with they they can close way more than one person per week alright then when we say come here we say alright they're gonna pay $2,000 per year great alright during for a year the math works out to where you can make that amount now I know a lot of coaches that have way more than 40 or 50 clients that don't make a hundred thousand dollars per year they make a lot less and it's because they're not organized with these three metrics here so my goal for you is I want you to get dialed in with these metrics here if you want to learn how to take your business to the next level and you want real help with this send me a text that this number right here it's gonna pop up on the screen I'd love to sit down chat with you on a zoom call learn more about your business and show you how to get to this level and beyond that's it see you later


to it. Equipment is going to be a credit for how much we bought it for which was 51,000 so that's going off the books we're now selling it and then we have to get rid of the accumulated depreciation related to the equipment so remember the equipment was on there at cost at 51 and then we had depreciated it over time so that's how much it went down over time that related depreciation which is a contra asset account has a credit balance we need to make it go down so we're going to debit accumulated depreciation and again in real life we would see this journal entry because it would be in our records and it would be 22850 and then we're going to have a difference in this case the debits are now adding up to the 489 and the credits are winning therefore we're going to need another debit what will that debit be if we highlight all of these it's going to be the 2001 i'm going to use our plug formula to do that the plug formula being negative sum


Apple Action Wireless has some of the best data rates in wireless on our plans, and not to mention an amazing deal on one of our hottest smartphones, but that's all the time I have to explain. See store for details. Better service. Bigger savings. That's today's Apple Action Wireless. Last year, the Pye County Housing Authority announced the old Elkhorn City High School building would be converted into 27 affordable housing apartments. On Tuesday, the Pye County Fiscal Court approved the final steps before pre-construction begins. One was approving signing a legally binding agreement where the Fiscal Court is passing through those grant funds to the Pye County Affordable Housing Development Corporation with other tax credit funding, and the other one was approving the bid that we have a low bid for the FES group to do the construction work. Officials are hoping to have a pre-construction meeting around the 1st of May with construction expected to begin sometime after that. Construction crews have one year from the start of construction to complete the project. Now we're getting together all the contract documents to get everything signed, and then we'll do a pre-construction meeting and get our release of funds from the block grant program. Officials add not only will the project bring 27 apartments for low-income families, it will also revamp a historic structure. All the renovation work will be done to historic standards, so it will be a historic renovation. All that had to be approved through the State Historic Preservation Office. The total cost of the project is $4 million. Reporting in Pikeville, I'm Shelby Steele for EKB News.


Each year, 25 million people are displaced due to environmental disasters. Another 40 million people are living in internal displacement as a result of conflict of violence. Protracted displacement is becoming the norm, with internally displaced people in conflict situations remaining displaced for an average of 17 years. Funding is stretched, and humanitarian tools alone cannot handle protracted crises. Humanitarian development and peace building actors must work together to find solutions. At the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, member states and other members of the international community pledged to strengthen humanitarian and development collaboration by pooling resources and capabilities towards achieving common goals of reducing needs, risks and vulnerabilities. That same year, the twin resolutions on sustaining peace called for integrated action to prioritize prevention, address root causes of conflict, and support institutions for sustainable peace and development. As a key part of the humanitarian development peace nexus, IOM, along with other humanitarian development and peace building actors, have embraced the new way of working. This emphasizes three approaches. Agree on collective outcomes. Humanitarian development and peace building actors should work towards common goals in line with national SDG targets. They should pursue these through joint assessments, analysis, planning and programming. Long-term solutions require multi-year programming and funding and at times joint funding. With milestones in three to five years, government ownership and donor buy-in is key. Build local capacities of communities of local NGOs and of local authorities to reduce the drivers of need, vulnerability and risk and enhance resilience. This is sometimes referred to as localization. Each actor in the nexus should contribute towards these collective outcomes through their comparative advantage to deliver on the ground. IOM has several such comparative advantages. Through its broad mandate, it has been engaged across the humanitarian peace and development realms for a number of decades. Structurally, IOM has a dedicated transition and recovery division to ensure there is no missing middle between programs focusing solely on humanitarian or development action. Our transition and recovery activities address the causes of vulnerabilities through hybrid humanitarian and development programs tailored for crisis environments. The pursuit of common outcomes through joint approaches presents challenges, primarily in upholding humanitarian principles and maintaining humanitarian space. This requires careful context analysis and conflict sensitivity. Our locally driven programming and participatory processes promote resilience, livelihoods and social cohesion. They generate a commonality of purpose in the communities we serve that helps to prevent and resolve conflict. IOM also has a long history of engagement in reparations and transitional justice, which are key components of sustainable peace. The humanitarian development peace nexus requires a comprehensive whole of organizational approach beyond the work of the transition and recovery division. IOM has advanced partnerships in the area of health, ranging from direct service delivery through mobile clinics to training community health workers and partnering with health providers in the camps we manage to equipping and extending the reach of government health systems into displacement settings. We also have programs in counter-trafficking humanitarian border management and diaspora engagement, which are highly relevant in displacement and migration crisis situations. At the same time, with the growing recognition of the importance of migration for development, IOM's migration and development portfolio is on the increase, not least to support labour mobility. In order to ensure such synergies, IOM's Migration Crisis Operational Framework, EMCOF, is designed to promote a comprehensive approach before, during and after a migration crisis occurs.