Probably more people will trickle in as it is, but it is so great to be back here in person at Big Stamp Cafe after our pandemic zoom phase of the salon. I'm Whitney Sherer, I'm one of the co-organizers with Amy Yellen and Anjuli Mitterduva, and also on the staff of the Robbins Library, which we're very thankful for their support and help. They're awesome, so welcome everybody. Great to see you. So tonight we are doing a kind of sort of October, Halloween-y themed-ish reading that we're calling Mysteries and Thrills, and we have three mystery slash thriller writers here tonight. Lynn Reeves Griffin, Stephanie Gale, and Edwin Hill, and we're so thrilled that they are joining us to read tonight. So it's great to see you. I have a little bit of housekeeping that I have to do before the reading starts. So first thing is to just tell you sort of the lay of the land of the salon if you haven't ever come before. So each, the salon takes place quarterly. Each reader reads for about 15 minutes, and it's a reading series with a twist. So the author has 15 minutes to do whatever they want, but they have to include a sensory element besides just language. So we've had people do pass around perfumes, we've had food, we've had all sorts of stuff, so it's always fun to get another side of the sensory experience during the reading. After the three authors read, we're going to do a Q&A with all three authors. We'll just have them come up on the stage. You can ask them any and all questions. We'll get a little bit of conversation started between them for probably another 15 minutes or so, and that's that. So I wanted to just give a huge shout out to Emily and the staff at Kickstand Cafe. They've been at home for the whole time that we've been doing this salon, which I think is seven years, right? Ultimately, she's not like, yeah. So we couldn't be more grateful to be able to use this beautiful and well-remaining wall space. So it's just, it's great. This is being filmed by ACMI, and it's going to be available online soon. It's usually within about a week or so probably. So we'll send out an email when that's online, and you can share it with friends and family. And let's see what else do I have to say. Oh, this program is supported in part by a brand from the Arlington Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. The program takes place in the heart of the Arlington Cultural District, which was designated in 2017 by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. We have books for sale. We've got Dick Haley, the book seller in the back. The books are actually provided by the book rack, which is our local bookstore just up the street. So it's kind of a joint effort there. So please, if you haven't read these author's amazing books, please grab a copy. They're going to sign them at the end. They're all, they're all working books, and you cannot go wrong. And we have a couple other writerly events going on over the course of the next month, or we're in October, we're launching into November, which if you're a writer, you know, is then a RIMO. So there's always, or National Novel Writing Month. So there's always interesting stuff happening. The Ravens Library is going to be hosting a few writing events throughout the month. And one of them is actually a joint venture between the library and the Arlington Author's Salon. We are calling it, what are we calling it? Writing in Arlington. What are we calling it? Writer's Life. The Writer's Life. How could I forget? Arlington Edition. How could I forget? That seems a leading title. I don't know. But it's going to be a conversation between myself and Anjali. We're going to be talking about the writing life, the creative process, answering questions about local resources, the publishing landscape, all that sort of stuff. That's on November 17th at 7 p.m. at the Ravens Library. So there's going to be information on our website in the next couple of days about that event if you're interested in attending. And we have, there's another series that's going on right now that is being put together by an Arlington resident, Michelle Hoover, who probably a fair number of people know. She's an amazing writer, teacher. She now, her life is so fabulous. She splits her time between Arlington and Cyprus, which is like so cool. And she's doing this series called The 7 a.m. novelist where she's doing a conversation with a different writer every day at 7 a.m. before I think it's 50 days.  Or I think you can watch it after the fact you have 7 a.m. is too early for you. So she, you can google 7 a.m. novelist and find her newsletter subscription super easily. And I would recommend that you check that out because it's excellent. Okay, so without further ado, I will introduce the first reader. And the first reader tonight is going to be Lynn Reeves Griffin. Lynn is an internationally recognized family counselor, public speaker, teacher and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in parents, psychology today, Solstice literary magazine, Chautauqua Journal, craft literary, fiction writers review, brainchild and more. Writing as Lynn Griffin, she's the author of some family focused novels. One is Life Without Summer, See, Escape and Girls Sent Away. She also writes novels with domestic suspense as Lynn Reeves with the dangers of an ordinary night published by Kirk and Blaine Books in November 2021 and Dark Rivers to Cross coming in November 22. Very soon. For more about her work, you can visit her website at littlebrickin.com or you can ask for yourself a big one tonight. So Lynn, come on in. I'd like to be here. I do have a family counselor background and my heart is inaugurating and I thought that what I would do is share with readers and writers alike the sort of behind the scenes of this particular novel. And in this case, we're going to start backstage. Always a family counselor.  But life had other plans for me.  Now, I hope that I don't look very old to you. But the sad thing is that that wasn't very long ago, that those were sort of limited choices available. And so like a good girl, I chose the one that I thought would be best for me. And it started with nurse. And in my nursing career, I enjoyed it, but my heart was still backstage. Now, when you see this kind of adulation, it's very hard to get it up for a sort of team approach to a job. So I found myself struggling in my nursing career to find the place where my identity, as someone who was on stage, could come into full, you know, realization. And so I found myself finding my best connections one-on-one with people. And as I threw my years in nursing, found myself one-on-one with families mostly, I decided I'd go to school for education. So I did do that. But the heart of the actors is always there. And so I found a way to move my onstage persona to a different place, which was a lot of public speaking and some television. And I used my expertise as a nurse and as a family counselor to get back on that stage. But I found a way to get back on that stage in a way that was satisfying, but it didn't quite fulfill what I needed it to. So imagine as a novelist, there's this inspiration, there's this identity, and it isn't fully realized. It's sitting somewhere waiting to be paid attention to. And so for me, this is the first inspiration, the actress part of my life. And so then, along the way, I still kept acting. I still kept working on television. I really enjoyed these things. But they were still just another part of my life, very separate of the life that I was living professionally. And at the same time, I was building a family. And my husband and I moved to a seaside town called Cituit. So I'm about an hour from here. And it's a gorgeous place. And when you walk those beaches in every season, you get different inspiration. So that's what it looks like in summer. Here's what it starts looking like in fall and winter. And so as I walked to the beach and I started focusing on the landscape, and I started thinking about that lighthouse, and I kept walking to the end of that lane, I came upon a private part of my town that is not for public use. So it says no trespassing, danger, danger, do not go past this fence. So what do you think happened? So I kept walking. It's a place in my town called the Glades. And as I went into this place, I needed to know more. So one of the things that I did was I started doing my research. And the place kept speaking to me. And I came across this Robert Louis Stevens quote that I just adore. And it's really the beginning of where the inspiration actress plus the inspirational setting are starting to come to me as something else. And that's this wonderful quote, some places speak distinctly, certain daggards cry out for murder, certain old houses demand to be haunted, and certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks. And now I'm starting to get a story in my mind. I'm thinking about the actress mean, I'm thinking about the seaside landscape. It's something's there, something's drawing my attention, but I'm not there yet. And so I keep doing my research. I find out that the Glades hotel is no longer a hotel, but it has a very interesting deep and dark history. And I start digging into it and a story begins to percolate. I realized that there is a naval observation tower out there, and these little tiny sort of cement block structures that are referred to by locals as the colleges. And again, inspiration, but still I'm not knowing where the story is quite yet. Then I get a job in the back bay of Boston at this school that used to be a theater. This is the Exeter Street Theater on Newbury Street and Exeter. And if you in the 70s or the 80s ever went in that theater, like baby for Rocky Horror Picture Show, does that ring any bells? This theater, and if we can have the next slide, maybe the next one, it has this theater in the building. So I'm doing, I'm working here and the place is speaking to me. And then I dig deeper and I was saying, I remember this was a theater when I was living in Boston in the 80s. I want to know more about it. So I did some research, I did some digging, finding out the theater and suddenly there's my story. So I decide to take that coastline that was speaking to me, that building, which was once a theater, and perfectly well be a performing arts high school for actresses that are striving to be famous. And I put those three things together and came up with the idea for The Dancers of the Northern Area. And I was so fortunate that my publisher has the beautiful cover, which is actually the back bay, it's a street in the back bay. So they really were getting how my inspiration came forward to this idea. And in our next one, I decided that I wanted to take this inspiration even further. So what I did was I researched and read dozens and dozens of plays. I brought some of them with me here today. But how can you go wrong with plays like The Swing of the Sea, or The Innocent One, or A Sea of White Horses? There's a line in The Dancers of the Northern Area Night where the protagonist says, my little boat of a heart is no match for his sea of white horses. And that comes directly from the conflict in this play. So what I decided to do was use my play inspiration to structure the novel. So the novel is actually chosen from 27 plays. They're a little bit of a highlights magazine or an Easter egg hunt where you can see them in the chapters. They are all the chapter titles are drawn from plays that are the inspiration for the story. And in a final word about this inspiration and idea for a novel is that the inspiration comes full circle. Because after the novel was published, I got my very first New York Times review and a couple of weeks after that review, I got a letter from a gentleman named Chad Beckwood. And he wrote to me and said, I saw the review and I'm a playwright.  So I went out and bought a copy and I read it. And when I got to the end of your novel where there's a list of plays that inspired you, one of them was mine. And he wanted to let me know that he had been having a terrible time of writer's block, but that after he read my novel and saw that I used his work as inspiration, that he got back to his desk. So inspiration can come from lots of places. It might even come to him this evening. So my message I think here is to just be open to that inspiration. Be patient until it all clicks together because a novel is many different component parts that find their way together. There's no just one inspiration for any piece of art. And I'd love to answer questions when the time comes about plays and structure and theater and all that kind of stuff. So thank you for listening. That was fabulous. I already have like six questions for you. And as thinking about that theater, the people who have been involved with Corrupt Street for a while might know that Corrupt Street's old space at 162 Winston has a secret hidden theater in the basement. It's also the Steinman piano building where apparently, I mean I don't know if this is a rumor or true, but Charles Dickens was supposed to have read on the stage, Henry is the coolest. Because writers like to trespass, all of my other staff there at the time, all of the staff who would like creep down there and I mean it's like crumbling. I mean it's really like you don't want to be down there, but we would go down there and then check it out. It's so popular that you just want to send it off. And you think of all the things that happened on that stage. I know. I know. I mean history. Oh right. So our next reader tonight is Stephanie Gayle. Stephanie is the twice Bushcart Prize nominated author of the Thomas Lynch Mystery series, which starts with vital threats. She is the immediate past president of Sisters in Prime. Stephanie co-created the Boston Reading series, Craft on Draft, which is fabulous and just such a great series. And she works at MIT in the finance department. She shares her home with her spouse and with the world's best funny bow. Welcome Stephanie. I'm regretting going second after Lynn because she was so sunny and inspirational. Strob in. It's going to get dark. So I'm Stephanie Gayle. I'd like to start with a sensory experience. I just want to check is everyone here global or at least has everyone here experienced snow and cold weather? Has anyone not experienced snow or cold weather? Let's go easy. Okay. If you're comfortable doing so, please close your eyes. And if that doesn't make you comfortable, just please very softly focus your gaze and open your nose so you're not actively looking at anything. So just either close your eyes or softly focus your gaze. All right. Now imagine you are outside on a road with no cars or buildings in sight. The sky is overcast, blocking the sun. And it is cold. It is seven degrees Fahrenheit. You have no hat, no gloves, no coat. On your feet are flip flops. A strong wind is blowing. It ruffles your hair and gets inside any space where you have exposed skin. When the wind, the real hill temperature is two degrees below zero. There is nothing to him to cover your software. Without opening your eyes, tell me how you feel. Cold? Anything else? Good. What parts of your body feel the most cold? Feet. Yeah. What might you do to try to work yourself up? Yep. Yep. Move those palms together. Dump up and down. Wiggle. Shake. Perfect. Okay. Now open your eyes and we focus your gaze. Feels nice and toasty in here, doesn't it? Okay. Now, why did I do that? Well, firstly, it's fun to ask people to do things and have them do it. Okay. Second, when I wrote Edel Fears, which is the second book in my Thomas Lynch mystery series, I knew that cold weather was going to be a vital component of the story. And usually stories about weather focus on things like tornadoes or earthquakes or hurricanes or monsoons, because those are inherently dramatic and they cause a lot of collateral damage. Now, I chose a blizzard, but not so much for the accumulation of snow, but because of the cold. And I chose it because when I wrote Edel Fears, I knew I wanted to write a story about a missing child. And I wanted that child to have a rare sensory and automatic neuropathy called congenital insensitivity to pain with anhydrosis or sepa, which is what I'm going to be calling it in the future because that other name is too much for math. Now, this is one of the weird instances where I'm like a very strange obsession that I had for many years actually paid off. Many years before this book even existed, I had read a newspaper article about a young boy who couldn't feel pain. And the idea of it just stuck with me. He couldn't feel pain. It's astonishing. He could break an ankle and keep walking on it, albeit not well, because what would stop the rest of us pain would not influence that. Now, that's where my obsession grew. Because we tend to think of pain as that. We don't like hurting.  But pain is your body's warning system. That's what keeps you from touching hot surfaces, or using a broken limb, or engaging in risky behavior that might cause you pain. And people with sepa don't have this warning. So they can injure themselves and not even know it. They have to be taught and re-taught what not to do. Don't grab a hot item off the stove.  And the kicker is that sepa, which is a rare hereditary condition, so both of your parents have to have the genetic mutation to cause it, sepa prevents people from regulating their body temperature. So in the old days, people with sepa used to often die from fevers, from seizures, because they didn't know enough to regulate their body temperature. The same thing that causes the problem with fevers also keeps you from regulating your body temperature in the colds, say during blizzard. So if they stay outdoors for too long, that is also very, very risky and potentially fatal. But maybe you can talk a little bit closer. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure they take any fevers. Is that a no? Is that a no? Sorry about that. So now I'm going to read you a bit from the book where Chief Lynch is organizing a search for the missing boy. His name is Cody Perrand. He has gone missing during the blizzard outside his parents' house. It was a snow day. He was very excited. Yay, let's go outside. Cody has sepa, which is the condition I was telling you about. So the longer he is outdoors, the more likely it is that he could die. And this is why I love writing mysteries, because so much is at stake all the time.  And this is for people who are masks. So this is taking place outside Cody's home. Chief Lynch is running the search. You'll see that that is not going well. The volunteers gave us trouble. Whole families appeared. Kids cried, I'll help find him. I told Officer Klein he should arrest the next parent who brought a child to help search. He wiped snowflakes from his cheeks and said, seriously? Mrs.  Did she see Cody? I asked. No, she's a psychic. She helped find my wedding ring last year and she found that Peterson's lost cat Marmalade. A psychic. Uh-huh. What was with these people? Mrs. Fran's sister Jessica showed up by example to math. She was younger and longer than her sister. Why haven't we started yet? She demanded. Time took away. Mr. Fran stomped his boots and said, ready yet? We assembled the volunteers into two person teams. One city, one cop. There were fewer cops, so two teams were compulsive neighbors. Ask them if they had everything they needed. Are we supposed to have walkie-talkies? Damn it, of course. The cities didn't have them. I told Klein to sort it out. The snow fell sideways, blown by a wind that made everyone shiver. Even big guys like me felt the chill. How could Cody survive this? He can't feel the cold. No pain was the superpower. One that could kill him. Yankiewicz and Robinson showed up last. Yankiewicz tugged on his ear flaps. Made me wish I had some. Chief? He seemed scared. I nearly fired him after he wrecked a patrol car. I'd taken him off the Meadowmaid duty and found something he could do. Restart our town's abandoned K-9 program. Mrs. Fran tugged to the front window curtain side, watching people pace the snowy road. I moved out of her sideline. I was thinking if it would help I could bring Skyler. Yankiewicz rocked on his heels. Made deep half-moons in the snow. He was a little heavy. A lot of my men were. She's my other dog. Trained in search and rescue. Skyler could find Cody. The snow might make it tough, but she can show us where he headed. A neighbor approached Mr. Waterson, former Army. He told me when he arrived. Chief, where are the water bottles? Water bottles? I repeated. You have to make sure our searchers stay hydrated. He looked around. Some of these folks need better gear. You included in this weather cotton kills. I'll get someone to catch water. Yankiewicz peered at my map. You need to have the area they're searching. He's a kid. He didn't walk six miles, not on this. Only have him search a quarter mile. It sounded too small. Most searches done in good weather. You don't run the survey bigger than this. So Yankiewicz knew about search and rescue. That made one of us. Go get the dog, I told him. Hey everybody, change plans, I called. The volunteers grumbled. Mr. Faran said we need to get out there now.  I've got a case in my garage. If someone comes with me, we can grab them. Mr. Faran stomped over. Why are you redoing the maps? I told him the search was too ambitious. What if Cody got that far? We need to be out there looking, not waiting for water. I said, if we don't find him, we'll widen the area. I need to consider everyone's safety.  I pretended not to hear. So as you can see, Chief Lynch has no experience organizing search and rescue. When you need to inject tension into a book, it's always a good idea to set your protagonists to challenge their likely to fail at. So now we're going to close our eyes, close again with a sensory experience.  And imagine the cold, and raise your hand when you feel it, whether it's the cold biting your toes, or making your neck good goose bumps, or making your hands ape, or even hurting your teeth. When you feel the cold, raise your hand. The wind is blowing, snow begins to settle into the cracks of your samples. All right. Open your eyes, refocus your gaze, and understand this from now on. That pain, though imagined, is a gift, and you are stronger for it. So the next time you step your toe, or get a splinter, or are cursing the snow as it settles onto you while you're shullying out of your parking spot, be sure to say, thanks universe. Thank you for coming in. Thank you so much, Stephanie. That was so great. I love the idea of writing about a character where you're eliminating the senses, you know, having to imagine somebody who doesn't have access to all the same senses as you. That feels like such an interesting challenge as a writer. Our third and final reader of the night is Edwin Hill. Edwin Hill's critically acclaimed crime novels include The Standalone Thriller, The Secrets We Share, and three novels featuring Hester Thursky. He has been nominated for Edgar and Agatha Awards, featured in Us Magazine, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal, and was recognized as one of six crime writers to watch in Mystery Scene Magazine. He lives in Roslandale, Massachusetts with his partner Michael and his favorite retriever, their lab, Edith Ann, who likes his first drafts enough to eat them. Learn more about him at www.skillsidewinhill.com. Thanks for having me today. I'm going to actually pass out these little chapsticks because they're my sensory thing. I thought I'd talk a little bit about the creative process that went into this book. One of the, when you write crime novels, one of the things, one of the benefits of writing crime novels, sometimes your publisher wants you write a book every single year. And of course, that's one of the challenges of being a crime writer as well. So I signed the contract for this book on, it was about, it was probably March 1st, 2020.  And so this is my, this is my pandemic novel. This is the novel that I wrote while we were all panicked. And it doesn't, it actually doesn't feature the pandemic. I tried to and I just couldn't go there. So one of the things that, like getting into a novel for me is always interesting. Every novel is really different, the process that I got through. With my editor, I have to, I write on spec, so I have to write out a proposal. I have to say what the book's going to be about. I have to write a big, long outline, give that to him. He sends it to his editorial board. They decide whether they want it or not. So I wrote this big, long proposal for a book about a school in New Hampshire, a couple that runs a private school in New Hampshire. And all sorts of hygis that happen at the private school. So I start writing that book. And I've worked on it for about three, four months. And then all of a sudden, the pandemic has happened. And like, I can't even go to New Hampshire. I can't, like I plan to go up to Exeter and look at the camp, you know, whatever. And I can't even leave the state to go up to New Hampshire to do that. So I'm like, okay, let's move the setting closer into Boston. And so, so then I call my editor and I say, okay, the school's out. And now it's going to be about a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist who spies on his clients. He says, okay, okay, I like that idea. And the psychiatrist has a brother who just got out of prison and two sisters. He's like, okay, I like that idea. And I was like, do you need a new outline? He says no. So I said, okay, I'm going to start writing now. The main district, so the main district was due on April 1, 2021. And so, you know, I write it, write it, keep writing and keep writing and keep writing. And so then I'm like, in January, it's due in April. And I'm like, this psychiatrist just isn't working. So, and neither is the brother who was in jail, who just got out of jail. So I'm just going to get rid of those two. And now it's going to be about these two sisters. And now it's about two sisters who have a secret from their, from their deep past.   We're not going to do the psychiatrist anymore. It's about two sisters. He says, what do they do? And I said, it's about two sisters. And they have, they have a secret. Okay. And he's like, what's the secret? It says, it's about two sisters.  And I said, I'll get it to you soon. So now I'm like, I'm a total parent. And so it's January and it's like winter. And at the end of, at the end of December of 2020, we have this box of chocolates. And one of them said that it was almond. And I said, the only thing I want out of 2020 is for this to have marzipan in it. It didn't. I mean, that's like where we were in our lives at that point, right? And so I didn't even get my marzipan. I have no idea what this book is going to be about. And so it's January, I'm driving around, I'm like taking a van to go for a walk. And I'm like, driving down the street. I saw this light, like it's like, it's like the 10th light around. I'm like, really bad. And so there's a school over here. There's a private school over on this corner. And then over on this corner, there is this old abandoned factory. And I'm just sitting around thinking, God, I bet those kids are always going into that abandoned factory and getting in so much trouble. I bet those kids are always going into that abandoned factory and getting in so much trouble. I bet those kids are always going into it. So all of a sudden the novel literally just falls into place. And this heavy goes to what Lynn was saying about how suddenly all these pieces start coming together. So I kind of want to get to the sensory thing. One of the things I love in novels is when I, all my novels so far that I've written have been from multiple points of view, I love to look at how different people will see the same mundane object, the smell, the same scent. And they'll bring something different to that story. They'll see it in a different way. Someone will see it as something very, very, very kind, something wonderful. Someone else will see it as something threatening. And so in this novel, one thing that was really important in the, and I didn't know that it was there, was the scent of that chapstick, that sort of artificial orangey scent. And so I've written this, I've written a scene, there's a chapstick in it, whatever. And I was, I'm going to read that scene for you now. So the very beginning of the, very beginning of the book. This book, so this book is told from six points of view, but the two most important points of view are two sisters. It's told in, it's told in both in 1995 when they're 14 and 12, and then it's told in the present day when they're adults, they're in the 40s. And their names are Natalie, who's the 14-year-old, and Glenn, like Glenn Close, people get confused about that. Glenn is their sister who's 12. And so I'm just going to read a few pages. Natalie Cavanaugh had a secret, one that made her stomach hurt, and one that she had to keep to herself until she could figure out what to do next.  Her mother Ruth tapped a finger on the steering wheel and flew with Mac plate on the radio. From the back seat, Natalie's 12-year-old sister Glenn said, old people music, and call me old, Ruth Cavanaugh said. I'm going swimming if you get home, Glenn said, meaning she was hopping the fence to the next door neighbor's pool. Be sure they ask for us, Ruth said. It's an open invitation, Glenn said. Don't abuse it. Ruth turned into starling circle and down their driveway. The Cavanaugh's lived in a brand new development on the outskirts of Elmhurst, where acres of porous had been clear cut to build 15 houses, though so far only two were complete. The others lay frozen in various states of construction. At the very center of the circle, the Cavanaugh's, 14-year-old Natalie Glenn and their parents, Ruth and Allen, lived in a great colonial. Right next door, Dion Sykes and her two kids lived in a nearly identical house, the one with the pool. They all moved into the circle during the spring, expecting to hear construction. So far, they'd only heard each other. Ruth parked in front of the garage. Natalie swept damp banks from her forehead to the shimmering asphalt, where waves of heat lapped at her knees. Glenn shoved her. Natalie shoved back. Girls, Ruth said, let's get everything inside before it melts. Plastic grocery, grocery bags filled with the station wagon. Natalie grabbed two and dashed into the house through the living room, passed the burden same on the family room carpet into the kitchen. Her mother crammed ice cream and ground beef into the freezer. Your father's probably still asleep. Natalie's stomachache returned with a vengeance. Usually, after a night like last night, her father slept in the guest room. When he finally woke, he slumped at the kitchen counter and apologized for the bits of memory that came to him in flashes. The knife wound in his arm would crystallize those memories. Let's all be as quiet as we can, her mother added. I'll put things away, Natalie said. No, I'll put things away, Glenn said. You could turn anything into an argument. It's my turn. I'll put the groceries away, Ruth said. The two of you can out in the car. Race you, Glenn said. Natalie took off, slamming the door. Behind her, Glenn stumbled down the front stoop, losing ground. But when Natalie went to grab a bag of plastic hot-on and window print, and Glenn beat her inside, cheatered Natalie said.  If dad wakes up, we'll be sorry, Natalie said, her voice would whisper, the lie coming easily. You should be quiet, especially after last night. They deposited their bags on the Formica counter. Stay with me for a second, Glenn, Ruth said. Glenn's face flushed enough so that Natalie knew at once that her sister had done something she shouldn't have. Glenn was always getting in trouble, pushing boundaries while Natalie spent her life inside the lines, fascinated by her sister's bold infractions. Now she lingered to see what Nat Glenn had done, but Ruth said those bags won't walk themselves in from the car and waited for Natalie to leave. By the time she returned, with more groceries, whatever had happened between her mother and sister had already transpired. Natalie jumped her sister with her thumb, thumb, but Glenn shrugged. A moment later, their neighbor Diane Sykes snopped at the back door and let herself in. Cool party, she said.  Ruth nodded.  Natalie and Glenn ran upstairs to the room. What did you do, Natalie, as Emily O'Bean, that Glenn said, as she chose a one-piece to cover the bruises. Natalie left her sister and hovered outside her father's office. On most mornings, even on a Saturday like this one, she'd hear the clack of her Evis typewriter behind the closed door. Anyone familiar with that? Today, she towed the door open, stacked some paper literally every surface. She slipped into the room, index cards were stacked on a tattooed bulletin board with characters meanings and plot points, tersely written rejection letters, paper at the back of the door. My wall was shamed. Alan Cowden unnamed it, especially on nights when he teetered on the precipice of modeling, when he tipped between Jofiel and Dandress. Alan called himself a writer, but mostly he taught English at the local community college. Suddenly, he didn't like to remember. Glenn had made him remember that last night. The door to Alan's office opened. Glenn stood in the hallway. You shouldn't be in there, Glenn said, as she applied lip gloss, ruined orange tube, but matched her ponytail. The scent of artificial citrus hung on the air. Where did you get that Natalie asked? It's my Glenn set, and I'll know if you use it. You stole it from the A&P. Did not. Glenn turned and ran downstairs. A moment later, Natalie heard a splash in the Sikes's pool. Are you coming, Ruth Cabana, showed her up the stairs? I'll meet you there, and Natalie showed her back. She changed her own bathing suit, unlike Glenn, she can wear a two piece. At the Sikes's house, Natalie's mother Diane Sikes sat in the shade of an umbrella. Natalie bounced off the board and into the air. Natalie would think about this moment for years to come, about these few seconds when she hovered in mid air, about the summer sun and the stench of sunscreen, and orange scented lip balm, and the stomach ache that wouldn't go away. All the players in one place, all up on her father.  She saw her mother lean toward Diane and whispered again, Natalie clenched beneath the pool's surface. Here in the world was quiet. Natalie held her breath till her lungs felt as though they would burst, knowing that as soon as she came up to take a breath, the day would return to focus. She couldn't have known that this would be the last time any of them would ever truly be happy, or that with the inner geek news trucks would line a Starland circle and her mother would be suspected of murder. She also couldn't have known that by this time next month Diane Sikes would be dead. When Natalie, what dad Natalie did know was that eventually she beat to tell the police where to find her father. Natalie's secret, the one that made her stomach hurt, was that she'd already seen him earlier this morning when she'd gone to retrieve the library book that Glenn had accidentally left out the night before.  So, the novel came together with the scent of orange in that passage, and it came together much later when I was writing a scene way at the end of the book, when two characters are, they're drinking, satting en blanc, which of course smells like citrus. I know a lot of people here are writers, but all of a sudden that sudden detail connected the entire novel together. It was like there was this bungee cord that went through the entire book, and everything sort of came together. So, that was my process with this one. Thank you. So, my takeaway is if you're stuck with your novel, you need to find an abandoned factory or theater or hotel, and then it will all suddenly start to exist. So, okay, so I think we're going to invite the three authors back up. Maybe you guys want to sit, I'll bring chairs up for you to take more sense. Is that a bit of a question? It usually comes out in the readings, but it's usually after a while somebody in the audience says, if you can tell us how you came up with the idea. And so, I'm curious if you feel like just a random coincidence or if you think that you're focused on sort of the mystery, somehow it makes the story more closely tied to the specific inspiration or the way that you look at the world, or kind of just escape to that. Yeah, I think for me, this is like novel four, and I've got novel five coming out. I've figured out that the shortcut, and there aren't that many, but there's one shortcut for me, and it's to really lean into that inspiration. Because I need something to propel me forward, and if I'm making a mistake, I'll figure that out. But at least if the inspiration is strong, then I know I'm at least starting from someplace. I'm not starting from, you know, possibilities. That's just me. It was really well put. I mean, one of the, I mean, every novel of mine hasn't been different as far as process has gone. And with that, this novel, I think my inspiration just disappeared, because it was just so weird to be working on something at that point. I took the idea that I rejected the psychiatrist that's why I said that's what my current novel's about. So, you know, it's like all ideas are kind of key. And that one was actually, this one has been easier, right, because I think I already had that inspiration to focus on. This is one of the rare ones where I knew what the inspiration was, and it tied to the story. I don't think that's been true for other novels. Certainly not a newspaper story that I've noodled on for years and years, and then used. So, this is kind of an exception for me. Any other questions? Made your deadline? She asked if I made my deadline. You know, I didn't make that deadline. I was like a wee wait. And the funny thing is, I have a deadline right now. Like, my novel's due on October 1st. If not, I'm turning it into tomorrow. Which for a writer is like making your deadline? I also have not. So, the novel I'm working on right now is like a rational one story. So, it's the same story told by six different characters. So, I did have to have an outline for that, because otherwise, I already went crazy writing it, but if I hadn't done something, it would have been really hard. But other, but other times I've just kind of winged it. Same. It depends on the story. I always write from multiple points of view, because being a family counselor, everything feels like it's about a relationship today. So, I have to have the different viewpoints. And so, that becomes very, very difficult to do if you don't have an outline. Though one time, I didn't have an outline, and I literally had to pull the whole thing apart, and then put the separate stories and justify how I was going to weave them back and forth. And it turns out I drove myself out of my mind, and they went back exactly the way that I am. And Stephanie laughed at this question. So, I want to know why you left. And I also follow up to that. It's like, I'm not a mystery writer, or a thriller writer. And so, to me, it seems like you have to have an outline. Like, how could you not? It's like the whole thing is just a little puzzle box. So, if you don't have one at the beginning, do you, at what point do you put one in? But first step. So, within the mystery community, there's a really sharp division between plotters and pancers. So, plotters outline, and pancers write about a seat of their pants. And most people are somewhere in the middle. Although, there are some people who write whole, like, scene, every scene, and then they go in and they expand on it. I don't. The first book in that series, I didn't know who did it till the end. And it was a blue group of women's pants open with that revelation. I was like, then I went back and I just, like, seated the clue. So, it actually isn't as awful as it sounds. My problem I find partly the incentive for me to write is to find out what the story is about. And if I know everything, key and crucial, I'm less interested to write it. It's also why I don't talk a whole lot when I'm first writing something. It's like, I kind of want to ruin the mystery. I've also tried writing outlines, have lost those outlines, found them later. They weren't helpful, but I've also deviated. So, I just, I generally know where it's going to start. I almost always know where it's going to end, what that resolution is going to be, and that I might know some key scenes in the middle. But I don't know everything. And for me, that's part of the joy. But I know that makes some people crazy. I feel like you have to plot at some point, right? So, you're talking about plotting once you've get more of a gestalt of what it's about, right? There has to be some plotting at some point to make sure that it's all working. But I'll sometimes know what's going to happen. I just don't know the choreography, right? So, I look at that a little bit differently. Like, I know some of the dynamics or some of the sketches of it, but I don't actually know how it's going to work. And there are times where I'm sitting there going, I know what's supposed to happen. I just don't know how I'm going to make that happen. And then that's when the discovery takes you in different directions and that's fine. There's one, the one trick that you do in this, or one can do in Mr. Norris, is to have a tiny little question that's posed at the beginning of the book that just kind of hangs there.  You don't answer until the end of the novel. And it's really satisfying for your reader. And those are the ones that I love to sort of just discover during the writing process, the one I have written out, it's about a birthday, like that little scratch thing is about a birthday cake. And, but I do kind of, I do need to know who like the killer is. The one I've changed, I've changed it a few times. I think the viewpoint, whether it's first or third in the novel that I have coming out, I played around with a couple of scenes that are in second point of view, which was tricky, but I wanted them to have a lot of psychic distance, like almost as hazy what the heck is happening. So second person worked for that. But it's always really about intention. But, but the point of view piece is really fun when you do more than one. It's super hard to, but the fun of it is you really have to distinguish between them. They can't just sound like the same person. They have to uniquely have their own struggles. It's almost like mini novels, right? In the dangers of an ordinary night, it's three points of view. So it's three mini people's heartbeat. And you have to get that right. And that matters to me because just when I'm kind of tired of that person, I can go the next one and figure out how they go together. In the dangers of an ordinary night, they're all from what's called third limited, which is the camera angle is sort of inside the character, but there's a little bit of distance. You don't know, you get to know a little bit more about what's going on around you. Multiple person first? I've done it all the time. You know, I love first. I am as simple as the first person point of view. So look, Kyle's coming home. I love first. It's immediate. And if I have one talent in life, it's voice. Voice is actually something I'm good at. I have been running more in third person. I find it more challenging. But somehow in mysteries, it can be tricky with first, because you'll only have more persons point of view. And so how do you get that person information that they wouldn't have access to? It can be a little trickier sometimes. It's also a little trickier, but fun to show when that person isn't getting it, because they think they're getting it. And you have to kind of show that they're not in the other character's reactions, which can be a really fun thing to play with first. So my heart will always be with first person, but I have been reaching out to third. All of my points have been multiple point of view. This one that I'm working on right now is everyone's in the first person. So it's six points of view, everyone's from the first person point of view, which was really interesting to do. And they're very distinct. There's a 13-year-old. There's a serial killer. There's a lot of different points of views. That was really interesting. But otherwise, I've done limited third just like that. Get stuck. You know what do you do? Always get stuck. Never. I get stuck. I write every day, and I have a word count limit every day. So I always have to make whatever I've set my goal to be. And oftentimes, I don't keep everything that I wrote that day very often. And if I'm really, really stuck, I'll make my word count goal really achievable. So if I'm sort of like in a place where I'm feeling blocked, I'll make my word count goal be like 200 words, and I'll always try to beat it. But if I'm really like in a good rhythm, I'll get my word count goal. I'll make my word count goal like 2,000 so that I'm really... Do you have tricks for getting unstuck is more to the point, I think. Because the story doesn't always flow at your desire. It flows based on the story's desire. And what information you already have that's meaningful, and you might not have that information yet. So all the times I was walking the beach to the Glades, I knew, here's a murder year, right? But I don't know what it is yet. So my tricks are to stay with it, to take it on the walk, to imagine the what ifs, to say, well, what if this happened? No, I don't like that. What if this happened? Oh, that has promised. And so to play with the tricks of moving forward. So it's sort of semantics, but are you ever really stuck all the time? Are you really stuck? No. Because the process is to keep moving forward in whatever way you choose to do that. I think there are flavors of stuck. I don't want to write stuck. There's, oh my god, I wrote myself into a corner, and I actually don't know how to solve the problem I created for myself stuck, which is probably my least favorite form of stuck.  But that's actually not true. If you have a lot of writer facts, that's the time to talk to them and ask them, because sometimes the outside perspective is actually just like they'll tell you the obvious thing you weren't thinking of. If it is regular type of stuck, I do think that walking or showering, showering, I have some good ideas in the shower. I should never leave the shower. I think it's very pretty though, I think your problem food would be bad. Anyway, just imagine being a sandwich in the shower. So I think it depends on stuck. And then there's sometimes like, honestly, I did a talk on like the seven different types of I don't want to write, and then the solutions to them. And sometimes it's just like, you need to like decompress a little and maybe go like, look at something that isn't your computer or paper, look at nature, look at some beautiful art, or do something else that feeds your soul in a way that the writing isn't helping you with right now. Yeah. This is a book called stuck, where there's a little boy and he just keeps throwing things up in the tree.  And it's the writing process where you're like, I'll just throw a quail on this. Anyway, it's a great book. So I think this is an awesome place to end. I want to say thank you to everybody for coming. I want to say thank you to Kickstand for hosting and the Robbins Library for facilitating this. And huge thank you to our three authors for doing an amazing reading. I brought up an advanced copy of my next novel. So the first person who can tell me the highest peak in Northern Maine. There you go. Oh. Speaking of keeping informed, there's a mailing list of back book books. So if people want to sign up for a mailing list, know about future events, please sign your name. The next one is January 12th and books are back there too. So feel free to people and grab books and get the offers to sign them before the end of the day. Thanks everybody.


The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Las Vegas. Everybody watching the Cube's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. This morning, Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system in here, but it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the Director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile in Naga Chakravarti. He's the Chief Digital Officer at I-OPEX. Guys, welcome. Thanks for having us. Next. So, John. So, okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that. So, let's just give him a second here. Three different transitions. I think it's pretty loud probably coming through. Usually we don't get that, but it is live. So, John, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title is Director of Product and Technology. Obviously, you're here because you have an affinity to automation, but talk about your role and how automation fits into it. Sure. Well, I'm the Director of Product and Technology, and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration, and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So, I'm here to learn about from these experts and all these leaders within the UI path and from our vendors as well. Okay, Naga, tell us about iOPEX. It's kind of an interesting name. Where did that come from? I think cloud when I think OPEX, but get rid of my cat bag. Where's the name come from? And what do you guys do? Actually, we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the core team, comes from a service background. And I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, the dependency on people was also increasing. We thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, I would say iOPEX is currently at 3.0. And if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me, from operation excellence, that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. So the market just went right to you guys. You were ahead of the game and then, wow, now it's a real chill. I have the time that we fortunately named it OPEX, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. Yeah, I got it. So John, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did it, was it the merger? Take us through that. Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOPEX. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. The proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-Mobile Enterprise. Not having any experience within automation, as we had discussed before, usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners. iOPEX being the main critical partner in that evolution. And so, iOPEX came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green, is that we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shout-outs here. Yao Duong, John Loh and our CIO, Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOPEX, UiPath, to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, oh wait. No, it's okay. So you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel. Absolutely, absolutely. So our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOPEX to get that in place. And once we have that in place, I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program, that's incredible. And we're a large company. And we'll, I mean, we're just starting. So it's going to be fun. So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroots effort? And then the COE comes later. How do you typically recommend approaching it? I think the fact that we started very small, there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we're solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation. And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified. Let's say, if you have to go to different departments, it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments problem statements. And when you navigate it, you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit? And when it comes to benefit, you need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem? So somebody internally within T-Mobile, we were able to use very nice. John's team, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation and slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggy piggyback and scale it bigger. So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyperscale cloud providers or automation platforms from UI path, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else, there are organizations like IOPX. And you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint, but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, how does that business model from an IOPX perspective work? Do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of okay, now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, from a business perspective, IOPX wants to do as much as it can of value for T-Mobile because that's the business they're in. So tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, so I'll say real fast that IOPX is actually part of the T-Mobile team. They are embedded. We work with them daily. They had the expertise, they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure. They're there. Absolutely, let me add one more point to it. See, if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile, I would say it is a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you, there was a natural way to get embedded as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say, I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and the openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. I got a lot of questions. John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding and maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I could, a lot of people ask me, well, how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative, line of business? So those executives were from the IT team, for sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. How do you choose? I got so many questions, I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? I think it's a combination, right? One fundamental guiding principle that we always look at it is, let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe, you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that get executed in the systems of record in the form of workflow, and there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath. You will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere, but you also have to look at why is this clutter happening and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together, and that's when you'll start deciding, hey, this is repetitive in nature. This is going to scale. This is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard, and that scorecard naturally drives the decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me, or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? So I was going to ask you how you visualize it.  Okay, so combination, got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before. Big organizations that I know, they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio, the applications have dependencies on each other, and then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications, any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? So we actually have a change management team. And we make sure that before we go forward with anything, it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with IOPX, with our development teams, on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? Yeah, so when it comes to change management, right? While John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is a proactive thing that we end up doing this, right? When a bot goes live. There is a live support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamental core principle for that entire support to work good is, you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails, right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record, the data format, is it changing? Or the bot logic is failing? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that, we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons and that kind of complements the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey, there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay, fair enough. The systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way, the change becomes a smoother process. And how quickly can you diagnose that, is it? Hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? So it depends on the complex question, right? If we know the pattern early, then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you need to basically look at how the business is going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Please. As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future, UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that? In general, what differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? I think it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform, you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving, it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in. Process mining, task capture, made it a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey, I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skill set? So a platform will try to look at what is that I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise. I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture and that's the kind of platform that anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? Is there at all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? Yeah, so we are enterprise license. You are, okay. And IOPX helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs, right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of them. It's a large company. So I'm 23 is going to be huge for us. Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. And good luck in the future. Yeah, thank you. All right. Okay, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson, UiPath Forward Five. The bots are running around. Dave, we're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at Forward. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.


in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. Righty, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas, California, at the convention center at NAB 2017. 102,000 people, a lot of production people talking about everything that has to do with media and entertainment and also technology. Met is actually the theme this year, media entertainment and technology. The three are linked together in a way that they've never been before. And we're really excited to have someone really from the content side and the tech side as our guest, it's Justin Simmons. He's the director of technology at the Sundance Institute. Justin, welcome. Yeah, thank you. So everybody knows the Sundance Film Festival. There's a lot of press every year, a lot of cool movies and independent movies. But you're really on the IT side. I wonder if you could explain a little bit, people don't know probably there's kind of an IT story behind Sundance. Yeah, I mean, when you've got an event that's as big as the Sundance Film Festival and really the eyes of the world are on it for that period of time, there's so much preparation that goes into it because you have one shot to get it right. So we really start planning as soon as the festival ends. Sometimes we have multi-year projects and there is a lot of technology behind it from websites to big flash sales to all the photos that are collected and all the video that's collected during the event. Also, a lot of people don't know about the Sundance Institute is that we have a year round program. So we have about 30 lab or educational events that happen year round all over the world and those are also generating more media, more files that need to be stored and saved and tracked. So it's interesting is back in the day when storage was so expensive and media so expensive storage was actually a negative. It was a liability. Now everyone's finally figured out that data's an asset. You got to store it, there's ways to store it. You need to get the metadata to make it accessible. So that's really changed the dynamic of the way that people look at keeping all these assets. Yeah, I mean we saw really unfortunately a lot of times people would say we don't record it because we don't know where to put it and it was really frustrating from technology perspective to hear things like that. Now it's capture everything and what's happening in such a compressed period of time like that it is all about metadata and all about workflow to make it efficient because if you get behind it just keeps growing and growing and growing. Right, this is a great quote from Sable from NFL Films from back in the day. They said, how did you know to get that in slow motion that shot? So we shoot everything in slow motion because you just don't know when that great play is going to be. So it's a very different mindset to capture everything. So I wonder if you can explain with that mindset and then now you have 4K and 8K and Ultra HD and I mean tremendous amounts of gear here. How do you attack it from your role? How do you put together a plan that you can capture and manage all this content? So for us, the first step was really getting a digital asset management system and incorporating that digital asset management system into the workflow as much as possible. Like I said, you can't be happening behind that if that works happening behind it's just never going to get done. So putting the digital asset management system in the center of the workflow was extremely important and now that we've got a great digital asset management system, we're using Reach Engine by Levels Beyond, we're looking at ways that different things can plug into that and automate as much as possible so that when the work's being done, when the scenes are being shot, that metadata is captured and it goes right into the system and everything flows into storage, into archive, into preservation. So you're populating metadata in real time as stuff's being shot. You're not doing it kind of after the fact. Yeah, there's a couple of different things going on there. One is with photos. Everyone's got badges around their neck so we're shooting their badges at the festival and then right at the ingest, those cards come back from the photographers. All the metadata gets tagged in it right then and it all goes into a digital asset management system. They're selecting their target photos from that set and then it's off to being posted on the website for press. It's being incorporated into video and then for video, we're using Prelude to tag things in real time. That's going right into digital asset management system and then using Adobe Premiere in conjunction with the digital asset management system. We're able to make sure that all the metadata that's done during the editing process also stays with those assets because we have 35 years of history with the organization and we want to make sure that we're keeping that indefinitely. So there's no point where we're like, well, we don't need the 1988 festival anymore. And then how has cloud impacted your world and added a new asset class, the knock on cloud before one of the knocks, especially for film and video, the assets are so big and the speed of light is just too damn slow, so I'm going to say, for moving the stuff around. That said, can put a tremendous amount of capability in compute and store and power at the hands of anybody worldwide, consistent distribution. So how have you guys integrated a cloud strategy in what you do? So we went really aggressive on cloud about 2011, 2012 and we ran into the limitations really quickly. The speed and the cost when you start going at scale it started to impact us, but there was areas that cloud was really successful. So like our front end web servers, we can just scale them up during that event. So we really need this kind of extreme performance for just a couple of days a year. So being able to spin up 30 instances of the web server, bunch of database, have a million people a day hit that, that's great. Where we've struggled is on the meeting entertainment side to make cloud cost effective when you're going really big with storage and then also getting the performance that we need. So we've pulled that back, the more of the media storage from the cloud, but where we are going to continue to use it is on collaboration. So now we're sure we're not unique in this but we've got creators and collaborators that are everywhere and the content's being created all over and everywhere. So we want to use the cloud to capture that content and we also want to use the cloud to help collaborate with whatever editor or sound mixer that we're working with. I also think cloud has now become increasingly important to the independent film community. A lot of these productions have small budgets and they're looking to be as effective as possible. So they are collaborating globally and so they're going to cloud and I think it's going to be really interesting over the next couple of years to see how what solutions come up really targeted towards the independent film community that make it accessible for these productions that just they're going to be around for a year or two. They need a solution to get back up, they need to collaborate and it all needs to happen very quickly and for a reasonable cost. Right, right. Now what about on the distribution side? So it used to be, you went to the movies and then you got it on Netflix or you DVR'd it or TVO but now there's so many ways that people are consuming media whether it be social media like Twitter or Snapchat or Instagram versus YouTube and Vimeo those types of platforms. How are you kind of addressing the multi-distribution opportunities within the assets that you guys have? So we do a lot of live stream, we do a lot of YouTube and we've been doing that for a long time but what we've seen recently over the last couple of years with the filmmakers themselves is a real shift towards using, doing electronic delivery for large digital cinema packages. So these DCP files can be 100 gigabytes plus and we just started seeing people really adopt digital delivery for those in the last couple of years and so Sundance Film Festival comes in kind of at the beginning of a film's life and what a lot of these filmmakers are hoping to do at the festival is get distribution. So from there, they're able to now take that DCP file, they're not shipping hard drives, they're not shipping film prints and they're now taking that through the distribution path and it's not something the Institute's directly involved in but we facilitate that where the industry comes to meet with these independent film and independent artists. Okay, so last question before I let you go, what are some of your priorities for 2017? So some of my priorities for 2017 is preservation. So we've been doing a lot of work around organizing our files and our media but we didn't have a really effective way of preserving the content. So we had just a bunch of big file servers sitting out there and we were kind of replicating things between them and so I needed a solution that would actually take those files that would be integrated into the workflow and actually protect it. And so that's where we're working with Western Digital as official provider to help us actually protect and preserve our digital media assets. So using our digital asset management system with Reach Engine as part of that workflow, we're going to have the files that are sitting on our production storage but then another file, another copy is going to be put onto the HGST object storage. And there, the preservation is at a level that I haven't seen on any other device. It's using a razor coating that's splitting the file into multiple parts and now that file is far better protected than it has been on our current systems. So that's a big priority for us to get that going and really get these assets protected and preserved because like I said, we're planning on keeping these indefinitely. It's so sad, the stories you hear coming out of Hollywood of an earlier time where it was all on the film, the film wasn't properly protected, that so many of these great films didn't survive, only pieces of them survived or they've got bits and pieces that they're trying to restore. I'm glad that era has passed. All right, Justin, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I know you're busy, you're conference hopping and thanks for stopping by. Yeah, no problem, thank you. All right, he's Justin Simmons, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.


Stephen Sorgrat said that we're actually in a very special time in the whole evolution of mankind and science technology. So we're in a special window where we can actually understand the things around us. If we start turning over aviation to robots, what does that mean for us as individuals? What does it mean for mankind if all of a sudden our cars and our planes and our trains, like they are in Europe, are highly automated? So I think where it's not just aviation that's on this cusp, I think it's many, many sectors of the transportation industry. And I think it's causing a lot of people heartache because it's redefining who they are and what they're capable of doing. How many of you have learned something from YouTube? You might not have had a grandmother to explain to you. It's like, oh, this is convenient and easier than asking my grandmother something else. We do it all the time. It actually makes our lives better. It's not no different. No, but see, I think you're making an argument that it's superior to some of the other ways. And that's where I would say... I do think it's superior, which is why we chose to use YouTube that moment. We chose YouTube instead of some other means that was still available to us. Couldn't it just be that it was easier and convenient and right in front of us and we didn't have to get our butts off the chair and walk down stairs? That's what I mean by superior.


And the twists in this movie, especially at the end, where you expect it to be like a killer, it goes completely left field and it's like, whoa!  The whole sorority house is all falling apart and stairs are crumbling. It's complete madness and it's pulled off very well.


So we're here at the BET Education Conference. Yeah, hey, welcome to the BET Show 2018. My name's Ron, I'm part of the training team for ESSA. This is the C732, entry-level, ruggedized Chromebook. Very much a pupil sort of focused product. It's military specification, chassis, very robust, very solid. It even has drainage, so if you spill something onto the keyboard, it will run straight through. How does that work, the drainage technology? So you wouldn't believe it, but the drainage technology, we've got square pipes that go through here rather than cylindrical and the liquid moves through quicker.  Yeah, yeah, this is just, if anything lands on the keyboard, it's going to go straight through the device and not get inside. USB plugs, that would be awesome. Well, that's, you know, that's specialist spilling you're doing if you're pouring it into the USBs. If you pour it on the top, normal accident, it'll go straight through. Like a whole glass of something is OK. Yeah, it's 330 millilitres, so you know the size of a can of pop. So perhaps Coke or, you know, other pops are available. Can we see the ports? Yeah, they're on the bottom here. So you can see to the edges here, so the liquid, yeah. The liquid goes out here. So here's a micro SD card slot. That's right. This device actually can go 4G as well. So you can put into this SIM card. Really? Yeah, yeah. Is that optional? Yeah, it's, this product isn't actually available in the UK. It's just Europe, Middle East Africa, as we were saying earlier. Will 4G, or there will be two versions, one with 4G and one without? No, I think there's just this version. It's not available, as I say, in the UK. It's a slightly different model in the UK. The other thing is this doesn't have VGA. It has Type-C. So Google and ourselves are promoting the idea of USB Type-C for faster charge and for faster data transfer. And then over here, on that side? Yeah, we've got standard USB here as well and obviously Type-C. So there's two Type-C and two USB? Yeah. Is there a price for that one? This one is probably going to be about £200, something like that. Yeah, but right now it's not designed for the UK market. Why not? We already have a model that is very similar. I think it's actually something to do with telephony. It's something to do with the 4G aspect that it's not available UK-wide. All right. That's pretty cool. And then it has a design to be like a military... Yeah, so you can drop it from 60 centimetres. I'm not going to do it. You can also put 65 kilograms of weight onto the chassis. Inside there's actually a kind of a honeycomb, so it absorbs shock. All right. This one, how popular is this on the market? So this is the R13. So this, I suppose, in terms of when we're talking about this being a pupil sort of centred or focused product, this one, I guess, would be maybe for an older pupil who is perhaps less accident prone. So it's more about design, yeah. And a MediaTek chipset. MediaTek chipset, yeah. So it's been very popular over the last year, you've been telling? Yeah, it has. This one's called R13. The R done it's the fact that it rotates, so it'll turn to tablet format. Because of the security, I can't make it flat for you, but yeah, R means rotating screen, so it's a convertible. And these are extremely smooth, kind of like they feel kind of like MacBooks. Yeah, they have a definite kind of look to them. They're very much about, you know, the design led, I suppose, rather than rugged. Also from last year. Yeah, so this is a retail product. How popular is this? It's very popular, very popular in retail. And again, from the bet perspective, the idea of us being at an education show, I guess this would maybe be more for a school teacher rather than, you know, the entire class. So the 11.6 inches, for what ages? So the 11, I guess, yeah, this is an 11, and that's an 11. It's not so much for adult... It's not that it's not for adults. It's not for the university so much, right? No, it's much more for, you know, younger, primary kids. So they should start this from first grade, or? Yeah, I think so. That's very much the idea. You know, the idea that we've made at Rugged is, we expect, you know, younger kids to be perhaps more accident prone, I guess. Maybe take a little less care.  So the kids, do they actually carry this home and back to school every single day, or do they leave it in the school? There's lots of different options. Certain schools just have the units in class and the kids will come in, use their Gmail, read, you know, log in and use it. Other schools, the kids actually own the product and they'll take it home and they'll do work at home. Maybe it's the only thing they carry. They don't carry your whole backpack, they'll just carry the laptop. Yeah, I mean, they can. All of that documentation, obviously, is going to be cloud-based, so they can carry this and they've got access to everything. And then if you have an 11.6 stretch... So this one, yeah, I'll move around a little, it'll just be easier to show you. So this, I guess, is a step up from the entry-level one. Lots of fun last year. Yes, yeah, yeah, so this one actually is current. So we're calling these now, these are spin. So the idea is it will convert to tablet. It also has a rear-facing camera, so when you're using it in tablet mode, you do have the facility of camera. But again, yeah, you can use it in normal laptop mode. It's ruggedised, it has the drainage, the same as the other 11-inch stuff. If there is a spill, the liquid's going to go straight through. One thing that's great about all these Chromebooks is they all have really great keyboards and mouse, right? Yeah, yeah. That's a requirement. You can ship a cheap one, you have to have a good one. With ASA, we've always had what we call precision trackpad or touchpad, so you get the experience of a touchscreen on the trackpad. So you can use all of the gestures. So you can zoom and you can, you know, scan and move as if you're using a touchscreen, but it's actually the trackpad, so. But here they are all Intel, except for that R13 from last year, MediaTek. MediaTek chipset. 8173 and then... One of the things we did touch on is this one actually has an i... This is a 14-inch, and this is called the 14 Chromebook for work. And this has an i5 processor in it. So is this this one? Yes. So this is with an i5. Yeah, it's kind of future proofing, you know. When is this released? This is current. Like recently, but in the last year, right? Yes, yeah. 2017, and it has like a glass... Yeah, it has a... It's again, it's a bit more design-led, I suppose, than these robust, smaller ones. And so this more like... Enterprise... So yeah, Enterprise, NGOs, military, education, health sector. So yeah, features Type C. What kind of pricing we're talking about here? So I think we're... Slightly over £300, as an estimate.  Are you the leader in the education Chromebooks? Yeah. In the UK? Yeah. You're Middle Eastern Africa, EMEA. You're the leader in education Chromebooks? Yeah, yeah. Consumer Chromebooks too and... Yeah, I mean, in... You know, so the high-street retailers, Dixon's, PC World, the majority of Chromebooks in those stores are actually yeses. So we've got quite an array of Chromebooks. And how's the feedback of the user? Are they basically, in general, oppressed and happy about the Chromebook? Yeah, the thing with Chromebook is, Google, we talk about the three yeses. So we talk about speed. These things switch on in seven seconds. They... Because you're not running a great heavy operating system, everything happens really fast. So the first S is speed. The second S is simplicity. Basically, you're using a series of apps rather than an operating system. So it's very intuitive. And the last S is security. You don't need to buy antivirus and things of that nature because the system, essentially without going into too much detail, it looks after itself. It updates, you know, if there's any kind of... And actually, the speed gets better every year with the new updates. Yeah, yeah. When they come in, actually, it's never going to slow down, right? Sometimes some other systems seem to get slower after a year or two or something. It's almost like this system gets more live, as it goes. And you can just log out and give it to somebody else. It's like a new laptop. Oh, God, yeah, absolutely.   So, yeah. Do you provide extremely good warranty? So, again, warranty is kind of an elastic thing. You've got a year's warranty buying the device, but you can, you know, depending on where you're buying it from, how you're buying it, you can buy in a three-year, a four-year, a five-year warranty to look after the product. It's cool. It could have like drop-proof warranties and everything. And if something happens, they just swap to a new one. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Cool.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jatsby'scasebrakes.com, coming at you with a filler for Hit Parade Baseball. Six spots being given away in this break, but first let's do that capstone box. Big thanks to this group for making it happen, appreciate it. There are the teams right there, and let's roll it and randomize it two times, snake eyes. Different dice roll for the giveaway part. One and two, got Nico down to David, and then two times for the teams, two, got Toronto down to the Mariners. Gammie, yes, we will have more prism to post as soon as pick your team eight sells out. So the sooner that sells out, the sooner I can post a fresh set of breaks so you can grab your teams. There's the first half of the list right there, and there's the second half of the list right over here. No trades, it's alphabetized by teams, and let's print and rip. Is that not printed? Come on here printer. Ripped. Let's see what we've got in here. Good luck everybody. We've got a tailor ward for the Angels, two-color dual relic, new age materials. That will be 4J and the halos. And we've got a Mike Soroka. Nick Relic for Atlanta. That will be for David and the Braves. And we've got an Otto Otto, 84 out of 99, Otto Lopez for Nico and the Blue Jays. We've got a Tariq Scoobl Summit autograph for Detroit, David D. with Motor City. Got a Julio Rodriguez rookie card for Seattle, that's going to go to David as well. Last bit here, what have we got? Here is Glenn Otto, 42 out of 49, Texas, that will be for David. Got a cool Vilo, Shoei Otani insert. That is that. Alright, nice. Now let's flip back to the list here. Let's see who's going to get into Hipporate. Let's gather everybody's names, 1 through 30, new dice, new list, and it will be the top 6 after 6 and a 6. 1, spooky, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12th and final time, 6 and a 6. So from 7 on down, it's going to be sad times, Tristan just on the outside. But 7 through 30, thanks for giving it a shot, appreciate you. Top 6, happy times for you because you are in the break coming up later tonight. Nico was happy. So it was David, Eugene, Chris, David again, and James. So there was another filler that we had to fill and that filled a little bit later. There's other stuff on the schedule in between then and the break itself, but we'll get there. Jaspy'scasebreaks.com. Bye-bye.


You'll never do it. Sorry, T. Ferris, you're not, you just can't make it there. Oh, here we go. You're not forgiving T. Ferris. I am forgiving T. Ferris. Okay. Because you got to forgive everybody. Exactly. But at the end of the day, I won't never forget because, you know what I'm saying? We was partners and it wasn't no need for you to do that to me. You know what I'm saying? You didn't switch sides.  You see what I'm saying? Yeah. And I ain't never seen nobody do that before. Yeah, we on boss talk one on one. One on one. Yeah, we gonna talk. Exactly. That's what I wanted to do. And since I'm on that just, I guess we could stay right there. Like, I seen what? I want to say congratulations on ending. Congratulations on what? Because that whole issue is over. It's over. It's over. It's over. I want for it to go in. I want to tell you right now. I want for it to go back in. I want for it to go in. It's over. It's over.  I know you're happy. With the four-year battle, you know, with that situation. Right.     So why do we have to go through all that just to get to this point? We still got it, you know what I'm saying? But at the end of the day, I just wished that, you know, we didn't have to go through all this just to get to the same point we all wasn't trying to get to anyway. Did she, like, I think she posted that she was independent now or something. I think I've seen that. Right. And she was pretty much... She's independent now, so that's good. Like I said, we wish her the best, you know what I'm saying? She... Always to this day, if you go watch my interviews, I always say, me and Megan never had a problem with each other. Bro, I'm fine. Would you still talk? Do y'all, would y'all still talk on a good, like a friendship? I'm fine. This is the business. You got to continue to do business over here, you know what I'm saying? That's how it goes. Like, I learned so much now. Like, this is just how it goes. For myself, this happens to people like me in the music business. Exactly. Every single day. You know what I'm saying?  No hard feelings. Well, I ain't gonna lie to y'all. I was a big Megan fan. No one wants you to get upset. I ain't mad at you. When she come out in the night, it's a little old, you know? Get out. I'm married. I'm in the room. I'm trying to stay, keep my composure. She walked through. How? You know? And I'm looking like, dang, you know? It was a present. It was a whole thing.  She's a lot more classier than sexy red, than this new thing we dealing with. We got some new stuff we dealing with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a whole different ball game now. I'm telling you, man. But when Megan was classier enough, you know, we thought that was bad. We thought Cardi B, we thought Nicki Minaj, I was like, dang, man, they looking. Man, she got a, she got shots, don't she?    You see what happened? Hey, man. It's wild. It's wild. Hey, man, do the whole brand. It's ratchet, it's ratchet city. Nah, man, it's ratchet. But how you deal with that being a label that, because I've seen where you had like different events with all these young TikTokers and whatever. And a lot of them are doing crazy stuff. Yeah. And you're looking to sign someone, maybe even like that. I just, I just have to go with what the coach is going with. You know what I'm saying? There's some, I can't be the person who's like policing and stuff like that. Cause one thing about this music stuff, like it's been like that since the 50s. It was always something that the parents didn't like, you know what I'm saying? And you think they thought it was crazy, you know what I'm saying? And it just, it just keeps going. It keeps growing. So it's going to continue to always do that. So I'll just go try to find the best or who I think fits my label or whatnot and roll with it, you know? Man, anything, anything might go crazy now. Right. That's what I'm saying. You don't know. I mess with after I got off my cycle or anything. He hoes it crazy. Man, I remember that.  I don't know why. Tony Nill. Tony Nill calm in here. Tony Nill calm in here. He hoes it on fire. You know Tony Nill, he called me, I remember he first called me. He was like, come on, man, you got to go with this girl.  And I'm like, yo, bro.  And he was like, no, man, I'm serious. And I was like, man, I was like, Tony, man, whatever. I didn't get in the club. You know what I'm saying? And next thing you know, I just hit a whole club. You thought he was playing.  Isn't that what he's talking about? I said, oh, okay. He said it. You know what I'm saying? Because he told me about it way earlier. Way earlier. You know, he on the radio on DJ. Right. So he was telling me about it early on. No, because he always telling me about other artists. Other artists. Yeah. Who are you trying to break with? Do you wish that you had likes at, okay, I'll listen to that.  I don't know how I would have took it.  You tripping. Come on. Come on, Tony. You know what I'm saying? But I'll hear you out. You know what I'm saying? And for show.  The women from Erica to Megan Thee Stallion to a couple of other artists that I seen, you really pressed forward on, you knew that the women was a niche. Right.   I saw the way early, you know, with a recorded beat early on, even before she, for Bodec Yellow came out. Really? And just putting her little projects out. And I was like, oh, okay. You know what I'm saying? Eventually something's going to happen right here. I'll see, you know what I'm saying? It's like, they keep trying. And when she hit, you know what I'm saying? I knew I was doing the same thing. So I wasn't going to be, I knew it was going to be long before, before we came with Megan and then. So I see that go, I see Bodec Yellow go. And I see Megan Thee Stallion coming up. I'm like, okay, well, this is a wave, you know. So when they was telling me when the stuff happened with Megan, it was like, oh, don't look for another girl. I'm like, you crazy. I'm about to go find another one now. And that's, you know, Eric Banks comes. You know what I'm saying? I'm sorry. I got to ask you about this, man. I was looking for a girl. No, he was looking for one. But I knew in that moment that I could, I could keep coming with a certain type of girl. And, you know, it was a good chance it was going to work. Let me, let me, because when you think about like, like the women that was articulating the styles, Megan, Megan got a great flow. She really can rap, bro. Like, and then Nicki Minaj really can rap. She's going to go in. Nicki Minaj is the best. That's all of them. I'm going to be honest with you. She is, she articulates better than all of them when it comes to rap. Okay. But Megan, the stallion ain't far behind. I'm just going to tell you the truth. She the first female, you actually birth, help birth the first female rap artist out of Texas. Man. So kudos to you for doing that. Appreciate you, man. Ain't nobody else done that. You can't never take that away from him. Yup. Can't take it away as much as they want to try to defame me in the whole process. You know what I'm saying? You will never do it.  Oh, here we go. You're not forgiving T. Ferris. I am forgiving T. Ferris. Okay. You got to forgive everybody. Exactly. At the end of the day, I won't never forget because you know what I'm saying? We was partners and it wasn't no need for you to do that to me. You know what I'm saying?  You see what I'm saying? Yeah. And I ain't never seen nobody do that before. You know what I'm saying? Like, we literally left millions on the table to go run behind this girl. That mean you were supposed to have been doing this the whole time. You know what I'm saying?  Yeah, yeah.