Craig Mod: Things Become Things That Last

Lawrence Peryer: I was listening to Rick Rubin interviewing Malcolm Gladwell the other day, and they had a little piece of their conversation that made me think of you and the discussion we were gonna have. One of the things that Rick asked Gladwell was, do you ever have projects that, or themes in your, for your books that don't flesh out?

Gladwell's answer was that he has so many outlets. It's rare that he can't use an I. Like he, I think he may have even definitively said, that never happens. It's basically he has so many different vehicles and outlets from the podcast to essays, to book chapters, et cetera. He can make his ideas work through one of his outlets.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: That resonated for me to, to ask you something similar, you know, how do you ever have to abandon a thread or given your diversity of outlets? Do you have a similar situation?

Craig Mod: That's an interesting question. I like Gladwell. I also have enough stuff that I've like kind of deliberately concocted on my own anyway.

That's why the membership program exists. I mean, that was essentially a response to not having an outlet. I was deep in a year of working on an essay for the Atlantic and then it got kind of like canned slash I got ghosted. Like it just didn't work out. And that's what catalyzed starting the membership program.

And that's what catalyzed starting the Ridgeline newsletter was that I didn't want to be in a position where I felt beholden to some random editor's whims on the other side of the world. Since then, I've been lucky in that I can usually find a place for something if I need to. But yeah, that was until six years ago.

I definitely struggled with not finding homes for things or having to abandon certain things. I mean, probably for the best to a certain degree because these things weren't necessarily the greatest versions of themselves. I spent, and I've talked about this before, like from 2011 to 20 16, 17. 2011 to 2017, I spent working on a novel that was based off of bearing my dad.

And, you know, I, that didn't get published, which was probably good, and I got rejected from many, many things, but it allowed me to do all these residencies. So I, I got my Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Residency, my Dale Residency. Tin house. I got into Tin House. Through it, I was able to do the Iowa Writers Workshop, kind of intensive.

They have a two three month intensive summer summer program where you could just do a bunch of workshops really quickly, like bootcamp, like Iowa Writers Workshop Bootcamp. So I, that project got me into all those things. So even though it didn't have a classical piece of output in the sense of it didn't become a book that was published, it was a very useful tool for almost all of my thirties.

In that sense, I was grateful for it. It was like a really good kind of training ground and I met a bunch of interesting people and, and good friends still to this day through that project. So, you know, even the things that. Don't make it out into the world in the forms you expect them to make it out in, I think, obviously have a lot of good and, and this was one of them.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. You'd be very hard pressed to call that a failed endeavor.

Craig Mod: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: You'd have to be a certain kind of person to, to view it through that lens. It's interesting that you tell that anecdote though, because I've had instances in my own life where I've had younger people ask for advice about getting into creative fields.

I've always said, just make your own work. And that could be like, make a 32nd short or it doesn't, don't, you don't have to go make a feature film, but just have something that you can start and finish. And at the very least, you've practiced on your tools. Like that's invaluable.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: But you've also learned how to finish something.

And that's pretty powerful as well as a creative

Craig Mod: Oh, it's, it's, it's everything. And that's what most people don't experience because it's so easy to talk yourself out of finishing stuff. Kevin Kelly has a great quote. He says, don't be the best. Be the only. And I love that. So, you know, that's another thing to keep in mind, like if you're working on stuff or if you feel overwhelmed creatively, stop trying to be like the best illustrator or the best, like Miyazaki style illustrator or animator.

Figure out what. Your weird, unique, overlapping of skills and life experiences can make you the only of, and I think exactly like you say, you know, choose projects that you can complete. I mean, there's a reason they call it a practice, right? It's like literally. That's all you're supposed to be doing, you know, essentially, until you're dead, just keep practicing, practicing, practicing.

So, yeah, I think that's really good advice.

Lawrence Peryer: I wonder if Kevin Kelly got that from Bill Graham. That's what he used to say about the Grateful Dead. They're not the best at what they do. They're the only,

Craig Mod: yeah, he probably did. Yeah, it's a great line. Although Kevin, I don't think was a dead head, but he was certainly in the, in the scene peripherally.

Yeah. At that point. Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: It strikes me overall about. Many of your works or a lot of your work, which is, I'm curious how the themes reveal themselves to you. So specifically with this work, this sort of intersection of walking and memory and friendship. The veracity of memory or the reliability of memory.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: I think I want to pick at you about your process a little bit. You know, like, do these things emerge and you recognize them, or do you have this conscious intention that I want to craft a narrative that that conveys this? Could you tell me about that?

Craig Mod: Yeah. I would be hard pressed to say it was a conscious, you know, sort of deliberate thing.

Yeah. I think a lot of it just comes from. What I'm reading or who I'm inspired by, or what books I feel. Moved by or drawn to, or there's something about the voice or, so, you know, it's, it's almost less about themes explicitly and more about just where the heart feels pulled towards. That sounds like very woo wooey, but I've just spent a lot of time reading all sorts of different books and certain things speak to me more than other things.

And so, like Annie Dillard in the way she writes about nature and writes about being in the world is a huge influence, you know? And she, I don't think has any kind of deliberate. Process. You know, when she was writing Tinker at Pilgrim Creek, she was just there. She was also really young. She was like 25 or something, 26 when she was writing that.

And so I think I'm more drawn in that direction. And so standard narrative has always been really hard for me. Like I'm uninterested in plot, I'm uninterested in explicit story. That's why a lot of what I do is in Yeti. Because for me it's not about, oh, like are we hitting these plot points and does it take the reader to this place and that place?

And it's more about. Just the energy and the feel of almost each sentence and then chapter by chapter, uh, rather than necessarily the whole, I think things become other things is probably the most cohesive thing I've ever written in the sense of there is this kind of story, there is this sort of reveal happening.

There is this kind of like structure to it in terms of acts, you know, and the Fine Art edition has less of that than the Random House edition. So that was interesting working on those two editions and growing the random house one through. Being able to work with my editor who kind of helped guide it through basically just questions.

You know, she got a fine art edition manuscript and then just sprinkled all over it, you know, hundreds and hundreds of questions all over the manuscript. And then basically the random house edition is me responding to all of her questions, uh, and growing the narrative through that. And then us moving a few things around and trying to shape, shape the narrative more intentionally.

But it was a very organic, unexpected process. And I think the walks too for me and having all the logistics set up. So I'm a hundred percent focused on just the walking and I don't have news or social media or podcasts or anything running in the background. And as I'm walking that physical act, it just gets the mind moving and stuff just.

It tumbles out, you know? And as I'm walking, I'm dictating. I'm constantly dictating. And then that's how I'm able to do two, three, 4,000 words a night after walking for eight hours. Yeah. And then outta that, you can start to find themes. I remember when I started working on things become other things, about four and a half years ago now, I went through all of the writing I did during the the walk and printed it all out and then literally cut out of.

Cut out of the printouts sentences and paragraphs that felt most resonant to me, and then I just put them all on the ground and shuffled them all up. Then started just going through them again. And so that, that allowed me to kinda look at the themes that were naturally emerging during the walk in a way that was kind of divorced from the explicit linearity of the walk itself.

So I was just trying to get like fresh eyes on like what, what were we feeling? What were, what things were kind of burling up as we were walking. And that became Genesis for some of the first drafts. And then Brian started to sneak his way in more and more. And then an editor I was working on with for the fine art edition, Ali Chance, he, um.

Really started helping me pull on that thread. And that's when that kind of expanded into more of a, a, a thematic part of the book. And then Molly Turin, my editor at Random House, really helped flesh that out even further. I mean, Ali and I kind of have a very minimalist aesthetic when it comes to literature and we like things to be kind of sparse.

And part of the reason I said yes to Random House was I wanted to kind of. Experience what a big publisher would do with a text like this, and it was super instructive. It was, it was a really incredible experience to kind of go through that with Molly, who has an eye at a big for a bigger audience, and having her pull on these threads, me respond to those polls, those questions, being really proud of and excited about where we landed.

Lawrence Peryer: The story of it becoming a Random House Edition is intriguing to me because it challenged an assumption I had, which was that larger, more mainstream presses don't like to pick up self-published titles. And quite honestly, I'm not even sure if that's true or if I invented that, but that was always my perception.

I think that's true.

Craig Mod: Yeah, that's true for sure. This, it's very rare. I mean, I think like Hugh Howie is a good example of someone who was militantly self-publishing. He, how he wrote Silo the books that became the Silo Apple TV show. They're called Wool. Uh, and he wrote a series of books basically on his blog.

I mean, he just had a publishing blog talking about Kindle and Kindle singles. This is like 15 years ago. And he sold hundreds of thousands of books, I think independently on his blog. And then his stuff obviously then got picked up by big publishers and then over a decade later. TV rights and movie, you know, TV shows are being made and all this stuff.

So I think for him, uh, he, he is a canonical example for me of someone who is able to do self-publishing transitioning to much bigger platforms. Random House very much didn't want me to do my edition because I had those experiences with The Atlantic where, you know, I'd worked on something for so long and then it got ghosted and like I felt crushed.

I'm now this kind of weird, you know, it's almost like a great depression survivor who's always kinda like hoarding wheat or something. I don't know what they did. People who like kind

Lawrence Peryer: a pantry full of cans of like tomato soup or something. Yeah,

Craig Mod: so, so yeah, I've got so many, so many beans and so for me to give up.

To me, what's most important is this independent platform, and I'm also just really proud of it and the systems are all in place to produce great books. I've got my distributor, my printer, I've got like a whole marketing machine set up through my newsletters and and membership program. You know, I've worked my whole life to kind of build this up.

So this project that I had already. I tried to shop first and foremost to big publishers because I thought, okay, these themes deserve maybe a bigger platform than I can just give on my own. And honestly, it's about honoring Brian to a certain degree, our friendship, that memory. And then just like politically, I mean, you know, I, the timing of this book, I didn't obviously play.

I didn't know things were gonna be so stupid at this point. People who come from a town like mine understand the stupidity and have understood it almost cellularly for decades. So a lot of it isn't surprising the stuff that's happening right now in the states and to be able to have those conversations, I think in a non didactic way, I think that the book has, covers a lot of political themes.

To do that in a non didactic way, hyperpartisan way or whatever, is really important. It's one of the things I'm most proud of about the book to do that on a bigger. Platform to me made sense. So I, I was shopping around, rejected by everyone. I couldn't get an agent. Uh, everyone was saying, we can't sell this.

And so I'd given up, I'd had one amazing meeting out of many, many meetings with Andy Ward at Random House, and we had this incredible meeting, super high energy, really. Just great Andy. Andy is a mensch. He's just beloved by everyone who knows Andy. He's George Saunders' editor. So it's like, that says something, you know, George just feels like one of the greatest guys alive in contemporary publishing on so many levels.

We had this amazing meeting and then he's like, oh yeah, we'll we're, we'll definitely get back to you. And then they didn't, you know, and I was like, you know, I'm sent into kinda like the trauma place again, going back to the Atlantic and get getting ghosted. And so then I just decided. A couple months after that meeting, not hearing anything from them, I had to do this on my own.

And that's when I got the machinery running. I was like, okay, let's prepare for this climb. It's gonna be this big crazy climb. Get all the gear ready, you know, metaphorically prepare myself to do this book on my own. And, um, it was three months into that process when they finally got back to me and were like, Hey, yeah, we want this book.

And so, wow. By that point I was already committed to my own edition. That meant I was not gonna compromise on that. So when I talked with Molly and she was like, yeah, we want, we want this. I was like, do you really want it? Or like, I mean people have said they've wanted other things. I'm like, I'm doing this on my own.

I have to do this on my own. I can't compromise on that. And she was like, okay, lemme talk to everyone. We'll get back to you really quickly. And, and they did to their credit and they were very open to discussions, which was also great I think. 'cause they just saw how. Unmoving I was gonna be, and, and they offered white a substantial advance to essentially buy me out of my edition, which would just make them, they made me like them even more.

Like, I was just like, okay, the, these people are serious and they get how important this is to me. But in the end, I said, look, we're not competing. A hundred dollars book is in no way competing with a $20 book. I'm gonna give you guys a totally different edition. Like, I know this is weird and yada, yada, yada, but.

I think it'd be great if we can do both of these and it would just make me feel so much better. And so we were able to hammer that out. I mean, the contract negotiation was a little bit annoying. And um, again, I was being triggered by all of this kind of scarcity mindset stuff and wanting to protect my own independence.

Yeah. Uh, because that is so critical. But in the end, yeah, we were able to get to a good place and. Now I'm basically not selling my edition because I so badly want everyone to read the Random House edition because to me, that's the one you want. You should read first, and then if you really, really, really are into that, like go, go find the fine art edition, which is a distillation of it, and it's a little bit of a different experience

Lawrence Peryer: when you did the deal with Random House.

Everybody was aligned around the notion of, okay, it will be a, let's call it an air quote, substantially different edition.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: Did you have to commemorate that in terms of like in the contract, was there a word count that you had to commit to to make it different? Like how did you assure them it would be different?

Or was this just they, you had learned each other so much at that point?

Craig Mod: No, I mean, it was just faith. Yeah. The contract doesn't have anything about word count, but it does have clauses about pricing. I'm limited to the number I can produce until I hit a certain number on the random house side and I can't price it below X.

Like there's some price, but I don't, I also don't want to price it below X. You know, it's like I'm very deliberate about like where things are priced right now. Yeah, that was the, those were the only constraints to give people a sense of, it wasn't just like, oh yeah, here's the contract. Perfect. Okay.

Great. We did go back and forth a lot about these, these numbers probably in the end, in a little bit of a. I don't know. I wouldn't say pointless way because we landed in a place that was, you know, not too different than where we started. But I wanted to push, there's just a few things I was trying to figure out, and I realized in the end they were most concerned with hitting certain numbers.

So like big publishers just want to get, they wanna book to do 10,000, right? Like, that's what, that's if and like internally for me too. Like, I really, really, really want us to sell 10,000 copies of this. Because that to me, you know, the whole point. Of going with a big publisher is to get to those bigger numbers.

Also, this price point, you know, it's just a much easier possible thing to do than 10. Sell. Selling 10,000 a hundred dollars books is really hard. Although I'm pretty close to it now, you know, we've just, we're in the sixth edition of Keya By Keys is being printed. We've sold over basically over 6,000 copies of that.

Uh, things become other things basically sold out of its 2,500 initial print run and I've sold a thousand Coia bones and so we're close to 10,000 copies of hundred.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. Right, right, right. It's crazy.

Craig Mod: Yeah. So it is possible, but it takes, it can take a while in over a few different books. But for this random house one they really want, and I really want us to get to 10,000 and I'm aiming for like 5,000 pre-orders.

It's really hard. We are not, I don't think we're close to it yet. I mean, I'm kind of shocked. I get these little updates about, you know, where we are with pre-orders and I'm just, I'm shocked by how hard it is to get someone to click a pre-order. Gratification is delayed when the book doesn't come out for a month or two months or six months.

And so I'm hoping that as we get closer to the Pubdate and once we hit Pubdate, those calls to action will be a lot more heated. But the reason why you wanna hit those pre-orders is because to get to the lists, and again, that's another. When you are, um, going with a big publisher because you can't, I can't aspire to hit a New York Times bestseller list with an indie edition because they just aren't tracked.

So that's another thing. It's like, well, if we're gonna, if we're gonna go through this process, if we're gonna do this kind of contract or whatever, then let's also try to get on the list because not for an ego reason, although it's like, sure, that's nice and that'll mean something to like my mom. She'll understand that.

But like, again, it's about maximizing the reach of the story and maximizing the. Scale of the conversation we're able to have in order to have a bigger positive impact. You know, that's kind of what it is. And so you play all these stupid games, try to hit those sort of points, and then that gets you status points that you can cash in for other things and blah, blah, blah.

So the contract, you know, was really, I realized when we were going back and forth a bunch and it was getting weird because I was like, why is this so hard for us to agree to this? I realized, oh, okay, they want these numbers. And so I was like, Hey, look. Let's just write those in. Let's just say I'm limited until I hit this number of sold copies on your end, and then I can produce infinite number on my end.

And they were like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. So it was about empathizing. Weirdly, I had to empathize with this giant corporation to get to the, you know, to get to a, a place we're both comfortable with. But it was like, oh, okay, that makes sense. And if we don't hit those numbers anyway, I'm gonna be sad for me.

I really wanna hit those numbers, not that. Again, not that like I'll consider the book a failure if we don't, but like it feels like that's what we should be aiming for if we're doing a project like this. So

Lawrence Peryer: yeah, it's okay to have goals, right? It's like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's an okay to state them out loud

Craig Mod: and to use them as a forcing function to do a bunch of stuff like this, you know, like, uh, like, you know, setting up all these podcasts and um, yeah.

Then the book tour, although a book tour doesn't sell books, but I'm doing the book tour because I think it's important to see people and to get out there and like, when am I gonna do something like this again? Yeah. Uh, so might as well.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. It's, and you talked about empathizing with the big corporation, but it's also an acknowledgement of like.

It's a statement of there's an alignment of objectives here that may be surprising to everyone.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: You know, when you talked about sort of the, the formula of price point and quantity that would allow you to get back to your typical mode of operations, like that's a very reasonable. Arrangement. I was gonna call it a concession, but it's not even a, it's a, that, that's, that seems reasonable to me.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Look, if we can't sell 10,000 copies of the Random House Edition, then it's unlikely I'll need to make more of my edition anyway. And so that's fine. And maybe I don't make more of my edition. That's also fine. Having limited additions I think is also good. You know, Koya Bound is not gonna be reprinted, there's just no reason to reprint it.

You know, I'm producing, uh, this new photo book. I shot 90% of it in February and it's going to print this week. Basically, I just sent the InDesign files in last night. This is, it's April 9th. We're recording this. That is meant to be now the Fine Art Companion to the Random House edition. So it's funny, like you can keep playing with these things and you can build off them and you can use the constraints as further creative fuel.

So this new photo book I'm actually really, really excited about because. First of all, I just think the photos are great. I also love that it's a photo only book, which is something I hadn't, I haven't done in about 10 years. It's actually my first solo photo only book. 'cause KO Bond was with Dan Rubin. So this is just me photos only with an like a very short essay at the end.

And. I kind of love it, and it feels like a true, perfect companion to the Random House Edition, which to me feels like the canonical edition of the Tea Bott story, and so. That this kind of interplay to me feels really symbiotic and positive. And so anyway, it's, none of this is planned. It's all this kind of improv jazz feeling your way through things as you move forward.

Like I, I have five books I wanna do. I know the next five. If you, if you're like, okay, you can't do any more walking, you can't do any more traveling. Like if there's COVID again and I just had to sit home for like, say the next five years. I know what I would do. I just, I have all the books, I have all this stuff kind of drafted it.

Like I would just crank through these projects. Like I just, I have enough kind of accrued built up, even though I have that. At the same time, I'm trying to be as flexible as possible and not be like, okay, these are the only things I can do. And also trying to build in these different timeline, these timeline scaled projects.

So like this new photo book called Other Thing. We're going from shooting it to having it in people's hands in two and a half months, which is pretty cool. Like that's pretty awesome. So I love that we're doing that and that just makes me think like, why am I not doing at least one of these a year, you know, with other scale things happening in the background.

Lawrence Peryer: It's really interesting because, you know, our listeners can't experience this part of what I wanna tell you, but just sitting here watching you speak about. This process and what's going on with the photo book, the way you came alive talking about it, you can feel the enthusiasm that you have for the project.

It's very palpable as your interlocutor. It's, it was, uh, it's, yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah. Well,

Craig Mod: well I think it's surpri. What's exciting is it's surprising to me, like I didn't, this didn't exist three months ago. You know, none of it, it was just this impulse. It was like, yeah, I should probably go do this.

And I didn't have time to do it. I had every excuse not to do it. The book is dedicated to my friend Enrique, who passed away in November last year, who was my roommate when I lived in California in 20 10, 20 11, 20 12. He was just 38, so really young guy. And his memorial happened during the, when I was in on the peninsula shooting this new book, I just brought my stepdaughter to boarding school in New Zealand like a couple weeks.

In January. I was exhausted from that. Like I just, I don't like traveling. I don't like doing international travel. I really don't like airplanes. I don't like airports. It's just like vampiric to me. Like my life is just totally sucked out of me. Like everything about, if I look at my aura ring stats, like whenever I'm on planes or if I'm walking through airports, I'm, even though I try to be the Dalai Lama, I'm so stressed about everything and it's only gotten worse.

I feel like it's just, it's. I don't know. We're being ground to dust, I feel like in, you know, when you engage with these worlds. So I don't want to be, I don't want to be traveling. And I had just finished the New Zealand stuff and then they announced his memorial and I had already planned the other thing, photo walk.

And I'd been in contact with all these inns and I had all this stuff set up and the thought of flying. Also, flights are just so expensive now, and the thought of flying to California for basically a weekend or whatever, because that was about all I would be able to fit in. It just, I was like, I can't do this.

And I felt so bad about it because I really wanted to be there with everyone celebrating Enrique's life. And so what I tried to do was when I was shooting the photo book, I just tried to like keep ENR can in mind and embody his positivity and his joy. And love of life and connection. And so I tried to really think about that while I was shooting all these people and I felt really bad to miss the memorial.

So the book, the photo book is dedicated to him. That feels just, that feels about right. I think. I think Enrique would be psyched that I was doing that and he'd be like, dude, don't, yeah, don't, I'm dead. Like, you know, you don't need to come to my memorial. So anyway, just the fact that this project has like all these different facets to it, whereas three months ago it didn't exist.

It's exciting, you know, there's always something like this right there to be done. And you, you, it's almost like a theological. You have to build up this belief system that you can go out there, you can do it, you can find it, you can shoot it. If you go put in the energy, you're gonna find something interesting.

Going to the peninsula, doing this project two months ago. Was a huge act of faith. I didn't know who I was gonna see or meet if we were gonna get any good photos. I was shooting mainly with film too, for the first time on a big project like this, that was terrifying. Not knowing are the cameras even working properly?

You know, it's like, are the shutters firing off in the right way? You can't check anything in the moment. And so just having this tremendous amount of. Faith going into it, and then also keeping Enrique in mind and all that stuff. So it was pretty powerful. And then to come out of that, have a bunch of work.

I'm proud of forming these new relationships with like kind of photo studios and the scanner around the corner for me and all that stuff. It's exciting. And again, that was just there waiting to be done. I could have done that. I could have done this at any moment in the last year. And, um, I don't know.

It's, I think for young. Artists, creators, it can be so hard to have that kind of faith to commit to a project and believe that something interesting is gonna come out of it. The reality is, is like for the most part, interesting things aren't gonna come out of your projects. Like they're gonna be, there's that IRA glass quote about taste and skill.

Taste and talent where like your taste, like when you're young always outstrips your talent. And like you spend a lot of your time as a young artist trying to rectify, trying to pull up your talent to match your taste. But it can be so discouraging early on. A lot of people just get frozen and uh, and stop there.

So I empathize. When I think about my twenties and the work I did in my twenties, it was a huge constant struggle of not being able to hit taste points that I wanted to hit, but you just gotta put in the practice.

Lawrence Peryer: When working on the Random House edition, was the editing process different than your typical works and I or your fine art editions? And by that I don't just mean because you were working with Molly as a personality and as a different human, but it seems to me like this process was more about adding as opposed to going for that minimalist.

Aesthetic you talked about earlier. Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about how the process may or may not have been different, may or may not have been more or less enjoyable? Like I'm, I'm curious about your experience of, of, of that.

Craig Mod: Yeah. I mean, it was great because, because I had done the fine art edition, like I think there was, like my shoulders were able to drop, I was able to be less stressed.

I had gotten a bunch of feedback from readers, positive feedback from readers about the fine art edition. I didn't have this kind of, oh my God, can we do this? What's this gonna be? Worry that you can have when you're working on an early manuscript. So I was in this sort of like, alright. Screw it. Let's just push this thing like yolo, like there's no, there's no downside to pushing this thing.

Let's just see how far we can push it. And again, these, this idea of contracts and getting paid for things gives you a kind of permission to do these different things. So I was like, okay, I'm putting on like this different writerly hat now because I have this contract with Random House because they're paying me this advance, which I, you know, even though they let me do my edition, or even though we came to an agreement where I was gonna do my edition, I still got a really decent advance for a first.

Quote unquote, first time author doing a weird, esoteric memoir. You know, I mean, I, I like totally like honorable and, and good advance, you know? So anyway, because of that, I was like, okay, this is my job to like lean into this and like, all right, let's push it. Let's see where we can go. And so what we did was we took the fine art edition manuscript, and I just shoved that in a Google Doc.

We did all of our back and forth in a Google Doc. Actually, it was great. We didn't, we weren't using Word at all until much later in the process, which people who've worked with big publishers were just shocked that we were using Google Docs to go back and forth. But it really is, it's the best commenting, collaborative kind of editing space, thinking space, I think.

Molly just left a trillion questions all over this Google doc and I was able to go through and we were able to have little conversations in the margins of clarifying the questions and then I was able to use that. And then I had my own doc did not, I wasn't writing in the Google Doc because I think it's a little too exposing to like have that kind of real time.

'cause she, she'd get notifications, Craig modified the file or whatever. Like I didn't want that. So I kind of went into. A writing hole for about six months with all of her questions and just started fleshing it out, building and building and building. And I just realized really quickly, like I had so much more to say, you know, also in writing, the fine art edition was such a convoluted process because it was like, I had this pop-up walk I did, and I wrote a bunch in there and it was just like daily bloviation dumping text into, you know, the newsletter.

And then I cut up all the. Printouts and I had all the paragraphs and sentences and then I kind of rewrote around that and then Brian started to like really become more and more of this kind of forefront character. And then it was like, okay, I've gotta like cut all this, all these other people out of it and rewrite around Brian.

So the fine art audition was, was really convoluted in a lot of ways to get to that final product. It wasn't this like straight line at all. And so because of that. Being able to return to the manuscript where the manuscript had kind of a clear thrust and start again in a way and think about all the stuff that had been cut.

So the characters that had been taken, like John doesn't exist in the fine art edition at all. Um, I remember I was like really sad when I had to tell John. I'm like, sorry I'm cutting you out of the book entirely. Uh, he was like, John doesn't care. To be able to bring him back intentionally and also to reframe the book.

The way the random house edition opens I is, it opens with a chapter I don't get to in the fine art edition until three quarters of the way through. I think to get to that chapter, to took me all, you know, writing all the way to that point and then being like, that chapter to me felt like a pivot for the fine art edition.

Lamot, like Bird by Bird. All the, you know, you read all these books about writing on writing Stephen King. It's like, if you have something great, play that card immediately. And there was a certain energy I was getting from that, that shift in the book, three quarters of the way through the fine art edition.

And I was like, this is how the book should just start. This is, this whole book is just a letter. To Brian. Like that's, that's kinda what happens. It's like I'm tiptoe, tiptoeing, tiptoeing in the fine art edition. Then three quarters of the way through it like shifts to this letter to Brian, and then the whole, the last quarter is kind of like facing him.

And I was like, the whole book should be facing him. Like, screw this. Like, you know that, that energy, I want to, I want to imbue with the whole book. And then once we did that, which is like this major surgery, it gave the book space to be so many other things and. Bringing John back in was a big part of it.

And then bringing John back in allowed us to bring in the book of John and all of this, uh, historical background and more context about me and say all this stuff because now Brian wasn't this thing we were building up to, Brian was acknowledged from page one and he was able to be present through it all and that, that, that was, that was exciting to have that.

So, yeah, I mean, talking through this, it sounds insane, but. And I don't think most books are this convoluted, but this book had to be to get to where we got it to.

Lawrence Peryer: It's interesting because it doesn't sound convoluted to me actually. It sounds like a very unique and special experience to be able to go back and take a work, revisit it, rework it, re-engineer it, expand it, rediscover it.

Yeah. Um, and even the process you articulated about getting Molly's questions and then going away, like that seems very, that seems rather orderly. And I'm sure there's more nuance than what you described, but it doesn't sound like it was a shit show by any means. No, it wasn't a

Craig Mod: shit show, but it was just like.

It was so improv, jazz, you know? I mean, it was just, nothing was planned. It was just tap dancing here and there and like avoiding these pitfalls and these traps, trying to avoid those traps or whatever. Yeah. And I think re I think you can over revisit something too, you know, and so that was always like top of mind.

Like I would say there's like there's 0.0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 1% chance. I won't say there's no chance, but there's almost no chance I would ever want to come back to this and do something with it again. Like I am so, so sick. Of this manuscript and so sick of this story, I think, and I think that's actually how you wanna feel when you launch a book like that means you have just rung and rested from it every drop you could possibly get from it.

And I just recorded the audio book on Sunday morning and Monday morning, oh, 15 hours I was in the studio recording an audio book, which is, which is basically like waterboarding your brain. I mean, it's terrible. So much respect for professional audio book people because like that. It's hard. Maybe if you do it a lot.

I mean, I'm sure if you do it a lot it gets easier, but holy crap, man. That process just took everything out of me. Monday after the studio, I was like, oh, I'm gonna do all this work. You know, I had to get this InDesign file done. I was a shell ESP and also reading the second half of the book, and you're not just reading it, you're performing it in a way and kind of accessing all the emotion.

Of the second half of the book where like, I mean, it was actually really exciting to reread it. We found one copier, which is really annoying because we really combed the hell out of this thing. So there's one. There's one word that that's in there that shouldn't be in there, and there's one bar over an O that's missing on one of the Japanese romanization.

But so that was, that was interesting to see that we were like, you know, because it's like you're reading so psychotically closely of this text when you're doing the audiobook, because it has to be. Perfect has to be identical. And you know, and the producer kept stopping me. He was in California and he kept stopping me and being like, oh, you said a, you said a, when it's the, and it's like re redo these sentences.

But reading the book and feeling the energy of the second half of it. The emotion of the second half of it in this almost out of body way was really exciting. Like that was really sweet. I was like, wow. Yeah. The second half really does have this, this kind of heightened energy getting, I think it just accesses this.

The first half is closed off, protecting my, essentially protecting myself. And then the second half is when you know the guard is kinda let down. And I felt that in the reading and the energy I got from the reading, even though I was exhausted and used up, there was this kind of high from it too. Anyway.

I hope the audio book is okay.

Lawrence Peryer: Like, 'cause it, well it's funny you talk about it 'cause uh, that, that was also in the Gladwell interview the other day. He was talking about how awful it was having to do his audio book and that he actually realized he couldn't read some of his own prose and he went back and rewrote it.

So it was actually readable because he said he, you know, the way he wrote it was just never meant to be spoken out loud and he couldn't get through it. Yeah. And so he just rewrote the paragraph and read it for the audio book in a way that was actually readable.

Craig Mod: Oh. I rewrote. I would, I wanted to rewrite a bunch of stuff for the audio book and I kind of held back and there was one sentence where I was like, we're rewriting this.

Well, I can't say this 'cause I used the word particular three times. Uh, you start looking at these words and you start to lose your mind because it's just, you just start to go loopy. And I had to say on this part, a particular shrine on this particular peninsula, on this particular day. And I was like, oh, no, no, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Particular is the word. I switched it to. I was like, wow, why is this so easy to say now? It was, it was peculiar. Peculiar. Oh yeah. Try saying that three times. That's awful. Yeah, yeah. Peculiar this peculiar shrine on this peculiar peninsula, on this pe I was like, I can't, I literally, I can't do it. So we changed it to particular, uh, particular, which is, which is more fun.

So, particular, particular, you could say that. You could say that.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah. It's, it's easier to say. Yeah.

Craig Mod: Peculiar, peculiar, peculiar, peculiar. Say that three times and then match it with Peculiar Peninsula. No, it's like you just can't do it. So I forced us to rewrite. I was like, I'm the author. Come on, we're getting rid of this sentence.

Lawrence Peryer: It actually seems like the audio book should be the last thing that gets done before the book goes to press, so that you could fi, you could capture any, oh, any final. A hundred percent.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think normally it would be done that way, but. For some reason we've been working on a, a little bit of a crunch schedule, I think because I was slow in getting a bunch of my rewrites to them in the fall.

I was about a month behind, and so that pushed everything and then we hit the end of the year crunch. And then I had the Kisa Bya Japanese edition come out, and that took up a bunch of my time and I couldn't do more. I couldn't do another pass on the, the revisions. So I think normally yes, I think that probably happens, but right now we're kind of like everything's last minute, but thankfully just one, one word, you know?

That's fine. I

Lawrence Peryer: am. I, I appreciate that our time together is, is coming towards its end and there's a bunch of stuff that I know we're not gonna get to, but I I do wanna ask you a couple of more questions if, if we can get them in. Sure. I'm really curious about your relationship or your thinking about analog and digital.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: Walking bookmaking analog. Yeah. I'm, I'm curious about. Your relationship with digital tools and digital environments. You know, you, you, you talk about it a lot. You talk about sort of your media diet, if you will, or your, or your media starvation in, in some cases. But I'm curious also, I think about a lot of these, a lot of this as like experiments with disconnection.

Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about. Your relationship or your more, less your relationship, more your, your philosophy of technology use. Like when you were talking earlier, something I was curious about was your daily writing practice, um, and the dictation, like, yeah, do you use speech to tech software or do you transcribe and has that changed over the years?

And I'm less interested in that specifically, although I'm interested in that and more about your overall sort of philosophy of tech.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, for the, for the walking and talking stuff, it's all speech to text, just in notes using Siri basically. There's probably better options now. I mean, all the open AI stuff, all the LLM stuff, it's just so much better at transcription.

Like the series, the

Lawrence Peryer: thousands of dollars I've spent in my life on transcription that I, I pay now 1999 a month for, oh, it's, it's

Craig Mod: insane. Yeah. Well, but I mean, like, come on, that, talk about thankless jobs. We're getting rid of, like, transcription is like, you can't, like, that's almost worse than recording an audio book.

At least recording an audio book like you're producing something. Useful transcriptions are like you're producing an artifact that is in and of itself a thing. Whereas transcriptions are often just like. Whatever secondary stuff, or supplementary stuff or whatever. So yeah, no, but like just the way you can speak bilingually to an LLM too is really powerful.

So I can say, Hey, I'm walking the key peninsula in Japan. Yeah. I'm gonna be mentioning a bunch of places that are down here. I'm gonna be speaking English, but I'm gonna be mentioning these places. These Japanese places, please transcribe those accurately or whatever and then they will. And I won't have to, right now I have to like spell things out.

Like I'll be like K-I-I-K-A-T-S-U-U-U-U-R and it's like hard to do these romanization and like do them in real time. So my files are full of all these and it doesn't all caps so it's like, it's just kind of weird. But yeah, basically just Siri in notes and just this running notes file of Siri transcriptions.

But otherwise, like my core philosophy and uh, I'm someone who grew up on that elder millennial generation where we had a taste of pure analogists in childhood and then quickly shifted to digital early teens, but not smartphone, psycho digital, that we have dopamine. Crazy digital that we have today. So I've experienced kind of all three, I would say like categories of, uh, from the whole spectrum, from analog to extreme, extreme plugged inness.

For me, I've landed on the digital stuff isn't real. Nothing happening on the internet should be considered permanent or should be considered in and of itself a final artifact. And that's why with my members stuff, I always say first and foremost, whenever I run a board meeting, the purpose of this program is two things.

We're making books, physical books. That's. The number one purpose of this program. And then number two is education. That's why I run like the board meetings and stuff like that, but the education stuff directly comes out of doing things that make me better at making the physical books. So it's not this like Altru totally altruistic thing of, oh, I'm just gonna like do educational stuff because I feel like I should.

I'm doing it because it helps me do the other stuff better. So everyone, it's like a win-win, you know? Everyone, everyone really wins. Hmm. But the reason why I've landed on the only thing that. Matters is the books is because that really does feel like the place to have the, the best conversation and by focusing on the books and but to have the best conversation in the sense of I want people to engage with this stuff with their full attention.

And I wanna be having conversations with folks that are totally present. And I think a physical book is still maybe the best way to do that, even more than a movie because, you know, you turn a movie on. People are still reaching for their phones. You can have the ambience of a movie and you're still doing all this other stuff with your attention.

Whereas a book, like if you're not fully in it, you're not in it. You can't multitask with a book. And so I think it is a perfect, focused piece of technology, piece of media. And in that way it, it's really exciting. All of this other stuff is supplementary in my mind, and all of this other stuff will be gone.

It will disappear. It. The archives, you know, the digital stuff is so tenuous, but if you put. A thousand printed books out in the world. Unless someone really hates you and hunts down, makes it a point to hunt down every copy and burn every copy, chances are that artifact is gonna be in the world forever.

For hundreds of years. And I don't think there's any other piece of media that you can say that about. So if End to end books force you to coate your thinking because they are so final, there isn't a way to go back to them and revise them in the form that they're in. Yeah. You can do the things like I've done with the Random House edition and kind of do additions and stuff like that, but that's it for that form of the thing.

And so because of that, it creates this sense of deadline. And I sense, I think a sense of, um, refinement that online stuff, digital stuff doesn't. Bring to the table. It doesn't bring that sense of urgency. And so that also makes it exciting for me in the sense of like, this is the best version of this thing I could have possibly done.

And here it is immutable. Here it is in the world, in thousands of copies, hopefully tens of thousands or whatever for this randomized edition. It's probably gonna be here forever. And like that feels, that feels like it's respecting the project in a way that a lot of digital only stuff doesn't respect the project.

Certain things, like when I think about YouTube a lot, and I think about the people on YouTube, I think about how much effort is going into these channels and how much time and production now today is being put into these things. And it kind of breaks my heart that there is no real archive of this stuff.

There's no, even with DVDs and Blu-rays, at least you had like some physical media, even though it's like not very robust physical media with prints, 35 millimeter prints, at least, if those are archived properly, they can kinda last a long time. But a lot of this YouTube stuff is just all of this creative energy kind of going to this place where it sort of evaporates

Lawrence Peryer: even worse with TikTok.

Anything you create in app? Oh yeah. Oh my goodness. Oh yeah,

Craig Mod: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, exactly. So there's, I think the only way to think about those. That, that those mediums is to assume they're temporary. But you know, I'm friends with like Derek Mueller from Veritasium, you know, and Derek has created essentially this incredible TV show entirely on YouTube.

And I do wonder, is there a way we could archive this and. Is there a Veritasium book that he should do that's somehow distills a lot of these great videos and a lot of the amazing infographics he's produced into some kind of printed archive, because that feels like it would honor the work he's done in a way that just existing on YouTube doesn't.

Yeah, the scale is different, obviously, and you have to think about that, and you have to keep that in mind. You know, Derek's reaching hundreds of millions of people on YouTube, but what is the quality of that attention? What is the quality of that? Conversation. I think, you know, those are important questions to ask.

So for me, you know, the, the original question was like, how do I think about digital and physical, digital and analog? More and more, I think an the power of analog is becoming readily apparent. As digital becomes more and more diffuse, it's obvious that we aren't gonna be able to archive everything because there's so much stuff is being produced.

For me, I'm really grateful to have this analog practice, which I've been doing my whole life or my whole adult career with, with physical books. And so for me it's really intuitive and I do think physical books are kind of a perfect analog instantiation. It's, I think they are a perfect piece of technology to a certain degree, and we've, we kind of have really dialed in perfect it, and we're really lucky that we have the postal system.

Global postal systems are pretty incredible. I, Robin Sloan just produced this, um, print only zine. That I have here they did with, uh, his risograph reality. It just says reality has a surprising amount of detail on one side, and it's this beautiful kind of, I guess this is, what size is this? This is probably a three, I think, um, folded over twice, and it's got this photo of this pilot on it, and then on the back he has this essay that only exists in this printed zine, and he just, it's this basically love letter to the US postal system.

An acknowledgement of the miraculousness of it, the miracle that is global US post postal systems. Um, because he's like, I can mail this thing anywhere in the world for basically four, not basically four, $1 65 cents. That's insane. You could, and it's insane to me that for all of the fractured nature of politics today, that the world is agreed on postal system as functioning everywhere.

That basically is in a war zone. Because you think about it, it's weird. It's like, I pay, you pay a dollar 65 in the us but you can send it anywhere in the world. Doesn't that create kind of a postal deficit? So the thinking was that, you know, say, okay, Robin mails me this in Japan. Japan's not getting any money from that stamp.

It's like Ja, Japan, like it's arriving in Japan. Then Japan is, the Japanese postal system is agreeing to this global agreement where we say, okay, we are gonna, but they keep track of the trade imbalance. But the thinking was that a letter begets a letter. So this letter coming here, I would respond in kind to the person back in the States.

So I'm gonna pay the Japanese postal rate to send it back to America. So you'd cancel those things out. Obviously that doesn't happen all the time. And it, there is a rectification of postal imbalances that ex that there, you can look it up on Wikipedia. It's, it's pretty interesting. So it at the end of like, whatever a year, I don't know what the timeframe is, but Japan goes, Hey America, we have, we've covered x hundreds of millions of dollars in postage for you.

I don't even know if it ever gets that big. And then America goes, okay, yeah. You know, okay, we'll pay that out. Or you know, Italy, hey, you owe us $20,000 in post-it. It kind of gets balanced out. It is miraculous that this all works. And Robin's kind of acknowledging that, uh, for me too, my, my practice couldn't exist.

My books, my independent book system couldn't exist without this system. And the fact that, and, you know, I charge what I'm charged for shipping and handling, which is about like 30 bucks, right? So 30 bucks, I can send this object beautifully packaged, protected, and it arrives pretty much anywhere in the world in two or three days.

It's essentially a teleportation device. And, and for $30 I can teleport this, you know, this object that weighs almost a kilo kind of big and onerous and it arrives in perfect mint condition anywhere in the world is, I like acknowledging the fact that we can do that and that the cost is reasonable, I think is really important.

Anyway, so that's a very long, long-winded response. Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: There's a lot poetic around that because what it is, you're teleporting as well is a piece of your soul, a piece of your intellect, like your lived experience. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. It's very cool. Alright, before I let you go, a quick one and then another one.

Sure. Will there be an ebook edition of the Random House? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So there will be, yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Did you have to conceive to that or were you okay with that?

Craig Mod: No, I don't care. I have no preciousness with this random House edition. Also the, it's just printed in essentially mass market hardcover form.

So it's on that kind of rough. I mean, I really love that sort of rough mass market paper that, you know, it's just Salt of the Earth Paper. It's a book. It says book, and it's all black and white and everything's kind of grainy, so there's no preciousness to it. So yeah, like make every edition like I don't, they can do what I have.

I have no. There's no preciousness to it. So yes, there will be an edition. I'm very happy to have it. That's wonderful out

Lawrence Peryer: there. So you're about to, you know the book's go in the press. We've got the early May street date. The things are gonna happen that are gonna happen. I noticed it was, it's number one in travel, in Japanese travel guides on Amazon today, so congratulations.

Craig Mod: Well, well, whatever. Thanks. Exactly. Whatever that means. There's probably like six. That means I sold six books. Well, you know, I,

Lawrence Peryer: I come from the music business where a number one record in America sells 80,000 units. And it's like we're a nation of 360 million people and 80,000 units is the number one record.

Like Go team.

Craig Mod: Well, for books it's even smaller. I mean, like 5,000.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

Craig Mod: Five to 10,000 puts you on the bestseller lists.

Lawrence Peryer: It's incredible, isn't it? Yeah. It's really incredible. Yeah. So you're, you're doing the, you mentioned you're doing the podcast. You're gonna go on the book tour that ends, you go back to Japan, you sit down, you exhale, then what?

Craig Mod: I have no idea. I just, I just know I'm gonna need. Recovery time. That's

Lawrence Peryer: yet you have five years of projects staring down the barrel at you.

Craig Mod: Yeah, well, I, so I'm setting up a new studio and that's, uh, directly in service to those next projects. And so that's sort of my goal for July, August is to do, I hope, as little travel as possible.

I hope, really get this new studio space dialed in in a way that it's all, you know. Look, I could do these projects in a closet if I needed to. Like I don't need a perfect workspace to get these things done. I think that's really important to acknowledge. But it would be amazing. This would be the first time in my life I have a true, fully dedicated project space.

'cause I'm always like taking over my living room or whatever and like the floor is covered in the book for weeks and it's, I'm hopping around him and there's dust and hair and crap on everything. It just sucks. So to have a true. Again, not like massive, but like big enough workspace where I'll be able to map these things out in a way that feels exciting, it feels fun, and it, it feels like that'll be a totally different register of brain to be using.

And so I'm excited to hopefully just be able to come back and lean into that and build that space out. Just take stock of things. You know, it's like going on Tim Ferriss a couple weeks ago, like that. Pod came out and I've got hundreds of emails that I, you know, there's no way I'm gonna be able to respond to all the stuff that came in from that, but I would like to spend a little time sitting with it.

And when I'm on this tour, I'm not gonna be able to do anything but the tour. And so I expect there's a back, there's gonna be a backlog of stuff. Like I'm just gonna, and I'd, I'd like to just have quiet time where I'm not working on a book, I'm not doing interviews, I'm just getting the studio space built out in a way that feels great.

And kind of reflecting on these first, you know, basically March, April, may, June of this year. So we'll see.