Convos With Creative People Brian LeTendre

Happy Friday the 13th to all who celebrate! Jolene and Brian are back to talk about prepping for National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org). We talk about how you can use the rest of this month to get ready for the 50k-word challenge. Even though we focus on NaNo, you can apply most of what we talk about to any large creative project you might be preparing for.

For the horror fans out there celebrating the best month of the year, we also talk about the scary movies we’ve been watching, and give some recommendations for movies you can spend the rest of the month watching.

Thanks for listening! Next month we’ll be back to our regular format and will have a guest joining us, so stay tuned!

J & B

We are back with a super-sized episode, featuring one of our favorite people, Karin Wu!

Karin has over 20 years of experience in nonprofit, education, gaming, fashion, and other industries, leading marketing, fundraising, product development, and distribution in both domestic and international markets. She shares her creative journey with us, and we take a deep dive into what it means to be a creative leader, and how to stay true to what you value the most.

You can connect with Karin on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/karinwu.

You can also learn more about Karin in this fantastic episode of the Totally Human podcast, where she and host Liya James talk more about leadership and allyship. https://youtu.be/se8KkcMAXFo

Thanks for listening!

We couldn’t wait a whole month! We’re back with a new episode, and we are joined by our amazing friend and incredible writer and poet, Victoria Nations. We chat with Vicki about her creative journey, how she crafts incredible short stories, and her intentional approach to the business side of being a creator. We also get into a deep discussion about finding your community, reflecting on how we all found each other and have created an amazingly supportive community of our own.

Here’s where you can fund Vicki and her work:
Website: https://victorianations.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Leaves_Cobwebs
Tumblr: http://tumblr.com/victorianations-writer

Here are links to resources we talked about in this episode:
Richard Thomas and Storyville Studio
https://storyvilleonline.com/class-basics
LitReactor
https://litreactor.com/classes/upcoming
Speculative Fiction Academy
https://www.speculativefictionacademy.com/courses
Cat Rambo’s The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers
http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/academy/
NaNoWriMo
https://nanowrimo.org

Here are some free small press Discord communities with writing and publishing discussions:
Tenebrous Press
https://discord.gg/pDMxEgUh
Ghoulish Books
https://discord.gg/bN5BY6cR

And here are the links to the recent books launched by our awesome Midnight Society pals:
The PhDidn't Handbook: How to Quit Grad School Like a Champ by Erica Davis:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2TBB7JS
Into The Gray by Kathleen Palm: https://www.amazon.com/Into-Gray-Kathleen-Palm-ebook/dp/B0BSVGDBGN

Thanks for listening! We’ll be back next month with another incredible creative guest, so stay tuned!

J & B

It’s a new day! The podcast is back, and Jolene Haley is joining Brian as the co-host of the show. In this episode Brian and Jolene catch everyone up on their creative adventures, talk about the projects they worked on for Camp NaNoWriMo, and discuss what’s filling up their creative cups lately.

Thanks for listening! Starting next month we’ll be welcoming a guest to the show each episode, so stay tuned!

J & B

Convos with Creative People is a podcast about creative paths and processes. Each episode features interviews with creators of all genres and mediums, and discussions on writing, art, design, marketing, music, podcasting, and more. Hosted by me, Brian LeTendre.

In this episode I dug into the 2009 archives of the Secret Identity podcast for an interview I did with Raven Software’s Senior Creative Director Dan Vondrak, about the X-Men Origins: Wolverine game.

Why am I pulling up this interview now? Because Dan Vondrak directed the campaign of this year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. I am loving the campaign, and what is kind of incredible about it is that much of it was created remotely during the pandemic.

The idea for this episode came from the first time I booted up the game, as I got hit with a wave of nostalgia. Not because the game itself is set in the ‘80s (though that is a big deal for me as someone whose formative years were that decade), but because of the studio logos that are emblazoned on the screen when it starts. In addition to lead developer Treyarch, there are a slew of other studios who worked on the game, including Beenox, High Moon Studios, Sledgehammer, and Raven Software.

I could write an entire series of blogs on the work of those studios (and I likely will at some point), as they created some of my favorite games of the Xbox 360/PS3/Wii generation. Just in case any of those names don’t ring a bell:

High Moon Studios brought us the awesome Transformers games War for Cybertron, Dark of the Moon and Fall of Cybertron.

Beenox created Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and Spider-Man: Edge of Time, featuring my two favorite Spideys--Peter Parker and Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099).

Sledgehammer Games was born out of Visceral Games, creators of Dead Space, one of my all-time favorite series.

Raven Software was behind X-Men Legends I & II, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, among many others.

Which brings me to today’s blast from the past. Back in 2009, I was in the middle of my game journo stint, covering games for Comic Book Resources. The Secret Identity podcast was also going strong at that time, and NYCC was the place where we would get almost an entire year’s worth of interviews done for the show.

It was at NYCC 2009 that I got to interview Senior Creative Director at Raven Software Dan Viondrak, who was the project lead on X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a game that was released alongside the upcoming movie.

The game featured a story written by Marc Guggenheim, who you may know from a variety of comic-related projects, including his run on Wolverine of course, as well as runs on Flash and Amazing Spider-man, and his development, writing and production work on the Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow TV shows.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine received decent reviews at the time, and most agreed that the mechanics were the strong point. It felt great to play as Wolverine, and the game really captured the brutality of his combat skills, and how far he could push his healing factor.

Sadly, unless you own a copy of the game and a console to play it on, you’d have a tough time playing X-Men Origins: Wolverine today. Thye license expired and it’s not available digitally. But there are plenty of used copies floating around out there, and it’s definitely worth checking out.

Raven made a Wolfenstein game that was released later that year as well, and also the underrated Singularity in 2010, before working on the Call of Duty franchise for the past decade.

Here are links where you can find more about X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Raven Software:

Raven Software: https://www.ravensoftware.com/home
X-Men Origins: Wolverine game trailer: a...

Convos With Creative People | Don Cardenas

Convos with Creative People is a podcast about creative paths and processes. Each episode features interviews with creators of all genres and mediums, and discussions on writing, art, design, marketing, music, podcasting, and more. Hosted by me, Brian LeTendre.

In this episode I welcome artist, musician, fellow podcaster, and friend Don Cardenas to the show. I’ve known Don for over five years now, and we first connected around our mutual love of music, as he was a listener of the Thrash it Out podcast. He’s an amazing artist, and I interviewed him about his book Packs of the Lowcountry for the Secret Identity podcast back in 2017 (in fact, it was the last interview we did for the show, which ended later that year).

As we always do whenever we catch up, Don and I cover a lot of ground in this discussion. In addition to talking about his work and his process, we ended up talking quite a bit about finding your creative community, and adjusting creative expectations for yourself in the midst of a pandemic. In fact, this conversation was the inspiration for the blog series I recently started about rebuilding my creative routine.

I’d like to thank Don for being so gracious with his time, and for the great discussion as always. Go check out his work, and listen to his podcast!
Here are links to where you can find Don, as well as some of the stuff we talked about in this episode:

Don on Twitter: twitter.com/DonCardenasArt
Don on Instagram: instagram.com/doncardenasart
Don’s Website: doncardenasart.com
Comics - Coffee - Metal podcast: https://anchor.fm/donald-cardenas
Brian’s episode on CCM: https://anchor.fm/donald-cardenas/episodes/CCM-Podcast-Episode-20-Brian-LeTendre-eikvta
Packs of the Lowcountry on ComiXology:
https://www.comixology.com/Packs-of-the-Lowcountry/comics-series/40302
I Wish it Was Xmas Today (Cover): https://youtu.be/ajKIHBrnA5o

As always, you can follow me and keep up with my creative projects on Twitter @seebrianwrite.
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CWCP Theme music: Dreamer by Kevin MacLeod, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Link to original work: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3676-dreamer