Hello listeners, welcome back to Macabre Monday’s Meet The Maniac. I'm your host, The Chronicler, aka Maya, and today I'm joined by our maniac, Mr.Scoot , author of the tech noir series “Duel”, amongst other notable stories. Scoot is a Catholic writer on Substack, boasting several newsletters, namely the Peasant Times Dispatch, Gibberish, Stained Glass Catechism, and Bima Sakti. Did I pronounce that right? Yeah, that's a collaboration with Michael P. Marpaung. It's a, I'm sorry, Michael, if I've mispronounced your name. It's apparently the Indonesian word for the Milky Way. So Scoot, you are a man shrouded in much mystery—I'd say. So why don't we suspend some of that with a proper introduction from you? All right. Hi, I'm Scoot. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what else to say besides what you said. I write a bunch of things. I don't write a lot of things. And I'm kind of new to the Macabre Monday crew. Kind of, I didn't, I didn't feel right kind of putting my name in the hat for the lottery until I started like writing something scary. So, and it's, it's funny because like, I'm afraid of, or I'm not, I don't handle it very well. So I don't know. I don't, I don't know what else to say. I'm a human being. I have a, like an actual face. That's not like a heart in a Betsy Ross flag. And that's, I don't know. I've already figured it. I've already lost words. So there you go. Don't worry. I'll have enough room, enough of them for the both of us. All right. I'm a chatterbox. So how did you get started on Substack? So the, the Catholic endeavors were really the first ones. I was on WordPress for a while and Substack kept popping up. People kept on talking about it and there it would like, so in such and such writer is talking about this on Substack. And I was like, all right, let me, let me explore it. Let me check it out. Maybe kind of see what kind of trouble I can get into. So Peasant Times Dispatch was kind of the first venture. And Substack makes it so easy to like go paid to like feel legitimate. Like, I don't know. WordPress feels like a blog and Substack feels like a professional newsletter. So like the idea was that I was going to start professionalizing my writing and you know, try to see what kind of an audience there is for it. The fiction side of the house actually came. So Gibberish was originally supposed to be a language newsletter. It was because like I was getting into conlanging and like wanted to do more with that. But I just didn't have the time. And I, I started it, you know, I think a couple months after I started the Peasant Times Dispatch did nothing with it. So then January of 23, I rebooted it. I was like, I'm going to post fiction. I was trying to put fiction on Peasant Times Dispatch. And I just, it didn't fit with everything else that was there. So I was like, all right, let's separate it. Let's have fun with it. And the rest is history. It was, it's been a lot of fun to play around with Gibberish and kind of experiment with things. It's been a lot of fun reading what you have. You mentioned Conlang. Do you use a lot of those skills for the Bima Sakti newsletter? That one's, that one has just started like a couple weeks ago or maybe a month ago. So eventually, maybe. But I definitely, I, I love what Tolkien did with his languages. And I love the depth that they, that it adds to worlds. I, I think about just the name of things a lot. And like, it doesn't take a lot of effort to go and either like back rationalize words. So an example of what, of what I've done is last summer, I posted a longer story called Blood or Flood, which is set in Atlantis. And, you know, I didn't think, I wasn't thinking about like inventing a language for it, but afterwards I was just thinking about it and so I posted a couple world-building articles on like how I might approach building a language based on what I've already done without thinking about it for the story. And so I was able to like, you, you back rationalize things and then you could just, the language expands very organically once you get a couple of guardrails and then you just follow it a little bit. So it, it added a lot of depth. And if I ever wanted to expand that story, now I've got some direction. I've got, you got to understand like history, culture, just kind of the way people think. And it, it, it kind of all flows naturally from there. That's so interesting. Were you into conglang before you started writing fiction or? Yes-ish. Well, it's funny because I was interested in language first and foremost. So my mom is from Canada, grew up hearing French all the time. Like I like to joke that I know how to scold myself in French. Like I don't actually know French. So languages have always been really interesting to me. And I've done like a stint on Duolingo or two, just kind of exploring other languages. I took like, I took a weird combination of languages in school. Like in high school, I started with Latin, then switched to German for some reason. And then I took like a couple of years of Spanish in college. So like they all just kind of mixed together and it just, it was, it was interesting, but I didn't really unlock language. I didn't know how to understand them until I started looking into like constructing languages. There's a website Zompist, I'll send a link to it. But it's, it really broke down, like what would, what are the steps that you would take to create a language? And it just kind of unlocked real languages for me. So then I was able to like, in trying to invent a language, I was understanding the grammar rules. And like, the minute constructions that go into understanding like real languages. So kind of both of them ascended together. And that was just really interesting to me. That is interesting. It's interesting you started with Latin, because I feel like that's a key to so many languages. And it's so mathematical, the way that it's structured, I feel like. Well, and that's one of the things that I've realized is that it's into, so I forget where I've talked about this, but like, there are people who will talk about being polyglots. And I'm not trying to like, insult polyglots of certain varieties. But like, if someone says that they speak seven different languages, but it's like Latin, French, Italian, German, English, you know, whatever, like, those are all Indo -European languages, they share more things in common than they have different. But like, when you start looking into like, Austronesian languages, like Tagalog in the Philippines, Indonesian, you know, Vietnamese, things like that, like, you're getting into entirely different language, like an entirely different language family. The way words are formed is completely different. The way like, there are grammar structures that don't exist in English. So it's the closest thing that you can get almost to a truly alien language, because it doesn't have anything in common. So like, when you find, if you were to encounter someone who like speaks, you know, languages in different language families altogether, then that's just, it's, it's, you have to break down the process and then relearn it from the ground up. So that that's something that's been really interesting for me to, like, approach without really understanding it. Interesting take a direction that this podcast today that I didn’t expect, but here we are. Language Monday. Yes, exactly. So what got you into writing fiction, if you don't mind me changing the subject? No, please. Fiction at all. I have always been a, like, imaginative person, I would say. I, I live a lot in my head. And so I think the, the, I can't remember the first fiction I ever tried to write. But I have always been just thinking of like, well, what if this and what if that and then just kind of expanding it, I would say, actually, this isn't necessarily like fiction related. But like, when I was in like, high school, there was a online game called Nation States that was run by the author Max Barry based on his book, Jennifer Government. And it allowed you to kind of like create a country and all this stuff. And then like, inevitably, people have like forums, and they would like roleplay their different countries, kind of like D & D, but international politics. And I like I dove deep into that. And I had a lot of fun with it. And so, like, that was kind of I kind of, I guess, that was backing into writing fiction by world building. And then I was able to take take that and then like, start doing it intentionally for writing fiction. And that was a lot of fun. So I don't know, like, the first serial I wrote on Substack was Sandbox Earth. And that came out of a conversation that I had with my dad about just like, what would happen if aliens came to Earth and then didn't notice us and then they like fought each other and it's like, it's, it's an idea that really stuck with me. And it has just lived in my head for all this time. So writing on Gibberish is really the first time that I have like brought that out and been like, hey, like all of these ideas for my entire life that I've just been swimming around my brain, like, I'm spilling them out for everyone like here, check them out. Like I find them interesting. I hope everyone else does too. So far, so good, I think. Oh, yeah, so far, so good. So far, so great. Oh, one of your top stories actually speaking of your fiction was Father and Son. I think that's your most popular on your website. It is. And for me, that's one of the most impactful stories that I read from you. And I think I've read quite a few of your, your stories. Thank you. I'd love to know about the process of writing that particular piece. Well, that's a, it's funny you should ask that because so that's another one that has lived in my head for a long time. It actually started I drew like a picture at work one time I used to work at a, I don't know one of my first jobs when I was in college was as a
