She Had Glass Eyes Part 2 - Indie Author Interview with C.S. Schiavone

We sat down with author and musician Callie Sioux Schiavone. Her book, She Had Glass Eyes, really drew us in. It explores how humanity and technology connect, blurring the line between reality and the narrator’s imagination.

Callie Sioux is a creative alchemist who uses multimedia to turn real-life adventures into fiction and entertainment. She is an author, musician, entrepreneur, podcaster, and music venue owner. Raised as a ranch kid in New Mexico, she writes stories, songs, films, and audio dramas that capture wide-open spaces, grit, and persistence. 1232, her audio epic, is a behemoth project that launched her into the world of audio drama. Her recent signing with Twenty Hills Publishing will bring her speculative fiction to a bookstore near you.

00:00 Introduction to Callie and Her Journey
10:01 Life Experiences and Side Quests
19:51 The Inspiration Behind 'She Has Glass Eyes'
29:56 Exploring the Euphonia Machine and Its Historical Context
39:55 Writing Process and Overcoming Fear
55:25 The Writer's Journey: Carving Out Time
59:22 The Struggle of Christian Art
01:09:30 Authenticity in Storytelling
01:18:30 Introducing 1232: A Time Travel Fantasy
01:40:40 Supporting Creative Projects

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Creators and Guests

Host

Jonathan

Host

Slava

Digital Strategist. Co-Host. Aspiring writer of stories.

What is The Side Quest Book Club Podcast?

If you’re a reader looking for something deeper or an indie author working on your book, The Side Quest Book Club is for you. We skip the usual book reviews and ratings. Each episode turns fun side quests into real lessons, so you’ll leave not just entertained, but with a better understanding of why storytelling matters.

[Slava]
What's the genesis of this story?

[Callie]
My crazy and wonderful mother. She has been such a major force in my life. She was always reading Edgar Allan Poe to us.

I grew up on a lot of Joan Baez ballads. So there's this strange way of telling stories that's kind of dark and brutal. She is a cross between Snow White and Jessie from Toy Story.

[Slava]
Okay.

[Callie]
I'm so grateful to be a part of this building. The gentleman who owned the corner grocery store in the 90s, I believe, he got shot in the corner. They played music from the 70s.

Animated Lord of the Rings, kind of Irish tunes. He used to serve turkey leg, pony stew, fresh baked bread loaves. And people showed up.

We sold out.

[Jonathan]
Coming to you from an endless library where every book is read and every spoiler discussed. Join us as we dig into the lives of fictional people who cannot defend themselves. This is the SideQuest Book Club.

Welcome back SideQuesters to another episode. Today we have Callie Schiavone on with us from last time we talked about her book, She Had Glass Eyes. And we're going to get right into it.

[Slava]
So Callie is an author. She's a creative world builder, audio drama creator and producer, musician. She is the author, as you said, Jonathan, of She Has Glass Eyes.

We covered this in our last episode. And we're very happy to have her here with us. Talk about her book and her journey as an author.

Wonderful. Callie, it's great to have you.

[Callie]
Right on. Thank you, guys. I'm really excited to be a part of SideQuest.

I've been looking forward to it.

[Slava]
As a lifelong SideQuester, you finally made it to the boss of all SideQuest, the podcast called SideQuest.

[Callie]
Complete, yes. Oh, boy. Now what kind of SideQuest will emerge from this?

You know, that's the joy of it. But I found the spot for you, Ching, right here.

[Jonathan]
There we go. We'll come down to your tavern that you run. And we'll run some D&D campaigns on the Yawning Tavern.

And make sure we have rotating fancy folk that come in, have adventures. And then always make sure that they stop back when they're in Chattanooga.

[Callie]
Heck, yeah. I love it. Let's do it.

[Jonathan]
And you can start teaching people all the different skills you have. Right. Stunt work, cowgirling, all of it.

[Callie]
Nice, yes. Yeah, the tavern is where that's the best place to learn all those random things, is at a tavern, for sure.

[Jonathan]
Can you knife throw?

[Callie]
Yes, not super great. I'm better at roping things. I do shoot a little bit of different calibers of weapons.

[Slava]
All right.

[Callie]
A little bit of axe throwing. And then a little bit of bow shooting as well, bow and arrow.

[Jonathan]
Do you ever shoot your bow on your horse?

[Callie]
You know, cow ponies are a strange breed. They're as hardy as they come. But there's certain things they're not as adept at learning to do.

Because my horse would be like, what are you doing? This is crazy. This is retarded.

And he would not like that. So I have not done that. I would love to, though.

I have seen those competitions. And they're absolutely fascinating. The different style of techniques and shooting that you have to do.

Totally different bow and all of that. Like, I use a 40-pound recurve. So it's for a little bit more hefty training for hunting, more so than like a horse bow, which is so light so that you can have that strength while you're riding to draw it back.

It's very different things. But that's, I mean, that's going to be added to the list, fellas. Absolutely.

[Jonathan]
Of course. Of course. Well, what's your most memorable side quest to date in life?

Or one of them?

[Callie]
Oh my gosh. You know, I have been trying to pick one. I think, oddly enough, I think that I would have to say music.

Because I grew up out on a ranch and got to do a lot of things in the agricultural world. I really wanted to be a filmmaker and a film student. And it was more or less self-educated.

Got to do a few little things. But then in a bookstore, after a very busy day out at the ranch, I met this really tall, long-haired, hippie kid named Jet. And he and I fell in love and quit our jobs and packed everything up in a Honda Element and hit the road to play rock and roll music.

And I think that's probably the most memorable side quest for me.

[Jonathan]
Yeah. Found love, pack up the car, hit the country, and play music.

[Callie]
Yeah. I just did not expect that. I just really did not expect that.

I always loved and enjoyed music. And I did have a little bit of background in music, doing different stuff for church. But I didn't expect to become a musician professionally and be on the road for well over a decade, playing all over the U.S. and Europe. Like, that was just... I was going to travel, but just not like that. I had no idea, you know, as far as how my brain was planning.

But yeah.

[Jonathan]
Yeah. So in your life, and I picked this up from a couple interviews and then some of the conversation we had before the show, you've just got a bunch of skills. You're a cowgirl, you're a berserker to your own right, right?

You don't know how to knife throw, but you use bone arrow and you play music and you travel and all these things. You're an animal handler. When did you realize that these things were connected as a person growing up into the world that we live in?

[Callie]
Right. I had no... I still don't know how they all connect, to be honest.

I am so grateful that I have a myriad of experiences and my growing up sounds very exotic and circus-like. And it wasn't not that. I mean, my family is a little eccentric.

And so the way that I grew up, even in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, and still being able to travel and, you know, enjoy these various aspects of different things, I would say that one of the only ways all those things connect is, one, I was potentially, hopefully designed to be a storyteller. So all of those little experiences can feed into telling stories. And then two, I think that the queen of side questing was probably my mother.

And so it doesn't matter where, what, she will get... You'll be driving down the road with her. And she'll see, you know, usually in my childhood, there'd be, you know, a dead animal on the side of the road, or maybe there's a weird side dirt road somewhere.

And she would just take that weird side road, or she'd pull over and be like, come on, girls, let's go see what, you know, what, let's go see if that animal that needs help, or what is it or what? I don't know. Like, it just...

Okay, mom. Yeah, exactly. Or there's so many other examples I could give of her really doing that all throughout my childhood.

And she's just growing up in that kind of environment to where you're constantly curious and unafraid to just be like, well, I don't know, we're going through this door, which I think is why I have decided to claim the berserker kind of motif, if you will, because I'm not particularly sneaky or stealthy in nature. And I've always had to just like go down random roads, literally. So it's like, pull out the axe, get ready, and just be ready to like hack away at like, ah, I don't know, mixing all my metaphors.

This is, this is too early in the morning. I'm mixing metaphors of like real life and axes and total fiction. And just so everyone knows, and it's very clear, I have never pulled, in all, with my mother, in any kind of side quest, pulled out an axe and started hacking.

But this is, I gotta get out of here.

[Jonathan]
Not even a down tree in the road? Next question. Yeah, next question.

Next question. No, we use a chainsaw for that.

[Callie]
Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, exactly.

[Jonathan]
It's faster.

[Callie]
Get me out of here, guys.

[Jonathan]
Okay, okay. That sounds wild. When I was growing up, I was enthralled with Houdini and his origin story of running away to join the circus.

And I was like, that could be fun. So it's kind of, it's kind of, it brings a little bit of my childhood spark back in my soul to hear that somebody actually got raised a little bit circus-like. And I'm sure it's not as fantastical as it is up here, but it sounds really fun.

[Callie]
Right? Yeah, it's definitely had its curiously strange moments of, you know, when I retell a story to someone, it's like, oh, and they're like, whoa, Callie, that's really intense. That's wild.

And I'm like, oh, oh, yeah, you're right. Like, it's not normal.

[Slava]
You didn't know that?

[Callie]
Yeah, like, okay.

[Slava]
That's so much better than sitting, let's say, fast forward to your 60, right? And you're recounting all the stuff that you've done. It's so much better to tell your friends or your children or your neighbor your story instead of going, yeah, well, I was an accountant and I went to work and I crunched numbers.

Then I came home and I watched Gilmore Girls and then I had a Chardonnay and then I woke up and then I went to work, you know, and people have those lives and they're happy and content. And that's great. I'm not dumping in anybody.

It's so much more interesting to have the life that you've had. I feel at a level a lot toned down than the adventures you've had. I feel like I've lived 10 lives.

I worked in construction. I wanted to work for the state's Department of Roads because I really enjoyed working outside. Then I, you know, became a Christian and I decided, whoa, wait a minute.

I need to learn about my faith. I went to seminary and then all of a sudden I got the academic bug and instead of, you know, working on the hot asphalt or building houses, well, I was actually more on the demolishing end. But anyway, instead of demolishing old houses.

Not surprised. Now I am in a classroom and learning all these heady things and reading, you know, what some theologian in 1132 wrote. And then I'm like, oh, okay, well, this is cool.

I'm really good at this academic stuff. I think I should pursue teaching. And so I started pursuing a master's and a PhD.

And then I decided, you know what? I need to take a break from academia. My brain hurts.

And because on my side quest, I was always interested in digital media, data analytics, marketing. I decided to try that out. And I got hired with no professional experience in that world, but a lot of self-taught playing around having side quests in that world.

And I was able to build a whole platform for a company. It became a revenue stream. It got like 500,000 followers, 80,000 subscribers for the newsletter, quarter million dollars in like six months.

I'm like, oh, I am not bad at this. And that's what I've been doing for the past 17 years. But each decade, if I look back on my life, it's something completely different.

I feel like I've lived different lives. And then my current job is so different. It's still digital IT.

It's still marketing, but it's so different and a completely different industry than the previous job, but then the previous job to that. So each time the shifts were so stark.

[Callie]
Yes, yeah.

[Slava]
I was like, whoa, I'm doing this now. And I've been doing what I'm doing for about, I wanna say three years, yeah, three years, three and a half years. And it feels like 30.

When I remember the previous job, which felt like 30 years of that thing, it feels like a lifetime ago. So I think lives like that, it's just for me, and I know I might sound like a jerk saying this, but this is just more interesting. There's so much more memories to talk about and so much more people you can interact with and get along with.

Because I think like people like us, Jonathan, you, me, Callie, we're able to interact with almost anybody, get along with almost anybody because we're not in one thing all the time. We've seen so much and done so much. So I think that's wonderful to have a life full of sidequests.

[Callie]
Definitely. I think that it's something that really helps develop character and it helps develop, sometimes forcefully, I feel like. You switch or you get- I feel like it's always.

[Slava]
Always, yeah, there you go.

[Callie]
And I think it's unique to be able to, a lot, like you said, a lot of people don't have that perspective on change or shifting and on taking, just going for it. Like, oh, well, I have no experience, but yep, I'm going to say yes to the job too because there's that other half of it, right? And I've done that a lot too where I don't have a lot of experience, but they're willing to take a risk on me.

And so they say yes and I say yes. And so then it's like, all right, here we go. And we'll do this new thing and it works out pretty well or not so well to the next.

I mean, it sounds like we're going to get another shift from you, Slava. I mean, three years, right? So, uh-oh, we're coming up on the time.

[Jonathan]
Yeah. He wants to be a cowgirl.

[Slava]
Can we send him to you? I'm a cowgirl. Callie, from your lips to God's ears, because what we've noticed with this podcast, which started out as its own side quest, Jonathan and I have been friends for like 20 years and we lived in different states, so it's not like we hang out every weekend.

But after a hiatus of not seeing or talking to each other, I reached out to him because I needed help with some IT nonsense that I was going through the previous job. Which he still hasn't paid for. I just- Let the record show.

I owe you. Bottle of whiskey, baby. And as we started talking, he's like, hey, have you ever thought about starting a podcast?

And this is in the middle of COVID. And I'm driving to work. I'm like one of four cars because I'm an essential worker at the job I was doing.

So I had to be in the office pretty much every day, if not every other day. But it was public safety adjacent, so I had to be in the office. And I started listening to a podcast by LSG Media and they were doing X-Files.

And I loved X-Files when I was a kid. And listening to these two guys talk about episodes and memories and what they thought about the show and how the characters and the characters growth, it popped into my head. I was like, you know what?

It'd be really fun to start a podcast and just to see where it goes, just for the hell of it. And after I connected with Jonathan, like a month after that thought popped into my head, Jonathan said, hey, you ever thought about starting a podcast? I was like, yes.

And then this thing started. And here's the point I'm trying to make. Three years later, four years later, actually, because three years of recording, one year of planning and putting things together, we have...

[Jonathan]
We didn't plan a bit much.

[Slava]
...we have, except when we invite authors at seven o'clock in the morning to come on the show, then we don't plan at all. But the point is, now, three years later, we have bona fide, actual published authors with a following, not some unknowns, but with followings and works behind them, like you, like Nicholas Gisbaro for the Vildarium series. We have people reaching out to us.

And yes, Abby helped us connect. But Nicholas's agent called us and said, hey, guys, I listened to your Project Hail Mary episode. Liked what you do.

Would you like to get my author on? So now we're getting noticed. So what started out as like, hey, you want to just do a podcast for the hell of it?

Which turned into like, hey, we're both in marketing. Let's try to make this thing a reality and just kind of exercise our marketing muscles. See if we have the chops to build something.

And that turned into a passion project. And that turned into us talking to real life authors. So who knows where this will go?

I hope it continues to grow because this is, I have fun doing this, talking to you, talking to Nicholas, just talking to Jonathan and ranting about world building. I have the greatest time doing those things.

[Callie]
That's awesome, guys. I love hearing it.

[Jonathan]
We should do, I'm going to just make this verbal so that the audience can hold us to it. We should do a live show sometime indeterminate time frame down at the old watering hole in Chattanooga. What's it called, Kelly?

[Callie]
The Woodshop.

[Jonathan]
The Woodshop.

[Callie]
Yeah, that would be amazing.

[Jonathan]
We're not musicians, but we can.

[Callie]
No, but you know what we do? We do a lot of different types of events. And of course, selfishly, I'm wanting to do more literary events there.

But one thing that we just did that was an absolute blast, which you guys could maybe plan on coming down for is we did a Bilbo's birthday bash, a Lord of the Rings themed weekend where we had a live band playing a lot of the, you guys will like this. This is good. This is good cypress material.

All right, I'm waking up. Here we go. Here we go.

But we decorated the whole bar, the tavern with, you know, lots of Lord of the Rings inspired themes. And it's a super cozy little place in the neighborhood. So it's very pub like already.

And so we got to do that and we got a band that is extremely, they're wonderfully talented musicians, but they're also real deep, old school Lord of the Rings, nerds and Tolkien fans. And so they went and started pulling a bunch of different music pieces that helped inspired the Howard Shore score. And then they, you know, they played music from the 70s, animated Lord of the Rings movie, you know, and so they did some deep tracks.

And then, of course, you know, some great kind of Irish tunes. And so we did that. And we had Lisa served turkey legs and pony stew and fresh baked bread loaves.

And then, of course, ale and mead. And, you know, a bunch of different cocktails. And people showed up.

We sold out both nights, like within a few weeks of putting the event live. I had no idea there was going to be that many nerds here in Nashville or in Chattanooga, because I figured, yeah, they're in Nashville, they're in Atlanta or whatever. And there's big cons that happened down there.

And I didn't quite know that that was going to be Chattanooga's thing. Oh, man, they loved it. So like, we're definitely doing it again.

But there's room for a lot more themed events like that. That's fun. And that was really exciting for me.

[Jonathan]
Did you do it on his birthday?

[Callie]
Yeah, we did it on the weekend because I think it was on a Monday this year.

[Jonathan]
September 22nd. Yeah, yeah.

[Callie]
So we did it the following weekend. But yeah, it was dope. I mean, I think next year we might do it a whole week.

Why not? A whole week.

[Jonathan]
Yeah, may as well. And the wood shop, I was a little pulling up on Google Maps here. You guys are on St. Elmo Avenue?

[Callie]
Yes. Yeah. St. Elmo.

[Jonathan]
5500 St. Elmo Avenue in September. Go check out the Hobbit Week.

[Callie]
Yeah, the Hobbit Week. Yeah, St. Elmo is also a really cool old historic neighborhood that's got a lot of history that I still continue to learn about. But the wood shop itself was an old corner grocery store since the early 1900s.

And during the Prohibition, they were distilling some moonshine down in the basement and getting that. We met a gentleman whose grandfather used to work there as a boy. And he was in charge of delivering people's groceries.

And he had a little red wagon that he would go up and down all the different old houses. It's full of a bunch of old 1800s builds, like 1880s, 1870s builds. And he would deliver their groceries.

And then of course, there was always snuck in there a bottle of moonshine.

[Jonathan]
There it is. You know, jar of moonshine, so. There it is.

[Callie]
And then it was a literal wood shop, which is kind of part of where it got its name where a gentleman and a couple of different entrepreneurs were after the gentleman who owned the corner grocery store. You know, in the 90s, I believe he got shot in the corner of the building. And so it stopped being a neighborhood grocery store, just in case you were like, oh, go from there to there.

[Jonathan]
Oh, yeah.

[Callie]
And then it was abandoned for a while. And then a guy used it as his literal wood shop to create some cabinets and buildings and a couple of custom builds. And then one of his employees, a musician, started holding like house concerts and, you know, kind of like backyard party kind of shows at the wood shop.

Very DIY, very under the radar. And then they more or less kind of turned it into they put the bar in there and the little kitchen, so on and so forth. My husband and I went in there to catch shows.

We'd seen a bunch of different shows there. And then he started his blues radio program and live blues show there every Tuesday. And that's what got us in there all the time.

And then a series of small miracles later and a side quest, maybe another one of those things. I had no idea. But then culmination of a lot of the different skills we have.

And wham, it was ours. And we just rolled right into the next phase of life and having a music venue, which definitely fits us. But it was wild.

There's so much history down there, man. And I'm so grateful to be a part of this building's, you know, it's interesting story that it's telling, you know? It's an old house.

[Slava]
Well, I think this transitions perfectly into talking a little bit about She Had Glass Eyes, which I enjoyed the hell of. I am your evangelist for this book, Callie. Yay!

I have told so many people about how good this book is because that first line, that first two lines, I read it in a... We will read it. Yeah, definitely.

I read it for one of our episodes that we had Abby on. She's like, aren't you having my friend on? I was like, yes, we are.

And here's why. I've told it to a couple of my other friends. And I think I mentioned in a few episodes since because we record about 10 episodes ahead.

So building up to your episode, I had already read it. But I enjoy this. And I'm going to read the line for the audience again, because it is really, really cool.

And a quick aside before I read it. When I was a kid, I had my own side quest. And the audience knows because from a little bit that I've shared, I didn't have a good mom.

I had a pretty terrible mom, unfortunately. So my side quests were all in my head at the local library, reading Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King. And maybe it was nostalgia.

But when I read that line, and as I was reading the book, it took me back to first being exposed to Poe. Because it's so Poe-esque. And I was like, hell yeah, we're definitely, definitely doing an author show with this person.

Where is my Kindle?

[Jonathan]
We have a propensity to geek out on the first line of books. Yeah, it doesn't happen often. But when it does happen, we won't shut up about it.

So congratulations, Callie. You've won an award I haven't started yet. You and one other author.

[Callie]
So good work.

[Slava]
Another thing is, I enjoy female characters that are not Pollyannas. I don't do damsels in distress well. My wife is not a damsel in distress.

She can hold her own. And if we were to go on a side quest, she would probably, you know, either get the crossbow or the axe. She wouldn't be cowering in the back, clutching at my elbow, asking me to save her.

So I enjoy deliverance because, yeah, she's a little mad. But she's also kind of a cool chick. So I like that.

But anyway, here's the line that just hooked me. Act 1, England, 1846. With all the festivities surrounding the wedding in Buttingford this summer, I deemed it necessary to give it a wide berth.

Quaint rural gatherings are indeed charming, but I can only stomach so much charm and so much quaintness before my countenance falls ill and I am tempted to commit atrocities. Boom.

[Jonathan]
Yes.

[Slava]
Very good. Very good line. I masterfully done.

[Jonathan]
Thank you.

[Slava]
And I don't say that lightly. I'm not just, you know, gassing you up. I really think this is an amazing line that you put together.

[Jonathan]
Thank you. Agreed. Have you ever committed atrocities, Callie?

She's like, and the episode's over.

[Callie]
Yeah, just Callie exits the chat and gone. Well, you know. Callie, are you there?

Well, why do you think I don't have the camera on today?

[Jonathan]
She's actually just skinning a cow right now. Yeah, exactly. We need meat for tonight at the tavern.

But it's a shame.

[Slava]
It's a shame that you can't have your camera on because that soared in the previous episode that I saw.

[Callie]
Oh, nice. Yeah, I was like, yeah.

[Slava]
The sort of atrocities.

[Callie]
The sort of atrocities. Yeah, that's what it's called. I know, I know.

It's women are so vain in a lot of ways. And I just, I didn't have time this morning to really get much set up. And so that's.

[Slava]
No, that's perfect. I'm with you. I'm backing you up because I'm just as vain.

I won't put out videos. Jonathan wanted to go video a year earlier.

[Jonathan]
I want to go hog wild.

[Slava]
And I said, no, until we get good cameras and good lighting and I can be presentable on camera, we're not doing it. So I'm with you. More power to you.

It's not vanity. I think that's a noble, if I may be so bold, sense of pride where we don't have to be supermodels or anything like that. We don't have to be Hollywood-esque production here.

But to the degree that we can be professional and do the best we can, we should. Yeah, anyway. So what sparked?

She had glass eyes. It was going to be my question. What's the genesis of this story?

[Callie]
Well, you know, you already picked up on a large part of my influences and my, you know, we were talking before we hit record about my crazy and wonderful mother. And I will be referring to her a lot. She has been such a major force in my life for good and for weird.

But she was always reading, you know, Edgar Allen Poe to us. I grew up on a lot of Joan Baez ballads that are all about, you know, oh, the train wrecked and the, you know, the main guy his legs are chopped off and will his lover, you know, still stick with him or not. And so there's this strange way of telling stories that's kind of dark and brutal.

But my mom is not a dark individual. Like she is a cross between Snow White and Jessie from Toy Story. Like, exactly.

Okay, that's her. All right, she's got red hair. She wears her hair in pigtails.

She's always got her hat on. But, you know, she sings in every kind of creature out of the woods comes to her. It's very unique.

She's a light character. And so I think even that in and of itself is very inspirational to me, but of more Victorian era literature. And I love that.

I love Rudyard Kipling's short stories, Dickens and many, many others. And whenever it was in, it was in 2020 towards the end. And she got horribly ill, not from COVID, from something else.

And I flew back. I was living in Nashville at the time. She was out in New Mexico.

And I flew back to help take care of her. She was just all this. She's as strong as an ox.

And this just took her down. So I wanted to go help my dad with her and everything. So I went back to New Mexico and I was trying to challenge myself to be more precise with my writing and to write shorter.

So we'll, I'm sure at some point, we'll talk about 1232, the audio epic, which is a massive, massive project. And so I can be very long-winded and I was challenging myself to write more short stories. And I, there was a prompt from a different anthology series that I wanted to get into about, strange, mysterious things happening in a quaint English village in the 1840s.

It was more or less the prompt. And so I had been ruminating on that and I wanted to write something that would kind of cheer my mom up in that weird sort of dark, twisted humor way that she and I have with each other. And so I literally was like, okay, England, 1846, what happened?

Was there anything significant? Because I love pulling from history. I think there's so many fascinating people and situations and circumstances and gaps and twists and turns, much like side questing in our own lives, I think we can all attest to.

That inspires me more than a lot of other things. And so I can't believe I found it. And then there's not a million more books about it, but I found one of the articles about the machine, the euphonia.

And so that is what sparked that. And I started writing this story about this. And I'm always kind of waiting for characters to speak to me.

I'm very character driven in my writing style, my choice, whatever. And I heard Dillie's voice and kind of talking about this thing. And I was like, oh, who are you?

Wait, what? And so I just wrote this little short story. Basically the first 3,000 words, more or less act one.

And that's what I wrote. And I read it to my mom while I was very Victorian. I'm like ladling soup down her throat and she's coughing or whatever.

And I'm reading this dark tale about obsession and madness. And so she and I had a good time with that. So I have to say that the inspiration was all those different influences that I'm humbled and flattered and really happy that people are picking up on that.

I really wanted to take people back to that era and time of enjoying such a dark tale that's fable-esque and not necessarily just dark for the hell of it and just to scare you. And so thank you guys for your kind words. I really appreciate it.

But that is the inspiration. And then when I got involved with 20 Hills Publishing, they're the ones who read the short story and said, man, we really love the short story, but is there more? Like, it feels like there's more.

And I said, yeah, there is. But I was just trying to be brief. And they said what every writer wants to hear is please write more instead of cut, slash, edit.

And so that's what I got to do. I got to expand the story into what you read. And I'm really grateful for that.

It was fun.

[Jonathan]
Congratulations on that. Yeah. I know.

[Callie]
Thank you. Yeah, it was cool, man. It was really cool.

[Jonathan]
So you're blowing my mind right now. And I feel like in future things, like you need to tell people like Euphonia is real.

[Callie]
Oh, I know. Yes, yeah, it's real.

[Jonathan]
Can you side quest us over to give us a verbal history of this thing that you found? What was it back then?

[Callie]
Right.

[Jonathan]
Because we've read the book. And anyone who's listening is going to go read the book. So what did they make in the 1840s or whatever it was?

[Callie]
Well, that's the curious thing is the idea of pushing the boundaries of technology is part of a very interesting, I suppose, anthropological type of saga throughout mankind that how we've devised and developed things often way before anyone knows what to call it necessarily. And people are inventing and talking about it. And that fascinates me to no end.

Like the guy who invented the wheel or whatever, like I want to talk to him. I'm like, how did you do this? So whenever I was researching interesting events, I came across an article that said, now some kind of flowery language, which I'm butchering at the moment.

But it's like now premiering at the Egyptian Hall, the Euphonia, the marvelous talking machine. And I was like, oh, OK, that's weird. Wow, 1846.

Like, all right. So I dug into it. And it was a machine that simulated human speech.

And it was invented by a German inventor named Joseph Baver. And not much was known about him at all. He was not some kind of giant in the scientific world of the day.

And he had created this machine that I don't know why, but he created a woman's head. And it was made of like porcelain and rubber lips so that the mouth could move. And it had, you know, hair and makeup.

And it was just this floating head inside of this like kind of wooden cage crate with strings and different things attached to it. And he had a type of keyboard, not like a computer keyboard, but like a piano keyboard, pedals and knobs that he could use and manipulate and open the mouth and pull these different reeds in the nose for it to make speech. Now, the problem is, is we don't have, and I'm hoping, oh God, I hope this reaches somebody somewhere.

But we don't have the euphonium machine right now. It's not in a museum somewhere, okay? We don't have blueprints.

[Jonathan]
You think it still exists?

[Callie]
Somebody's got to have it. Somebody.

[Slava]
Oh, he's part of it, yeah.

[Callie]
Part of it or the blueprints or something. You know what I mean? Like we don't have any physical, like I can't tell you other than what I've read in articles and other than what they sketched in the articles of back in the day of how this machine worked.

Do you know what I'm saying? So like, I am hoping that the more we talk about it, somebody's going to hit me up and be like, I have the machine.

[Jonathan]
But- It's in a rural museum in, you know, Podunk, Kentucky in the hills.

[Callie]
Exactly, exactly. Somebody's got to have it. But it's absolutely incredible, this machine.

It could speak four words. So it wasn't just- I don't believe it. I know, I know.

And it used these pillows. And so it had this weird sort of like raspy sort of voice. And your imagination can play with how on earth it sounded.

But it could sing. It could say, you know, hello in a bunch of different languages. And it could actually form words.

And then he, you know, went on tour with P.T. Barnum.

[Jonathan]
And- So that part's real too.

[Callie]
That part's real also. So in the book, that's how we're introduced to him, is that he's premiering the machine at the Egyptian Hall in London, which was an exhibition hall that Tesla would have been at a few decades later. Oh, incredible.

And, you know, people were shocked by it. They, you know, it was- I'm shocked by it.

[Jonathan]
It's 2025 and I'm shocked by it.

[Callie]
Right. And it was kind of a strange, grotesque way of creating this machine. Like why a woman's head with like real hair?

Like this is weird.

[Jonathan]
Probably because he was lonely.

[Callie]
Anyway, carry on. Yeah, but there's a lot of things we can- That's the first AI bot.

[Jonathan]
I'm extrapolating.

[Callie]
But Slava, exactly. No, you guys are on track because this is the question and the worry of AI. Like people were protesting the machine because they were like, this, people are going to be replaced.

You should not be creating something in the human image for multiple reasons. They were thinking of it in a biblical sense of, you know, blasphemy. They were thinking of it in like, uh-oh, robots.

They don't, they didn't call them robots yet. Automatons are going to take our jobs. They're going to influence and hurt us down the road.

And they were having those exact type of conversations in 1846. And that really, you guys, that just sent me on a spin. You know, so I had to write something about it.

And if you pick up a copy of the physical book, we have an article with a sketch of the machine in the back.

[Jonathan]
Is that real or is that you just had that made for the book?

[Callie]
So we, it's a bit of both. We, there's, like I said, there's no like copyright or blueprint ownership material. But we took one of the articles, which you can find the Library of Congress.

You can find a bunch of them. About the machine and gave her a little bit of a, gave her a little bit of a change as far as what her face might've looked like. Kind of according to the description in the book.

And then, yeah, but that's, that's like one of the legit article that talks about how people, how people perceived it. And some people found it amazing, but most people found it, you know, horrible and the end of the world and very upset. Grotesque.

And grotesque. And that's why he went on the circus circuit.

[Jonathan]
Yeah, that demoralized him.

[Callie]
That demoralized him. I think because he, in real life, he, in real life. And that's kind of where I stepped in is like in real life, the machine and the man disappeared off the tour.

And I was like, hmm, well, that's weird.

[Jonathan]
So people need to know. People need to know that this is based on real events. It is.

[Callie]
Yeah.

[Jonathan]
I, so, so I have to nerd out a second like Slava did or Fanboy, I guess is actually what it's called. When I was reading it before our last episode, I also mentioned to Slava, I was like, this feels like Lovecraft. This feels like Poe.

This feels dark and enjoyable. And it feels Victorian without feeling forced. The narrative, the voice that you use consistent across the board, the language, the sentence structure.

Now, I'm not an expert, like hands down, not an expert. But it doesn't matter if it's objectively factual, right? If I felt like I was in the world, you did your job as the author and I was invited into the world.

And I absolutely love it. Didn't know, it makes it even better. It makes it awesome that like you, you took some real event, which needs to be part of your marketing.

Like unsolicited advice has to be involved. And then also like they were having the same conversations. That's 100, I just did the math quickly.

179 years, we've been having the conversation about AI, right? Like humans being replaced, maybe longer. But at least in this instance, it's 179 years.

And so like you're pulling back to the first conversations. As far as we know, of like, are people going to be replaced by AI? Are they going to be replaced by humans?

This unholy thing, you know, a Frankenstein, a Mary Shelley Frankenstein type story. Just like Callie, we got to tell the masses. We're going to turn this into a short.

We got to tell the masses this is based on real events that I had no idea about. Like that's the first geek out thing. Second thing, are there more stories in this world?

Dilly or otherwise, I'm now seeing like your world come to life as you're talking in my mind of like, what if she has like this whole series of atrocities and oddities of like the people that Barnum like touch but weren't big enough to get noticed. And it's just all these like this anthology of sorts. You got me going.

[Callie]
Yeah, right. I know.

[Slava]
How many followers did Barnum create?

[Callie]
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think that's the kind of rabbit holes you fall down into, you know.

And then it's difficult to stay focused and not pull in other things as someone who gets exactly like when I when I came across that article and I thought I was like, oh, I'm going to look up this thing and there's going to be so many books about it, like fictional books or, you know, this has got to be like there's no way. And I'm sure I'm not the first person to use it in any way, shape or form in fiction in the right. But I was like, this is strange that it's not the that I don't know about this because I love this stuff.

And so it was very, very cool to be able to put that in. Like I was saying, I love history. That's a huge inspiration for me.

And it's so untouched in a lot of ways. There's so many strange, curious things. Also, you know, because, you know, in the past and there's individuals involved.

Well, nobody knows what their reasoning was. Nobody knows why he invented it exactly. We could speculate.

And that is where the fun begins. And then Dilly and Deliverance and her whole situation and who and how she was, you know, I just pulled a lot of different things. She's like I said, the characters kind of begin speaking to me.

I hear their voice kind of in the in some sort of dark sphere of my mind. You know, like it's not formed. It's a blank world and then a voice characteristic, something more begin.

And then I just foolishly start walking towards that in the dark. And then all of a sudden, the world begins to light up and there's things begin to take shape. And sometimes those voices turn into something.

Sometimes they don't. But I was really pleased to meet her. And at first I was like, is this a good idea?

Because having a female undertaker in the 1840s is not historically accurate.

[Jonathan]
Yeah, exactly.

[Callie]
I'm not saying that there weren't any because women were in just about every single profession on the planet, even back then, which nobody wants to talk about. They all want to say, but that's just not true. They just weren't very many of them.

And they were underrated for sure. But they were in just about every profession. And so I'm sure there was a female undertaker somewhere.

But that was kind of an interesting perspective to give. And I was really pleased with how it kind of wrapped up and her pursuing the oddities and being such a strange individual. Her desire to keep people at a distance and yet come across something that just infatuated her.

And do we not see that today? We have people proposing to their AI girlfriends, you know? And we all think, how is that even possible?

Like, why would you even do that? But they're also, they're not as strange as deliverance, hopefully. Hopefully.

Hopefully, right. But there's somebody who wants to keep the world and individuals at bay. But there's something so enticing about a soulless machine that they want to be close to.

And that is, you know, that's just, that's that whole, like, where, when, how does the soul come about and everything? That's an option that mankind's been after. I mean, that's the point of Frankenstein.

That's the point of a lot of different stuff and of that era. And I think it's, it was just a, I would love to do more in that world. I've thought about it quite a bit.

And there are a few other things that are not related to She Had Glass Eyes or Deliverance, to be honest, but are in that same vein. I love being able to write in that style. And I have to give props to 20 Hills because all the gals on that team for the editing, you know, I wanted to be way more historically accurate with the language, with the Victorian stuff, like some of the first drafts, you know, the sentence structure and the things.

And we had to find a good mix of the two to where, like you were saying, Jonathan, to where it's like, you got taken into the world, but you didn't get distracted by, you know, a bunch of words.

[Jonathan]
You did it.

[Callie]
Nobody uses anymore. And so, well, we had, and I have to give them a lot of credit for it. They really, we had to push full that relationship a little bit on some of that, as far as the sentence structure and the writing.

And, you know, there was a few where I was like, I don't care. The sentence is this way. Yes, it feels like a run on, but it's not because this is the type of, you know, verbs where you, this is, this is it.

Like, this is how it's going. And they're like, okay, well, but you can't, nobody knows what this word is. So find something that's a little bit more palatable.

And I'm like, okay, fine. So it was really, I'm just really proud of it. I'm really pleased.

And I can't wait to do more. And you guys know, as creatives, as authors, you know, you put something out into the world. There's the glowing moment of like, look, everybody.

And then it's like, okay, I can do better. Let's go. Let's go again.

[Jonathan]
How many cards did you play of like, I'm not changing this, that they let you keep?

[Callie]
Quite a few. Uh, and they were, they were cool with that. Like, there was, there, there was a few frustrating moments.

I was probably a little difficult for them to deal with. Because I can be quite stubborn.

[Jonathan]
The only author who's honest about her work.

[Callie]
Yeah.

[Jonathan]
I might have been a little difficult.

[Callie]
Um, and there were a couple things that definitely, I don't know. See if I could count. I'm not going to count.

Because I don't think I'd be entirely accurate at this point.

[Jonathan]
15, 20.

[Callie]
Yeah. 20,000. No, um.

[Jonathan]
Oh, wow.

[Callie]
No, I'm kidding. There were, there were a good handful where I was like, look, guys. I hear, I hear the beta readers.

I hear you. I'm not changing it. And that's just that.

And they're like, okay. They really didn't. They only pushed back on kind of this one section.

Um, that, uh. I guess we can talk. Can we talk all the details?

I don't know. Is that a good idea?

[Slava]
Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, cool, cool. This is the show about you.

[Callie]
Okay, okay. Well, I, you know, I don't know. I haven't gotten to talk about the book, you know, in a lot of depth.

I don't process in a lot of depth yet. Please. Too many people.

But there's a scene in Act Two. It's the beginning of Act Two. When they're in the village.

And like the village meeting basically is happening about bringing the surface to town. That was a lot longer. And they wanted me to cut it out entirely.

Because they're like, hey, we got to keep the pace. Like, da, da, da, da. And I was like, I hear you on that.

However, this is very. In writing, in being inspired by certain types of Victorian literature. It's all about those little vignettes upsetting the scene of like, yes, you are going to get an explanation of, you know, the farmer and his cottage.

And that's going to be only a little blip on the timeline. But you're going to get it. That's that that was the point.

Like, Victorians were looking at those kinds of details. And then I also consume on the regular a ton of British television. And so those, yeah, those scenes of the townspeople and their opinions and their thoughts.

Was like, super important to me. And so we cut it down. We found some good compromises.

And I cut out a bunch of because they're like, well, you know, we don't really need all these weird random characters with names to pop up because they're not really part of the rest of the story. And I was like, OK, heard. I understand you, right?

If you don't need to side quest too much, right? But the point was, I had to keep that scene to help set the stage for what would be coming after. That was super duper important to me.

And so we found a good compromise, if you will, on that. Where they're like, OK, keep that scene, but cut it in half. And I was like, OK, no problem.

You know, so that that kind of is a big part of it.

[Jonathan]
That's sweet. Is there any are there any other parts of the process that you want to share with us? Because neither of us is published authors, but we do know some of the people who listen are aspiring writers and things like that.

So any it doesn't even have to be advice, but just like this is what it was like. And here's how you might, you know, go about doing your own thing.

[Callie]
Sure. I you know, I'm I'm still I've been writing. You know, I've always enjoyed writing fiction and stories since I was young, like us all.

That's not anything new. I think we can just about everybody can relate to that. Kind of like everybody can relate to writing a song at some point.

And so and then I was pretty good at school. Not great. I was actually absolute rubbish at grammar.

Still am. That was that makes me feel better. I still am.

I told the publishers I was like, great. I can't wait to sign with you guys before I sign. I am horrible at grammar and I'm probably not.

Like if there if there's one big, heavy lifting thing you're going to have to do, it's going to be the grammar like you guys got. I don't know. You got to figure that out.

[Jonathan]
Appreciate the honesty.

[Callie]
But I'm getting I'm getting more, you know, as I write more, I'm getting better at remembering all the rules and my drafts always look better. So I guess I'll just say that for someone who is continuing to write, wanting to be published or not, you don't always have to pursue some kind of professional aspiration to call yourself an author or a writer. But if you, you know, if you do take the criticism, use that to constantly improve those first drafts, because the quicker you can write those first drafts, the quicker you can finish a story and actually get it done with a lot of confidence.

So like do it, you know, just do it. Just keep writing. Keep working on it.

And be careful what you're reading and ingesting while you're writing. Be honest with yourself. Find good critique.

Like my husband is my biggest critic. And so he's and also my biggest fan. Right.

But he's also very brutally honest when it comes to writing and and everything. And so he was able to really push me to to be better just in the whole process. And so I don't really have a lot of writing advice yet.

Maybe in another 10 years, I'll be able to just like, man, I'll just get in the. You guys will just be like, wow, wow, wow. But for now, it's it's more about it's very personal.

And I think that everyone kind of is. There's that stage where it's like you're writing advice and you're writing concept is personal. And then as you develop more and more, it you begin to see the pattern of the advice you can give others easier.

[Jonathan]
I feel like I'm terrible at grammar. And so like that is a mental block, right? Of well, I mean, I'd like to have a published book at some point.

So hearing it's like super encouraging to me to hear from you that, hey, some places are like they'll work with you. Like they they don't expect you to be the Stephen King when you walk in. Because they're going to work with you.

And so thank you for that. Even if no one else cares, that that helps me.

[Callie]
Good. Yeah. Good, good.

And that's the thing is the fear is the number one thing that stops us all, right? Is that that fear of being a failure, that fear of someone criticizing all too harshly or that fear of starting or that fear of all the different fears that can come into your place, like you said, become a mental block. And those things you have to peel away.

And God takes us all on a different quest to peel away those fears and give us confidence. And I think it has nothing to do with believing in yourself. It has everything to do with working on yourself and working on your craft and taking the advice and just starting.

And, you know, I enjoy a lot of authors who are, you know, really well dead and gone. And from my perspective, they just started, you know, and they didn't get to do maybe they did use different types of podcasts, you know, articles or interviews that we don't have access to anymore, but they they went ahead and started. But it's yeah, writing is is a strange, you know, cruel mistress.

It's strange.

[Jonathan]
Yeah. How do you carve out time to write while being a professional side quester?

[Callie]
I don't really. It's it's one of those things where I'm I'm a very I'm a ponderer. I like to marinate in an idea and I will sit on an idea or a project or a story for a really long time before I ever write anything down, sometimes even years.

And so then it's a little bit easier for me to then schedule and carve out the time to write. But it's usually only a couple hours at a time. I've had one incredible writing trip.

Absolutely incredible. And that was some of the most glorious days of my life, being able to actually carve out three weeks to write a story from beginning to end by myself on a trip. And that was that was insane.

I mean, if I could do that every at least once a year, I would. But, you know, you just you just can't. So you got to just find those little moments and put on for me putting on headphones and having a good playlist or even just putting on headphones to kind of zero me in on it.

Then that for a couple hours at a time, that's that's what I get.

[Jonathan]
So you took yourself on a writer's retreat. What was the the publishing or the the fruit of that trip?

[Callie]
It was you know, it hasn't been entirely realized. It got to be a like I said, just a well, a much better written draft because of all my different experience. And it's in the 1232 universe.

It's in the medieval history. It's book two of 1232. And and that was just oh my gosh, it was just awesome.

It was so great to be able to go and focus on that story and write the next series of it, the next chapter. And it I'm writing that story with my sister, Cheyenne. She and I started writing 1232, a time travel medieval fantasy story long, long time ago.

And we don't have to talk about that just yet because that's a whole other thing. But so now I need to get that draft to her. But she's also a busy.

She's a mom. She's got two kiddos. And she works very, very hard.

And she's got a lot going on. But she's an incredible writer. She's an incredible writer.

And so we have to kind of bounce back and forth on when each other can work on on a story together. So it takes time.

[Jonathan]
So you're co-authoring this with your sister?

[Slava]
I love that. That's awesome. So I want to talk about 1232.

But before that, to finish out this section of the podcast, I have a couple of questions I wanted to ask you, Callie. Sure. And these came about as I was listening to other interviews that you did.

So the first one is about being a Christian artist. In our world, as we find ourselves in the Christian strata of the world in 2025, and even before when I was growing up, and I'll be unapologetically brutal, I find Christian art is absolute garbage. It's sanitized.

There's those JPMs that you talked about, Jesus per minute, right? And it has to be so quaint, Pollyanna-esque, where there is nothing genuine. And those are also your words, which I really resonated with.

And so as a Christian, and as a Christian artist who has created these worlds that are not per se Christian, just like this podcast, we're not a Christian podcast, even though both Jonathan and I are Christians. We talk about books. And sure, our worldview informs how we talk about it.

But this is just a book podcast. This is a book club. So what would you say, or how would you articulate this?

How can we state Christian, orthodox, all that good stuff, but yet engage with evil and the more the grotesque stuff and horror and sci-fi, the worlds that some Christians shy away from, or they want to sanitize it to the point where it's meaningless? How do you do it? And how would you encourage others to do it if they're sitting here?

So it's a two-part question. If they're sitting here, hypothetical me, I want to write a story about horror, but I'm somehow unable to or hindered because I have fears or I'm not sure how to breach that wall where I can write something as a Christian, and yet it'd be genuine and maybe a little bit disturbing, but it's me interacting with the world. It's me not endorsing anything necessarily that I'm writing.

Does that make sense?

[Callie]
Yes, it does. And as I was figuring out the most succinct way to answer this question, there's a couple of different things we have to take into consideration. So when it comes to Christian art and the development of it over the decades in our Western world, something that really frustrates me in music and in entertainment in general is with the birth of the radio, we had a new concept of counterculture.

We had rock and roll, gospel, country music, acapella, all that was played on the same radio when it first came out. Same station, do you know what I mean? There was only one or two stations, and they had gospel, whatever their scheduling was in the morning, and then whatever else.

And then Elvis at night, I don't know. And then there began to be this separation in society where it was like, well, no, Christian needs to be over here on this station, and secular needs to be over here on this station. And we began this divorce between what is very human and natural is that all of us have a spiritual propensity.

We're a design, we have a soul. This is what we feel. And especially as artists, we're constantly tapping into that every time we create.

And so having this big divorce of the soul of saying, well, there's certain art that belongs in a certain situation, and there's certain art that doesn't, a lot of that comes down from greed and exploitation, exploiting Christian audiences and making them think that they have to listen to or read or ingest only Christian material. And what is interesting is I'm not entirely sure why people feel like they have to sanitize, like you said, or write these stories that are trying to talk about a very deep and personal conversion and conversation and make it so shallow.

[Slava]
Good word.

[Callie]
You know, I've struggled with that my whole life. You know, I mean, we always go back to the greats. George McDonald, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien. That's because those men were, they never denied where they had been and always were looking forward to where they were going.

[Jonathan]
That's a good word.

[Callie]
I think that we, in the American church and the Western world, we have taken the idea of where we've been and where we're going to a whole extreme of like, well, you know, well, you should be ashamed. And, you know, well, now everything's better, right? And don't worry about that.

And this is what good people do. And we've just started this whole marketing campaign and it's leaked into how the artist writes. So we've been bamboozled as Christian creatives and entertainers to think and be educated that, you know, how and what we write needs to be wholesome.

And I've just never been able to reconcile that with the brutality of the things that have happened in my own life, with people in scripture, with people in history. I mean, it is dark and it is gritty and it is real. And like you said, we don't glorify it.

We don't, as we'd say in Christianity, we don't glorify those things or we don't promote those things, but we allow them to be discussed. And there's always, always when you use tact and decorum, I'm somebody who greatly believes in that as that's where the line is for me. I will be continuing to write horror, thriller.

I've got a really dark tale that I want to tell that's kind of in that fable zone of it's more modern. And that is, it's going to be shocking because it's shocking to me. I struggle writing it because it's dealing with some really dark, heavy stuff, but I feel called to write it because I think that shining the light on that and redeeming the story or telling a fable, telling an anecdote of some kind is really important.

And then as far as how to be genuine with it, I mean, the problem is, the problem is y'all is nobody wants to be honest with themselves. Okay.

[Jonathan]
Say it again. Say it again, Callie.

[Callie]
Nobody wants to be honest with themselves. They don't want to be honest with the time that it takes to develop and be a good author, but they also don't want to be honest with themselves with what they truly struggle and go through. And everybody is looking for, escapism has gone just a little bit too far to where we'll even apply that to our writing, to our creative pursuits.

And that is, is not the point. And so when I think about the Christian literature and entertainment and kind of how it's created its own little bubble, I see that that's exactly what it's done. Instead of being this counterculture that's attracting people to it, it's instead created its own little bubble and world.

And yes, there is a lot of really shitty art in that bubble that, that, that be, you know, the people are like, well, you know, uh, Jesus told me to make it. And so it must be great. No, Jesus is calling potentially.

I mean, I don't know what that person's specific calling is from Christ. I shouldn't be that, uh, arrogant, but my point is, is that Christ calls us to holiness. And in that process, he teaches us things that help us become better people, right?

That's the point. And in that, we can always develop our language and conversation skills and relationships. And it's the same with the writing.

It's the same with art. You start at one place, you're called to do something and you get better as you go. And you're supposed to take that criticism and you're supposed to take that.

And so, um, I think one to answer your question, one, we've been very deceived on when it comes to like the Christian world and the Christian art and entertainment, and we've been very deceived. We've been told that it's better to make safe art because that's what God has called us to do. That's a lie.

I think, I think that's an incredible lie. Um, because I look at the life of Christ. I look at the stories he told.

I look at scripture and I say, I see nothing safe about it at all. Um, I see challenging and fears met head on and brutality and redemption and peace and love and justice. And those things are not safe.

Second of all, when it comes to people being able to write genuinely, it is that honesty. And I don't think that secular people are more or less honest. I think there's a lot of terribly shallow secular work out there, which is why we are seeing Christian authors really rise up and start Christian entertainment in general, really rise up and write things that are more, and we're hitting home with people better because we're finally being honest.

And then at the end showing that hope, you know, so that's, you know, that's the things you want to, you want to be a Christian. You want to follow Christ in your own life. And it is a personal relationship, right?

So what you're going through as a person is, is important. And then if you're called into the entertainment industry in any way, shape, or form, you want to share with other people, do your absolute best. Don't cut corners, you know?

And I'm still, I'm, I'm nowhere near where I want to be for my personal excellence as an author or as an entertainer. I have a long way to go, but I'm going to continue to pursue that. And people, even in the Christian sphere are given trophies for just being, oh, you, oh, you're a Christian.

Yay. You have something wholesome.

[Jonathan]
And you're popular.

[Callie]
And you're popular or you're this or that. And we, we need to, we need to continue to push back against that mode of, of congratulating people just, just because they crossed the finish line. That's like, well, were you first?

No? Okay.

[Slava]
Exactly.

[Callie]
I mean. You're second? Yeah.

The king of the losers.

[Slava]
Nice work, bro.

[Callie]
Yeah. You know, we, we, we've gotten so soft as a society and you don't have to be cruel. Like I said, that's where I draw the line.

You got to do it with decorum and tact. You don't want to be cruel, but you can be honest and you can be truthful and you can write and develop art that is light and dark, and it can absolutely be excellent and made with good intentions, but written in a way that resonates. And that is, it's a challenge.

I don't, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, it's just a challenge, but we got to keep pushing each other to do that.

[Slava]
Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

[Callie]
And that's, that's my very long winded answer.

[Slava]
I love that answer. That's a great answer. Are you enjoying today's SideQuest?

Make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an episode. We are available on YouTube and all major platforms, so you can listen to us anywhere. Now, back to the show.

[Jonathan]
So Callie, you're bringing up this, I have struggled with this, right? Like I have struggled with writing well and writing authentically in the world that I'm working on. So I, a little backstory for you, the listeners have heard this before here or there.

I worked on a book for seven years with a buddy of mine. I wanted to be the next Lord of the Rings. We've got 40 characters, three languages started, six continents, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We started from creation of the world through present day, which is estimated at 10 to 15,000 years. And the origin story for, and I'm going to use Tolkien races for conversational purposes, so people get an idea like, okay. So we've got the orcs, if you will, equivalent called the Veserath, which are, we'll say, a combination of elves and other humans.

But the origin of this people group is mystical, spiritual, and brutal at the same time. And I wrote this story. It's probably the best story I've written in this world so far.

But like, there's heavy rape in it. Like, right. And I just like, I've thought about this.

I'm like, at some point, my mom's going to read this and just like, how do I feel about that? Right. But it's authentic to like them, how they're birthing this nation of like evil.

Right. And there's a wrestling. There's a like, how do you use decorum?

How do you not glorify it, but like also truthful? Like I can't have a big bad evil in the future if I don't have a nation that tries to overwhelm and conquer that needs to be stopped. Right.

And this is just kind of like sharing my experience of not having an answer for this. For any of the listeners out there, like we need to talk about evil. Like Dinah was raped in the Bible as well as other women.

Like these are things that happen in the world. Not talking about it doesn't do anybody justice and simply continues to let them be collateral damage in history. And we can't do that.

Same with dismembering people, like killing swaths. Like you just, we have to talk about the fact that darkness exists, evil exists. You can't whitewash it.

Evil exists, period. Hardline. Like it just, it does.

Because I don't care if you're a Christian or not, like at some point in your worldview, something is declared as evil, which means that you agree that evil exists. We might not agree on what that is, but you agree that evil is a present reality. I don't really have a question there.

I just wanted to share that I also, as a writer, like, and that's not going to be the only story of something absolutely terrible happening in this world. But we have to push back. We have to write it.

[Callie]
Well, that's, there's two things that I'll say on that really quick is, you know, one, the comment about the mom really cracked me up because even though my mom is, you know, of course one of my biggest fans and I love her to death, you know, she was a little upset that she had glass eyes, did not end with a more, you know, a flourish of hope or a light. It kind of ends like, oh shit, you know, like, okay. And also kind of fun and quirky, you know, it's not like dark, but it's like, oh wow.

And she was like, oh, oh, I really wish that, you know, there was a better ending. And so that, you know, that that's tough. That's tough to deal with that kind of feedback for yourself or from others.

And then I think the most critical thing and pray about, like, seek out the truth in this and pray about this and anybody who's listening and you're in the same kind of position that Jonathan is in or myself or Slava, and you're, you're trying to wrestle with this. It's a wrestling period, the end. But whatever you write, make sure that the choice is clear for your characters, that your evil is choosing because, and that your good is a choice.

It's not about like, oh, they're so bad. So of course they do all this stuff. It's no, they are so bad because they choose to do these things.

And this is the consequence. If we learn anything from reading scripture, we learn when we're talking about, this happens in the Bible and this, that, and the other thing. And people will throw that in our face and say, yeah, isn't it a true book?

Like, why do you read that? And it's like, well, actually what the Bible is showing me is the choice that certain people made to do these horrible things and the justice that comes and the consequences that come. And so the consequences of the choices that your world and your culture of people that you're writing about make are going to be the consequences later down that everyone else has to deal with.

And so, you know, that is, that's exactly what you have. That's the challenge as a writer is making sure that that choice is clear. So if we go back to Tolkien, we go back to Lewis, we go back to all these things, okay, that inspire us.

And even the greats of, you know, even older literature doesn't even have to be Tolkien or Lewis, to be honest, because before that kind of divorce that we were just talking about, earlier, the, you know, Christians were the only place they could publish was in the secular sphere. Well, with air quotes like that, that's, that's the only, there was one publishing house that existed and that that was it. Like, it wasn't like go to the Christian publishing house or the secular one, you know, Dickens, A Christmas Carol was secularly published, if you will.

Christ was more in, you know, Christ was more in the, in the conversation than it is now. That's why we, you know, we've got to work on that. But it's always those choices, you know, the choice to use, to make a ring that is going to control other people is a consequence of the decision made by, you know, the different high elves that came to middle earth.

Like that's what makes it such a great story. That's what makes the world building make sense. And it's not just senseless violence or like, well, they're evil.

It's because each choice had a consequence and that's the consequence coming through. And that is how you connect those dots. So make your choice very clear.

And that is how you're going to show the good guys from the bad guys.

[Slava]
I love that. Yeah, that's a fantastic answer. And that's a perfect segue into talking about 1232.

I listened to the prologue and our protagonist has a choice to make, doesn't he? I'll tease that out. You guys should go listen to it.

I'll link it in the show notes, but talk about anything you want, like pitch the story of 1232, where this originated from, what it's about. Just kind of give us a little bit more than cliff notes, but give us.

[Jonathan]
Can I refine your question, Slava? I love that. So I haven't checked out any of it.

Slava has just told me like, hey, she did this thing. Check it out. I examined that there are 30 something episodes.

That's as far as I know. So I can be, I'll stand in as the scapegoat audience to like tease me, convince me to go check it out. I mean, I'm already going to.

[Callie]
Right. Well, 1232 is a time travel medieval fantasy and it's very different than She Had Glass Eyes. And it's once again inspired by history.

It's about a brother and sister with a very rocky relationship, non-existent one. Basically, who are from New Mexico, who get whisked back in time to medieval Wales in the year 1232, where they're confronted with the brutality of life and Christ. And they take with them the baggage of lessons they've learned from the American church to medieval times where real life has very complicated consequences.

And they meet a warrior priest and a prince disposed or deposed of his throne and a evil enchantress. So we get to talk about paganism and Catholicism. They don't shy away from how those two things were brutally clashing in that era.

And then we talk about broken relationships. And that's kind of where it comes from. And it's a fully narrated.

So like an audio book, you've got narration so you don't lose your place. It's fully dramatized, meaning you have over 40 different voice actors from all over the world being a part of it. And it's also got sound effects.

So you can get very immersed inside the world, whether you're in your car or listening to your headphones. Or shaving. Or shaving.

[Jonathan]
I was shaving and listening to this. Thanks a lot. That adds a lot.

[Callie]
Appreciate it. And then it also has an original score that was written by myself and my husband.

[Slava]
Very nice.

[Callie]
Yeah. And it's a story that started as a film script. We shot the trailer for it back in New Mexico back in 2009.

And we created a little short film and I got to take that to a couple of different homeschool conventions back home in New Mexico and inspire a bunch of other homeschool kids to start getting into film more. And then it sat with Cheyenne. My sister and I wrote the script.

And while we were taking the short film to a couple of different homeschool conventions, she's my older sister. And she thought that I was very silly for doing all of these things. But as I was telling her more about the story, she said, Callie, this sounds like a book.

And so I blame her for the book. So we started writing the book. And it took 14 years because we were traveling.

She got married. I got married. I was on the road full time playing music.

Had no time to write. And we were going back and forth trying to share documents and all these different things. This is back where we were literally mailing each other printed copies for edits or eventually hard drives and then eventually a shared Google Doc with internet.

But you know, so and then we got the book finished in 2020. So I was no longer touring. And the world slowed down and shut down.

So we were both able to finish it. And then I started optioning it out, pitching it. And I got stuck in exactly what we were just talking about.

Christian publishers liked it. But they're like, one of the main characters doesn't become a Christian in the end. And you've got a lot of paganism involved.

And you've got, you know, there's some blurred lines.

[Jonathan]
Yeah, bro. The real world exists.

[Callie]
There's some brutality and some blurred lines. And it's just not Christian enough for us. And then the secular world is like, oh, man, there's a lot of praying in here.

Yeah, exactly. I'm like, well, if you were in these positions, you would pray. And so I got stuck.

And I wasn't sure what to do. And I was confused because I do absolutely feel like the Lord gave me this story. And I do absolutely feel like it.

Both of us were like, it needs to be told. Like we've put so much work into it. And we feel its importance.

And 1232 is a story of courage and hope and heroes and villains. It's very different from Shadclaw's eyes. But we were really passionate about it.

And then I was stuck. And I was like, all right, we're going to have to self-publish. But this is a huge book.

And it's going to cost a lot of money and time. And you kind of don't really have either of those things. And then I was like, well, maybe I'll do the audio version.

You know, I'm in the studio more than I am, you know, editing drafts or whatever. And I've got experience, you know, recording my own albums and producing and all this kind of stuff. Maybe an audio book is where I can start.

And then there's a lot more male characters than there are females. And so I was like, I don't know how I'm going to do that with voice acting. And then my husband was like, why don't we do like an audio drama?

And we sat down. And in less than 20 minutes, we had cast the whole thing with just different people we knew from the film world and the music world and the voice acting and all the different things we've done. And I was like, dang, okay.

And I prayed about it. And I just felt this huge go from God. Like he was like, yep, I want it to go out.

So I'm looking at yet again, something that's going to take up a ton of time and cost a ton of money and how the heck to do it. And so I did a Kickstarter and it ended up being extremely successful. And I was very surprised by that.

And we were able to raise well over 20 grand and get the first season recorded and produced. And I had an incredible team, took a ton of people, a lot of hours. And we are all so proud of it.

And it got nominated last year for a best fiction audio drama with a pretty big Christian speculative fiction organization called Realm Makers. And so we got our little nomination there, which was awesome. And we were in line with people who've worked with Adventures in Odyssey, Focus on the Family, like we've got to be counted amongst them.

And it was huge. And we decided to release it podcast style, like episodic because of the nature of the editing, but also wanting to hearken back to the days of yore when we all used to tune in every week. That didn't work.

That didn't work super well metrically, but it did okay. And yeah, so if you have time, you enjoy audio books, you enjoy, you know, stories, you're looking for something that's definitely family friendly. It is not for children.

However, it is more or less child safe. You know, there's no sex scenes. There's no...

[Jonathan]
What kind of age groups are we talking here?

[Callie]
I mean...

[Jonathan]
Roughly speaking, you can't quote her on this.

[Callie]
Okay, 10 years old at the youngest. If you let your kids watch Indiana Jones or Pirates of the Caribbean or even Lord of the Rings at 10 years old, you can listen to this. And we have a lot of young listeners and we have a lot of adult listeners.

We have a wonderful swath of people. And the 30 episodes that you see is just season one.

[Jonathan]
Season one's 30 episodes?

[Callie]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's plenty of hours. Um, and then season two is, is not introduction.

Yes, no, it's 30. But it's not in production right now. Side quests, right?

But like, I don't know, like doing different things. But that's 1232. Such a joy to make.

And I love multimedia. And I love being able to do different voice acting and get into all those different modes. And I love film.

I mentioned many hours ago, whenever we started this, that I wanted to be a film student. And this was like producing a TV show. This is almost the same amount of like hours and work and time.

But we just didn't have the visuals to go with it. But the nice thing is, is we wrote the book. And so you get to read the description of and you're not.

Sometimes audio drama and radio drama still to this day can get very confusing. It's like watching a movie. It's like listening to a movie.

And you're like in another room and the movies, you know, the TV's on. And there's all these weird like pauses and things. And you can't picture it all together.

Or maybe you don't remember the different voices or so on and so forth. So having the narration and the descriptions that are happening in the book, I feel like makes it extremely well rounded. And the book has made a better audio drama, I think, than a book.

[Jonathan]
You cast it in 20 minutes. That's so impressive.

[Callie]
Yeah. And then just about everybody said yes. I think I just had one person say, no, I don't have time.

And I was able to pivot and find somebody else. It was amazing.

[Jonathan]
Yeah.

[Callie]
Amazing.

[Jonathan]
So actually, in one of the previous interviews I watched of you, you talked about wanting to go to film school. I went to film school. You didn't miss anything, honestly.

Except for the student loans. Like you're doing way better off.

[Slava]
Well, I feel like we are kindred spirits, the three of us. Because I also wanted to go to film school and be not an actor. Because even at a young age, I knew I couldn't act anything but myself.

And my range would be this small. But I loved film. I was the guy at 14 when DVDs came out.

I would watch the director commentary. I would watch film theory. So the same thing with graphic design.

I'm not the greatest artist. I have sketches in journals, hopefully nobody will ever see, that are okay. But I've also done audio editing for three years for this podcast.

I've now transitioned into learning video editing. And I'm only able to do that because my brother and my nephew were graphic designers. Brother were, because brother passed away.

Nephew still is. And observing them for I think like 17 years, I have it in my head what good art should look like or what a good design should look like. And I've been listening to audiobooks and radio dramas since I was a kid.

That's, you know, escaping what we talked about earlier in the episode and reading different kind of books. So I feel like the conversation today, we are really kindred spirits. It's like, you know, love film, love books, love sci-fi, speculative fiction.

I adore horror. Like when I was a kid, horror got me through a lot of tough times. I would get lost in the world of Stephen King, Dean Koons, Shelley, R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, all those things. And I think to be able to come full circle, for me personally, this is a personal note, and now be in a creative space where it's not just me and a buddy, say Jonathan or somebody else talking about it, but publicly talking about it and having an audience and growing that audience. Our audience has doubled since August, which is an amazing spike. Like literally double, you know, maybe 48 percent.

But it's a big jump for us. Meeting you, meeting Nicholas Cosvaro, meeting Abby. The way we met Abby is I put a poll on Instagram.

What's your favorite zombie book? And she answered. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting one.

And then I went to her Instagram account. I'm like, oh, she's a content creator. Let's get her on the show.

And all this just takes us on one more side quest and a different side quest. And here we are now.

[Callie]
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's similar to how I met Abby as well, is through Instagram and 20 Hills and just that whole group of people.

And I love that, you know, for all of its ilk and ills and how much I hate social media, it really does can do a good job of connecting us all and getting us to meet. Like if you use it as a tool, it's amazing. It's an absolutely incredible tool.

If you use it as, sorry, sirens. If you use it as just a, you know, you're just consuming or you're just using it as a vanity check of some kind, then that's when it gets really destructive. But if you can figure out how to use it as a tool, it's amazing.

And getting people to network and finding you guys, finding them, all this different stuff, it's, man, it's really cool. It's really cool. And, you know, that's a, it's interesting how we all have this propensity for film and these storytelling and doing all of this.

And then here we are in an age where, thank goodness, it's getting, writing and having the skill to tell a good story has not gotten easier, but the tools at our disposal, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I don't like AI or anything like that, but I do like the different types of tools that we have. For editing, for creating stories, I get, you know, our time will come as we continue to pursue different things, but I believe that I will be able to make films one day, but it'll probably be, yeah, really tight, small crew, you know, because you don't have to have everybody. But I look forward to that, to that day.

And I think that, you know, it's just important to keep working on, working on the writing and experiencing life. You know, that's the nice thing about SideQuest, right? Is you get more life experience.

Saying yes to those, those, those are very important because I was just talking to a young author last night and she's like, I just feel like I need more life experience to really write something. And I said, yeah, for the most part, that's true. Like there are certain things that you can absolutely imagine and you don't have to have experience in order to write something very poignant and beautiful.

But at the same time, the more opportunity you have for grabbing life experiences, the better. Because that means you're engaged and that's how you're going to write good dialogue. That's how you're going to write a good character is that you're engaged in life, you know, so.

[Jonathan]
Yeah. I think it also makes writing easier too, because then you're not making it up. You're like, oh, well, this is what I experienced.

[Slava]
Yeah, because this short story that I'm writing also, seven years writing a short story, it's autobiographical. It's something that I witnessed as a kid and it's, you know, ripe for a horror novel or a horror short story. And it's, you know, all sorts of sundry reasons why I have not been able to finish it.

But, you know, maybe one day and maybe one day soon. But one thing I wanted to touch on, you mentioned just earlier in your response is, you know, AI and social media. I think it's how we use it because I work professionally on social media, creating social media content.

And I am an early adopter, so I like to try out new technologies. So we, for example, we use AI for some of our episode art. We don't use it to create the episode art, but we use AI to alter it to have a particular kind of look.

So if you go to our YouTube channel, which right now it's only audio, January, which will be in the past when this airs, January is when we will have video, would have been, how do I say that in English? There's gonna be video, there'll be video on the YouTube channel. But if you go back through our history on Spotify or on Apple or on YouTube, the channel art and some of the thumbnails and episode art, it's clearly AI.

But it's also real photos that are in the public domain that I've used AI to alter to make it look like our brand. And I do that because I also have a life and a career and two dogs and a wife and other books that I'm reading and just stuff that I have to do. So I think the point is, and I agree with you, I also hate social media and a lot of AI slop that comes on when you're watching videos or you're watching Instagram, you're doing scrolling when you're bored, which I do sometimes.

And I can see how it is just damaging to us as humans. So I think, I'm not trying to create a counter argument, I'm agreeing with you, but as I'm agreeing with you, I'm also like, well, it's all in how you use it, right? Because if you use it to cut corners and you use it just to put crap out there, take no pride in your work, then that's when you get where we are today.

And I think it touches back to what you said earlier where it's all about, what's the phrase you used? Escapism. It's all about escapism.

And yeah, I read Stephen King to escape. But if it was the only thing that I ever did, if I turn on the TV or read a book or turn on social media only to get a little dopamine and move on.

[Callie]
Yeah. I mean, that's, exactly. I mean, using a tool is, yeah.

And how you use it is important. Keeping it sharp, keeping it good. I think, I can't help but mention this is a little bit of my own personal rant when it comes to resorting to using AI.

[Jonathan]
So like- We love a personal rant.

[Callie]
Okay. Here you go. Here's my hot take on the reason why I think it's okay if you are a creative person and you're having to use AI to do some of the heavy lifting is look, we all can't be good at everything, okay?

That's just not going to happen, right? And if you're somebody who's multi-talented, like, woohoo, bravo, get out of the way. Most of us aren't, you know?

Most of us are having to, you know, like, yeah, this isn't for you. Most of us are maybe good at writing or maybe good at drawing or maybe good at copy or, you know, whatever. And we're not good at all the things.

And then I find it so frustrating that in the age of social media, when people just can't wait to share their art, they're extremely hard to get a hold of and to get a real quote from and to work from. So I have to use AI sometimes because I cannot get a hold of a freaking artist on Instagram or through their email or they don't even have a website or whatever. And like the reason why- Ironic, exactly.

Like the reason why so many of us are having to resort to using some of these tools is not because we want to cut out real artists and not because we want to do anything, you know, put corners in that way. It's because you guys are either charging way too much for a skill you clearly do not have or you're impossible to get a hold of and you don't do your damn job and read your emails and get back to me. You know, I don't have time.

Everybody has time to check their email. I check my email every single day, you guys. And I cannot believe- She's checking it right now.

I am checking my email. You can't tell. I've been reading my emails all morning.

I am caught. Well, no, just kidding. But like, it's just crazy to me that the lack of professionalism in artists and getting a hold of artists and graphic designers and sketch artists and filmmakers and musicians and all this kinds of stuff, the lack of professionalism is what has really in my mind led to people resorting to AI.

[Slava]
Callie, I'm telling you, we are kindred spirits. I have the same rants every damn day and Jonathan just looks at me like, you know, I heard this before. But yeah, I can't stand certain things and unprofessionalism is one of those things.

Like as somebody on many of my side quests has worked at restaurants, this is an example, has run restaurants even as a young person, has washed dishes, cooked on the line and ran the front end of the restaurant and then, you know, did orders for the food. I understand the pressures. I understand customers can be absolute unreasonable douchebags.

But I also know when I'm sitting down, if it's just the natural chaos of a restaurant life that's making my food late or cold or bad or if somebody's just completely fucking up and not doing their job. And that drives me up the wall.

[Callie]
Yeah.

[Slava]
So I condone your rant. Your words are accepted. This is good.

This is a good rant. Your words are accepted.

[Callie]
Right, yeah, I accept it. Okay, cool, cool. I know, I get really fed up with that in a lot of different ways.

But yeah. So I mean, I'm not saying it's everybody's fault, but it is just a little bit.

[Slava]
Yeah, no, it's a collective fault. Like if everybody just did 1% better, each time they did something, we wouldn't be here. But I wanted to ask before we start wrapping up, I have one more final question for you.

But as we wrap up our little chat about 1232, how can people support it financially? Where can they go to give money for second season?

[Callie]
Right, all right, nice. I like that. That's a good question.

So audio-epic.com is the website. You can also find information for She Had Glass Eyes, audio-epic.com. That's where you'll find my author bio.

You'll find the site. And you'll also find a donation button there that you can if you want. And you can send us a note and say, hey, I want season two.

And you can throw in five bucks, 10 bucks, 100, 2,000, I don't care. And whatever you feel like doing.

[Slava]
Start at the high end and work your way down.

[Callie]
Exactly, 10,000 cap and then go down. And yeah, let us know that you want season two. I mean, enjoy the first season.

Dive in. We've got Arthurian legend involved. We've got time travel.

So if you're somebody that grew up enjoying stories like A Knight's Tale and Merlin from BBC and all these different kinds of fun, fantastical, quirky little humorous stories, then I think you're really going to enjoy Pearl 32. And we wrote it for you if that is your profile there. That's where the algorithm takes you.

And I hope you enjoy it. And yes, if you want season two, you got to tell me. People got to tell me they want it.

And I will absolutely get the gang back together and make time to finish it. The nice thing is, is it's over halfway finished with the production of season two. Like we've got all the voice acting down, all the episodes, but we're just, we're waiting on a few more things.

One of my wonderful, wonderfully talented editors and his name is Casey Caviero. And he, you know, I want to pay him well because he is amazing. He does such an incredible job.

And that's, you know, that's just the nature of it. But that's how you be pro.

[Jonathan]
Season two's over halfway done. Yeah. You guys, I haven't even watched it yet.

But like, if you, it's just so hard to do film. It's so hard to do production. Yeah.

Go give her five bucks. There you go. Give her a dollar.

Like, what's the rough number you need to finish it? 10 grand. 10 grand?

Yeah. Guys. Not bad.

10 grand. You could come up with 10 grand. Let's all go panhandle for the afternoon.

[Callie]
Yeah, there you go. We'll probably make five. I could panhandle for the afternoon.

[Jonathan]
I believe that. You'll probably make more than Slav and I because you can play music. So you can just, you know.

But you guys, go drop some cash over there to Callie. Help her get season two out the door. Yeah.

Like even a couple bucks.

[Callie]
Yeah. And that's, and thank you for that. Appreciate that, fellas.

Yeah, absolutely. That's the cool thing about it. And yeah, I'm always, I'm always working.

And always, there's always a portion of what I take in from my work that goes to my art. And you know, you just, you hack away at it. And.

[Jonathan]
Always.

[Callie]
Always.

[Slava]
Yeah. And we'll drop your socials in the show description. We'll drop the donate page.

We'll do all that for you. Because I think, unless you want to call out your IG page, we'll put it on the description.

[Callie]
Yeah. Yeah. At Callie Sue.

My middle name is Sue, S-I-L-U-X. Very cool. You'll need to see it to know how to spell it.

Sounds good.

[Slava]
So as we wind down, because we don't want to take up too much of your time. And you've been gracious with your morning for us.

[Jonathan]
Yes, thank you.

[Slava]
So we appreciate it. And the many interviews that we watched and the conversation we had today, you are, what I appreciate about you as a person is like your tenacity that you have for all the side quests that God has put you on. A two part question as we end here.

Like, how do you keep yourself motivated with all the changes coming your way? All the stuff that you have to juggle. And then how has your faith?

Because we talked a lot about being Christians and being in the world and creating stuff. So all the side quests. What has motivated you and kept you grounded?

And then how has your faith played into that?

[Callie]
Right. Well, you know, it's a two part question with one part answer, to be honest. And that is, you know, my faith and my worldview and my relationship with Christ is the number one motivator.

[Slava]
There it is.

[Callie]
I know that's it. You know, I don't have anything more to say because you talked about that call to holiness. We talked about that call to excellence.

We talked about the traumas and the difficult things we go through in life. What's the one thing that keeps us going? Where is my confidence placed?

And that's in the son of God, Jesus Christ. King of Kings. Lord of Lords, he's coming back, y'all.

You better watch out. You know, you better put your shit together because the thing is that, you know, not only because, oh, something scary might happen and I need a lifeline. It's more about that.

Exactly that. Every day motivation. I have dealt with a lot of darkness in my own personal life.

And it is only, only by the tools that Christ has given me, that hope, that faith, that love, that forgiveness that I can even get up in the morning and try again. Because we have all been knocked down, whether it's creatively or emotionally or physically. Dealt with a lot of different health things in my life.

And it has been, I've been angry at God. I've been thankful. I've been lost.

I've been on my knees in tears. I've been rejoicing on the mountaintops. It doesn't mean that we're not going to go through all those ups and downs.

But every time I go through those ups and downs, there's a rock, there's a line. There's a, there's always that. There's always that.

He's always there, always. And I have been so, I could, and we don't have time for any of this, but know that I have gone from moment to moment. And I can tell you all the different times the Lord has been faithful in my life.

And it's been very small things to very, very big things that are very obvious. And I am so grateful and so blessed by that. 1232 is a testament.

She had glass eyes is a testament. We all are a testament to that. What I'm doing right now in this crazy epic side quest of having this, you know, this music venue and bar and that God is faithful through all those things.

And the reason why you want to know him and have a relationship with him and welcome that kind of influence in your life is so that you can see all those unique things too. And so that you can wake up every day and be like, damn, what's God going to do today? This is wild.

I'm going to be okay. And that is why you need a savior. Not just because of the end of the world, but that's kind of a big one.

I don't know what we're going through right now, but it is.

[Slava]
Yeah, that's beautifully said. And I'm reminded of what Peter wrote to the early church and the early church, obviously, you know, facing backlash and oppression on multiple sides. And he says, you know, that you have, and I'm paraphrasing, he talks about the hope that you have and how to share that hope or talk about that hope or answer questions.

And also before that, he's talking about the difficult things the church is going through. But at the center of this little piece of his letter is set apart Christ as Lord. And that changes everything.

So I think you capture that beautifully.

[Jonathan]
I also see you waking up in the mornings and going like, damn, what's God going to do today?

[Callie]
Yeah, yeah, we'll go back on that berserker thing for just a moment. Okay, nice segue. Yeah, yeah.

That's the kind of mentality when you're somebody who's dealt with, you know, depression and all these dark things. And then you get a second chance at life and you get this, you get great people around you. And yet you still have to really fight for your will and fight against the anxiety and the depression and the darkness.

And it absolutely is, you gotta put on your armor. And for me, I have to take on those challenges head on. And it's that, it's like, it's this weird kind of like berserker against darkness thing.

Like I'm terrible at video games, but I can play the ones where you just get a giant weapon and just hack slash your way through.

[Slava]
There you go, yep.

[Callie]
You know, and yeah, I guess if I played, if I had time to do D&D, there would be bunches of variations of a berserker. Calgary berserker.

[Jonathan]
Hey, there it is. One of my favorite verses is Exodus 14, 14, where it says that the Lord is a warrior. And just like, that's it, that's the statement.

That's the thing. So I love that. So especially like the, and we didn't even talk about this.

So maybe we'll just have to have you back on, whether or not we read another piece to have you back on, just in general, it's like an author chat of just like, what do you do as a creative who struggles with darkness? Right, like Slava has his story, I have mine, like you mentioned depression. The Lord helped me overcome depression.

Literally, we were in a Jonah season. And we were not on talking terms. You know, I used we in air quotes, right?

And he came to me and I was watching Game of Thrones and he said, there was a line at the end of, I don't know, whatever season it was. And he, the character's like, a lot can happen between now and never. And he just popped this like bubble for me.

And he's like, but in like hearing that line, I was depressed in a bad state. And he's like, he breathed hope on it. And he's like, if you fast, I'll take away depression forever.

And like, it's just not a, depression's not something that gets to go away, right? Like that's not what we're taught in the world or whatever. But I similarly, I'm a fighter.

I believe in growth. I believe in developing ourselves. I also believe in stark honesty with yourself, even when it's not comfortable.

And I was like, well, I can just be depressed, which is like this wet blanket that ruins every part of your life for an indeterminate amount of time. Or I can fast and take a chance at this being real. If I fail, like I still have depression, but like, whatever.

I screwed the fast up every day. And he was still gracious enough to like remove it for the rest of my life. I don't want to kill myself anymore.

I love myself. I enjoy, he removed anger, bitterness, and a whole swath of other things. And so I love to hear from other artists who have, have or are having to fight back darkness because it's an honor to know that we're all in this together.

And to know that even though we might have moments where it feels like we're alone, you're not alone. And so this is kind of just a shout out to all the listeners. If you're dealing with something like this, like you're not alone, you have us.

We might not know you personally, but it is a battle that we do together as a family.

[Callie]
Absolutely. And that's the best part about being spiritually connected and looking at each other as brothers and sisters in Christ and in good spirit is that we can pray for you and it absolutely changes things. Absolutely changes things.

But I really appreciate you guys. And yeah, this has been a great chat. And yeah, I look forward to more.

Thank you so much for reading She Had Glass Eyes and also for checking out 1232. Really appreciate that. Thank you.

[Jonathan]
Thank you for coming on the show. We'll catch you guys next time on SideQuest. And until then, enjoy your side questing.

I have a favor to ask you. If you like what we're doing, the simplest way to support the show is to hit subscribe. In return, we'll keep leveling up and we'll listen to your feedback and read authors that you suggest.

And of course, we'll take side quests along the way. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time.