A phone conversation with Walt Boyes - By N.L. Belardes

I talked to Walt Boyes on the phone today. I thought he wasn't going to write back, so I just dialed him up in Chicago, not knowing if he was unreachable or not.

He was reachable. In fact, he informed me that he sent me an email that I never received. The unfortunate reality of firewalls and crazy email systems is just weird sometimes. We had a good conversation. He agreed that the podcast could have more singing and dancing, and that he does indeed write fiction. "I've had a short story published and I'm on a board with a Science Fiction journal." I found a link on his personal homepage.

I told him about my making Jim Pinto a character in my latest work. "Oh do you know about Tuckerization and red-shirting?" he said. "There's two ways you can write about people. Remember all those guys on the enterprise on the away missions that wore the red shirts?"

"Oh yeah, they always died."

"Exactly. You can write about them that way. Or Tuckerization; Tucker was an author who always wrote people he knew into stories to memorialize them..."

I'm thinking the Tuckerization method would work in this case. I do plenty of red-shirting in my other works.

"You need to talk to Frank Williams over there at Ecco. He's with your competition. He knows Pinto real well."

I was thinking just get to know Pinto myself. I mean, why not? I'm not making him into a mad scientist. No red-shirting, I swear... But I think I will track down Frank Williams just for the fun of it... the goose chase is on...

Walt Boyes is a cool cat. He's a former Bananaslug from Santa Cruz and was great fun to talk to... we talked podcasts, blogs, fiction and plan on talking more after the first of the year...