Episode 785 is part of our 15th Anniversary special and includes an interview with Ann Leckie, the first assistant editor of PodCastle. This is a transcription of the interview.

 

Matt Dovey

Hi Ann! Thank you for coming on the podcast and again, first time a long time I think.

Ann Leckie

Thank you for having me! It’s been ages.

Matt Dovey

Yes. Well, I mean, you finished editing what? 2009? 10?

Ann Leckie

That sounds right. That sounds right.

Matt Dovey

Yeah, I think it was. It was Dave and Rachel… So many editors. Yes, it is about then. So, it has been well over a decade. So, thank you for coming back on. So, we first and foremost, would you like to introduce yourself for those listeners who might not have been around for your editorial run.

Ann Leckie

So, I’m Ann Leckie. I am of course famous for being the first assistant editor of PodCastle. That’s not what I’m famous for. I’m actually famous for having written Ancillary Justice, but it is true. Rachel Swirsky was the first, she was the founding editor of PodCastle and I worked as her assistant editor, reading slush, basically. And so that’s who I am. In fact, at one point, this was several years ago, it was after Ancillary Justice had come out. And I was at a bead store, actually and the nephew of the person who owned the bead store turned out I didn’t realise, it was a PodCastle listener. And at one point, he was like, “oh, there’s somebody’s name Ann Leckie on PodCastle” and I said “Do you not recognise me?” And he said, “What?” and I said, “Welcome to PodCastle. I’m Ann Leckie” And he went, aaaaah! like literally started screaming. And for a long time, that’s what people knew me for. Like, nobody knew that I wrote stories. They knew that I was a host on PodCastle

Matt Dovey

I’ve not had that moment. Yeah, I look forward to that.

Ann Leckie

It’ll happen.

Matt Dovey

I don’t blame them for not recognising you, given that we’re an audio market to be fair.

Ann Leckie

True, But I would talk all the time! We would have conversations and stuff. A lot of people would recognise my voice, which is one of the fun things, yeah.

Matt Dovey

How are things then? Just generally.

Ann Leckie

They’re doing great. They’re doing great. It’s a little cold and chilly here you know, waiting for spring but…

Matt Dovey

We are in the throes of winter around here. It’s been snowing today for the first time.

Ann Leckie

Oh no!

Matt Dovey

There’s the promise of spring on the corner. I should hope.

Ann Leckie

Yeah, I think so. At least you’ve got those like the snowdrops and the crocuses and stuff promised.

Matt Dovey

So, why did you choose the story you chose today, apart from the fact that it’s an absolutely brilliant piece of mad genius.

Ann Leckie

It’s a brilliant piece of mad genius!

Matt Dovey

Isn’t it?

Ann Leckie

It really is. It’s now… I’m gonna have to ask because you’ll have to edit this out. Please edit this out. It’s the Benjamin Rosenbaum, right? (Editor’s note: sorry Ann!)

Matt Dovey

Yes, it is the Benjamin Rosenbaum

Ann Leckie

Ok, I wasn’t sure because I gave two stories. And then it was like What story did I pick?

Matt Dovey

The Benjamin Rosenbaum by Benjamin Rosenbaum?

Ann Leckie

I love the title. First of all the title is amazing. Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’, by Benjamin Rosenbaum. By Benjamin Rosenbaum

Matt Dovey

Exactly.

Ann Leckie

I love this sort of alternate reality. I love the sort of, it’s just funny and charming, and it’s such a neat alternate world that he’s made even though it’s clearly there to be charming and funny and kind of a little thought experiment. And interestingly, this is kind of funny – I know when we were emailing back and forth – and I was asked to provide a couple of stories just in case Rachel’s and mine overlapped and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not going to happen.’ And y’all are pretty… Thought that was pretty funny. And apparently Rachel said exactly the same thing when she was asked that. But our, we are good friends, Rachel and I, and Rachel’s of course an amazing writer. Our tastes don’t always line up. I mean, sometimes they do, but there are ways in which our aesthetics are very different. So after a couple of years as the Assistant Editor, Rachel said, let’s have a week where you pick this week, a month where you pick all the stories. And so I was like, Can I even pick ones that you rejected? Rachel hadn’t wanted that story. I was like, I love this story. And Rachel was like, it’s really good, but I don’t want to run it. And I was like, Okay, it’s my month. I’m going to run this story. And it’s not a question of whether the story was good enough. Because obviously, it’s a fabulous story. But I think it’s a really good demonstration of how an editor’s individual taste actually plays a really strong role. And I’m sure you’ve seen this, where there’ll be an incredible story and you’ll be like, this is a really good story. And I don’t like it very much. Right? Or it just doesn’t grab my heart really hard. But wow, that’s a really great story. And part of being an editor is actually using your personal tastes to sort of guide what you’re choosing, which in some ways can make a writer trying to sell stories sort of despair, like how can I possibly meet an editor’s personal taste? But also, when one editor says no, that doesn’t mean that another editor isn’t gonna go ‘Oh!, this is a story I’ve been waiting for, for so long’. But no, I love this story. I just love how funny it is. I love how positive… I’m gonna say positive and that’s the wrong word.

Matt Dovey

Manic energy I think isn’t it? it just gives us a happy feeling.

Ann Leckie

It’s very very compassionate toward you know, it’s antagonists. It’s just, and I love the mechanics of the ending, which is very much everything’s just falling apart. What can I do? I climb you know, I go up. I really, it’s a lovely ending. And I just I really, I love the world building. I just think it’s a neat it’s a neat, neat story.

Matt Dovey

It’s you can really tell just how clever Ben is from reading the story – just a throwaway lines in it and I could never conceive of some of these things he just dashes off on the back off of a sentence.

Ann Leckie

Oh that’s fabulous and I know when back when I had time in my schedule, and there was the plague and I would go to Wiscon he would do, like, let’s build a world panel and he’s just hilarious. He’s just… He’s so funny.

Matt Dovey

So sharp

Ann Leckie

Yeah, he’s just amazing. I know he has a novel out recently and I think I really need to pick it up, because I just love his work so much.

Matt Dovey

So, you’ve sort of spoken a bit there about how you and Rachel had differing tastes, because yes, you and Rachel both did say there’s no chance was overlapping, which I did find quite funny. Did you sort of plan to play that into a strength then between the two of you?

Ann Leckie

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And also, I mean, we each trusted each other’s judgement enough that even if my aesthetic wasn’t the same as hers, if I saw something come in that was really high quality. That was her aesthetic and not mine. I knew she’d want to see that. Or something that was very much my aesthetic, and really well done, but she probably wouldn’t take I could stand up and say, I really liked this.

Matt Dovey

Please?

Ann Leckie

You know, and sometimes the answer would be yes. And sometimes the answer would be no, you know, that’s life.

Matt Dovey

Yeah, the slush pile is made of hard choices. I mean, we open… we’re open at the moment, and we will probably get around 1000 submissions, and we need to choose like 15 or 20 you know?.

Ann Leckie

Exactly. And so many of those submissions will be so good.

Matt Dovey

Yeah, there is nothing you can pick out as a flaw or a reason why not. Just for whatever reason. That day, that time. It just didn’t quite land right for you personally, and you can’t. I spent a long time when I was slushing really second guessing myself like, ‘Well, who am I to decide this?’ Well, I’m the person who has been trusted by the higher ups to make these decisions. And at the end of the day, you’ve only got your own taste.

Ann Leckie

That’s exactly right. And in fact I’ve told this story a few times, but I don’t know if you’ve heard it when I first started slush reading. For PodCastle. I was I was trying to sell stories, right? I was very much a sort of a beginning writer sending out my own stories on submission. And I had heard like a lot of this fear that you have to grab your… the reader like in the first sentences that that nobody will read to the end of your story. If they’re not and I was like, that’s not fair. That is not fair. And I am here for all the submitting writers and I’m going to read every submission all the way to the end – that lasted for about a year which is longer than it probably should have. But one of the things I discovered is that with the volume of stuff coming in, first of all, you have to cut very quickly. You have to say I’m not going to keep going with this. And also, nine times out of ten you can tell the first page or so if it’s something you’re going to take for whatever reason there are many, many reasons why you might say I’m not going to finish reading this by the end of the page. And, so, that’s a thing where, like you say you can only take a certain number of them. You have to cut somehow you can’t spend forever thinking about what you’re going to take because you got to fill up that month’s schedule, right? And so, at a certain point, you just have to kind of go by instinct, and that’s, I mean editors are doing that. And that’s how that is. But the good news is, maybe some editors gonna make a different, a different call.

Matt Dovey

You never know when you’re going to find the editor who just for whatever reason, completely vibes with your work and you’re made.

Ann Leckie

Exactly.

Matt Dovey

So, you were, as you’ve mentioned, founding assistant editor along with Rachel, who will give us, has given us the story of how everything got started. Can you tell us a bit about what it was like in those early days? Sort of getting the castle off the ground and flying through the air for the first time?

Ann Leckie

It was super interesting. It was the first time that I had seen from the back. I mean, I knew in theory what happened with a publication or with a podcast. And I didn’t I hadn’t ever actually like gotten my hands in the actual mechanism. And it was really kind of fun and interesting. At first it was like woohoo, I’m working on a podcast! I’m… well, rejecting stuff isn’t as fun as accepting stuff. It was much, much funner to pass stuff up to Rachel like, ‘Look at this cool thing that I found’ and ‘oh, I’m gonna have to send a rejection for these’. And, I spent some time thinking about what my rejection note was going. I was like: that was really fraught. Right finally once I wrote it, that it was done. And I could just send it out. But at first I was like, ‘oh, and I’ve been in these people’s shoes. This is hard’. I really want to say I feel for you please keep writing but I know I can’t, you know, just individually go and, and you know, give someone some chocolates and pat them on the head and say it’s okay, you know, just keep playing. So that was kind of fun, but it’s really interesting. To be on the other side. And of course, it took a little while at first, we had stories I think the first thing we ran was Peter Beagle was the first. So we didn’t have slush open. We had chosen a few stories and then opened slush. And so it took a little bit for that to kind of get running. And it was it was really interesting. The more and more stories came in. The larger volume the more interesting it was. It was really a lot of fun.

Matt Dovey

What was your sort of volume of stories like back in the day?

Ann Leckie

I’m sorry?

Matt Dovey

How many sort of stories did you get in at a time back in the day?

Ann Leckie

Oh, offhand I don’t know. Because I would just go into the email box every day. We didn’t use I think you all are using…

Matt Dovey

We are on Moksha now.

Ann Leckie

Ah you are on Moksha now. We weren’t – they would just come into a Gmail box.

Matt Dovey

Yeah.

Ann Leckie

And I had keys to the Gmail inbox and I would just tag things right, and I would reject the things that I didn’t think Rachel needed to see. And then I would tag for her to see the things I thought and then give a note if there needed to be a note. And so, it was very, and sometimes stuff would come in and the inbox would just be crammed with stuff and I would just go down down, down. So it was very different. I bet it’s easier with Moksha because you can probably filter stuff more easily. It was actually reading slush for PodCastle, When I won, who was it? Oh shoot. I know him he runs The Submission Grinder.

Matt Dovey

Oh, David Steffen.

Ann Leckie

David Steffen. This is terrible. Very nice young man. And he had a, he, he may still – he had a fair amount of very short pieces that had been published. And so, he had a habit of submitting a short piece immediately after he had been rejected. Right. Which I suspect with Moksha you can set up like,

Matt Dovey

Yeah, we don’t actually but you can do.

Ann Leckie

Yeah. Well, mostly it’s not a, it’s not a thing mostly right? But there was one particular …so Ferret Steinmetz had been rejected very quickly *by me*. I had rejected him in like 20 minutes. And he’s, he said to make himself feel better. He was going to offer a pizza to anybody who was rejected faster than 20 minutes, and it was not long afterwards when I had spent like, half the day going through the box because it had really piled up. And I was going through and going through and going through and going through going through and I rejected something by David Steffen and got all the way through and I was like, ‘Oh, look at that empty inbox!’ And bing! from David Steffen.

Matt Dovey

Yep.

Ann Leckie

All right, David. And so I opened it up, and it was very short. Otherwise, I couldn’t have done this. It was very short. And I was like, Rachel is not going to want this. And I rejected it less than five minutes after he had submitted.

Matt Dovey

Ooh hoo!

Ann Leckie

And so he was – fair, he bought him some pizza.

Matt Dovey

Fair enough!

Ann Leckie

And then we ran into each other at Worldcon and I’m like, I really did not mean to do that to you in quite that

Matt Dovey

You don’t want it to come across as brutal! but the fact is it takes five or 10 minutes a lot of time to sort of read and make the decision anyway and if it feels like it took a week or something – it’s only because it’s sat there for a week not being looked at.

Ann Leckie

Right, yeah, I mean why me people? Wait, I know one of the nice things about doing online submissions is back in the day. I remember when I walked up hill to school both ways in the snow

Matt Dovey

Self-addressed Stamped envelope!

Ann Leckie

Yes! and you would wait for weeks. Weeks!

Matt Dovey

I got in just at the death of postal submissions, just as online was becoming the norm and I’m great especially over in the UK when most of the magazines are in the US – I cannot imagine.

Ann Leckie

Overseas submission holy cow. And now like something doesn’t come back within a few days and people are like what is up with this? What is up with this? And I’m like ‘oh you children’

Matt Dovey

And ironically enough – you’re probably on David’s Submissions Grinder looking at the graph to work out if you’re past the first round of rejections. Have you seen his Submissions Grinder?

Ann Leckie

He set that up, I think after I had sold Ancillary Justice and of course my submission process is very different now. But I remember back in the day it wasn’t submission grinder it was there was another site – they started charging which is why David started Submissions Grinder

Matt Dovey

Exactly. I can’t remember the name of it now but submissions grind was wonderful and David’s always – He just won a FIYAH award from sorry, Ignyte Award from FIYAH for community service for the submissions grinder. It’s a wonderful platform.

Ann Leckie

As always, although those graphs and stuff the other site had that too, where you can see how many other people on the site had submissions and how long they’ve been in how long it average was. And you could really obsess over that really nicely.

Matt Dovey

Yeah, really reading the tea leaves.

Ann Leckie

Yeah. But it’s a it’s a good resource because then you can say, Oh, well, I shouldn’t have heard back within a month. It’s normal. There’s 73 Other people ahead of me in the queue.

Matt Dovey

It’s Analog, it’s gonna be another nine months. It’s fine.

Ann Leckie

Exactly. Yeah.

Matt Dovey

How do you think working at PodCastle changed you and your writing because I just read Raven Tower, and it did strike me as fitting the entire novel is narrated to the protagonist.

Ann Leckie

Indeed it is. Although I wasn’t thinking of it in podcast terms, but

Matt Dovey

I wonder if it’s sort of a subconscious. You know, the voice has sunk in.

Ann Leckie

It might well be it might well be. I found that just first of all, it was super fun to narrate episodes and to host episodes. That was just that was cool. Reading slush generally really gave me a feel for what might or might not be working in a piece and what might or might not need to be done to make it work better for me. I do think that you’re reading entire manuscripts while it was exhausting. It really did show me a lot of things about how structures of pieces were and weren’t working or where people would go wrong. And and I find that extremely important. And I do think a lot of times people say ‘Oh, baby writers ought to read slush’, and I agree. I think it’s a really good, it’s a really good experience. Although I do think it’s important to let them have a little authority and a little bit of sort of editorial input. So that because that was the cool thing about my being friends with Rachel, which was a we would just sit down and talk about what choices would be made and why and what we thought about the things. I know some places don’t let their slushers actually send rejections. They tag things to reject and then someone else goes through and… which I understand when you don’t really, you don’t have implicit trust that somebody’s going to not make a goofy mistake and or when someone’s new, but I do think having a little bit of authority as practice for making those calls is probably good.

Matt Dovey

As Slushers we make the call and our rejection and when we bump something in Moksha, conveniently, we can follow it so that then we see the follow up comments made by the bosses so you can see the reasons why they then accept or reject.

Ann Leckie

Oh cool.  That IS good I like that

Matt Dovey

We’ve got a very good sort of, I mean, the team is really good at talking to each other and getting second opinions and everything. So, it is a nice little family. It’s lovely. Was it just you and Rachel back in the day?

Ann Leckie

It was just me and Rachel.

Matt Dovey

That must have been exhausting. I mean, there’s about a dozen of us now.

Ann Leckie

Oh wow!

Matt Dovey

And that’s we are low on numbers at the minute as we’ve lost a few

Ann Leckie

Well you probably get more subs now. Then we were not a SFWA qualifying market and you are now, and that that probably makes a difference in the volume of subs but we still got quite a lot.

Matt Dovey

Not only SFWA, SFWA prorate but Hugo nominated! and British Science Fiction Award Winning Of course.

Ann Leckie

Oh yes.

Matt Dovey

Yeah. We’ve got, we’ve been nominated for a Stabby. We’ve been nominated for the Ignyte Awards we’ve been nominated for oh god all over the place, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves recently actually. Two years in a row and we had the Hugo nod. Fingers crossed for this year, which is almost a second felt more meaningful. But the first time we felt like well, maybe that was just you know the limits of our fingertips. We’re just reaching for it. So to get it the second time right there. We’ve got firmer grasp on this recognition that really meant a lot the second one so we have ended up in high and mighty places. Thanks for the running start you gave us which is

Ann Leckie

Well, now that I mean, y’all have done incredible work yourselves. I mean, we could have handled stuff over and folks could have not done so well with it. Right but

Matt Dovey

I think there were times it was perhaps really sorta, you talk to Alasdair about you know, when he took over the company, it was on rocky ground it nearly crashed into the cliffside. But I mean you know..

Ann Leckie

That’s hard. I mean, when you’re not used to doing all that and yeah, it’s difficult but he’s I mean, the whole thing has done really well.

Matt Dovey

Oh yeah. It’s on firmer ground now that we’ve got the nonprofit status as well from the last couple months. We are on firmer footing than ever. It’s you know, there’s untold heights ahead of us, I hope.

Ann Leckie

Yeah,

Matt Dovey

Fingers crossed. You had great success. Speaking of success with your debut science fiction trilogy with Ancillary Justice, as mentioned winning the *big breath* Hugo, The Nebula, The BSFA, The Arthur C. Clarke, and The Locus Awards, all while you were still editing this with Rachel, then your most recently, you’ve done the Raven Tower, which is a fantasy novel of gods and powers. So do you think you’ll keep skipping between genres going forward? And what is it that particularly draws you to one or the other for any given story idea?

Ann Leckie

So I’m actually  – I can start a big fight here – I actually don’t see a huge difference between science fiction and fantasy. There’s people who would be out with torches and pitchforks over that, and I mean, every your opinion is valid. You get to have an opinion, even if it’s wrong. Um, but I mean, I do feel there are different modes of each and there are modes of spec-fic that are more fantasy-ish and there are modes of specfic that are much more sciency very little science fiction is actually scientific. I was raised by scientists and they would laugh at my taste in literature. Like ‘this isn’t science’. But I do I feel like I tend to approach fantasy, a little more science fictionally then in other cases, then maybe some other folks do.

Matt Dovey

I mean, Raven Tower had quite strict rules in place with the gods powers.

Ann Leckie

Oh, yeah.

Matt Dovey

And they were part of the tension and the explanation.

Ann Leckie

They were very physics based too, like, the if, for folks who haven’t read it, Gods have to speak the truth. And if a God says something that isn’t true, they have to use their power to make it true. But some things aren’t ever going to be true no matter what. And some things take more energy to make true than other things. Right. So, there was very much a sort of conservation of matter and energy going on with a lot of the stuff there, right. Which, you know, you don’t have to pay attention to that fantasy if you don’t want to, but I kind of wanted to, I thought it was kind of cool, but since it was fantasy, I didn’t have to pay complete attention to it. Right, if I didn’t want to, um, but yeah, I do. I like that sort of stricter framework. Um, and in fact, actually some of my stories ran on PodCastle. Rachel bought them and, and a lot of people thought of me as a fantasy writer, the folks who knew my my short fiction, and were surprised when I came out with a science fiction novel and a lot of the people who read my science fiction novels were surprised when I came out with fantasy, and we’re like, oh, you’ve newly turned to fantasy. And I’m like, Well, no, not actually. I’ve got this, you know, half a dozen fantasy stories. So, I can go either way, depending, you know, depending on whatever… whatever.

Matt Dovey

The mood strikes you.

Ann Leckie

Yeah, yeah, but I definitely want to keep going back and forth. Although at this point, I think my science fiction sells better. But…I mean…

Matt Dovey

Surely, because you think there’s a lot of crossover. I mean, I agree with you. I don’t really see if… I read them equally or watch them equally. I write them equally. I probably lean slightly towards fantasy because that was just what I happened to read more of as a kid and like you I just sometimes, when you’re writing science fiction, I get a bit bogged down with the detail. I can’t bother with this. Just wave our hands and go ‘ooh! It was magic’. Sometimes it’s easier. But yeah, this idea that you sell better in science fiction, but not so much in fantasy as if they’re these diseparate genres is kind of…strange.

Ann Leckie

Historically, most people who have written one or a lot of people who’ve written one have also written the other. And they’re very difficult to separate possibly because historically, the authors have been so intermixed. In trying to define I mean, if you really want you can either have a good discussion or knockdown drag out brawl, trying to define the boundary between the two. It’s really very difficult to do.

Matt Dovey

Yeah. As with any boundary I think,

Ann Leckie

Oh, well, yeah, boundaries or boundaries are fake anyway, but this one in particular is very vexed and difficult to draw. I mean, this isn’t even just like, you know, when is the when do a few grains of sand become a heap. This is like, they’re so mixed up together. At the end, authors have played with mixing them up deliberately for so long. Um, and so yeah, I mean, I feel like you, but people talk about him like they’re so different and it’s really very strange to me. Or, you know, well, obviously, science fiction is more rational and better than fantasy and like, what?

Matt Dovey

Yeah, I’m not sure Dune is necessarily more coherent and sciency than Lord of the Rings is. Dune is basically magic.

Ann Leckie

Dune is, Dune is a fantasy. Dune is in fact my personal definition of when do you know something’s a space opera and not hard science fiction is if the culture fights with swords, if a technologically advanced culture fights with swords, you got yourself a space opera in your hands. That is next thing to a fantasy.

Matt Dovey

The most important thing in the science fiction is working out: What’s your excuse for why people still use swords just because they look cool.

Ann Leckie

Exactly! That’s the thing. It’s like if you’ve got your technologically advanced society using swords, it’s because you think swords are cool.

Matt Dovey

Yep. I mean, swords are cool.

Ann Leckie

What reason? I don’t care what slow shield or whatever it is you come up with. I’m sorry.

Matt Dovey

It’s aesthetic.

Ann Leckie

Yeah, it’s because you think swords are cool. And you know, nothing wrong with that. Swords are cool.

Matt Dovey

I’m never gonna begrudge that to anybody

Ann Leckie

Yeah, but Dune is very definitely not a great example of diamond hard SF.

Matt Dovey

No. Goodness no. So, we’ve only got a few minutes left before zoom kicks us off, I’m afraid so. It’s been a good conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. We could go on for longer except for this 40 minute limit on the free tier. So what are you working on now that we can look forward to?

Ann Leckie

So I actually have a, it’s in the Ancilliary Justice universe in the Imperial Radch and one at least of the characters is a Prescott translator. The humans who were sort of created by the mysterious, powerful, dangerous alien Esker to mediate between themselves and humans. A lot of people really liked the Prescott translators in the trilogy, and were unhappy that they weren’t on stage for as long as they wanted them to be so they should be satisfied with with translation state. So,

Matt Dovey

giving them the people what they want. Can’t go wrong

Ann Leckie

Yes, also it was fun.. I wrote it because I want it to but

Matt Dovey

Yeah, you can tell when someone’s not enthusiastic about what they’re writing you’ve got

Ann Leckie

Oh yes, and I’m really lucky at this point. I’ve been very fortunate. I can mostly write what I want to write.

Matt Dovey

Do you think you’ll go back to the Raven Tower world?

Ann Leckie

Oh, almost certainly.

Matt Dovey

Good I look forward to it. Finally, then, what works would you recommend people read if they’re interested in your stuff? And where can people find out more about you?

Ann Leckie

So I do have a website annleckie.com Um, people who are interested in my work and haven’t read any should probably start with either Ancillary Justice or the Raven Tower. There is on my website, you can find my short fiction, much of which is available free online. It’s linked on my website. And, and you can hear some of my stories on PodCastle, although you got to dig pretty far back into the archives.

Matt Dovey

But that’s what this is all about is digging back into those archives because there’s so much of them

Ann Leckie

Oh, my goodness. Yes. And there’s so much fabulous stuff in there. Just so much.

Matt Dovey

So we are coming up on Episode 800 is sometime later this year.

Ann Leckie

Holy cow.

Matt Dovey

That was a good face. It’s a shame that no one else is gonna get to see this video but me.

Ann Leckie

Well, that’s one of the things like you know, when you see you know, somebody had a baby and you see the baby and you’re like, Oh, they’re so cute. And then sometime later, they’re like,

Matt Dovey

They’re a teenager.

Ann Leckie

They’re like in college. They’ve got a professional job. They’ve got their own kids and you’re like, No WAY! Yeah.

Matt Dovey

Yeah. 800 episodes and15 years and it all started with you and Rachel. So thank you very much for getting us going. It’s been an absolute delight having you on and I could keep talking for another 30-40 minutes that I think time’s running shorter. This episode probably run long enough already after the episode after the story so, we’ll, that people have their time back but it has been a delight. Thank you ever so much for coming on and talking to us again. And thank you for all your work on PodCastle back in the day that got us to where we are now.

Ann Leckie

Thank you. Y’all have done such a great job.