Hi, my name is John August. If you Google me, you'll see I'm mostly a screenwriter. I wrote

Big Fish, Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, and a bunch of other movies. Two years ago,

I decided to do something different, something new. I started writing a book. So many people say

I'm going to write my novel someday, that mythical someday when life is just easy and beautiful

and you have money in a beautiful office and expanses of time. But someday it just rarely

happened. It was something I'd never done before and knew almost nothing about. At the same time,

I began recording interviews with authors and agents and publishers and everybody remotely connected to the book I was writing.

I didn't know exactly what I'd do with all those interviews, but I had questions, and I figured I might as well get the answers on tape.

Writing a novel is as pure a distillation of your inner process and your thoughts and your intent as you're ever going to get.

This February, my book is coming out, and I have no idea what's going to happen.

From Wondry, this is a new podcast called Launch.

This podcast is about me and my book, Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire.

It's about how I wrote it, how I sold it, and how publishing works,

not just as a business, but literally how books are printed and shipped.

Sometimes you need books so quickly that you decide to go to a domestic printer to do your four-color

printing, that it just becomes cheaper than getting it printed overseas and air-fraided.

Launch is also a story about making something,

putting it into the world and waiting to see how it all turns out.

It's an activity of self-doubt.

It has like so many masochistic components to it.

You know, a writer is just constantly wrestling with that self-doubt

no matter where they are in their writing career.

...