Summer Adventures and Future Plans: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Beyond the Pen

Hello, Marcella. 

Don't start. 

Oh, come on. 

You could start with being nice and not creepy. 

Fine. Hello Marccella how are  you? 

Hi, Maccabee. I'm always fabulous. You know that? How have you been? 

I missed you. 

Oh no, don't, don't be weepy. 

Oh, okay. Fine.  well, one of us has got, at least shows some type of emotion. 

That's your job.

You got a point you gotta point there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. Fine. I'll be that person. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us. We've missed you so much on this. I know . Yes, I missed you. Okay. I missed you. She did not. She was like, fine. I just need a break.  well, we both needed a break. I was about to get burnt out.

Yep. 

So I know that we said we'd only be gone for like a week or two, but things have happened in both of our lives technology, not working for both of us..

Family stuff. Yep. 

Family stuff. We've had a lot of things going on. The, the, what is that? Like the month and a half we've been gone almost two months. I can't even remember two months. Yeah. It's a two months. 

Two months. Yeah.

Almost. Yeah. But we're back. We are back and ready to go. We've got a bunch of authors lined up and ready to go for July, at least. We're working on August.  I know that we've got at least one publishing company that is really interested in us, spotlighting them for the month.

So that'll be exciting possibly another one, but I know it's great. It's great. But trust me, we've got so many things coming your way. But before we get to that, You know, we, we gotta share some of the things that have been going on in our lives just to make them feel like we didn't really just abandon them for those two months.

So I will start because Marccella is again, just Marccella . For me the past two months. Yeah, ladies. Yeah. I understand the, the schedule that we were running doing it twice a week was really difficult for a while. We would record on Monday, have it up on Tuesday, record on Wednesday, have it up on Thursday. I mean, it was, I, I think between those four days, I got probably good three four hours worth of good sleep. Because I also had.. 

What's sleep, Mack?

I, I know, I know it's a crutch. I, I, I, I have a tendency of just wanting to do that sometimes I'm weak like that. I know  but you know, as a father, I had to get up at six o'clock in the morning, get my sons up for school, get them on the bus, you know, the usual parenting thing. We decided that during the time of the break, we would just recover, get something set up for the next season. We've also had some things going on in our personal lives. I will be. Upfront with this one.  The beginning of June, we had to hospitalize our youngest overnight because he had a Fibral Seizure.

And that basically means that their temperature spikes up so high, that it. Blue screens them entirely for a little while. My youngest actually was like that for. Probably about three or four hours before he started to get debt back to his baseline. So it was a very scary time. I definitely needed to take that.

We also had sickness, you know, because he also had, it was all based off of COVID, which we didn't know. He had go figure on that one. And then of course, My wife got sick with pneumonia and has been recovering ever since she actually tore a the muscle fibers in her lower left abdomen. So she was in major pain for a while there too.

Oh, for like two or three weeks. I mean, even one cough would just throw her into a spasm. Almost. It was horrible. So we've had a lot of things going on that we've been trying to recover from. So that's one of the reasons why I have been, been putting stuff up. The other reason why is because I've been working on another service for those who don't know me and Marella our, our voice actors besides.

Podcast hosts. But we're also both writers. And one of the things that I've been doing is I've been working to get a stockpile of characters written up with backs stories, even, you know, I've talked to two authors who are like, no, that's not backstory. That's the entire book. You've just written a book.

Which is hilarious, cuz it's really hard for me to actually write everything down. I have literally all these stories in my head. That's the way I am. But one of the services I'm trying to do, and I'm putting this out to our entire audience if I'm working on a beta service right now, and I'm looking for 25 authors to help me to get the service up and running.

And what I do is three. One, I would actually because for you. Sit down with you virtually. We talk out to character, we work on them. The other thing is, is that I actually have a stockpile of characters and their stories especially some family legendries and some historical events that can be used for author's worlds. So we would actually have the capability of working something out to where you would be able to use that in your next book.