Fictional Influence

About Fictional Influence

Nonsense-Free Kristin is where independent authors and creators learn to build their platforms, master their craft, and create on their own terms—without begging for permission from gatekeepers who hate them kristinmctiernan.substack.com (https://kristinmctiernan.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Kristin McTiernan

Category

arts · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 Mar 2021

Latest episode

29 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

48 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   29 Jul 2026

   William Miller - Men Never Quit Reading. Publishing Stopped Printing for Them.

   William Miller left a photography career after 9/11 to enlist in the Army. He now writes the Jake Noble spy thrillers, a paranormal mystery series built around an autistic FBI agent, and a hardboiled crime series for Aethon Books. He also runs Savage Realms, a sword and sorcery magazine he expected to fold after six issues and still puts out every month. In this episode, he joins us to dig into what actually changed in publishing in the early '90s, why a little gatekeeping might be good for a fandom, and what binge-watching did to the thirty-page chapter. In This Episode * William’s love letter to his wife: The Mackenzie and Cole series follows an autistic FBI agent. Miller’s wife is autistic, and he wanted a version of that on the page that includes the hard days, not just the “it’s a superpower” version. * The fashion photographer who writes fight scenes: Years in fashion photography before the Army, and what visual thinking does to prose. Also his flat instruction to authors: you do not know what cover your book needs. * Don’t take writing advice from people who don’t sell books: Miller studied creative writing at Eckerd College, where Dennis Lehane taught. His filter for writing programs is one question long, and it disqualifies most of them. * Men didn’t stop reading, publishing stopped printing: What Miller says changed in trad pub in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and why “men don’t read” has the cart in front of the horse. * Choose your own adventure: Delight Games handed Miller the keys and he wrote Jack Jericho and the Bloody Burlesque Show. It sold, and the content nobody would greenlight elsewhere turned out to be beneath the notice of the people who’d object. * Savage Realms Monthly and the paperback problem: Miller started it as a favor to writers with nowhere to publish, expecting six issues and a tax write-off, and now ships one a month. The print edition is the one Amazon fights him on, and it’s also the one that sells better. * “You gotta get rid of all the God stuff”: Trad publishers wanted the faith cut from Noble Man. Faith publishers wanted the guns and the human trafficking cut. He self-published, and the emails started arriving from people who’d done the work for real. * The agent who pitched him at ThrillerFest: The agent that loved his numbers and wanted to represent him. Four years earlier, she told him that the book would never work. * Genre hopping is bad business and he does it anyway: Spy thrillers, paranormal mystery, sword and sorcery, plus an unknown number of upscale literary novels sitting unpublished on a hard drive. His advice and his behavior do not match. * Binge culture broke pacing: Why he thinks the thirty-page chapter is gone, why he has to fight his own instinct to write long, and why he still tells writers to ignore what’s selling. (On the business side, he cites Maxwell Perkins, the editor who shaped raw manuscripts from Hemingway and Fitzgerald into books that sold.) * Where indie publishing goes from here: AI, universal basic income, and Miller’s standing policy of coming back in six months to eat crow when he’s wrong. Plus the argument that stories outlast whatever format is carrying them, delivered via Reign of Fire. Guest Links * Read the Jake Noble series: https://amzn.to/4uhzhB6 * Website: https://williammillerauthor.com/ * Facebook: AuthorWillMiller Kristin’s Links * Editing Services: nonsensefreeeditor.com * Newsletter: https://www.fictionalinfluence.com * YouTube: https://youtube.com/@nonsensefreekristin Timestamps 00:00 - Meet William Miller. 00:50 - Writing Autism With Care. 02:28 - From Photos To Prose. 04:34 - Creative Writing Degrees. 07:11 - Do Men Read Fiction. 09:26 - Interactive Fiction Detour. 11:54 - Gatekeeping Geek Culture. 13:51 - Magazine Roots And Aethon. 16:33 - Building Savage Realms. 19:45 - Print Sales And Amazon. 21:23 - Cover Art Censorship. 22:59 - NSFW Internet Flashback. 23:28 - Trad Pub Rejections. 25:26 - Choosing Self Publish. 27:23 - Agent Comes Crawling Back. 28:45 - Genre Hopping Reality. 31:42 - Pacing In Streaming Era. 34:15 - Write Weird Find Tribe. 37:17 - Indie Future With AI. 43:21 - Stories Always Survive. 44:03 - Buckle Up Advice. 45:16 - Where To Find Him. 47:09 - Final Thanks And Goodbye. About This Podcast Nonsense-Free Kristin is where independent authors and creators learn to build their platforms, master their craft, and create on their own terms—without begging for permission from gatekeepers who hate them. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kristinmctiernan.substack.com (https://kristinmctiernan.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   22 Jul 2026

   Rebecca Jones - Writing Romance Without Smut

   Rebecca Jones has a hill she'll die on: there are no bad tropes, only poorly written ones. She put out her debut in September 2025 and already has three books in her Jolene series, plus a Gothic romance on the way, so she's earned the right to defend the love triangle. In this episode, we dig into why so many of them collapse, when a cliché becomes a comfort instead of a crutch, and what gets lost when clean YA is treated like a rebellion. In This Episode * There are no bad tropes, only poorly written ones: Rebecca’s whole thesis, and why a love triangle works only when a character actually makes a choice. * How writers botch the love triangle: The most common failure is telling us two people are in love without ever earning it. We talk about the Wednesday dance that should have built a couple and instead just told us one existed. * Insta-love, chemistry, and flirting that isn’t cheesy: Insta-love can work when there’s a real foundation under it, from Phantom’s Raoul and Christine to the sly, layered flirting between Catherine and Henry in Northanger Abbey. * The ultimate love triangle: Rebecca’s pick for the trope done right is Gone With the Wind, and why The Empire Strikes Back borrowed its romantic DNA. * Clichés, killing your darlings, and the one-bed problem: A deliberate cliché can feel like comfort; a lazy one just muddies the book. Plus what “kill your darlings” actually means, and a great story about a scholarly Regency client whose one-bed scene ignored the scandal it would have caused. * The state of clean YA: On-page spice creeping into books aimed at teens, YA quietly written for grown women, and the clean movement Rebecca is glad to be part of. * Meet Jolene: Ballet dancer by day, zombie-slaying gamer by night, with a geeky best friend and a scene-stealing chaos-agent of a sister. * The Gothic turn: Rebecca’s period horror romance: 1899 France, a possessive ghost, and Phantom of the Opera with the opera swapped out for something a lot darker. * The indie author business: An aggressive release pace as a full-time writer, the Kindle Unlimited versus going-wide money question, why the best marketing might just be the next book, and the metadata work that landed her next to Lynn Painter and Rachel Lynn Solomon. * The worst writing advice you keep hearing: How “show, don’t tell” gets weaponized, and the danger of running your slow-burn romance through a chatbot that only knows how to pace a thriller screenplay. * Books for boys, and content warnings: The gap in the market and Rebecca’s idea for a space book written with her son, plus why she came around on content warnings and a love letter to the website Does the Dog Die. Guest Links * Read the Jolene series: https://amzn.to/48NUUQG * Website: rebeccajonesbooks.com * Facebook: Rebecca Jones Author * TikTok: @rebecca.jones776 * X: @NovelistRJones Kristin’s Links * Editing Services: nonsensefreeeditor.com * Newsletter: https://www.fictionalinfluence.com * YouTube: https://youtube.com/@nonsensefreekristin Timestamps 00:00 - Meet the Rebecca Jones. 02:09 - Why Triangles Fail. 02:51 - Insta Love Done Right. 03:57 - Writing Better Flirting. 05:26 - Best Love Triangle Example. 06:13 - Tropes vs Cliches. 07:17 - Fixing What Fails. 08:09 - One Bed Problem Solving. 09:30 - Beta Readers Power. 10:13 - State of YA Today. 12:25 - Gothic Romance Shift. 14:18 - Writing Since Fifteen. 16:57 - Rapid Release Routine. 17:50 - Kindle Unlimited Reality. 20:08 - Indie vs Traditional. 20:54 - Marketing Mindset Shift. 21:43 - Metadata And Keywords. 23:34 - Sisterhood On The Page. 25:19 - Belle Époque Gothic Romance. 26:01 - Bad Writing Advice. 27:19 - AI Tips And Nuance. 29:41 - Books For Boy Readers. 32:57 - Ideal Reader And Comfort. 34:10 - Content Warnings Debate. 36:21 - New Release Teaser. 38:05 - Tropes And Farewell. About This Podcast Nonsense-Free Kristin is where independent authors and creators learn to build their platforms, master their craft, and create on their own terms—without begging for permission from gatekeepers who hate them. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kristinmctiernan.substack.com (https://kristinmctiernan.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   15 Jul 2026

   Ryan Flannagan - Canada's Tom Clancy?

   R.A. Flannagan calls himself Canada's only geopolitical military fiction author. Four books and 1,800-plus Amazon reviews later, the title is hard to dispute. In this episode, Ryan sits down to explain how the loss of his university career pushed him toward the keyboard, why he built a series aimed at Commonwealth readers and openly at men, and how fast real-world drone warfare and tactical-nuke brinkmanship have caught up to fiction he began drafting back in 2021. In This Episode * A career ends, a writer begins: Ryan describes the devastating loss of the university vocation he expected to keep for life, and how writing (and his wife) gave him a focus when things were at their worst. * The niche nobody was writing: Military thrillers are almost entirely an American genre. Ryan spotted the gap and built CANZUK at War around Canada and its Commonwealth allies as the protagonists, not the sidekicks. * The market that flipped his assumptions: He went in certain the 330-million-person U.S. market was the prize. Instead, UK, Australian, and Canadian readers embraced the books while American sales stayed at “crickets,” and he unpacks why. * Why Americans won’t read a civil war: Ryan connects his U.S. sales problem to the lukewarm reception of A24’s film Civil War, and to how differently foreign readers and American readers read the same story. * Writing for men, without apology: Of the emails and comments he’s received over the years, essentially none come from women, and Ryan makes the case that traditional publishing walked away from an audience that’s still hungry. * When the headlines catch up to the manuscript: Ukraine, tactical nuclear weapons, and the explosion of drone warfare all appeared in his books before they dominated the news, and he talks about writing near-future fiction that reality keeps overtaking. * What three years in the reserves actually taught him: Ryan was infantry, not special operations, and he’s candid about how far listening to hundreds of audiobooks carries him toward writing operators convincingly, and where the research has to take over. * The anti-MVP approach: Before publishing a single word, Ryan spent roughly a year absorbing podcasts on craft and the business, hired a developmental editor and a copy editor, and argues that new authors owe it to themselves to write six to ten books before quitting. Guest Links * Read The CANZUK at War Series: https://amzn.to/3P3ynJ3 * Website: https://raflannagan.ca/ Kristin’s Links * Editing Services: nonsensefreeeditor.com * Newsletter: https://www.fictionalinfluence.com * YouTube: https://youtube.com/@nonsensefreekristin Timestamps 00:00 - Meet Ryan Flannagan. 01:24 - Career Upheaval and Writing. 03:05 - Learning the Indie Path. 04:51 - Momentum and Mindset. 07:25 - Finding a Canadian Niche. 12:40 - Anglosphere Market Strategy. 14:27 - Why Americans Don’t Bite. 19:13 - Reserves Lessons for Fiction. 20:46 - Military Banter Realism. 22:28 - Researching Special Operators. 25:09 - When Fiction Meets Reality. 27:19 - Drones And Future War. 29:20 - Writing For Men. 33:56 - Defense Blogging Passion. 37:49 - Lessons From Four Books. 40:24 - Editing And Craft Standards. 40:53 - Where To Find Ryan. 41:36 - Amazon Exclusivity Farewell. About This Podcast Nonsense-Free Kristin is where independent authors and creators learn to build their platforms, master their craft, and create on their own terms—without begging for permission from gatekeepers who hate them. New episodes weekly. Subscribe on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kristinmctiernan.substack.com (https://kristinmctiernan.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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Apple Podcasts (US)

4.5 / 5

2 ratings

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