Episode 341 - Conflict, Character, and Motivation with Austin S. Camacho
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Austin S. Camacho discusses CONFLICT, CHARACTER, AND MOTIVATION, including why conflict is about opposing goals rather than violence, how to find conflict in every scene including ones between characters who agree, how internal conflict distinguishes heroes from villains, why motivation has to be personal to feel real, how to make large-scale stakes relatable by grounding them in a character’s specific fears, and why ROCKY is the perfect example of a protagonist who states his true goal out loud.
Austin S. Camacho is the author of eight novels about Washington DC-based private eye Hannibal Jones, five in the Stark and O’Brien international thriller series, the detective novel Beyond Blue, and the action thrillers True Target and Mirror Target. His short stories have been featured in several anthologies, and he is featured in the Edgar nominated African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study by Frankie Y. Bailey. He is a past president of the Maryland Writers Association, past Vice President of the Virginia Writers Club, and one of the creators of the Creatures, Crimes & Creativity literary conference.
Episode Links
https://www.facebook.com/AustinSCamacho/
https://www.instagram.com/ascamacho135/
Summary & Transcript
In this conversation, Austin reframed conflict from a plot device into the deepest expression of who your characters are.
CONFLICT IS NOT VIOLENCE
Austin’s first disclaimer: conflict is not fighting. When most writers hear the word, they picture action scenes. What Austin means is far broader—two characters with opposing goals. Every story requires a protagonist and an antagonist whose objectives are in direct tension. If that tension is absent, there is no story. And the distinction matters because it opens up the entire range of human experience as potential conflict, not just the scenes where someone throws a punch.
He applied this to the smallest scale immediately: a husband and wife deciding when to leave for a road trip. They agree on the destination. They will disagree on when to leave, what to pack, when to take the first rest stop. That is real conflict, rooted in who these people are, and it reveals character at the same time. Every disagreement tells us something about the person who has it.
CONFLICT IN EVERY SCENE
Austin’s operating principle: every scene needs conflict, including scenes between characters who are ostensibly allies. The vacation planning example illustrates this, but so does any alliance formed between characters who have just met. Two people agreeing to pursue the same goal still disagree about when, where, how, and who leads. That friction is not a distraction from the story—it is the story, at the granular level.
He also described how scene-level conflict can mirror the story’s central conflict without being directly tied to it. A protagonist struggling to communicate with his mother can echo a larger story about a man who needs to understand his enemy well enough to stop him. The smaller conflict foreshadows the larger one, and both illuminate the same theme.
CONFLICT IS A FUNCTION OF CHARACTER
The conversation’s central insight came when Austin observed that conflict does not come from plot—it comes from character. The conflict exists because of something this person wants very badly, or fears very deeply, or cannot bring themselves to do even when it would help them. Strip away the genre, the setting, and the stakes, and what remains is a person who is defined by what they want and how far they will go to get it.
This principle applies equally to villains. Austin noted a common weakness in contemporary fiction: protagonists with well-developed internal conflict paired with antagonists who are simply evil, with no discernible motivation. The result is an uneven story where the reader eventually asks why the villain does not just give up. A compelling antagonist has to believe in what they are doing just as much as the hero believes in stopping them. He cited ROCKY’s Apollo Creed as the model: not a villain at all, but an antagonist with his own ego-driven need to win, which made the fight worth watching because both men genuinely needed the outcome.
INTERNAL CONFLICT DISTINGUISHES HEROES FROM VILLAINS
Austin described internal conflict as the primary mechanism for showing moral character. The villain, to oversimplify, will do anything to accomplish the goal. The hero has the same drive but will not take every available shortcut—and that restraint is where characterization lives. The hero knows he could win by cheating, and he does not. That moment of self-denial, especially when the cost is real, is what makes readers root for him. Austin extended the principle to villains as well: even a catastrophically bad person has something they love or something they are protecting and showing that complicates them in exactly the ways that make fiction worth reading.
MAKING HIGH STAKES PERSONAL
Matty asked how to make large-scale conflicts—bombs, world domination, civilizational threat—feel emotionally real to readers. Austin’s answer was simple: make it personal. The reason a character fights to stop a bomb is not that blowing up Manhattan is abstractly bad. It is that his parents live there. Once the stakes are connected to someone the protagonist loves, the reader can locate themselves in the story. The objective scale does not matter. What matters is that it is the largest possible stakes from the protagonist’s point of view.
He reinforced this with the observation that stakes only have to feel gigantic to the protagonist. A character trapped in a building with thirty seconds to reach an elevator that is not working faces stakes that are, objectively, small. But if the story has done its job, those thirty seconds feel enormous. ALIEN, by contrast, uses life-and-death stakes, but its power comes from watching Ripley fight to survive as a person—not from the abstract horror of the alien itself.
STATE THE GOAL PLAINLY
Austin closed with advice that cut against the instinct to withhold: let your protagonist state the goal plainly, even bluntly, to another character. It clarifies the story for the reader and anchors everything that follows. ROCKY does this in its most famous line—“All I want to do is go the distance”—and the rest of the film is the working-out of whether that specific, personal, clearly stated goal will be met. When protagonist and reader share the same understanding of what victory means, the conflict has somewhere to go.
This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Austin S. Camacho. Hey, Austin. How are you doing?
[00:00:06] Austin: I’m having a great day, and I hope you are too, Matty.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am, thank you very much. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you: Austin S. Camacho is the author of eight novels about Washington DC-based private eye Hannibal Jones, five in the Stark and O’Brien International Thriller Series, the detective novel BEYOND BLUE, and the action adventure novel WHEN DOES BLOOD RUN COLD.
His short stories have been featured in several anthologies, and he is featured in the Edgar-nominated AFRICAN AMERICAN MYSTERY WRITERS: A HISTORICAL AND THEMATIC STUDY by Frankie Y. Bailey. He’s the past president of the Maryland Writers Association, past vice president of the Virginia Writers Club, and one of the creators of the Creatures, Crimes & Creativity literary conference, which I think is also known as C3. That is a lovely conference that I can highly recommend. I have not been able to go for the last several years because it always falls right at the time of a regularly scheduled vacation that my husband and I take—that was the one downside of scheduling that vacation—but I hope to get back to it.
[00:01:08] Matty: I had invited Austin on the podcast because I know you talk a lot to writers about tips for writing conflict. I wanted to start out by asking: when you’re talking about conflict, are you talking physical, emotional, or all of the above? Just give us some context for what you’re going to be talking about.
[00:01:32] Austin: You went straight to the first disclaimer I always like to give, because conflict is not violence. When I talk about conflict in a story—because I write thrillers, people think, “Oh, the fighting scenes and the shooting scenes.” No. Conflict is really about characters who are pushing against one another, and that’s what makes a story.
If you don’t have conflict, you don’t have a story. You have to have at least two people, or two groups, and there always has to be a protagonist and an antagonist with opposing goals and objectives. That’s what conflict is about: opposing goals.
[00:02:21] Matty: Do you assess conflict on a story level—like what the underlying conflict is between the protagonist and the antagonist—or do you need to drill down further than that?
[00:02:33] Austin: Both. When you’re outlining your story, of course you start with the big picture: the good guy wants to win the fight, and the bad guy doesn’t want him to, or whatever the conflict is. But to keep a story interesting, you also need internal conflict, usually for your protagonist. You’ll also usually have conflicts with other characters. So you have your external conflict, your internal conflict, and the conflicts with supporting characters. Wherever you can find conflict, you put it in. The worse you make your protagonist’s life, the more your readers will enjoy your story. So yes, I take it all the way down.
I tell people there needs to be conflict in every scene. Even if all the people in that scene are friends, you can still find something for them to disagree about.
[00:03:37] Matty: Can you describe an example of a less overt use of conflict? Let’s say we’re having a conversation between two characters who are allies. What might constitute conflict that will help propel that scene, even if it’s not immediately obvious?
[00:03:59] Austin: Let me try to take things out of the thriller and mystery picture. Say you have two characters—maybe a husband and wife—and they’ve decided to go on a vacation. Now, that sounds like all agreement, but they’re going to disagree about when to leave, what to take, where to stop, and so on. There are all of these possible options for conflict. It’s real conflict, but it’s also conflict that all of us can relate to. As a reader, it’s good to be able to think, “Oh yeah, I’ve been there.”
And the unintended positive consequence of doing that is that each time you unveil a new conflict, you are revealing character. You’re getting us to know that person better. He’s in a hurry and just wants to keep driving until he’s done—that tells us what kind of person he is. She wants to stop every hour—that tells us something too.
[00:05:18] Matty: Does the conflict at the scene or chapter level always need to tie to the conflict at the story level? I’m having trouble thinking of an example where it doesn’t. If someone is assessing a scene and not sensing the conflict, and they need to add it in, what are the parameters for doing that in a way that’s holistically supportive of the story?
[00:05:58] Austin: It doesn’t have to be connected to the story, but it helps if it is. How about this: maybe the bad guy we haven’t met yet is hitchhiking on that same road. Now you can have a conflict about whether to stop and pick up a stranger. That ties into your plot and also gives you avenues for more conflict further down the road, because now you have the option of, “See? I told you we shouldn’t have picked up that guy.” So it’s good if you can tie it in.
Another good option—even if the conflict is completely separate—is to have it mirror or highlight the main theme. Say the protagonist and antagonist used to be coworkers, maybe in the same Army unit. At the same time, your protagonist is having some communication issue with his mother. It can look totally unrelated, but then later in the story you can reveal that better interpersonal communication might actually help him get this guy to stop doing whatever bad thing he’s doing. Interpersonal communication becomes a theme, and the smaller conflict echoes into the big one.
[00:07:57] Matty: I think there’s a balance between having it tie in and not forcing it. If someone is assessing a chapter and it doesn’t have conflict, I think there would be a tendency to just insert some because they heard that every scene has to have it, and it could result in something that feels very artificial.
For example, if you have a scene where two characters become allies—two people who’ve just discovered each other, pursuing the same goals, deciding to team up—on the surface there might not initially be any conflict. I can see how that might be laying the groundwork for conflict down the road. Are there exceptions where that’s okay, or if you look carefully, should there really be something going on there beyond the two of them simply agreeing?
[00:09:01] Austin: There really should be conflict there, especially between two people who just met—conflict about the details: when, where, how, and so on. It has also become common in fiction for the conflict between a male and female character to be sexual tension. They’ve decided they both want to catch this bad guy, but his idea of how to be a team player and hers are very different. That is great conflict, and it can keep rolling through the plot.
Maybe this disagreement becomes an argument and one of them hesitates to do something they know they should, and that gets them into trouble. Or one of them is driven to prove they’re better, so they go after the bad guy alone. There are so many ways you can use that conflict to keep the story moving.
[00:10:18] Matty: Can you talk a little more about how you can use conflict to reveal a character’s personality and their motivations?
[00:10:26] Austin: Do you remember the movie DIE HARD? On the surface it appears to be a cops-against-crooks movie. But shot through that movie is the conflict between McClane and his wife. Whatever writer said, “Hey, we need this element”—it revealed his difficulty with just admitting he’s wrong about something, and his absolute determination to make things work out. When you see that determination in his domestic life, you think, “Here’s a guy who’s not going to quit no matter what you do.” It carries over.
It reveals character in a way that would be hard to do any other way. You always want to show, not tell. You don’t want to just tell the reader, “Our protagonist would never give up.” This is a way of showing just how determined and hard-headed this guy is, and how dedicated he is once he decides where he’s going and what he’s going to do. It’s a great character-revealing system.
[00:11:53] Matty: I really like that when different aspects and sub-storylines share a common driver. This is a guy who never gives up, and it plays out in every single aspect of his life. Because if you had him besting the bad guys because he never gives up, but he’s wishy-washy in some other part of his life, you’d better have a really good reason for that disconnect.
[00:12:19] Austin: On its own, that inconsistency becomes a whole storyline you’d need to delve into. Whereas if there’s synchronicity between the underlying conflicts, each storyline balances and feeds the other.
That’s why I always say that conflict is a function of character. The conflict comes from who that person is, because ultimately the conflict is about something this person wants very badly, or wants to do very badly, or somewhere they want to go very badly. But it has to be important to that character. It’s all about who he is.
A weakness I’ve seen recently in some of what I’ve been reading is that many writers are very good at doing that with the protagonist, but then they don’t do it with the antagonist. If the bad guy isn’t absolutely dedicated to his goal, and he’s coming up against somebody who is, the reader eventually thinks, “Well, why doesn’t he just stop?” You have to show it on both sides.
[00:13:32] Matty: I want to delve more into internal conflict for both the protagonist and the antagonist. In a recent conversation, I was saying to one of my guests that as a reader, I’m not interested in hearing stories about bad people doing bad things. I am very interested in stories about good people doing bad things, or bad people doing good things. Either of those can illustrate a tug within the character’s internal workings—they want to beat out the other person for the job, but there’s also something pulling them away from it.
[00:14:13] Austin: I think this is one of the ways we illustrate the difference between the good guy and the bad guy. To oversimplify: your villain is the one who will do anything to get what he wants.
Your hero should always have internal conflict. “Hey, I know for sure that I can win this race if I take this shortcut, but should I?” That’s where we show who the hero is. The bad guy is threatening my girlfriend, and one solution is I can just shoot him in the head right now. But should I? If I’m a good guy, I want to try to talk him out of it first. Will I negotiate? Can I do this without taking a life? The villain probably isn’t thinking those things—but there’s probably something positive driving him too. “I’m going to take over the world, but I’m doing it because I want to make my mother proud.”
You can work that several ways in the story to show that these people aren’t entirely black and white. Even the worst person has something they love, or something they’re protecting, and showing that complicates them in exactly the ways that make fiction worth reading.
[00:15:42] Matty: I think one of the things that makes a really compelling antagonist—and I think this is true of some of my own antagonists—is that you might have someone who is willing to kill other people to pursue their goal, but they’re also willing to die themselves to pursue it. There’s almost a nobleness, from their own point of view, about what they’re doing, because they’re willing to pay the same price they’re exacting from others. That obviously serves as the basis for conflict, but I think the combination of conflict with those seemingly disconnected commonalities is what makes the characterization interesting.
[00:16:30] Austin: On the surface they do appear disconnected. When I was in school I was a psychology major. We talked about character—and in that sense, character isn’t about whether you do the good thing or the bad thing. Strength of character is how consistently your behavior fits your beliefs.
So if you’re the bad guy, and you’re a big bad guy, you have to have strong character: “I’m going to do anything to accomplish this goal.” And in a way, we kind of admire people with that kind of strength of character, even when the goal is negative. “This person is willing to make any sacrifice to accomplish whatever the thing is. He’s going to get this bomb in place even if he gets shot in the process.” You want to have that on both sides. You want the hero and the villain to both truly believe in what they are trying to do.
I always end up using movies as examples because everybody’s seen them. I don’t think ROCKY has a villain. It has a protagonist and an antagonist. Apollo Creed, for his own ego-driven reasons, was just as determined to win that fight as Rocky was—and that’s what made it a great movie to watch, because there’s a part of you that’s kind of rooting for both of them.
[00:18:19] Matty: Yes. That’s a great example. I like that idea that conflict isn’t always one person trying to keep the other from gaining what they want. It can be two people going for a goal in a zero-sum game, where winning by definition means the other person loses. Even if you don’t bear them personal animosity, you’re nonetheless going to enter into conflict.
[00:18:43] Austin: And that kind of conflict feels very real to readers, because it’s close to the way real life works. I don’t necessarily need to win, but I hate to lose.
[00:18:56] Matty: Yes. And I think that also makes the concept of conflict clearer outside the genres people first think of, like thrillers. It’s easier to understand how this has to play out in romance, for example. These more subtle kinds of conflict—not the trying-to-take-over-the-world level—are just as valid.
[00:19:26] Austin: Using ROCKY as the example again: if it’s a romance, it’s the exact same story if you have two men in love with the same woman. Neither of them has to be the bad guy, but they both know that for me to win, he has to lose. So the question is, how far am I willing to go? Will I flatten his tires so he can’t make that date? Well, if that’s your choice, then we cast you as the antagonist. If you’re the good guy, you’ve got the internal conflict: Should I? No, that would be wrong. And that’s fun reading for people.
[00:20:10] Matty: Yes, especially if by not flattening the tire you know you’re risking your goal. That’s a very nice character beat for readers to sink their teeth into.
[00:20:21] Austin: You are putting your success at risk because of your deeper feelings. And that internal conflict is one that, at one time or another, we have all actually experienced in real life.
[00:20:56] Matty: You had said earlier about the importance of making the conflict itself relatable. That’s probably easier for more people to think about in terms of two people vying for the same love interest, versus someone trying to prevent a large-scale catastrophe. Are there ways to make those very high-stakes, cinematic conflicts relatable for the reader?
[00:21:22] Austin: Two things come to mind. One: if it’s a big, big thing—the bad guy is going to blow up the world, destroy the United States—the issue for your protagonist doesn’t have to be about the bomb itself. The issue is, I love my country and I don’t want to see it destroyed. Or: I don’t want to see a bunch of innocent people killed.
But to take that one step further—because this is all about emotional context—make it personal. The bad guy is getting ready to set off a bomb that will blow up Manhattan. That’s obviously terrible, and the good guy doesn’t want that to happen. But if his parents live in Manhattan, then it becomes a whole different drive. Now it’s personal: “This isn’t about stopping a bomb. This is about saving my parents.” That’s the kind of approach that brings the motivation down to a personal level. It’s more relatable. If you’re Peter Parker, it’s all about saving Aunt May.
[00:22:47] Matty: That makes me think of THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, which I’ve been watching obsessively. What I find very interesting is that the people who are nominally the good guys, over the course of the series—I’m now on season three of four—are moving in their motivation from a focus on individuals (their friends, their spouses) toward humanity in general. And for the people who are nominally the bad guys, I see the opposite: a move from a very wide view of “this is what’s going to happen to humanity” toward something more personal.
Those are both fascinating character developments to watch, and I hadn’t thought about it in those terms until now. Seeing how those shifts bring them into conflict with each other is really compelling.
[00:24:02] Austin: Motivation is so important to the conflict. The show you mentioned is an excellent example of characters with true motivations. The most disappointing stories are when a character’s motivation is simply their official role. “We have to solve this murder. Why? Because I’m the police detective assigned to this case.” That’s not a motivation. There has to be more to it than that.
That idea of justifying a character’s actions solely because of their role is very unsatisfying. It’s already a boring story. We want the motivation to be deeper and more personal—maybe he had some past experience with a very similar crime where the perpetrator got away, something that makes it personal.
[00:25:11] Matty: And I think this is a good place to tie it into another piece of advice we often hear about not info-dumping. If the police detective has a reason beyond his job for solving the case, that can be very fun to dribble in throughout the story. A reveal about what happened to his relative, or his own brush with the law, or whatever it might be—the more it unfolds gradually, the more propulsive it is. It keeps you reading to find out what’s really driving this character.
[00:25:44] Austin: Yes. It can start out simply: “I have to solve this case because I’m the cop assigned to it.” It can start there, and then over time you get down to the deep-down reason. With the villain, the same thing: you can start out thinking he’s just a sociopath who decided to kill somebody, and then over time reveal that he cares deeply about something.
They have to care deeply so that we can care deeply.
[00:26:16] Matty: That’s a great way of putting it.
[00:26:23] Matty: I did want to loop back to something you said earlier about always adding one more conflict for your protagonist to address. I always wonder what the signal is that the writer has done enough. I’ll use ALIEN as an example, since I love using it for pretty much anything. The crew’s mission is interrupted—that’s one problem. Then the John Hurt character dies. Then Ripley’s implied romantic interest, the captain, dies. Then everybody else dies. Then she gets into the escape pod with the cat, and even that isn’t the end. Do you feel like there’s a natural point where you think, okay, we’re done?
[00:27:23] Austin: That is so subjective. I’m driven to keep finding bigger problems for my protagonist, or to make existing problems worse, and I don’t know if there’s a natural stopping point unless you reach the place where you genuinely cannot imagine a way to make it any worse.
[00:27:52] Matty: I suppose it’s driven by a combination of factors, including genre. If your story is basically about someone finding satisfaction beyond their day job, you probably don’t need them to be tracking down a serial killer on top of that. The stakes are intrinsically different because of the story you’re writing. And sometimes you’re also constrained by format—a two-hour movie only has room for so much bad luck.
[00:29:44] Austin: I think the stakes only have to feel gigantic to the protagonist. It’s not really about whether they are objectively huge. In ALIEN, ultimately Ripley is just trying to survive—that’s it. That’s the entire movie. But in another story you could have a character who misses an elevator. He pushes the button, it’s not working, his office is on the eighteenth floor, and he has thirty seconds to get there. No matter what the stakes are, if they look gigantic to the hero and the reader is invested in that hero, the story works.
Now, I don’t read romance because I don’t feel those stakes personally—will he get the girl? That’s not me. But that doesn’t mean they’re not real stakes for the people who do.
[00:31:03] Matty: I think it’s helpful for writers to think very explicitly about what the final resolution looks like—what the triumph in the conflict actually is. If what you want the final triumph to be is whether the protagonist lives or dies, you have the first ALIEN movie. After that, I speculate the stakes escalate: it’s no longer just about survival, it’s about saving civilization or something larger. So if you went into the first story thinking you wanted the end result to be about saving civilization, you couldn’t just stop with her jetting off into space.
[00:31:47] Austin: You do have to make the stakes very clear—in the reader’s mind, but also in the protagonist’s mind. He has to understand what the stakes are and what he absolutely, positively needs to do. Did Rocky really desperately need to be the heavyweight champion? I don’t think so. Rocky really desperately needed to prove to his girl that he was a good man, and to prove to himself that he would not quit. And when they both fall down and Apollo Creed says, “Ain’t going to be no rematch,” Rocky says, “Don’t want one.”
[00:32:41] Matty: ROCKY is one of my all-time favorite movies for exactly that reason. Someone pursuing the goal of “I want to prove myself, I want to prove that I don’t give up” is so much more compelling to me. I watched one or two of the sequels and gave up, because it felt like the goal had shifted to simply: is he going to win the fight? I’m not very interested in that storyline.
[00:33:09] Austin: You are exactly right. The real objective in the first movie was not to become the champion. In the later movies it was just who’s going to win the fight, and they kept making the bad guy bigger and the threat bigger.
But the storyline didn’t move. I was more impressed by the story that ended with, “I accomplished my goal because I went all the way to the end and proved to everybody—and to my girl—that I am not just a bum.” That just felt right.
[00:33:51] Matty: Yes. And what’s interesting is that Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the script, was not at all subtle about it. Rocky says right there in the movie, “All I want to do is go the distance.” You can read a lot into that beyond the literal meaning, but even just taking it at face value: sometimes you don’t need to be subtle. You can just lay it out—here’s my goal, and I’m going to make it or not. And if you do your job right, you have people rooting for the protagonist to meet that goal.
[00:34:22] Austin: And I think it’s good in many cases for the protagonist to state the goal that plainly to someone. Because now it’s not just clear in the reader’s mind—it’s clear in the protagonist’s mind. This is what he’s trying to do, and then you don’t get confused by all of the other stuff that comes flying in.
[00:34:50] Matty: Well, I think our conversation is a really nice illustration of how intrinsically connected these things are. We started out with conflict, just as one angle, but how central it is to character motivation and interesting characters. So cool.
Well, Austin, thank you so much for humoring all my questions about character motivation and conflict. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work.
[00:35:14] Austin: You can go to my website at www.ascamacho.com. You can find me on Facebook—I’m there every day for some amount of time—and on Instagram. Or just Google me. I’m all over social media very often, either talking about my books, talking about my conference, or just making some smart remark.
[00:35:44] Matty: Would you like to put in a plug for Creatures, Crimes & Creativity? I’m sure people would love to hear more about it.
[00:35:51] Austin: Every September we put on a three-day conference, from noon Friday to noon Sunday. We attract writers, fans, and avid readers of genre fiction—mysteries, thrillers, horror, science fiction, fantasy, paranormal. After thirteen years, I’ve discovered that those writers have a lot more in common than most people realize. The process of writing a good mystery and the process of writing a good science fiction novel are not that different. You still need the conflict. You still need the suspense. You still need strong characters.
We have a lot of fun. There are panels, and we always have a couple of keynote speakers who give a talk at dinner. All of the meals are included in the registration fee because we want everybody to stay together and hang out with our writers. We have two big book-signing events, on Friday night and on Saturday, and these last few years we’ve had between 60 and 75 authors there at once signing their books.
[00:37:12] Matty: Before my calendar changed, I did attend a couple of times, and it is a super fun conference—a very warm, welcoming group of people. I’m going to have to move my regularly scheduled trip to Maine to some other part of the year.
[00:37:33] Austin: Thank you so much for inviting me. This was wonderful.
[00:37:37] Matty: Oh, thank you so much.