Literary Voices

please welcome Dan Z Sinha and Colson whitehead hi there howdy-do this is great to be here with Colson um we've known each other a very very very long time and um we don't have to even say how many years but it's really like a lifetime and what we thought was we would read just two pages of each of our books and then chat for a while and then open it up sounds good yeah sure I mean I can go the book is called an underground railroad and I had the idea many years ago in the year 2000 I was sitting on my couch and came across a reference to dignity wearing railroad I remembered how when I was a little kid and I first heard those two words I thought was a literal subway beneath the earth which of course is very impractical but I just thought you know what kind of story could I get out of that and this absurd premise and I kept putting it off I think I was a good enough writer to write the book I think I was like mature enough to deal with the subject matter I was sort of like a Gen X slacker type at that point so I think if I waited one day I'd be ready and then a couple years ago an idea for a book it was kind of dumb and my wife was like what about the other idea and so I decided to listen to her and I'm gonna read from the very opening IV from the upper-body strength so I read from an iPad and it's the main characters grandmother the first chapter is a sort of a prologue and so deals with I want to encapsulate a typical slaves life before it gets a my main character and so her grandmother is in Africa is kidnapped survives Middle Passage and then it's sold a couple times on her way down to Randall plantation which is where the book proper begins the first time Caesar approached kora about running north she said no this was her grandmother talking Cora's grandmother had never seen the ocean but before that bright afternoon in the port of WIDA and the water dazzled after her time in the port's dungeon the dungeon stored them until the ships arrived the homey and Raiders kidnapped the men first then returned to her village the next moon for the women and children marching em in chains to the sea two by two as she stared into the black doorway a jar II thought should be reunited with her father down there in the dark the survivors from her village told her that when her father couldn't keep the pace of the long march the slavers stove in his head and left his body by the trail her mother had died years before Cora's grandmother was sold a few times on the trek to the fort passed between slavers for glass beads it was hard to say how much they paid for her and WIDA as she was part of a bulk purchase eighty-eight human souls for 60 crates of rum and gunpowder the price arrived upon after the standard haggling in Coast English able-bodied men and childbearing women fetched more than juveniles making making an individual accounting difficult the ship the nanny was out of Liverpool and it made two previous stops along the Gold Coast the captain staggered his purchases rather than find himself with a cargo of singular culture and disposition who knew a brand of mutiny his captives might cook up if they shared a common tongue this was the ship's final port of call but before they crossed the Atlantic to yellow-haired sailors wrote a jari out to the ship humming white skin like bone the noxious air of the hold of the glue of confinement and the screams of those shackled to her contrived to drive a jari to madness because of her tender age her captors did not immediately force their urges upon her but eventually some of the more seasoned mates dragged it from the hold six weeks into the passage she twice tried to kill herself on the voyage to America once by denying herself food and then again by drowning the Sailor stymied her both times first in the schemes and inclinations of chattel I'm sorry I didn't even make it to the gunwale when she tried to jump overboard her posture and piteous aspect recognizable from thousands of slaves before her betrayed her intentions chained head to toe head to toe in exponential misery the comedy moment the comedy portion after that but that's beautiful so yeah I I'm gonna read from my novel new people which came out in August and um I guess it's a kind of darkly comic novel about a woman who's um it's said in 1990s actually in Brooklyn and it's somewhere that Colson and I lived at the same time um and I was really interested in that moment in Brooklyn um where we kind of came of age and I don't know if you feel this but there was this like sort of ten block radius with a lot of um when I think about the Harlem Renaissance there was this kind of Renaissance in Brooklyn of these all of us moved there after college and it was um before it got really gentrified racially there was this kind of college-educated artistic really vibrant black community you know Spike Lee's were made of famous his movies and his office there and I was at the Village Voice when I got to college and everyone who'd been sort of my age but been there a little bit longer had moved to Fort Greene and in Park Slope and it was cheaper than Manhattan and it was sort of the start of that wave of people coming to New York and you can deform in hatton so you have to go to Brooklyn automatically and you know I went there a thing could be part of this big scene no one want to talk to me I never had Spike Lee but it was like yeah I mean actually yeah it's fun to talk to you about that and this book is set in that time period um and the main characters well the main character is a woman named Marie who is a mixed-race she's just graduated from Stanford where I went to college and she's um living there doing her research on the Jonestown Massacre the cheery subject of the Jonestown Massacre and um and it's sort of about her unraveling as she works on this subject of the Jonestown Massacre she starts to kind of lose her grip on reality and becomes obsessed with someone and stalks them and things go terribly wrong um and I'm just gonna read a few pages from the beginning Maria is 27 she is engaged to marry Khalil who loves her unequivocally she is the one he has been waiting for his whole life Maria loves Khalil she never doubts this he is the one she needs the one who can repair her they met in college on the other coast years ago so they have in a sense grown up together it is sometimes hard for Maria to see where one of them ends and the other begins their favorite song is al Green's simply beautiful their favorite movies are Sammy and Rosie get laid chameleons street and nothing but a man their favorite novel is Giovanni's Room Khalil says they make each other complete their skin is the same shade of beige together they look like the end of a story they live together in Brooklyn in a neighborhood that is changing it is November 1996 interspersed among the old guard the Jamaican ladies with their folding chairs the churchy men in their brown polyester suits are the ones who have just arrived it is subtle this shift almost imperceptible when Maria blurs her eyes right it doesn't appear to be happening they danced together at house parties in the dark if I ruled the world they sing their voice is rising as one imagine that I'd free all my son Maria is writing a dissertation she has been granted a small fellowship to live on in this final year so she can focus on completion she spends her days at the Social Science Library on a hundred and eighteenth and Amsterdam poring over materials from a long gone time and place it is already late fall and she has come to rely on rituals to get her work done she wears the same pea coat and the same red gauzy scarf she stops at the same deli and orders the same thing from the burly guy behind the counter a buttered bialy and coffee light and sweet she carries the same assortment of snacks in her purse a bag of salted cashews a chocolate bar a bottle of water there's a window beside her Carol where she sometimes pauses to watch the cold air sharpening the edges of buildings she has decided all university campuses are alike the sense of possibility and stasis she thinks this to all graduate students if you look closely enough exude the same aura of privilege and poverty the photo on her University ID is four years old it was taken the year she and Kaleo moved here from California in the picture she looks like a different Maria it isn't just the golden brown of her skin and it isn't just her bangs which hang long over her eyes it is her smile crooked and loose and the expression in her eyes some barely can't contained hilarity she looks preserved in the moment before you burst into laughter she can no longer remember what was so funny her subject is Jonestown the People's Temple she entered the program planning to study 70s era intentional communities the bonds of kinship forged among unrelated people once she started investigating Jonestown she could not look away she knew then only the most basic that's the one that had become part of the detritus of the culture that Jonestown was a cult that the group's leader Jim Jones wore sunglasses everywhere that he and his followers committed mass suicide together one day in the jungles of South America by drinking the kool-aid the question that guided her then was the most banal the one posed by all Holocaust how does such a thing happen she was guided by a line from juveniles satires nobody becomes depraved overnight now so many years into it her focus has shifted she wants to know not how they died but how they kept themselves going there is no memorial to the people of Jonestown the remote jungle in Guyana that they cleared where they built a society has long been reclaimed by vegetation the last visitor to the site reported finding only the barest remnants of what once was there a tractor engine a rusting file cabinet the metal drum they used to poison the liquid before they drank it thank you what what does Maria see in the Jim Jones story I remember like 20 years ago thinking like I guess I realized that most of his parishioners were african-american yeah I remember when it happened was they late 70s into a miniseries like Guyana cult of the Damned movies about it but what does she see in the tragedy um well she is I think if you're um biracial and born in the like I was in 1970 I can tell you what I saw it and it and it and sort of projected onto her um that my parents were very idealistic interracial couple and then things sort of went terribly wrong but not as bad it's Jonestown um but I was really interested in kind of the idea of these racial utopias and kind of Brooklyn in a way I was thinking about that sort of utopia in a funny way of the kind of Brooklyn of the 90s and then this late 70s um Jonestown where they called it another America and they were gonna go and sort of solve all the problems of America in this place and the thousand people you know the sort of idealistic Americans it felt like a kind of ghost story for my my own life and my own family and like we were the kind of people who would have gone there but thanks yeah saying it was a comedy but so yeah that was kind of where I got obsessed with it and then decided to put all that on my character because it's fun to have a character have obsessions and especially if you've already done all the obsessing yourself oh yes yeah but um yeah I did a lot of research as I'm assuming you did and reading your book and yeah I mean um I did less than you would think I mean as a fiction writer that the burden of getting it right doesn't necessarily occur to me I can make things up and you know the second part of the book there's a literal railroad the second part of the book is that each state that Cora goes through is different so alternative America like Gulliver's Travels and so she goes to South Carolina which is a seemingly benevolent white run state North Carolina is a white supremacist state she finds her own black utopia in Indiana among a black community that sort of made their own society down the road from from the white town but I went back to stuff I read in college I stayed with me the big slave narratives with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs Harriet Jacobs wrote a book called incidents in the life of a slave girl and she writes about how when a slave girl becomes a slave women changed into a much more terrible form of slavery she's now prayed to her master's desires if she's not was not already she's supposed to pump out babies because more babies means more slaves and more slaves more property and so um you know rereading her book 30 years later maybe the side had a female protagonist now that seemed a worthy particulate to explore the female slave and then in the 1930s the US government was Great Depression everyone broke basically thinking of busy work for people to pay them to do hired writers to interview former slaves about their their life sixty years before to get their life stories before they passed on and and so there's hundreds and hundreds of them they're in the public domain so I'll not leaving the house so I can just download into my iPad and work on them in my leisure and for a fiction writer you know there's all those sort of nouns and verbs and adjectives that hopefully make it singing and sound realistic I kept coming across the word scourging but while they keep saying scourging there was an adjective for a beaten for beating somebody for punishing them so there's that kind of grim calculus of how often do you use the word beating when you scourging what they where would they eat and I stuff that wouldn't you and find in the history book because it's too small a detail but you know for the kind of work we do is very important you begin this during Obama right and then finished it before the election of Trump I mean they came out like three months before from selection and you know you're talking about sort of racial utopia of Brooklyn in the early 90s and and of course it's appealing but of course didn't exist and for eight years we had this yeah this post-racial thing which if you ask any black person obviously did it was not true but it does seem like a very separate time now there's those eight years and so um when the book came out a lot of conversation around the book revolve around black lives matter Greeks were you thinking of black lives matter when you wrote the book and the answer was no I mean we had these periodic discussions about police brutality and then we stopped and then something else happened to me start again so that's been a feature of my life as a black American but having it you know be out three months and then Trumka elected it does change thing yeah it's just interesting the timing of a book and what but I was thinking about it while he was reading it I was like I I feel like on all of your books have had sort of these thematic links and and this one like the surface looks like a sort of shift but it's actually in all of your books well I think you know I usually have more jokes in my books yeah but you know race technology and changing ideas about race you know it's definitely president a few my novels sometimes not there but definitely my first couple in this one and so it does it's a bit more straight what the narrator is not this sort of like hyperkinetic postmodern jujitsu dude but all the ideas i've been thinking about and a lot of this stuff that i is in my earlier books you know based on things I've had in college or sort of fed this back to a lot of stuff about but Tuskegee syphilis experiment eugenics theories I read in college and we're sort of waiting for a good sort of vessel or venue like your obsessions that you have in college I mean I was obsessed with 70 social movements in college and it's like I'm still writing about them now and I always told my students that like what you're obsessed with now you're gonna it's gonna stick with you take notes I mean I I kept all my college books I move a lot so it's like I hope I use this damn book it's really heavy right no exactly and I think also like it takes maybe decades and a way to let something percolate inside of you and feel ready to turn it into a novel you know well in this case you know have the idea in 2000 and I wrote was writing a book John Henry days which a lot of historical research I was like I can't do another historical heavy book again and also I didn't feel ready for it and then I can only take it on when I was ready and I was good enough writer like ready to contemplate slavery in an adult way you know reading the books again as a grownup you appreciate the true devastation of slavery in a different way than you do when you're a kid watching roots apparent and like I realize in a different way where do we like to see your child sold off beaten raped to have your child see some let that happen to you or your mother and so definitely not writing when I was a gen Xer douchebag and waiting till I was older I remember like you know the parents saying you got to watch this yeah and and it was it was a national phenomenon and my siblings had to watch it and then this summer traveling in Europe when they got translated I would say Bruticus everyone in Denmark was watching boots I think extracting a different experience from it but it really was a worldwide phenomenon as I remember it was a big thing in our house watching roots and on and that was kind of around the same time as Jonestown actually I think it was and on it's just a sort of comic strange thing was in my school I what year was it's like it was 77 77 okay so I was only seven but I remember going to school in the nights that everyone was watching it and there was this little all the black kids sat together and I sat with the black kids in the cafeteria and this little white girl came up to our table and said she'd been watching roots and that she wanted to make some kind of she wanted to do something for us and could she empty our lunch we were like yeah here and she grew up either to be with a great person or a terrible person now it's like oh let's and Asner from The Mary Tyler Moore Show that's Geordie from start with next generation ya know it's very strange to watch it now but I feel like it's like it marks our generation to something we all took in and how do you I mean this is maybe but now a question but I'm actually interested in how you concentrate in this day and age and kind of find that focus to sustain a narrative like this and we're all under assault I feel in terms of our question the last 13 months no not even that just like our attention span and how you sustain your work for me you know I work at home I'm not a big cafe person if I work at home I can take a nap I can weep write a page we take a nap and it's not in public but I think I grew up writing fiction with in the age of the Internet and if I'm stuck I need some research I'll go to Google or back then was AltaVista yeah I'm like look up for my first novel is about elevators back issues of elevator world so I'm used to that sort of intrusion and it's also a tool you know with this book I was look up slang like they say this in 1850 or was it more in 1910 and I would go to an online database and I go back to work and unless someone s like have a hood over my head and like being a cement line wall to work definitely since the election I'm a news junkie so I'm distracted I know people who were in the middle of books and now just don't know you know they're working at much slower rate discuss everything is so distracting nowadays right I mean I like because I do have to create all these sort of rules around for the first draft of a novel I find it really hard to get through it so I find I have to do tricks with myself like I can't have any internet any kind of distract them for several hours like and I can only write scenes forward and then once the first draft is done I'm like I really enjoy the editing and going back in and I don't need that help but I find the sort of blank page and the sort of project of writing those hundreds of pages the first time hard and then it becomes better as I'm working with those pages and you know you're right short stories and weird a memoir I've been a few novels when you're writing a novel can you stop my short story or do you like this constantly one thing or are you can I do one thing at a time I like I have to be totally obsessed and singular about it have you pretty much know right that says it's in between things like a palate cleanser kind of thing yet no me too but I don't really I feel the most comfortable in the novel like having written now three novels and one collection of stories and a memoir I feel like okay I I'm more comfortable in this form because it can allows for all these tangents and all of this sort of um I don't know it's like a serial monogamy with the novel sure I mean the one-night stand of the short story is like a little more just write a joke you have to wait two years or something to laugh at the short story get that immediate thing I guess that's why I started cooking because like you you get ingredients you cook it if you to your family and you can actually get response like this thanks whit this sucks I supposed to novel we're two years ya know you go through like full manic-depressive arcs within that novel and then it's it's like yeah you sort of have to really weather it out but I I've come to appreciate that because it gives you that space should we open it up or do we can we can yeah any questions or tips yes um I didn't with I labor over those decisions often but for some reason this book was the most fun and came the most easily to me of anything I've ever written and I sort of started writing I had another book that I'd been working for five years that was due to my publisher and it was like hundreds of pages and it was agony and I had had two children during the writing of that and that was its own disruption and I had i luckily live in California so I never had to bump into my editor but I knew they were I was worried they they were about to ask for you for the money back that was all gonna be hideous and then I just stuck those pages in a drawer and I was like let me just play with something on the side and I wrote this book through and you know six maybe less than six months and just had so much fun with it and they it was like I was cheating on my other novel and then I called my editor and said on I have some good news and bad news the book you've been reading and we're expecting is never gonna happen but the good news is look in your inbox there's another novel and so luckily it worked out well but she's not gonna go back to the other not sure I mean it's hard to go back have you ever tried that uh no I mean one book that everyone hated is unpublished and I was like oh maybe one day I'll fix it up but that energy that would I could use to fix it up it's better spent writing something new it's not just in a drawer and if my daughter has like a gambling problem when I'm dead yeah yeah but I just I'd never I don't think I've ever written in that voice but it was fun for me yeah [Music] well the questions about Indiana there's a self-sufficient black community why did I why do certain bad things happen to them that's really reality I mean there were there are black towns black settlements and then when you get successful just face it as what happens in the book white people want the resources want the land burn Edgartown burn the town down Lynch people drive the black folks off and take it over and that happened many different towns main different states and it would have been nice to have that nice moment for Cora God knows I put her through a lot of terrible things but her journey was not over yet I mean I think I've come to realize that writing is miserable and so that it's not right or like you're just making a choice to keep pushing forward and it's not gonna like there's going to be these moments of excitement and inspiration and sort of a wonderful ease but most of the time it's like gonna feel hard on the that first draft so I I think now that I know that I don't think it's writer's block I just think I've made a choice to go and you know watch television instead and I really could be writing this next scene right you know it's like I know that it's there isn't really such a thing as writer's block because it's not gonna feel natural until it does sure yeah the question is about what you do when you're stuck and I sort of feel like I don't have writer's block I just have sort of things I haven't figured out so they're talking I'm writing and I'll get to a section and I introduce save Ridgway in the book and a character named bridge way I got to him on page 72 I don't know who he was I know how he walked and talked so the good thing about novel well the bad thing about novel is that it sucks and takes a long time but also you have time to figure things out so I just wrote a sheet of paper it said introduction Ridgway TK that's like wider lingo for to come come later and wrote for three months then when I figured out who he was I went back and did it and so when I've been stuck just because I don't know what this person sounds like or how this scene is gonna play out before I start writing I do outline and so I know the beginning in the end and most of the middle and of course it changes when I start writing but if action though it's gonna seems in my dorky way that if it's hard enough to find the right words each day if I know what's gonna happen it seems twice as hard each day it's like introduce Cora's grandmother or introduced Valentine farm and then I'm undone know what down planform looks like and I might have to might take a couple weeks that sort of figure out is it two big houses or one big house where they farm and all the kind of questions that eventually make it sound real but eventually because I have outlined it and I thought about it for a year before I started writing I know that I'm committed and I said they figure it out did we go to Goodreads in an Amazon look at the stuff it's Jim for oneself probably not good because some people get the book and that's great and then some people don't get it and I member the first week when the growing railroad came out I got like one star on Amazon that's what the first review I read and was like why are all the white people evil in the book and it's like it's not even true I'm sorry I made you feel bad or made you think about your great-great-grandfather who seemed like a nice guy but actually raped tortured and terrible things so hopefully you want people to get the book some people won't that's just the way it is so it's not necessarily healthy to go there to awesome I said yeah I never look I've never seen my Amazon page or my Goodreads and I'm never will and I love that I don't have to and it's and it's partly because the books that I love have not always been the ones that they aren't written for consensus or for everyone so those aren't the books I want to write and I don't want to be aware of that kind of on that that I want to filter enough that I'm not thinking about those readers and I'm writing for myself and with my publisher like I asked them to just send me you know the press release so I don't have to like be sent reviews all the time or see all that stuff but I I tend to be thrown off by things easily and so I've just created a little bubble and luckily I live in LA where no one cares about what I'm doing a novelist in LA so it's good my book is about slavery I mean um in this novel her mother is african-american and she's oh sorry oh we get the whole question I guess yeah she was asking if both our books the question was on how would we have written about these characters differently if it was a black immigrant if the main characters or the difference in the black immigrant versus the african-american experience descended from slaves yeah how much I can't think of how I would bring the book by a different cultural background I remember I was in France and someone asked me could a white person have written this book and I guess the Erasmo appropriation and I was like only I could have in this book because it's my book like I couldn't have written crime and punishment so I you know same the same way people asked like what happens to Cora after the last page I have no idea I don't think about it yeah I mean I am interested in that difference between the african-american experience and what boat you came here on like what how did you get here and how does that inform your experience my both you know I wrote a memoir my mother's descended from the biggest slave trading family on the Northeast Corridor and my father's family is from the deep south african american family descended from slaves and the origin story does inform everything I write and um you know I think that I I never you know try to write I'm not interested in writing outside of that perspective because I think there's so many different narratives within that it's not limiting in any way um and I think that the universal is found through the specific so I lived in England for a year and I remember noticing how different it is to be a black immigrant as opposed to the experience I come out of and I'm really interested in those differences yeah yeah well for me for me it varies when do we bring our work to other people when some progress early later in the middle or think and when do you start to imagine those right readers right well my first book you know the intuitionist I thought that my ideal reader was like a 16 year old black weirdo kid who might read the book and think oh I can write here's a weirdo writing maybe I could do too and they came out and there were no sixteen-year-old weirdos black or white in the audience and I stopped thinking about the audience at that with that you know I changed subject a lot and I gained readers they lose readers I gain readers with Sag Harbor which is like a very very lipstick story about growing up and then I go to Zambia pocalypse novel and lost everybody anybody who came aboard for that like hate you so I'm always like disappointing people so I never think and losing readers I never think about them anymore and the sharing work it depends how needy I am I think like a hundred pages it's like a good point where I'm like now I can show my wife or my agent or my editor and get feedback and and that gets me going to the end I guess yeah I have a writing group of three really good friends who really get my humor and my sensibility and um when I was writing this book it was almost like a serial novel cuz I would be chuckling in my room and I was like they were gonna think this was really funny and I kind of wrote for these three women but I also thought like I probably could never publish this and that's usually a good sign for me if I think this is really going too far and I shouldn't publish this and so if I trick myself into thinking it's just never gonna see the light of day then I feel free or to sort of go into places that might be uncomfortable or dangerous or offensive but I really can't think outside of that little circle of very of myself and these friends who are my earliest readers because I get a media those self sensors start to limit me and I want to have that draft be really free that first draft yes what's there a time for each of us when we knew we had to be a writer and what influenced that sure well for me you know I was a sort of geeky kid and I would stay in my house all day reading comic books like x-men and spider-man and reading my parents like Stephen King novels so it seemed like in seventh or eighth grade that being a writer would be fun and then I wrote two stories in college and no one liked them we're just good training for being a writer cuz everyone hates you and stuff like that and I got a voice and became a writer like a freelance writer but I think I became a writer when I wrote my first book and no one liked it and I was like I was in my late 20s my parents like Shane go to law school now like we told you even agony and I realized that I just had no choice but the write another book and people might hate that one but I'll become a better writer by doing it and then if that it would suck but if that didn't take off I'd do it again so I realized that nothing else would sort of fill the incredible void of neediness life except writing keep going yeah because I went to college my parents are both writers so all I knew growing up was I did not want to be a writer like that was the one thing I was gonna be and I went to college to be pre-med and I failed really badly in organic chemistry I realized that like you know when your kindergarten teacher says on you can be anything you want to be or you can do anything I realized that was a lie because I worked so hard to try to pass that class and I failed horribly and the only place I felt happy was in novels and writing but I just wanted to avoid becoming my parents and and obviously that didn't work and I'm now doing exactly what my mother has done my whole life she's a creative writing professor and a writer and my father's writer and so I just kind of accepted like the family trade you know like the child of the cobbler goes off to try to go to Hollywood and then comes back and is like I'll just take over the business and that's what I did basically um sure the question is how does a how does word processing changed I'll be right as opposed to the olden days with pen paper and quill and cuneiform yeah I guess my brain has adjusted to it over the years but I I did this crazy thing I I did find it very too easy to edit myself over and over again and have too many different versions of a novel with a computer like it gave me too many options and my second novel I had written on the computer and I was really stuck and I moved to England for six weeks and I went to like a really old typewriter shop and bought a typewriter and I rewrote the whole novel on a typewriter like a manual typewriter from the dark ages and it was the only way I could really commit to one version and the story was to like make it a physically laborious task and it was just so insane and then I had it all typed and it was like can I send this to the publisher on the computer but it kind of got to why I found the computer challenging because they there was something about making it stick and not being able to change it that made me think more about decisively about the story yeah and then for me you know I feel like I'm writing when I'm at the computer but I do loud notes beforehand you know and have a you know do a lot of planning in my notebook and then as I'm writing my computer I'll go back to a note I wrote six months later because like was it a line that someone was gonna say six months was actually writing and then when I edit I you know print out mark it up for the changes in I used to have a notebook where I write like my brilliant thoughts down and then I left it on the plane and I was bleep freaked out and I have that I found it well the rest the story is that uh I got two hotel ones like I'm a master of memory I'm gonna recreate the notebook and I was writing away I was like I really got everything then went back to the airport next day and they found it JetBlue thank you and I compared what I remember compared to what I actually wrote I was like ten percent so now just like if I wake up with some building idea at 4:00 a.m. I put on my phone it's in the cloud and so I find editing on paper on the computer on a tablet reading the loud I find different kinds of errors and so like editing on computers like one one of the things I do yeah and I think that's our time thank you so much [Applause]