Episode 004 | How To Lead a Creative Life

Blythe Roberson, author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men, joins us in the basement to share how she leads a creative life. Her second book hits shelves this April so clearly Blythe's doing something right (preorder America The Beautiful? here). Take some notes, people.

We also get the scoop on A.J.'s trip to Venice, debate how to pronounce the name Charon, and try to make friends with our inner critics. You'll be laughing for hours. Three hours later, you'll still be laughing. 

Later, we call our mom to ask how she leads a creative life and briefly discuss her feet. You should see them.

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Haunted Basement is a full-service video production company that creates professional content for every budget to promote your business or brand. Visit hauntedbasement.video or contact hello@hauntedbasement.video for more.

Episode 004​​ Transcript

Bubba: Haunted Basement: The Podcast is brought to you by Haunted Basement, the production company.

A.J.: Haunted Basement is a full service video production company that creates professional content for every budget to promote your business or brand.

Bubba: Our portfolio has a bunch of different videos including branded content, social ads, music videos, documentaries, and our credits include an editing role on a feature film.

A.J.: We are a sibling-run production company, and together we have over three decades of experience working in film, tv, digital media, and marketing.

Bubba: So if you need a video to promote your business or brand, reach out.

A.J.: Get in touch. Let's talk.

Bubba: We have a link to our website in the show notes below, and you can also find us on Instagram at _hauntedbasement_.

A.J.: All right, let's start the episode.

A.J. and Ashleigh make weird sounds.

Bubba: Nice. Okay. Welcome back to the basement. 

A.J.: Hello. 

Ashleigh: Episode four, we're back. 

A.J. : I'm back from Italy, y’all.

Bubba: Back from Italy. In your headphones.How was Venice? 

A.J.: Venice was great. I got a lot of writing done and I also witnessed a Venetian funeral. Do you guys want to hear what a Venetian funeral looks like?

Ashleigh: I can just picture a skeleton on a gondola.

A.J.: Pretty close. So I was walking by this church and there was a crowd of 200 people all dressed up in funeral clothes, and I was just like, what is going on? And I look and there's like a huge gondola. A coffin was inside the gondola and there were three gondoliers, and they're all wearing very formal-looking attire. And the gondoliers all lifted their oars up in the air, straight up in the air. And all 300 people that were witnessing this funeral, guess what they did? 

Ashleigh: Did they sing opera? 

A.J.: They started clapping. Everyone started clapping. I've never experienced clapping at a funeral before. And it was like this really solemn event, but also felt really joyous at the same time.

Ashleigh: Celebration.

A.J.: Yeah. And it also reminded me of watching Lord of the Rings at the end of Return of the King when they go off in the boats to the Gray Haven. This sort of beautiful image of the dead going off in the water to a different world. And it was just like, I've never seen anything like this before in my life. It was pretty startling. 

Bubba: Who’s the boatman that crosses the river Styx in Greek mythology? Oh, Charon. Oh yeah. I think it's Charon, right? 

Ashleigh: Charon?

Bubba: You know that old Greek Sharon? It is. Anyway, that's what I'm imagining with a gondola with a coffin in it. 

A.J.: So I did a little research about it after. Clapping at Italian funerals. To see if that popped up any results. And I found something where they were describing that it doesn't happen often, and it usually happens when someone who is of a political rank dies. And the citizens don't really know this person personally, but they respect the person's contribution to society.

Ashleigh: I was thinking you were going to say they raise up the oars everyone's like (Ash opera sings). I love striped shirts. And as you know, I love singing and opera, so I'm thinking maybe I should become a gondolier.

A.J.: Has there been a great Broadway musical or Hollywood musical about a singing gondolier?

Ashleigh: I know. Let's make it, guys.

A.J.: A singing gondolier. 

Bubba: Oh man.

Ashleigh: I would love to watch that. I started watching a movie today because I don't feel super well, and what was it called? It was an old movie. And it's just so funny the way they cut different scenes. This girl's like, we were laughing for hours and then the next scene it was, yeah, it was later. We were still laughing and they were in a different location.

A.J.: What movie was this?

Ashleigh: Designing Women or Designer Women.

A.J.: Okay.

Ashleigh: No. Hold on. I'll, I'll find it. You guys keep talking.

A.J.: Talk amongst yourselves.

Ashleigh: I'm pretty sure Gregory Peck was in it.

Bubba: Have you watched The Apartment? I I've watched The Apartment since our last episode.

A.J.: Let's hear your thoughts, Bubs.

Bubba: Definitely a movie of its time or a movie. You could do a remake, but you'd have to really adapt it for modern times.

A.J.: For the Me Too movement. 

Bubba: Yeah. 

A.J.: Shirley MacLaine’s eyes sparkle in that movie. Did you notice that? Just the way they light her eyes, they are just sparkling. 

Bubba: Honestly, I was mostly commenting on how Jack Lemmon looks like if our puppy, Louie, was a human being.

Ashleigh: Your Boston Terrier. 

Bubba: Yeah. No offense to Jack Lemmon or his family. But he has this peppiness. You know how they act back in the day when they talk really fast and they're really animated like this. He's dealing cards. 

Ashleigh:

Why do they all talk like this? That's what I want to know. When did we stop talking like this?

A.J.: The Mid-Atlantic accent that was popular in the twenties and thirties. I think in the forties and fifties it started to slowly die down. 

Ashleigh:

I wonder why I'm so curious.

A.J.: I think it's trying to sell to a British audience where you have an American accent that vaguely sounds British.

Ashleigh:

Yeah, I dunno. Makes sense. We're from Britain. 

A.J.: Hey, I'm from Italy. 

Bubba: All right. So you saw you clapped at a funeral, or you at least experienced the clapping? 

A.J.: I witnessed funeral clapping. 

Bubba: Yep. All right. 

A.J.: And I went on a haunted Venice walking tour, and there was an Australian family with me. I arrived at this bridge at 10:00 PM and this British man who had been living in Venice for five years, he was the guide. And it was just me, one other person, and then an Australian family with two little kids. And the guide was like, hi, this is a haunted Venice walking tour. It's an 18+ tour. And the mom was like, oh, they're fine. There was a 10 year old girl, an eight year old boy. They're fine.

Ashleigh: Oh my God.

A.J.: And the guy was like okay. And he was telling us some gruesome stories of an Italian general who was skinned alive during a battle. And the 10 year old girl was just eating this shit up. She just loved the gory details. And he told us about this old well that this creature lived in and it dragged a little girl down there, and now no children are allowed in that square at night after the sun goes down. I was too afraid to even approach this well, and this 10 year old girl just walks right up and touches it. So that's another thing I witnessed in Venice. And then I just ate such good food.

Ashleigh: What did you have for breakfast?

A.J.: Okay, let me tell you, my breakfast routine. I would wake up. I would walk down to the pasticceria. I don't know how to pronounce it. The pastry shop. And I would buy some sort of almond croissant thing. It wasn't a croissant, but something like that. But the thing is, there are just so many fucking pigeons walking around everywhere on the streets of Venice, and they would just walk into the pastry shop because there were swinging doors. So two pigeons would come in with one person. So there's like four people in there and five pigeons, and whenever the door opens, the pigeons would start flapping around. And the person behind the counter was like la porta la porta! trying to get them to get out. I've never eaten a pastry before and had pigeon wings flapping in my face

Ashleigh: Pastry with a side of pigeon.

Bubba: Anything else you want to say about Venice before we move on? 

A.J.: Last thing I'll say about Venice is that walking those narrow streets at night alone and all of the entryways are just pitch black and you don't know if someone's going to pop out of them, it was always unnerving. And I would always be holding my breath for the 15-20 minute walk home because I was living in a part of Venice that, you know, you get five minutes away from San Marco and it's not touristy anymore, it's just people living their lives and most of them are inside. So it was a lot of walking alone in the dark that really got me jazzed.

Ashleigh: Creepy.

A.J.: Well, thank you all for joining me on my Venice adventure. We've got Blythe Roberson coming up next. Who is she? You're going to have to find out.

Ashleigh: You sound like a smooth jazz radio dj.

A.J.: Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about Midnight Magic. This is Midnight Magic with David Allan Boucher.

Ashleigh: And his voice was like the ultimate will put you to sleep. It was so good. 

Bubba: I wonder if there were any lawsuits for people that are driving home with Midnight Magic on because he was really relaxing. 

A.J.: All right, well stay tuned. We've got more coming right down the pipe here on Haunted Basement: The Podcast. Smooches.

Song: How do you date men when you hate men. When you hate those boys yeah. How do you lead a creative life? How do you do it? What do you do with a list of movies from my brother? Let’s talk to Blythe.

A.J.: Hello and welcome back to Haunted Basement: The Podcast. I'm A.J. 

Bubba: I'm Bubba.

Ashleigh: And I'm Ashleigh with a cold.

A.J.: We are siblings and we run a production company called Haunted Basement. And this is our podcast where we talk about the movies, music, and pop culture that inspires and influences our video work. Today our guest is someone whom Bubba and I both consider a friend and collaborator. She's a comedy writer and the author of the book How to Date Men When You Hate Men, and the upcoming America The Beautiful? One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled. Blythe Roberson, welcome to the basement.

Blythe: Thank you for having me.

A.J.: So Blythe, let's explain how you know both Bubba and me. You first met Bubba, correct?

Blythe: Yes. I met Bubba in Harvard College. That would've been like fall of 2010.

Bubba: I think it was 2010. Yeah, I was a freshman.

Blythe: Yeah, I was a sophomore and I was working for a comedy show called On Harvard Time, the premise of which was the Daily Show of Harvard, which was not something anyone had necessarily asked for or wanted, but it was a very collaborative, supportive YouTube comedy show that taught me and a lot of other people how to make comedy and how to make video content. And I met Bubba there. Did you audition to be a correspondent?

Bubba: I think I auditioned to be a correspondent because my earliest memory is being behind the desk and having those studio lights just completely blinding me and being scared out of my mind. But then I started writing and directing for OHT, which was so fun.

Ashleigh: Bub, you were part of it as a freshman? Oh wow. I was living at home at the time, a recent college graduate in a wonderful economy and my parents and I just loved On Harvard Time. It was really good. It was really cute. I didn't know what you guys were talking about half the time because it was very much to do with Harvard, but we enjoyed it. 

Bubba: I was telling Ashleigh and A.J. that I remember in the first week that I joined the show, I submitted a script that we were reviewing and we used to do this kind of writers meeting. Yeah, you tore mine apart.

Blythe: No!

Bubba: Yeah, I know. I think I learned a lot in my four years working on OHT.

Blythe: I think about that writing environment all the time because I had never really written anything before and just having a whole room of people read and talk about your stuff and no one knows it's you and everything is actually considered, oh, maybe we will use this was just, I feel like the perfect way to learn how to really write stuff.

A.J.: Blythe, you and I met in my downtown Los Angeles apartment in 2013.

Ashleigh: You met in L.A.?

A.J.: We met in L.A. I can't remember what the circumstances were.

Blythe: I was out there visiting to see if I wanted to move to LA or if I wanted to move to New York and Bubba was staying with you or something. So I came and met you and then I wrote in my diary, I met Bubba’s older brother. I think that he's going to be a part of my life for quite a while. I really like talking to him. Also, his friend Jonathan. 

A.J.: Blythe and Jonathan have a history. We drove from Maine to New York together. And Blythe was singing Bruce Springsteen the entire way. It was amazing. So I met Blythe in 2013. She moved to New York first. I followed shortly after and then, I don't know, one day in 2014, Blythe and Julia Lindon were like, let's make a web series. And I got involved and we made a web series called Kill Me Now. It was two years of our lives. We were all assistants to various celebrities/actors and had a lot of time on our hands during the day. So we would slip away and shoot during the day. It was great. And it was also a great learning experience of how to direct someone else's script and also edit and also work in comedy, which I'd never done before. And then Blythe wrote a little snippet about me in her book, How to Date Men When You Hate Men, which whenever I am in a bookstore, especially if I'm on a date in a bookstore, I'm like, I'm in this book and my date will always be like, what?

Ashleigh: So funny.

Bubba: Get me out of here.

Blythe: That's so funny, A.J.. I didn’t know you did that. 

Ashleigh: Do you guys want to tell that story?

A.J.: Blythe, you can go ahead.

Bubba: People should buy the book.

Blythe: Yeah, people should buy the book. For sure. So the part that I think you're referring to originated in a PowerPoint that I used to perform around town called Men I Thought Were Flirting With Me and Why which was a true retelling of all these different men that I was so convinced were flirting with me. And your entry was that you and I had gone to see some movie at Film Forum and there was a trailer before the movie for Hard Day's Night. And you were like, that movie is great. And I was like, I've never seen it. And you were like, you should see it. And I was like, well duh. You went to film school. You know a lot about movies. You should make me a list of movies that I should watch. And then four hours later I got an email from you that was a list of 99 movies and I was like, this man is in love with me. Why would he make a list of 99 movies? There's no other explanation. So I was like, I guess A.J. and I have to date now. And then later I was like, was that a flirt? And you were like, no, I am just enthusiastic about movies. 

Ashleigh: It's really funny. I was thinking about that story and how people need to understand that A.J. just loves movies.

Bubba: If that isn't the best funny testimonial for Haunted Basement that the man loves movies so much, just obsessed with movies.

Ashleigh: I love your book. I have it right here. It makes me laugh. It's one of those books where you could literally open up any page and just, it's like a giggle out loud book. So, so funny. 

A.J.: Well, I think we should talk about how you specifically live a creative life. I mean, you’re two books into your writing career, you've written in so many different venues in terms of comedy for standup, for web series, for television.

Ashleigh: The New Yorker, Esquire, Cosmo Vice, GQ. I can go on and on. 

A.J.: I can give you a little insight into something that I learned recently. When I was in Venice for the past two weeks, I learned something about my creative life. I was trying to write a first draft of a screenplay and I realized in order to do this, I need to talk to the part of my brain, the inner critic that does not want me to do any sort of creativity. I have to make friends with this inner critic. So I did something every day before I started writing. I said, okay, inner critic, you can read this, but you just can't read this while I'm writing it. I have to be able to write without you talking. And then at the end of the day, you can read what I wrote and have your comments about it. And I'm wondering if you have a similar process on how you tackle an inner critic, if you have one.

Blythe: Yeah, I'm a big believer in shitty first drafts where you just have to write a first draft and it's just going to be bad. And you have to push through that and just be like, okay, whatever. I just need to get words on the page and then I can edit from there. And it's just so much easier to edit, I think, than it is to write. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the bad words version of doing anything. 

Ashleigh: You gotta start. 

Blythe: Exactly. And the starting is difficult, but I think for me, the hardest part is always somewhere in the middle. I don't think I've ever not had this happen where I'm like, oh, this is a bad idea. I shouldn't do this. This is not going to work. And there's always a part of me that's like, I just need to cut my losses and abandon this. But whenever I push through it, it always ends up working, but it's always bad in the beginning.

Call Your Mom segment

Mom: Hello?

A.J.: Oh, hello mom.

Mom: Hey, you never told me how was Venice?

A.J.: Venice was so good, but we're calling because in the episode this week we talked to Blythe Roberton and we talked to her about living a creative life. And Bubba, Ashleigh and I were all like, you know who has lived a creative life? Our mom. Remember when you just used the house as your art project, you just painted all the rooms?

Mom: Yeah, I remember that. The person who bought the house loved it. She said, I love all the colors and all the paints and all that. But yes, you're right. I did use my home as my palette and that was fun. I liked that.

Bubba: And you're always doing it. You're always adding new projects into the mix. You're never done.

Mom: I know. And I always think to myself, I wish I had gone in that direction because I love it so much.

A.J.: Did it start with you drawing all those illustrations of faces when you were younger? Is that where your artistic sensibilities start?

Mom: Yeah, I think so. I used to draw all those cartoon characters and then I had this teacher in high school for Art, Ms. McMillan, and she was a cuckoo, but such a love and she was very artsy and she kept telling me that I needed to write a children's book, but I had it for years and I never did. And it's still in the back of my mind, so I'm going to write it. You know what, I'm going to write a children's book.

A.J.:There you go. 

Bubba: Well, you have illustrated a children's book, so you can cross that one off your list.

Mom: I illustrated two children's books.

A.J.: Oh, what was the second one?

Mom: Rory’s book that he dictated to me. I illustrated that.

Bubba: Where is that? I haven't, haven't seen that yet.

Mom: You haven't seen that? Oh, okay. I'll have to get it from Ash.

A.J.: What's it called?

Mom: I forget.

Bubba: Speaking of books, how did you get into Stephen King and why did you let us read Stephen King as young as we did from a very young impressionable age?

Mom: I don't know. I was probably in sixth or seventh grade and I liked to read and it's just his stories were believable even though they were crazy. So I was always looking for stuff like that because other things just bored me. But his stuff, just my imagination would just go crazy. He's just got an imagination that's like nobody else.

Bubba: He can lure you in so well that you can do what I ended up doing, which is spending a year and a half straight reading the Dark Tower series, all eight books, all, I don't know, thousands and thousands and thousands of pages, even though I objectively did not like it. I remember finishing the last book and being like, thank God that's over. I can move on with my life. 

A.J.: Mom, was Carrie your first Stephen King?

Mom: And then I saw the movie and I was freaked out. But my favorite book of Stephen King still to this day is The Stand.

A.J.: The thing about Stephen King, even when he writes a thousand page novel, he writes in his prose is so readable. It feels like I'm eating popcorn. I'm just yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.

Mom: Yes, yes, yes. And that book, The Stand is really about good versus evil and it's a little less gory and horror. It's more like the good in people versus evil in people. It's really interesting.

A.J.: So do you have any last tips for living a creative life?

Mom: Tips on living a creative life? I guess you have to block out what people think and say, because then you can't be creative. You can't use your imagination because you're kind of being blocked by the negativity of other people's thoughts. So I think that's the first, just go into it. Maybe don't tell anybody what you're doing, just do it and don't care about what anybody says or does.

A.J.: I love that advice. I think conquering or maybe becoming friends with your inner critic is a very important step in trying to be creative.

Mom: Tough thing.

A.J.: It's a daily thing. You can be on top of it one day and then the next day you got to be like, oh shoot, I've got to try it again.

Mom: Yeah. But what's going to happen if you do something or make something creatively and it's not what you wanted, you just start all over again and do something else.

Bubba: I feel like what you just said is very much in line with what Stephen King would say, because I actually just read how he writes 10 pages every single day, no matter what, every single day, even on weekends because that means in a month or two he has enough for a novel, but he never really has more than a very loose outline of where he is going. So every day he just sits down and he writes 10 pages and he said that, yeah, sometimes it leads me down a path where this book absolutely sucks, this book isn't going anywhere, but so long as I do it, 10 pages every single day get somewhere eventually. 

A.J.: Let's be honest, it does feel like he doesn't have an outline in a lot of his books. There's a lot of rambling. 

Bubba: But that is probably how he gets through it because he can kind of detach himself a little bit and just be surprised by it instead of being overly critical or holding in himself to these high expectations or anything like that.

Mom: Good for him. 10 pages a day. That's amazing.

Bubba: 10 a day baby.

Mom: I can't wait to listen to Blythe.

Bubba: Alright. Well, you got your pedicure. 

A.J.: Yeah, you got a pedicure.

Mom: Yeah. You should see my feet.

Bubba: Now we're talking. 

A.J.: Everyone should see your feet. Check 'em out.

Mom: It's below zero here and my feet are in boots and very heavy socks, but I needed to get them done.

A.J.: Yeah. All right, well, we'll let you go, but thanks for taking the call. 

Mom: Alright, honey, I love you.

Bubba: Love you too.

Mom: Bye.

Ashleigh: Where does your confidence come from? Because it shines through in all of your work, and in your answer that you just said, you have so much confidence and it's amazing. 

Blythe: Thank you. I don't feel that is necessarily true. I feel like this book I just wrote, there were a lot of times where I just like, God, this is so bad. I wish I had an MFA. I wish someone would teach me how to write this book. And I think for me, the trick was like 23 hours a day I would be like, this book is garbage and is going to ruin my life. And then for one hour a day, I would be like, I'm going to win the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for writing this book. And it's just holding onto that one hour a day that's like, maybe this is good. And I mean, sometimes it's months and months and I'm just like, this is garbage. But then just trusting that eventually it'll come back around. 

A.J.: Do you write every day?

Blythe: I try to write every day. I mean, I'm not always great about it, but ideally, I wake up at eight in the morning. I immediately sit down and write for two hours, and then I have breakfast, and then I write for two more hours, and then I have lunch, and then I write for two more hours. And then I will go for a walk and then write for two more hours and then do other work and have fun. But it's definitely not just sitting and typing for two hours straight. There's a lot of looking at Instagram and playing with my hair and giving myself split ends and stuff. Something that I'm really happy I did early on in deciding I wanted to be a writer was I took a lot of long form improv classes, which is kind of cringey thinking back because it definitely was a cult, but it forced you to be up on stage and be like, well, I have to fucking do something. And it's terrifying, but I can always say something. I think writing now, it's the same thing where it's like I don't really believe in writer's block because I can always write something. 

Ashleigh: I have a little quote from the end of your book that I wanted to ask you about. Okay. It says, if 60% of my romantic neurosis comes from watching romcoms and wanting my life to conform to narrative structures, then maybe it's on me to change those structures through my writing? I wish you had put a period or an explanation point, but I know why you put the question mark. So a few questions from that. So first of all, A.J. always talks about how you love the New York rom coms. What is your favorite rom com and why? 

Blythe: Just for the number of times that I've watched it, it's probably You've Got Mail, which is like, it's so funny. I love Nora Ephron. I think she's so funny. And I mean, it's also a movie about language and falling in love with someone about language. And it's a movie about New York, the love of reading. Yeah. I think definitely You've Got Mail.

A.J.: You've completely changed my perception of that movie. When I was growing up, I thought You've Got Mail was boring.

Ashleigh: I was going to say, I'm going to have to give it a rewatch.

A.J.: I thought it was a boring movie. And then I rewatched it after hearing your passion for it. And it has this autumnal glow to it that Nora Ephron can only capture.

Blythe: Yeah.

A.J.: It's like a nice, warm, cozy vibe.

Blythe: I read a biography of Nora recently, and one of the most interesting tidbits I picked up was she was like, I always try to put Christmas and New Year's into rom coms because they just have extra magic. And you get to have your characters just feel emotions that they wouldn't feel otherwise, which I thought was so smart. 

Ashleigh: Why not? If you're making it up anyway, put in the good stuff.

Bubba: I watched You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle back to back for the first time this past year, and I thought it was weird to see Tom Hanks in You've Got Mail as a weird kind of creepy, bad guy.

Blythe: Yeah.

Bubba: He's bad.

Blythe: Yeah, he was kind of abrasive in the nineties movies, which is weird because I feel like when I was a kid, I was like, oh my God, Tom Hanks is so charming. And now I'm like, oh my God, what did that do to my brain that I was like, Tom Hanks being a dick is charming. 

Ashleigh: And I think that's what you're getting at it in that quote. So how do you think you are changing those narratives and what do you want to do? 

Blythe: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I'm going to be slightly vague about this just because I don't know exactly how much I'm allowed to say, but I've been in development on the first book as a TV comedy. I had my first meetings with a production company about it four years ago. And I ended up going with the production company that I'm with because we had a big discussion about how TV can teach people how to love and TV can change how people treat one another and it can really make a difference in the world. And I was really hoping that the How to Date Men Show could teach people how to love each other better. And they were hoping the same thing. Hopefully the show gets made and we can kind of in our own little way do that.

Ashleigh: And I do feel like TV specifically, and there are certain movies, but TV right now is doing such a great job of that and changing the narrative, especially for women, putting them in positions of power, showing realistic interpretations of love and dating and navigating this crazy, messy world. So that's amazing. And my fingers and toes are crossed for you cause I would love to see that on screen.

A.J.: Development hell is a real thing, especially if you want to live a creative life, you're going to have projects that are going to be stuck in development health for a long time. Sometimes movies take 10 years to make. And I'm wondering, did this book, America the Beautiful, did it sort of spring out of being like, okay, this is not working out right now. I'm going to follow this idea.

Blythe: I guess I was kind of lucky that I started working on them both around the same time. It was like I was writing How To Date Men When You Hate Men, thinking about how lucky it is that Bill Bryson gets to just travel around and write funny books about it. And I was trying to convince my editor and my agent that it would be a good idea for me to do the same thing. And they were like, that's not a good idea and that no one's going to buy that book. And I would run it by them every once in a while. And then I finished writing the book, started working on the pitch, and then at around that time maybe around the time the book came out, I was like, what if I did the road trip book but it was also about being a woman on the road and there are all these canonical male travel narratives but there's none for women. And they were like, okay, that actually could be a good idea. So I had my first meetings about How To Date Men the TV show in February of 2019. I quit my job at Colbert in March of 2019. Went on the road in early June of 2019. And then when I was on my road trip, I was meeting with potential showrunners for the show. And then I came home and started working on the book proposal. And when I was out in LA for the Emmys that year, I met the woman that I chose as my showrunner. And so then I was kind of concurrently working on the TV show pitch and working on the book proposal. I sold the book and the show pitch at around the same time, which was crazy. And then from then on out, it was really nice to have both of those things going on. So as you know, the TV show stuff is a lot of hurry up and wait. So it would be a lot of writing. And then just me waiting for a million other people to read the drafts and then I could just work on my book. And I was like, if I didn't have the book to work on, I would go crazy waiting around. 

Ashleigh: Okay. So based on what you just said, you have to be two different people basically. You have to be writing and creating and you have to be business savvy looking out for yourself because no one else is going to. How do you balance that and where does that business mind come from? Because I'm sure there's a thousand people who are trying to get their own interests ahead of yours. 

Blythe: Yeah, I mean it's definitely really hard. I don't know that I'd necessarily have an answer to that. The business side of it is something I'm still trying to figure out because I think where I am with it is I think I succeeded. I think I've done pretty well in just, I didn't think I would ever even write or sell one book, let alone two. And it's crazy to me that I'm in development on a show that I would write and be an executive producer on, but I don't really have any money. I'm pretty broke and I'm like, oh fuck, I need to get a job. I might have to go back to tutoring when I get back from book tour because it's just so hard to make a living as just a writer. I mean, especially now with TV, all the mergers and stuff, it's like, it's definitely harder to be, I literally am kind of like, oh fuck, maybe I should just find a lawyer and get married to a lawyer.

Ashleigh: Book number three. 

Blythe: Yeah, for real. Yeah.

Bubba: I am always very curious for creative people: When you go back and revisit your work, how does it make you feel? How does it feel reading things that you wrote 5, 10 years ago?

Blythe: Yeah I will say the most recent thing I really did re-read was How to Date Men. I skimmed through it because I was doing an edit on this draft, and one of the notes was like, we want to get more of the voice of the book into it. And it had been so long since I had read the book, so I was reading it and my most prominent reaction was like, oh, a crazy woman wrote this book. Like this woman who wrote this book is fucking insane. And it was really interesting to feel that because I know that I felt these things very strongly when I wrote it, and I just feel very differently now. But I didn't want to post that anywhere because still every day, maybe not every day, but every other day I get a DM from a stranger who says your book means more to me than any book I've ever read. And I don't want to shit on that, I guess, or I don't want to diminish that by being like I was fucking insane when I wrote that. And I think also something that I fully realize is I'm fucking insane right now. I'm definitely crazy now. It's just in a way that I can't see fully, that I won't see for five years. And I think it doesn't mean the things that I'm feeling and the thoughts that I'm having are any less valid. But there was an older version of me that might read work from before and not feel like I would write that now and find that mortifying. But when I read How to Date Men and was like, oh my God, it made me excited to want to write another book about love and dating and stuff, because I was like, I've grown so much, I've experienced so many things and I want to build on this instead of diminishing this. 

Ashleigh: I mean, it's the best title ever. So I am not surprised.

Blythe: Well, the title was created by Bubba’s wife's high school best friend who was the associate editor of my book.

A.J.: Oh, what?

Ashleigh: Oh my God, small world.

Bubba: Hey, shout out Brynn. Great title.

Ashleigh: Great, great title.

A.J.: Blythe, when you write, do you write for a specific person? Who are you writing for or does it depend on the piece?

Blythe: I mean, I definitely feel like there are people that I have in my mind when I'm writing, which I don't know that that's actually serving me. When I wrote my new book, I really had it in my head that I wanted to write a book that my dad could enjoy. My dad is not really like my audience. And then I at some point had to just be like, this book is not for my dad. And then I wrote the book, gave a copy to my dad, and his reaction was mostly to be like, I found a typo or this must be a mistake. I was like, no, that's actually a joke. And he'd be like, well, that doesn't make sense and no one's going to understand. And it was really harmful to me. It was really devastating to me.

A.J.: Yeah, that's rough. And then I also want to know, how do you know when your writing is good? Is it when you feel the most vulnerable when you're writing?

Blythe: I don't know that I necessarily know when my writing is good, but I definitely, there are times when I make myself giggle and I feel like that's always good, but then it doesn't necessarily always translate to what other people think are funny. I overwrote my book by about a hundred percent. I wrote it and the first draft was 150,000 words, and I emailed it to Sarah like, hey, I forgot to ask you how long this book is supposed to be. And she was like 75,000. And so it was a long process of cutting stuff, like me cutting, her cutting. And she ended up cutting a lot of my favorite jokes and I was like, Sarah, these jokes have to go in. They're hilarious to me. And she did let me put them back in. 

A.J.: Nice. 

Blythe: Yeah, so I don't really know when my writing is what other people would consider good, but I know when I like it.

A.J.: Can I ask you when you fell in love with reading? Can I tell you the story of when I fell in love with reading? And then you can tell me yours. Okay. I used to love cold cereal. The more sugar the better, and I would eat my bowl of cold cereal and read the back of the cereal box. And that combination of eating just delicious, sugary cereal while just reading words, just the pleasure of just reading words, even if they're just advertising copy on the back of a cereal box when I'm seven years old. That was one of the big sparks for me of oh, I love reading.

Bubba: What a leap from the back of the Reesey's Puffs box to Stephen King novels.

A.J.: Super fast. When did you realize that you love reading?

Blythe: Oh, I don't know that I have a moment like that, but I definitely do remember when I was in fourth or fifth grade, I guess I was reading too quickly for the rest of the class. I would read the whole book in one day, so they let me read a bunch of extra stuff, the whole Chronicles of Narnia while everyone else was doing the unit on whatever book they were reading. And I feel like that time of my life is when I got hooked. But it was probably just because, do you guys have the Pizza Hut, the personal pan pizza program for reading?

Everyone: No. No. Tell us.

Blythe: I put this in an essay once the editor made me take it out because she was like, I have no fucking idea what you're talking about, but in my school district, if you read a certain number of books, every five books you read, you could go to Pizza Hut and they would give you a personal pan pizza if you were a kid and you were like, I've read these five bucks. So yeah, that definitely was, I was extremely pizza motivated

Ashleigh: Who is it that's, I think around here–and I still am not positive if it's true– If you were wearing your helmet in a police car went by, he'd give you a coupon for free ice cream. I don't know if that was true or if our mom just told us that to make us wear our helmets when we were riding our bike. So I think we have a new business venture, which is Haunted Basement cereal with short stories on the back of the box.

Bubba: Love that. And it aids with digestion because the stories are a little scary. Yes. It's best if you're a little lactose intolerant and you read these really R-rated stories.

Blythe: I was just having lunch with Phoebe Robinson, the standup comic, today, and she was talking about, she had just seen Death of a Salesman on Broadway and she was like, it's so crazy. Because I obviously read that in high school and seeing it now as an adult person is just so different. And I feel like I don't know that I ever had a moment where I was like, oh, literature clicks for me now just because I was probably an overconfident bitch. I was like I understand everything at all times. It's been such a pleasure of aging to revisit things and just have such a deeper understanding or even just a different understanding of things than I had even 10 years ago. 

Ashleigh: You just mentioned her, so how did you meet Phoebe Robinson? I've seen her on 2 Dope Queens. So funny. And is she kind of your mentor? You guys seem to have a really good relationship. 

Blythe: Yeah, I met her in 2015. I was hired to be a researcher on this show called White Guy Talk Show. I was like, this show sounds horrible, I hate white guys. And then it turns out that it was a sarcastic title. It was hosted by a Latina woman and an Indian man, and I was like the token white person on staff. So Phoebe was a writer and I sat directly behind her. And so we kind of struck up a friendship on that show and it ended up getting canceled five months later before I think it even actually premiered officially. But yeah, I kept in touch with Phoebe. She was just like, I think that was her first writing job, but she works harder than anyone I'd ever seen. And she was working on her book. I think she had just sold it and she was performing 2 Dope Queens at the time, but this was before I think the podcast. And she was just an incredible mentor, as you say. She just gave me so much knowledge about how the business worked and just an inspiration because Phoebe seriously works harder than anyone I've ever met. So, and then also, even though she truly was more busy than anyone I had met to that point and still have met, she would do a really good job of checking in with me and hanging out and seeing how things were going. And when I was working on my book proposal, she was the only person I knew who had ever done anything like that. And she was so generous with her time to be like, this is how it works. This is what's normal, this is what's important, this is what isn't important and just like, it's been incredible to see her career take off in the way that it has, which is just so deserved.

Ashleigh: Oh, that sounds magical. That's really nice. Okay, the last line in your acknowledgements and in your book, you're talking about your family, how much you love them. Thank you. Thank you. Please stop texting me so much in the group text thread and that really made me laugh because is there anyone out there who loves a group text? 

Blyhe: I feel like anytime I come out of a movie and I have 64 text messages, I'm like, either someone in my family died or my brother saw someone at the grocery store right now. 

A.J.: I just don't respond when I am not into it anymore. 

Bubba: Yeah. Some texts go unread and then I get in trouble because I miss valuable information about the key moments that are coming up.

Ashleigh: There should be a little icon that says important. Yes. Like actual information. 

Bubba: Well, that will all change when we all have assistants that just read us the texts and give us the quick debrief. This is a great time to plug the Haunted Basement Internship program that we're going to start up. If anyone wants to, come join us and read our family text threads to us. 

A.J.: Blythe, we love you. Thank you for joining us in the basement. Can you tell us when your book America the Beautiful? comes out where we can buy it? If we can pre-order it today/

Blythe: My book comes out April 18th. You can pre-order it now. Wherever you like to buy books, be it a website, be it a bookstore and what else was I supposed to say? I think that's it.

Bubba: Where can we find you too? 

Blythe: Yeah. My Instagram handle and my Twitter handle are @blythelikehappy. It's not a great handle, but it is my Instagram. You can follow if you want to see me on book tour, I will be announcing those dates.

A.J.: Yeah. Wonderful. Awesome. Well, thank you all for listening to Haunted Basement: The Podcast. We'll see you guys next time. Goodbye.