Are author’s heroes? Join us as we examine award-winning author and superstar fantasy writer Ken Liu’s journey via the beats of the Hero’s Journey. We also discuss dealing with failure and how AI affects writing and what role it might play in assisting writers (and readers!) in the future.

Today’s drinking game: drink whenever the audio gets garbled!

Links:
William R. Hincy’s website: https://williamrhincy.com/
Ken Liu’s website: https://kenliu.name/

Bios:
William R. Hincy: “Some people run from their demons; others sit down and have cocktails with theirs.” William R. Hincy is a man who does and writes about the latter. Having become a writer after deciding it was the only sensible thing for a problem drinker to do, Hincy aspires to use literature to connect society on an emotional level through characters who no longer create messes but have instead become the mess. Between rounds, Hincy has won 3 American Fiction Awards, an International Book Award, and his personal anthology of short fiction WITHOUT EXPIRATION was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. He now lives outside Los Angeles with his wife and kids, having found solace in the notion that the only things sacred are self and whiskey-winged interludes.

Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also penned the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

About WDW:
And for our algo-overlords (please introduce us to your friends!)… Welcome to your literary happy hour, Writers Drinking Whiskey, the show where you share a drink with writers from around the globe and you find more than your next read: you find the next AUTHOR you're going to love. Hosted by award-winning author William R. Hincy, the show takes booktube, authortube and booktok to another level with engaging, in-depth, and merrily irreverent conversations with today’s most interesting writers. And for our writers joining us, there's plenty of creative writing tips, fiction writing tricks, and poetry read by the poets.

Chapters:
00:00:00 Start
00:00:26 Introducing Ken Liu
00:01:51 Where in the world is Ken Liu
00:03:36 The Hero's Journey - author style
00:14:23 The call to action
00:24:00 On failure
00:30:14 Author tips with Ken Liu
00:35:07 Artificial Intelligence and writing
00:50:35 What would you tell the younger you
00:51:52 Learn more about Ken Liu
00:52:17 Community question

Brought to you by Whiskey-Winged Lit
Fiction for the modern reader. Life is the accumulation of scars—tell the stories!

Here we go!