Tonight, I’m talking with a writer in the trenches, Daniel Hietala— he’s been at it for years, but it’s really been the last few years that things have turned around. Books are getting written and new ones are in the works. His latest, The Wild Bill Saga - Book 1 - Prince of Pistoleers, is out now on Amazon in print or ebook, on Apple Books, anywhere you get your books— and directly at Scriptoria.com

I originally reached out to Daniel Hietala to get his takes on historical fiction. But, soon we delved into the craft, the way forward with writing, and the kinds of literature that compel us.

On the 50th anniversary of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, we take a midnight drive through its enduring, unsettling legacy. We explore the film's polarized reception, its roots in Hardboiled fiction and its true home in the psychological abyss of Noir. We ask: does Travis Bickle’s violent catharsis end with a bang or a whimper? And in our current age of digital alienation, do we need a new artistic mirror this brutally honest?

With the backlash of AI-produced work, it's time of artists to get back to the work, to double-down our bets on humanity. Tonight, we also look at how a novel like Gemma Files' Experimental Film could only have been produced by a human author.

Steinbeck’s daily journal while writing The Grapes of Wrath reveals the private war behind a public masterpiece. We explore his doubts, his discarded novel, and the lonely integrity required to create something honest—lessons for any creator facing the blank page.

Deconstructing the metafictional novel. In tonight's episode, we'll talk about the publishing history and struggle of producing this kind of art form.

The Demise of Nano-Wri-Mo took the world of marathon writers by surprise. Whatever happened to this communal writing experiment? Does coming together as a writing community, focused on a singular goal of creative expression lead to collective mediocre output? In tonight's episode we look into whether we can come together again in some different format but with the same intent and produce meaningful manuscripts.

Is American fiction falling in a downward spiral or are we at the cusp of something new?

In this episode I try to answer the old question: Should we write by the playbook? Have MFA writing programs degraded the quality of the modern contemporary American novel?

For full transcripts of this episode listen on Apple Podcasts or go to Cityscapepress.com