The Episodic sits down with structural editor D. Jason Fleming for a conversation that starts with an unlikely detour — Fleming's path into editing ran through film school before it ever touched a manuscript — and spreads out from there into the kind of wide-ranging talk I built this show to have.
We get into how that film background actually shapes the way he reads a draft, working through a real structural problem — protagonist confusion in Sarah Hoyt's Shifter series — and from there into the bigger questions: Heinlein and Dostoevsky on the craft of storytelling, Roger Corman's quiet influence on filmmakers who went on to make masterpieces, Kurosawa's visual instincts, and why Philip K. Dick spent so long as an outsider before academia caught up to him.
Fleming also talks through his work on Storm-Dragon by Dave Freer, A Kiss for Damocles by J. Kenton Pierce, and No Man's Land by Sarah A. Hoyt for Raconteur Press, which collectively earned three Prometheus Award nominations — and he's refreshingly direct about why publisher transparency matters to him as an editor, not just a selling point.
This is one of those episodes that starts as a conversation about craft and ends up somewhere closer to a conversation about taste — what makes a story hold up, and why some books get called timeless and others don't.