Two Truths and a Lie With Cory O’Brien

Introduction and Special Guest Announcement

[00:00:00 ] Brett: Hello, welcome to a very special Overtired. I am Brett Terpstra. I am here with Christina Warren and Jeff Severns Guntzel. And this week we have the Long Promise special guest Corey O’Brien, author of Two Truths and a Lie. How’s it going, Corey?

[00:00:21 ] Cory: It’s going great. Happy to be here.

[00:00:23 ] Jeff: Hi, Corey. We’re saying hello.

[00:00:30 ] Brett: Um, yeah, so we’re, we’re definitely gonna talk about the book. I have filled Corey in on kind of our usual format, and he’s down for, for playing along with what we usually do. So, um, I, I feel a little weird jumping right into Mental Health Corner. I want a little bit more robust of an intro.

Corey O’Brien’s Background and Career

[00:00:54 ] Brett: So, Corey, tell us a little about you.

[00:00:58 ] Cory: Uh, sure. [00:01:00 ] It’s a, it’s a, it’s a big question.

[00:01:02 ] Brett: It is. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That was so vague.

[00:01:05 ] Jeff: Tell me who you are.

[00:01:06 ] Cory: all right. Uh, I am a writer game designer man about town. I,

[00:01:15 ] Jeff: that’s you. I saw.

[00:01:16 ] Cory: yeah, yeah. I’m all over the place. You see a guy that’s me

[00:01:20 ] Jeff: That’s you.

[00:01:20 ] Cory: watching you, counting your teeth. Uh, I, I, uh, I, I used to write a website called, uh, mire Told where I would tell mythology like it was 3:00 AM and I was drunk in a chat room.

[00:01:34 ] Cory: And I did that. I did that for many years, parlayed it into a small level of notoriety that somehow got my publisher to pitch me to everyone as the beloved internet humorist, which I still, I still find kind of embarrassing. But, uh, then, then over time, like what I’ve always wanted to do is write books. Uh, and so over time sort of parly the notoriety from the blog into.[00:02:00 ]

[00:02:00 ] Cory: A career writing for video games. Uh, I’ve written for, uh, the comedy dating sim called Monster Prom. And then, uh, my favorite game that I, that I worked on is Hollow Vista, but you can only play it if you have an iPhone, unfortunately, which I don’t, I haven’t even played it in its native environment. I’ve played it, I’ve played it in like a browser version, but, uh, and then, uh, and now I work for like, um, for like fancy 3D games, writing dialogue, trees and stuff.

[00:02:29 ] Cory: But, uh, my, my number one passion is writing books and I’m very excited that I finally have this novel out. And so that’s, that, that, that brings me to this present moment.

[00:02:41 ] Christina: Um, so.

Transition to Fictional Writing

[00:02:43 ] Christina: How, how, um, I guess what was your process, I guess, moving from, uh, have you been like, I guess like writing short stories, like your whole life, uh, you know, I know you’ve done the, the, uh, the, the humor thing and, and you’ve worked, um, you know, um, game stuff. But what was, I guess, your process of transitioning to, um, [00:03:00 ] uh, fair, um, fictional, like narrative writing.

[00:03:04 ] Cory: I, I have been writing stories for as long as like, I knew that was a thing you could do, and I, I used to write a number of short stories. I, like, I went to graduate school for creative writing. I wrote a lot of short stories then yeah, I left that part

[00:03:19 ] Brett: Yeah, that’s an important piece.

[00:03:21 ] Christina: I was gonna say that helps,

[00:03:22 ] Cory: But I, I, I don’t think, I don’t think that graduate school, like graduate school certainly gave me a lot of opportunity to practice writing, but I don’t think, I don’t think it turned me into a writer.

[00:03:32 ] Cory: I

[00:03:32 ] Christina: No, you already were, but, but, but, but it, but yeah. But I think the opportunity to practice is, is probably helpful.

[00:03:37 ] Cory: yeah. And also meeting people and being in an environment where that’s encouraged. I really think of graduate school as like paying an enormous amount of money to larp that you have the job that you wanted to have for, for like two years, which is, I, I had, I had the luxury of being able to do that. Um, but I, what I have always specifically wanted to do is write long form narrative.

[00:03:59 ] Cory: I [00:04:00 ] wanted to wr