Gus James' The Xeno Files: Alien Sex, Bad Decisions, and a Damn Good Time

Gus James, author of The Xeno File and The Terra File, joins Mookie on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory podcast to talk about his evolving trilogy. Gus is an Oregon attorney by day, spending his hours fighting insurance companies, and a first-time novelist who wrote his debut purely to make himself laugh. When an early reader sent him detailed notes on proper three-act structure and where certain beats were supposed to land, he read every note and ignored almost all of them on purpose, reasoning that his story should be his, so screw the rules dictating how it's built. That instinct runs through everything else the two discuss: leaning on dialogue over exposition, skipping the show-don't-tell orthodoxy whenever it's in the way, and letting a down-on-his-luck lawyer narrator named Jim Braxton just talk his way through a plot that starts with him discovering, mid-threesome, that one of the women involved is an alien.From there Mookie and Gus trace his literary influences back to Christopher Moore and Jason Pargin, share the enduring appeal of an ordinary, unqualified guy thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and swap theories on why alien abduction stories dominated pop culture for decades and then vanished (Gus's answer: they didn't stop, aliens just got better at it; Mookie's answer: the South Park pilot with Eric Cartman getting an anal probe made these stories impossible to take seriously anymore). They dig into the current, ongoing drought of good storytelling in film and television, why legacy franchises keep alienating longtime fans by moralizing, and why LitRPG and lighter, funnier genre fiction might be exactly what's needed to pull disengaged young male readers back into books.Gus then shares his blunt, funny take on why marketing his own book has been harder than writing it, his inventive guerrilla marketing (alien-probe punch cards left at bus stops and restaurant tables, an upcoming booth at a UFO festival, homemade merch from a sewing hobby he picked up during COVID), and Mookie's optimistic reframe of AI scraping content for training data isn't a threat to indie authors, and instead is free, constant exposure to interested audiences. The GuestGus James writes absurd, fast-paced stories about aliens, bad decisions, and people who probably should’ve stayed home. His debut novel, The Xeno File, is a chaotic road trip wrapped in a conspiracy to save the planet. He lives in Oregon and insists most of the bad decisions in his books are fictional.Get his books, sign up for his newsletter, and find out more on his website: https://goosedown.square.site/Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text!Support the show