This week’s guest is Jude Hopkins (Babe in the Woods, The Wild Rose Press, June 2023). We discuss how women often make poor life decisions when it comes to relationships, how finding the right developmental editor led to rearranging her opening chapters which led to an offer and how challenging it is to market a debut novel. Then we segue into the phenomenon of people “wanting” to write a book but letting life get in the way and the messages Jude uses to avoid that kind of procrastination in her own writing process.    

Jude Hopkins is author of Babe in the Woods, her debut novel published by Wild Rose Press in 2023. She has also written various essays, including one published in The Los Angeles Times and another about the need for self-confidence in telling a story, published in Women Writers, Women’s Books. She was one of the runners-up in Proximity Magazine’s 2018 Personal Essay Contest, judged by Hanif Abdurraqib, for her essay “The Diagnosis.” Her poetry has appeared in California Quarterly, Timber Creek Review, Gyroscope Review—and soon to be in Witcraft and The Orchards Poetry Journal.

To learn more about Jude, click here.