Meg Mitchell Moore is the author of Mansion Beach, a page-turner-y multi POV summer saga with everything you could ask for: a beach, a body, rich people behaving badly but also sometimes not behaving badly, parties, drama and just enough gender-swapped Gatsby to think hard about the meaning of the American Dream. I loved it (KJ here) and I also loved this conversation with Meg, who apparently thinks in multiple POVS and is always just as impatient as I am to feel like the book is done and wonderful when sadly it is… not.

#AmReading

Meg: Audio: Great Big Beautiful Life, Emily Henry—Julia Whelan

Also mentioned: Julia Whelan’s Thank You for Listening

Print: The Road to Dalton, Shannon Bowring

from The Book Shop of Beverly Farms

KJ: Mansion Beach

Welcome to Glorious Tuga, Francesca Segal

Find Meg at @megmitchellmoore on IG, or visit her website at www.megmitchellmoore.com

HEY. Did you know Sarina’s latest thriller is out NOW?

Rowan Gallagher is a devoted single mother and a talented architect with a high-profile commission restoring an historic mansion for the most powerful family in Maine. But inside, she’s a mess. She knows that stalking her ex’s avatar all over Portland on her phone isn’t the healthiest way to heal from their breakup. But she’s out of ice cream and she’s sick of romcoms.

Watching his every move is both fascinating and infuriating. He’s dining out while she’s wallowing on the couch. The last straw comes when he parks in their favorite spot on the waterfront. In a weak moment, she leashes the dog and sets off to see who else is in his car.

Instead of catching her ex in a kiss, Rowan becomes the first witness to his murder—and the primary suspect.

Digital books at: Amazon | Nook | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play | Audible Physical books at: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indigo | More paperback links here!

New! Transcripts below!

EPISODE 450 - TRANSCRIPT

KJ Dell'Antonia

KJ here announcing a new series and a definite plus for paid supporters of Hashtag AmWriting. It's Writing the Book, a conversation between Jenny, who's just finished a blueprint for her next nonfiction book, and me because I've just finished the blueprint for what I hope will be my next novel. Jenny and I are both trying to quote-unquote "play big" with these next go-rounds, which is a meta effort for Jenny as that's exactly what her book is about, and we're basically coaching each other through, trading pages, thoughts and encouragement, as well as some sometimes hard-to-hear honesty about whether we're really going in the right direction. So come all in on team Hashtag AmWriting, and you'll get those Writing the Book episodes right in your pod player along with access to monthly AMAs, the book labs, first pages episodes, and come summer, we shall blueprint once again. So sign yourself up at amwritingpodcast.com.

All Speaking

Is it recording? Now it's recording. Yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Alright. Let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay. Now one, two, three.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia, and this is Hashtag AmWriting, the weekly podcast about writing all the things. Short things, long things, pitches, proposals, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, other things I'm probably not thinking of. We are the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done. And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, the author of three novels, The Chicken Sisters, In Her Boots and Playing the Witch Card, as well as a nonfiction book, How to Be a Happier Parent, former editor of The New York Times Motherlode. You've heard all this. With me today, more importantly, is Meg Mitchell Moore, who has written a book that I think you're gonna find is your summer go to. It is called Mansion Beach, and I loved it. And we'll talk about it in a second. She is also the author of Summer Stage, Vacationland, can attest to both of those great reads. The Islanders, Two Truths and a Lie, The Admissions, loved that one too. They're all great. So, anyway, lots of lots of novels in the family saga, sometimes touch of romance, beach, summer, deep, but also page turnery read genre, which is not a genre because that was too long. But, anyway, Meg, thanks for coming to chat.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. This is gonna be really fun.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So I've read some of your other books, obviously, and I felt like this one Mansion Beach was you sort of moving to a different this. It's a little how to describe it. You've got a lot of points of view, which you always, you often do, and a little bit of of a mystery, which actually, I've seen you do before, and then you've got a podcast going on so that you can have different people show show off what's happening. I guess I was hoping you would talk about the evolution of style, um, actually, over your whole career, sort of from, like, I'm writing a kind of a basic book with a couple of points of view and third person close, or maybe first person to these bigger, bigger stories with so much more to so much more to offer the reader. That's a really big question. Start wherever you want.

Meg Mitchell Moore

That's a great question. I I don't know if it has been such an evolution. I have always written multiple points of view to the point where it makes me crazy. And I wish I could. I wish I could do one or two. I really wish I could. I've tried it. I can't do it. I just can't. My brain doesn't work that way. It's I can't do it. So even my very first novel, which I published in 2011 it was called The Arrivals, that was a much smaller story. So yes, I for sure, I've evolved plot wise, but I remember, and this was when I was brand new and did not know what I was doing, and I was just trying to figure out how to write a novel. I had so many points of view. And I remember my now agent. Maybe she was not my agent then and was becoming my agent, or maybe she was already my agent, but I remember her saying, we have to take out at least like five of these points of view. And it's still, it still has a lot. I just that's how I think those are the kind of books I like to read, usually, not always, for one thing, but it just. Must be how I think I'm always in everybody's head, and it's really hard for me to restrain that. So this book, I don't think, has any more points of view than any other. Might have fewer than some. It does have a mystery.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah it might, then some that I've read, I guess I I, I saw it as different, maybe in part because of the the use of the podcast to frame things.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah that's new. And then it's a bigger, you know, it's a bigger idea. It's a, it's not a retelling of The Great Gatsby, because I don't like to use that word, but it is inspired by The Great Gatsby. So it has definitely some bigger I was looking at bigger themes, maybe from the start. A lot of times I back my way into the themes based on what my characters are doing. I don't always start with the themes, but this time i i was looking at some of those big whether, what's the American dream and what does success mean, and how does money equate with happiness, and some of those bigger questions. And I don't always do that. I might do it in reverse, but I don't always do that first. So I do think it has bigger theme wise, it's bigger maybe plot wise, yeah. And some of the elements, some of the elements that move it along, are a little different. I was working with a new editor for the first time for this. This is my first full book with my new editor. So I think that had something to do with it too, because I think she was probably pushing me for some of those elements that don't come naturally to me, which I think ended up being good for the book.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, it's a little more thriller. Isn't exactly the right word, but there's definitely a page turning mystery in there. I know here's, this is like a so there's a page turning mystery in Mansion Beach, and the question all along for the reader, like, you know somebody is going to die. But I at least did not know who, but I had an advance, and it came as a as a digital book, so I didn't have the cover and I didn't have the blurb on the back, if a reader has those things, are they gonna know?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Interesting.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Are they gonna know? Who it is that that dies?

Meg Mitchell Moore

I don't think so. I don't think so. The people I know who have read it both ways, I think have not known.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That's good.

Meg Mitchell Moore

It's sort of that white lotus effect, you know, for White Lotus fans out there, where there is a mystery, and you care about the mystery, but you also it matters, but it doesn't matter as much as what's going on with everybody else. So I really like that as a framing device. I like watching it and reading it. And I tried it myself this time. I did it a little bit in two truths and a lie as well. I guess that's my only other one that has a dead body, and a lot of people are mad at me for who the person was who died, which I want. And two truths...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Don't give it up.

Meg Mitchell Moore

No, I won't. So that was interesting, so I hadn't tried it again, and this time I went in a little nervous, because people had been upset with me, particularly my husband. But I I still, I mean, I had the chance not to do what I did in two truths and a lie, and I still chose to. So I still, for me, it was the right thing, but it was an interesting experience. And I didn't try it again for a couple books. And this time I did also because I was playing with some of the Gatsby themes. I mean, Gatsby has three bodies, so I thought, I mean, I should have at least one, so I won't, yeah, I won't give anything away about…

KJ Dell'Antonia

No, don't.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Who or what or how, but I did enjoy having that as a device to propel it now that also, I don't think that was in the first draft. I don't think there was a body in the first draft. I mean, there were huge changes in this book, and I think that was one of them. I think we decided we needed the body after one draft.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Wow. Okay, now I'm deeply fascinated, and of course, I'm trying. So I'm trying to make this interesting and useful for those of you who haven't read the book, although you could also stop, go get the book, and read it, and then listen to this, and then it would be even better.

Meg Mitchell Moore

That is true.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. Okay, so let me just start by saying I am actually not a person who typically likes a book where your whole like, like, the question is, you know, either who died or who did it. So Lucy Foley, I've enjoyed some of those, but it's not necessarily my favorite go to genre, but the thing that made this book work great for me was exactly what you just said, that there's so much more to it. You I could see that this story would exist before you added that and that. I mean, that's so cool. And then I also, I'm not a Gatsby person, so neither of those would like, neither of those hooks is going to grab me. But what grabbed me, I think, was the different women, different versions of the American dream.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Mm-hmm.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Is that where you started?

Meg Mitchell Moore

I started… Yeah, I think so I would. Really, yes, I wanted to really look at notions of success, particularly for women today. You know, it's contemporary. It takes place that, you know, in the summer that is coming out, or that, if you actually match up the dates, and I think I messed up the tides and the moon in some places, but it's the summer. So yes, I was very interested in those questions. I was I wanted to have a love triangle, because I think that's interesting, and that's part of Gatsby too. So it's funny that you say you're not a Gatsby person. I think my first, another change from my first draft, was very Gatsby heavy. I think I tried to, I think it just was, I was trying too hard to to do the same thing. And…

KJ Dell'Antonia

It’s kind of a reverse-gendered Gatsby.

Meg Mitchell Moore

It is, yes, it's reverse gendered. But what I was doing was just, I was just trying to, I don't know what I was doing, but it was a mess. I mean, I always knew I wanted to play with Gatsby, but I tried to do it too closely. And I tried a little first person with the narrator, which that's how Gatsby is told, but I can't write him. Can't write successfully in first person. So that was a mess. And I remember that my editor probably looked at this thing and said, This is what are we doing? But what she said to me nicely was, you need to, like, don't worry so much about Gatsby at all, like you need to free yourself from those constraints, and you need to write the story. And that was the best advice, because that's when it started to come together. So it's more that Gatsby was a jumping off point, and some of those themes, I was so interested in how those themes are so relevant 100 years later, and they are, so I think I needed that as a jumping off point, but I didn't need to, you know, retell it scene by scene, or try to have the narrator feel the same, or do anything like that. And I had some missteps along the way before I figured that out.

KJ Dell'Antonia

It interests me that this doesn't seem to have taken any longer than your other books, did it?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Uh, I felt like it took forever. My books have come out either with note with, you know, a year and then the next summer, or with two summers in between. This one has, this one has an empty summer in between. So I did need that extra writing time for this. And I remember, I always start out thinking I could do this in a year. I'll absolutely and I always hit. I'm a deadline hitter. You know, I always hit the deadline

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, you give them something.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah, I was a journalist for a long time. I just, I'm not late on things. I just always, I'm just, I always hit my deadlines, but it might be awful. And so this was nobody actually. I mean, it was pretty awful when I think back to that first draft, and I think that my editor and Agent thought, okay, we can do this. And I looked at it, and I looked at my schedule and my life and my brain, and I thought, I don't think I can do it very well. So we put it off for a year, which gave me not a year's writing time, but maybe six months that I hadn't had. And that made a big difference. So this one took a little longer. Same thing with vacation land. I had the exact same thing happen where I thought it was going to come out one summer, it came out the next summer, but Summer Stage and then the book coming out, if I finish it next summer, will have no extra time in between. So it kind of, I've gone both ways with it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Do you see any like consistency in why? Or it just sort of either happens that way or it doesn't?

Meg Mitchell Moore

I think I when I try bigger, when I try bigger books, I need more time, as it should be, but I always think I can do it. You know, I'm patience is not, is not my best quality. Impatience is my worst quality. So I find that I'm usually impatient to get something done or to hit the deadline or to put the book out, and I have to slow myself down when necessary, and vacation land. It was a different editor, same publisher, but different editor. I remember her saying, having that talk with me and saying, it will be a much better book. If we put it out the following year, it will be so much better. And she was right. So we needed that time.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I so totally relate to this.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Do you?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm in the middle of it. Now, if anybody who's listening is also listening to our what the books are writing the books, what the books also like? It's a little mini series where one of my co-hosts is writing nonfiction and I'm writing fiction, and we're trading pages, and we're doing a weekly series of conversations. And this week's realization was, I have always known that I'm writing a story with multiple points of view, but I couldn't start it that way. I had. I had to start it with just this one protagonist. And then I thought, Oh, well, then it'll just be that, and it'll probably be really easy. Look, I've got this all planned out. I'm just gonna write. I'm just gonna, oh, I'll bet I can get, what if I got my agent a draft this summer? Hahaha, it's, you know, it's not good, but I'm so impatient. I want ...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right, right. Well, I was listening to one of your to your podcast the other yesterday, and it was the one where you were talking about your story idea starting. How do you, how do you ideate the book?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh, gosh.

Meg Mitchell Moore

And you so you write a book, and then you present it to your agent, and then you sell it, right? So…

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Meg Mitchell Moore

That's your process. So I'm the opposite, where I write, I get the contract first, and then I have to write the book. And I don't know which is harder, because you don't have a built in deadline. You have your own deadlines that you said, but you're writing something that you said. Maybe this will sell, maybe it won't, I don't know, whereas I know it will eventually be published, but I also have that pressure of I have to get things in on time. So what do you think is, what's better? What's worse?

KJ Dell'Antonia

I don't know. I envy your... I envy that way. I feel like that would make me feel more secure, more professional. My, my agent, doesn't… she's very against selling a book of mine, at least before I've written it, because she says, I'll, she says I might change it, and then, and then, it won't be what we sold or I won't be happy. So so I don't know if she's I think she's just against it as a general rule, but I know lots of agents that that do it, and I know a lot of of writers that do it. Sometimes I look at this and I'm like, you know, I could do a proposal. Maybe we could sell it. I could get some money. That would be lovely, right? Yeah. But...

Meg Mitchell Moore

I see, I see your point, and I know a lot of people think that way. I remember a long time ago when I'd either published, I think I'd published no novels. Maybe my book was about to be published, my first novel, and I heard Ann Patchett speak at a conference, and she said, she said that she would never take money for a book she hadn't written.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Wow.

Meg Mitchell Moore

And I remember thinking, Oh, well, if that's what Ann Patchett says, I guess that's what like, that's how the world is. But I disagree, like I disagree, because for me, first of all, she has a different life situation, but for me to keep income coming in steadily, because this is my only job, I feel like that's the way to do it. And I also feel like other industries, like my husband doesn't only get paid when he goes to the board meeting. He's getting paid every other week for his job that he does for the company that he works for. And so to try to approximate a little bit of a normal salary, I feel like that's the way to do it. But then I also see the other side, and I see why Ann Patchett wouldn't do it, because she's Ann Patchett, you know, so she can take whatever time she needs...

KJ Dell'Antonia

See that's so funny. Because I think, well, you can do this because you're Meg Mitchell Moore, and Meg Mitchell Moore is going to sell and a KJ Dell'Antonia, one of them will, and the others somewhat less, so at least that's my my record at the moment. So I guess we just all see each other differently. My co-host Sarina sells on proposal.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Okay, so fiction, that's fiction?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, yeah. She sold thrillers and romances that way. Okay, so she has a bigger track record. But also, I've known people, you know, I guess there's just different ways of of of doing it. And I would not say that I chose this. It chose me.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Interesting, but there was always that chance. I mean, my agent... If I said to my agent, I don't want to sell till I write, she would say, Great, that might be better for both of us. We'll probably sell it for more, because you might write something really good, but I just don't want to take that. I'm too impatient, you know, I'm just Yes, maybe, if, you know, maybe if I had, you know, had some big blockbuster, and then I thought, Okay, now for two years, it doesn't matter what's coming in, because I'm getting money from that book, that would be different. But, um, that's not how it works for most people.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, and maybe I would feel less impatient with getting this done if I weren't like, I want to get to the point where I know if we're going to sell like, I wrote a whole thing last summer, and it never got to the point that we felt like we could sell it, and I I'm sick of it. I can't write it anymore. I'm done with it. I mean, maybe I'll come back to it, but, yeah, right. And like, I've had, you know, a freelance editor at it who's really good. My agent's been at it. I finished it like three times, and apparently it still sucks. So I'm done.

Meg Mitchell Moore

So that's interesting, because I always think that I would not be writing good books if I didn't know if my editor gets a very messy draft, and all of my editors have gotten bad dress and really helped me. And without that step, I don't think I would ever write a book that could even be sold. So I feel like I need to know, okay, somebody else who is better at this is going to be helping me really soon. I just need to get through it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That's that would be amazing. I don't think my editor cares enough about me to do that. So...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Oh, my editor would absolutely prefer a cleaner draft. Like, no question. I mean, she would be delighted if I showed it to five people and got feedback, but I'm always in a rush. So I'm like, here you're the first reader. Here you go. She's like, thank you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, that's my agent. I'll be like, Look, I'm done it's great! and She's no... it is great, but you know what would be really great? Poor agent. Yeah, okay. So, so we're we're both impatient, but we're doing this in in very different ways. Well, now I want to hear more about that. How do you go from a first draft with no body, to a final draft where the body, it's definitely one of the things that's pushing people to turn the page. It's not the only thing. So maybe that's the good news of not having started with a body. Also, did you know whose body it was?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Um, we discussed because, yeah, I mean, we discussed a little bit about it. I remember thinking, Could it be this person? And here's why we wouldn't want that person. Could it be this person? So we had some discussion. I didn't write it. I once I knew who it was. I didn't write multiple versions of it. I always had that person. But, and I guess I just think of it as more of a framing device than anything, and a framing device, you can add the frame later.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Meg Mitchell Moore

So the middle was mostly what was happening, was happening, and then there was this framing device and and then there are certain things at the end that kind of came together. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this makes it all come together. But I didn't know that in the beginning. And that was so you may be late.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Did you not know how the body became a body?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Ah, that changed. There was...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, I could see that.

Meg Mitchell Moore

And then I thought, oh my gosh, this is kind of what I needed to pull together all those themes. It was those exciting moments that really don't happen very often.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh, I bet and I mean, I can see it from the outside as a reader. It really did. It made it like your ending is one of those endings that changes the whole, your whole reading experience for the better, right? Not that it wasn't a great reading experience the whole time. You know, sometimes somebody doesn't stick the landing, and then you're like, yeah, no, I don't really want to recommend this. I mean, it was fine, right? But, and sometimes it's just great. It's like, solid. You're happy, yay. Okay, that's a good, it's a good. Yours colors the entire like, if I were somebody who would go back and reread it, would color the entire experience differently.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Oh, Thank you!

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, which is cool, yeah, very cool.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Now, when I wrote Vacationland, I started with a body, and the body came out. So I had the opposite experience, where I thought I was writing a thriller. The whole time. I was like, this is going to be my thriller. There's a body. And I had it all. And to me, it made sense. It all tied up, and my different editor, but my then editor said, I like everything but the body.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Wow.

Meg Mitchell Moore

We had to keep it was first it was a an important body, and then it was a less important body, and then it became the body of a seal, because I had to have just a scene of children looking at something they found in the water in the very beginning. And so it was a body, and then it was a seals body. This time. I got to keep my body at least.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So I love this also, because you haven't been, um, pigeonholed into a genre that involves bodies or doesn't involve bodies. Has that been a thing as you've as you've gone from book to book where people are like, well, I don't know… Meg, people don't really want you to kill people or the, you know, the opposite. Well, I don't know, people are kind of looking for some more thrills from you.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Well, Vacationland. I remember that editor said they don't, we don't want this from you. We want, we don't want. We want a summer book. We don't want. We're not looking for a thriller. You know, they had other thrillers. You know what? They're doing their own end of the business, too. So they definitely said that this time. I mean, I feel like I'm not pigeonholed, but categorized as beach as a beach book. But I think within beach books you can do all of those things. Yeah. So if I were to write a giant thriller that I said, I think this should come out in the fall, and it's a big book, I that's when they would probably say, I don't know if your audience, if you have the audience, right, pull that off unless the book is amazing, you know? I do feel like I need to come out in the summer to keep my readers.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, I actually love that. That beach book is a You're right. It's a pretty big genre. It encompasses a lot. It encompasses a lot of of things, the only requirement being that it's, you know, entertaining, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a book requirement anyway. But...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right, right. It is interesting because my books also happen to usually take place on beaches, but not all beach books do. So it is, it has become a very big category and competitive like you also want to stand out in that category, because there are so many books with the word summer in the title or the word beach in the title, or this. Actually, this cover is a departure for me, which I love, because I feel like I have done the just the oceanscape or the main or the woman looking at the water. I've had those kinds of covers.

KJ Dell'Antonia

It's your first... It's, it's, it's a cartoony cover. I don't, I don't mean that it, you know that sounds Yeah, it's almost a romancy cover. But there's only one person. First. I'm just so you guys should, it'll, it'll be in the show notes. You should, you should take a look, because you're right. It is a departure. I see, yeah, I see what you're saying there. But this one's, it's a hardback, right?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yes.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. Have all your books come out first in hardback?

Meg Mitchell Moore

They have, yep.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Nice, cool.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Have yours?

KJ Dell'Antonia

No, none.

Meg Mitchell Moore

None? Okay, now, what do you now…? Do you think that… that, I sometimes I feel like that's a great thing too.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I go back and forth on that. My agent is bummed about it. But for me, it's frankly, much easier to, like, go out to everyone and be like, spend $18 versus be like spend $38.

Meg Mitchell Moore

I agree.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So I haven't minded. Oh, and I was at the Newburyport Book Festival a few years ago, and they accidentally got my second book only in hard book, because it was, it came out in hardback and paperback at the same time, which there was a moment of about six months when publishers were doing that, and then they stopped and they only had the hardback. And I was like, Oh, I don't even want anyone to buy that. Like that, isn't I would be mad if I bought a hardback...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right, right.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And then the next day, I was at the store and was like, hey!?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right, yeah, it's interesting, because I do actually love… because I bought your book The Chicken Sisters this weekend, in paperback, and I love, I love paperback, yeah, I love it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

For travel…?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Lighter, yeah, and I think it is appealing. It's so interesting. I mean, I remember Emily Henry's first couple, at least, came out paperback, and then now that she can sell so well, they now they come in hardcover, but I still feel like...

KJ Dell'Antonia

I look at them and I'm like, I don't want that that way. Now, I'll just buy a digital version, because I don't that's not…

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right? Right. It's really interesting. And I know I don't understand the sales end of it, the way that the people who are doing the job do, and the profits and the margin and all that. But I kind of feel like, why isn't everything in paperback right away? You know?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, no, I feel the same way. And and also people's, especially now we're thinking, we're talking about beach books. Some people's beach I mean, if my beach vacation is an airplane beach vacation, I might bring one hardback, maybe...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And maybe, probably not, because I'm a fast reader, I could easily eat that on the plane, and then there I would be. So...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I don't know.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right, yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I guess that's what e-readers are for.

Meg Mitchell Moore

That's true.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Well, I mean, gosh, I could probably talk to you about in depth, about the writing of this for about 12 hours. Because, okay, one one last thought. So listeners, Meg writes like we said, in multiple points of view. Talk to me about how you know when to change the point. You know what point of view a scene should be told from?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah, I don't. I'm it's so much. I do so much rewriting, a lot of that. I mean, I'm just thinking, I just turned in a draft yesterday of, hopefully next summer's novel, and I that is also multiple points of view. It's, I think it's mostly three, it's three adult sisters and they each have a point of view. There might be a couple little scattered things, but when I look back, I think I need to probably adjust, even in the draft I just turned in, I think I'm a little heavily weighted toward one over the other, so I don't always know. I just go on gut and instinct, and then I fix it later, which is how I do almost everything. I just go by instinct, and it's usually wrong And I change it later.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So, you'll, you'll be like, you've written a scene, and the point of view of one person, you realize, oh, either it's the other person's turn to have some more time, or I need their inner thoughts, not this person's inner thought...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Right. Yeah, its not very organized.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And sometimes you drop in like, you know, a kid on a beach or something, is that when you need something to happen that you that your protagonists don't know? Or just, you just feel like?

Meg Mitchell Moore

I think, I think it's fun. I just think it's fun sometimes to have this person you haven't heard from and you won't hear from again. But a lot I probably did. I probably do that. It probably gets taken out 80% of the time when I do that, because usually it doesn't make sense. But I just wanted to do it. I did it in my book. I just turned in and the first this scene between the a realtor and her husband, the realtor who's selling this house that these people are in. She doesn't matter to the book, but I just really wanted to write the scene of her and her husband, and I even wrote in the draft. I know this doesn't make sense, and my editor said, Yeah, this doesn't make sense. Like, you either need more of them, or they need to go. I don't know what they're...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Do you ever give them away for? Like, you know, here's your pre order bonus. Read this extra scene…

Meg Mitchell Moore

I should do that. Maybe I'll do that. They'll do that. I have never done that, but maybe I will. But I feel like, I think it might be Anne Tyler. I remember reading an interview. Is she the one who does the strings like she has strings with different?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Maybe, i don’t know.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Every character has a different colored string, and then she pulls down the red one because it's the red, you know, that's how she knows who she's writing. And I thought that was really cool, but I've never done it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That sounds like a lot of work.

Meg Mitchell Moore

I guess.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And, like, I would need a different…I need a bulletin board. Okay.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah, I don't know where you, where I would hang it from, but it's just seems kind of nice to think, then maybe...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah it does.

Meg Mitchell Moore

She knows if she's done the right amount for everybody.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, The Chicken Sisters is alternating points of view. And I just, I just alternated. And then sometimes that was a problem, and I had to figure out, like, how to get somebody's feelings? Yeah? So....

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah, it's confusing. I don't know why I do it to myself, because sometimes I'll just read a perfectly, a book that's just perfectly written in first person. I'm trying to think of an example right now, because I don't even always read that much in first person, but like, Yellowface? … Yellowface. Okay, that book was so, like, simple in a way, but I love I loved it. I thought it was brilliant, and it was all just this point of view, and...

KJ Dell'Antonia

And didn't you occasionally get, like a newspaper article? I think...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Maybe, maybe.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That must have been what she did when she had something her person couldn't know.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah. I guess, yeah. I guess, technically, it would be harder to do it all from one because you how do they know everything? But I feel like I get lost, like I have trouble. I literally lose the plot, because I'm just this person's off doing something in their day that might have nothing to do with what's going on. I get really caught up in that kind of stuff, and that's what I have to edit out.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, I'm always trying not to do that. I'll sit there while I'm writing, like, No, do not let them move their coffee cup. They can move the coffee cup in a later draft, if the coffee cup is still here, if they're even still in this coffee shop, if this coffee shop even exists. But I can't seem to stop it. My my like, default mode is, you know, he said while taking a sip and burning his lip or whatever, right? Just, I can't seem to not do it.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah, but sometimes that's where you get the gold too, because you wrote all that, and maybe that one sentence is the thing that you needed. So it's just the process.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, it is. It's just the process, and it's longer than we hope and slower than we hope...

Meg Mitchell Moore

Always...Always. Yes.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And more, and more revising. Well, do you have any, like, genius words about revision for people? Because it sounds like you do a lot of it.

Meg Mitchell Moore

I do a lot of it. I think just is so important. It's just so for me, it's so important. I just think nobody gets it right. I hope nobody gets it right the first time. Because if they do, I'm really jealous, but I think for the most part, nobody gets it right the first time. So revision is, I mean, I'd say I spent almost as much time on the revision I probably do as I do on the first draft.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Do you still lie to yourself in the first draft and let yourself pretend it's going to be right?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Oh yeah. I always think, Oh, this is the time I did it, I nailed it, and then I get my editorial letter, and it's like, great start. Here's the 700 things that you need to do now.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Well, thank you. I feel better. I hope everyone else does too.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah, it's a long process.

KJ Dell'Antonia

It really is, all right. Well, this was fantastic. I really enjoyed it.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah, me too.

KJ Dell'Antonia

As we hit the end of any episode, we always like to ask people what they've been reading. So I hope I'm not springing that on you.

Meg Mitchell Moore

No, I just I always have an audio book going and a regular book going on audio I just started the Emily Henry, the new Emily Henry, which I've never listened to her books. I've always read them, and I know that Julia, the famous Julia Whelan, is always her narrator, so and she's phenomenal. So I'm loving the audio version, which is just funny that I've never done it with Emily Henry before.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Did you listen to Julia Whelan's book that she wrote herself?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Mhmm.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That was so fascinating, because it really was different, like I actually read it, but I could feel the… yeah. Anyway, okay.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Oh, you should go back and also listen. It's so it's such a good audio book.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I bet.

Meg Mitchell Moore

Yeah, it was fantastic. And then I'm reading a novel called The Road to Dalton that my friend Hannah, who owns the Book Shop of Beverly Farms in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, phenomenal store recommended to me. So I bought it last time I was there, and it is about a bunch of people in a small town in Maine, which is my vibe immediately I was in. But it's very good. So I'm reading that. I can't, I can't remember the author, which is unusual for me, but Shannon something I think [Shannon Bowring].. But it's The Road to Dalton

KJ Dell'Antonia

That’s okay. I will find it well. As everyone is gathered, I just finished Mansion Beach. I I really loved it. It was a rare book that I loved even more when I got to the end of it. And, yeah, it was amazing. And also in that, that vibe, that sort of small town Maine and yet, but this is like small island, middle of the Atlantic. Welcome to Glorious Tuga. Have you heard of this one?

Meg Mitchell Moore

No. I’ve never heard of it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Okay, so it's a tiny island settled 300 years ago by a miscellanea of Dutch and British and and African people didn't have any locals. So that's kind of and they have formed the society. It's only open for half the year, because you can't, like, get a boat into it, because storms and currents and whatnot. So this woman has gone thinking that she's going to study the native tortoise population all Darwin, but she gets there and they're like, great. You're a vet. That's what we need. So it's kind of like all creatures great and small meets...I don't even know what it meets yet, I got to come up with that. But it's really a lot of fun. And it's very multi it's multi POV in a really interesting way, because you're with her, and then sort of whenever you kind of get a little interested in someone else, you're like, Oh, why are they doing that? Then maybe you'll switch to their POV. it's really, I really enjoyed it so, so that was fun. So those are my ranks, all right. Well, thank you so much, listeners for joining us, and thank you, Meg for joining me today. Where can people follow you? Where's the best?

Meg Mitchell Moore

Mostly on Instagram @Meg Mitchell Moore, I'm on Facebook, but I don't use it very often and I kinda want to leave it. So…I also just read the Facebook, the Facebook memoir.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh yeah?

Meg Mitchell Moore

No, I really want to leave Facebook, but also I know that they own Instagram. So anyway, Instagram is the best place to find me, and I was so happy to be here. Thank you. It was really fun.

KJ Dell'Antonia

This was super. Okay. Thanks everyone for listening, and until next week, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Sarina Bowen

The hashtag am writing podcast is produced by Andrew Perella. Our intro music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

Greetings writers! Sarina here.

Earlier in May I was surfing social media, as one does, when I came across a story about children’s author Erica Perl and an ill-fated school visit. Her scheduled visit to a school was abruptly canceled. After asking a few questions, it was determined that a single parent had objected to…

Well, it’s hard to say. We’ll let Erica tell her story. But you should know that Ms. Perl’s twenty years of book publishing have included such salacious titles as When Cookie Met Carrot and A Whale of a Tea Party. (🔥!)

When Erica’s visit was canceled, at first she had a lot of conflicting emotions. We’ll dig in to the vulnerability hangover that comes with writing as a career. But then she pulled herself together and fought back.

In the fight, she had a few advantages on her side: 1. She is a lawyer, which didn’t hurt. 2. She had a contract! That’s the most important takeaway here, and 3. She had some help from writers organizations.

It’s a great listen. 🎧

Links from today’s episode:

School Library Journal article about Erica’s experience

Pen America

Authors Against Book Bans

The Authors Guild

The American Library Association

Pride and Less Prejudice

Where to find Erica:

Have Erica come to your school! Everything you need to know HERE.

Erica’s latest: Whale and the Birthday Rocks

Erica Perl on Threads

This has been Episode 449 of the #AmWriting podcast

NEW! Transcript below!

KJ Dell'Antonia

Hey writers, KJ here. We just recorded the latest booklabs first pages episode and it is packed. We read the first page as in 350 words of a listener's work in progress and then ask that one all important question. Would we turn the page? But of course we do more than that. That would take about two minutes. We're trying to help both the writer and all you listeners out there figure out what's working and what isn't, and what might be the best way to bring a reader into the book's world. So here's the catch, and it's a small one. Booklab episodes and the ability to submit a first page are only available to paid supporters of #AmWriting. So come on over to AmWritingpodcast.com and sign yourself up and you'll get not just the monthly book labs, but also episodes of the Writing the Books series in which Jenny and I help each other through our latest drafts, access to monthly AMAs, and come summer, we shall blueprint once again. So come on in. The price tag's kinda ridiculously low and the water's fine.

All Speaking

The recording now it's recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one two.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia, and this is #AMWriting, the weekly podcast about writing all the things, short things, long things, pitches, proposals, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, everything. This is a podcast about getting your work done and Sarina is going to introduce herself now.

Sarina Bowen

I'm Sarina Bowen. I'm the author of many books of fiction. My latest one is called Dying to Meet You, and I can confirm that it is in a bookstore near you because I probably even visited that bookstore within the last seven days. It's been a little crazy around here in a good way, but in the midst of all the crazy, I was on threads, as one does, when one should actually be writing, and I saw an interesting story which led to us having a guest today that I am super excited about. The story I saw was an author who wrote books for children and writes books for children who had planned a school visit and then suddenly because of some real stupidity that I will let her explain to you, her school visit was canceled. They decided they no longer wanted to hear from this particular person. And that is a thing that I have been hearing more of lately. That's why I'm involved with The Authors Guild and Authors Against Book Bans. And she fought back in the most lovely way. So please welcome author Erica Perl to tell us what happened and what she has learned from it. Welcome Erica!

KJ Dell'Antonia

And I'm gonna give Erica a quick shout out introduction because Erica and I have known each other as she has just pointed out for approximately seven billion years. Since there were dinosaurs roaming the earth and Erica roaming the New York state courts and me as well roaming the New York state courts. Me and the guys of a prosecutor, Erica and the guys of a criminal defense attorney, and we did things together, crazy, as that sounds, because although that sounds like an antagonistic relationship and sometimes is, it also really cannot be. And then she introduced me to people at Slate, and then she wrote a bunch of children's books, and then I wrote about those children's books in various ways, and all kinds of things have happened. And yeah, here we are. - Okay.

Erica Perl

It's true. It's true, it's all true. What can I tell you all? I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I love them... I love… I'm a fan of the show. So it's really exciting to be here in the first place.

Sarina Bowen

Okay, so first let's have you set the scene. I'm looking at the titles in your extensive list of fantastic kids books. And I would say they look right off the cuff. Super controversial to me.

Erica Perl

Yeah.

Sarina Bowen

Like, The Three Little Guinea Pigs.

Erica Perl

The Three Little Guinea Pigs.

Sarina Bowen

A picture book. Yeah.

Erica Perl

A classic fairy tale. A retelling of The Three Little Pigs. Yes. With guinea pigs.

Sarina Bowen

Okay. Well, The Three Little Guinea Pigs, right off the bat seems like, you know, a headline news kind of problem here. And also, When Carrot Met Cookie.

Erica Perl

Yes. Yes. talking, talking food. Scary!

Sarina Bowen

Right. So help us set the scene. How did you become persona non grata for, for books like this?

Erica Perl

Yeah. So the story is this, as, as KJ mentioned, a lifetime ago, I was an attorney. I was a criminal defense attorney in New York, which is how KJ and I met. And, but I dreamed of writing children's books. And I actually, at that time, started taking classes at night because it was the secret passion of mine. And many, many years later, I started "Zen in the Mood." I started getting published. And I've now had books published over the course of the last 20 years. My first book came out in 2005. And I've published about 40 -something going on 50 books, all with traditional mainstream presses. And as you mentioned, it's not that I'm trying to avoid controversy, but most of the stuff I write about I write for kids from very little kids up to teens and most of the stuff I write about is about you know, kind of childhood centric experiences making friends and feeling different and searching for connections.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And um and going to bed and getting up and yes you know, my children's particular favorite of yours, which you want signed for them was Chicken Bedtime Is Really Early.

Erica Perl

Chicken Bedtime Is Really Early

KJ Dell'Antonia

We say that in our house constantly. Chicken Bedtime is Early.

Erica Perl

That makes me happy. I've always, in our house, we have the classic lines from books we read when my kids were little and I always aspire to that, just having, you know, kind of being in someone's childhood rotation. So anyway, in addition to writing books, I also teach writing and a variety of capacities. And I also do author visits. Many children's book authors do this. And it's sort of a nice way to, in addition to the, you know, what we make writing books on our advances and if we're lucky our royalties, we also get paid to go to schools and spend the day doing presentations about being an author, about the creative process, about where do you get your ideas. And the whole purpose of doing author visits isn't to sell books, it's really to kind of get kids excited about writing their own, telling their own stories and about reading. And so I routinely do those, you know, many times during the year. And I have an agent who specifically handles my bookings, as many authors do, because if there was a time when I did that myself, and it's just like way too many emails. And so It's nice to have someone who handles all the logistics so that when you go out to wherever you go. Everything's all set for you. Okay, so I had a school visit on my calendar coming up and I wasn't giving it much thought because as I said my my booking agent who's name is Sarah DeVore , and she's of How Now Booking, and she's great, she took care of all the details. I wasn't worried about it or thinking about it and then out of the blue I heard that it was canceled. I think Sarah actually forwarded an email she had received. And I thought it was really strange because sometimes things have to get rescheduled, like there's school testing or there's something going on. But I've never had a visit canceled. And there was no explanation for it being canceled. And Sarah and I kind of got our Spidey senses up because we didn't know what was going on, but it didn't feel right. And she did some research on her end, and we discovered that a single, individual parent had seen a social media video that I made about a year earlier for Pride Month. Because in addition to all the other books that I have, I have an early reader series called Whale, Quail, Snail. And Whale, Quail, Snail is a, like I said, it's early readers. So it's for like really little kids. It's really very low reading level for kids who are just starting, kids are just starting to, you can read it aloud, but you can also, if you're starting to learn how to read, it's a great book to kind of learn on.

Sarina Bowen

Sure.

Erica Perl

And it's about three characters, three friends, a whale, a quail, and a snail. And this book was selected by a group called Pride and Less Prejudice, which is a group, a nonprofit organization that provides collections, curated collections of books that have positive LGBTQ+ representation in them. And they picked this book because “Snail” uses they /them pronouns. And they thought it was a really nice representation, kind of like a casual non -binary representation. And the book's not about Snail being non -binary. The reason I made that choice as an author is that snails actually are intersex. They are not boys or girls. And when I discovered that, I thought I should probably represent that in this book.

Sarina Bowen

Okay. So biology.

Erica Perl

Biology, yeah. But that is literally the only way in which it comes up in the book. And I was actually surprised that they picked my book because some of the other books that they pick are really wonderful books that are actually about how important it is to welcome all different kinds of families and just all you know kind of more thematically about that. This is not about that. That's my point. Anyway, so I made this video. I mentioned that they had chosen the book. I explained why and I said, you know, happy pride. And forgot about it, and then apparently some parent at this school saw the video and went to the principal. I presumed Freaked out about this video. I don't know if this parent ever saw my book or read my book. I just know that the video spurred the conversation with the principal and the principal canceled the Visit. At which point, I tried to facilitate a conversation in which I said, "What can we do? How can we fix this?" Particularly because they were giving me this sort of pretext reason. They said, "Oh, the librarian shouldn't have signed the contract. We have a prop policy and we don't deal with it this way." And I knew that was inaccurate because I knew that the librarian had actually brought in authors in previous years. And I also knew that if that was the case, you could fix it. You could have someone else sign the contract. And so I said, can we change the date? Do you need more time? And they immediately sent the case to the district attorney, the county attorney for this county. This took place in Virginia. And so all of a sudden I'm getting emails from this lawyer who's saying, like, don't talk to anyone at the school, this is a legal matter, like we're done with you and PS, we're not paying you. Which is something that--

Sarina Bowen

Oh my goodness.

Erica Perl

Which is something that the principal actually said also, but the attorney doubled down on it and was just like, so sorry, go away. - Wow. - And yeah. And I had also learned that the principal had told the librarian that if the school was forced to pay me for this visit, the librarian would have to pay out of her own pocket, which I was not going to let happen. So, yeah. So, and the other thing that I should mention is I have a contract, as I said, I have a booking agent, and she had set up a contract, which the librarian had signed on behalf of the school, which she's authorized to do. And in my contract, it said you need all sorts of things, including you need to give 30 days notice if you want to cancel a visit. I took out my calendar and this was 28 days and so I just said you know in the most basic of terms you didn't give me notice and you have to pay for this. There's a cancellation fee specified in my, in my contract and the amount is my day's rate. Anyway, so they, you know, told me to go away and I looked again at my contract and realized that not only was I entitled to be paid for the visit, but the contract specified that the law that governs this particular contract is not the law of the part of Virginia at all. It's the law of where I live. So it dawned on me that I could just go down to my local small claims court and fill out paperwork, which is something, I mean, I mean, I am an attorney, but you don't need to be an attorney, you don't need to have any legal knowledge. The whole point of small claims court is that anyone can come in and file a case against anyone else who owes the money or who has broken a contract, which is what happened.

Sarina Bowen

Right. And I think we lose sight of that sometimes because it does just sound daunting to file a claim.

Erica Perl

Oh yeah!

Sarina Bowen

If you're not an attorney, so thank you for saying that.

Erica Perl

Oh, absolutely. And honestly, I actually asked a couple of other attorney friends of mine, just because I was like, Am I missing something here, it seems to me, I haven't practiced law in quite a while, so maybe it's changed. But I think anybody can do this. And then when I went to small claims court, I physically went in person, and everybody there was so helpful, and they gave me the papers, and they showed me how to fill it out. And it wasn't that hard. It didn't cost much. It cost it, you know, a couple, like, I want to say, like, $20 to for filing fees, which included them serving the people I was, I was filing the claim against, which was the school board and in the county, and so the school board in the school system, I think I sued. So, so I just, you know, I paid the small amount of fees and I filed the papers, and the next thing I knew, I got noticed through the mail that they had been served, which means that, like the the court took care of filing legal papers and showing up in this county in Virginia, and saying, Here you go. You got served. And the thing that happened after that is I got an email saying we're not admitting that we’d done anything wrong here. We're sending, we're going to send you a check and we're going to settle this. So yeah, so I, I feel like I skipped a step, which is how hard this was. Because honestly, the filing part was easy, but getting the strength to do it was the hard part, because when it happened, I really felt like I just wanted to go away. I just wanted to, you know, to use a snail analogy, hide in my shell. I just wanted to like I felt awful and I felt bad, even though I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, because they were treating me like I had done something wrong and like I was a danger to kids.

Sarina Bowen

And why do we do that? Why? Do we do that to ourselves? Like, is that like a special writer thing or, or what?

Erica Perl

I mean... I think, yeah, I think there is this part of us that feels and it's funny, because you guys have talked about this on the show before that we feel lucky to even have the chance to do so many things that we do, even though we've worked really hard to get where we are, you know? And so I feel like it's this imposter syndrome thing where they say you're not really, you know, giving anything of value to our kids. You're just here to harm them. And you think they're saying it'll both be true, even though you know it's not true.

Sarina Bowen

Plus, also the energy it takes to take your creative work and put it out there in the world and ask the world to love it, you know, or to even just spend some of their precious day on it. And that takes, like, the first, like, a big tier of strength, and then if somebody comes back and slaps you for it, like, you know, that is gonna create a snail shell moment for even the bravest writer, I think.

Erica Perl

Yeah! Absolutely. And it, and it, and it happens to a lot of us. And I feel like I have a lot of friends who are really strong and courageous because they, you know, they write work that is, that is more kind of, you know, that they know will may draw attention because it deals with sexuality, or it deals with race, or it deals with things that are really hard for some people to deal with, and they walk out there every day with their armor on, and I have so much love and respect for them. And I feel like I have spent my whole career kind of like, you know, walking around not having to worry about that stuff, because everything I write is kind of safe, you know? Not everything, maybe, but most of what I write, um, is kind of in this terrain of like, you know, I do write things for older kids, but even the stuff I write for older kids. I'm really, really, like, not known for being one of those, like, edgy writers. I'm known for being somebody who's really kind of in a zone that is palatable to most people. I guess I should say, I mean, it's like…

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, I aspire to be edgy, but nobody has ever called me edgy. So... Right, right. Maybe someday...

Erica Perl

Yeah, so I, you know, I have lots of friends who are and I admire them, as I said, because they know that, that they may draw this kind of attention, and they're ready for the fight. And I think I was blindsided a little bit by this and scared, because I just felt like me?! I, you know, can we just talk about this? That's not who I am, but the truth of that is, right now, we are all vulnerable to this kind of attack. And so that's for me. All of a sudden I felt like, Okay, wait a second. Like, I've been walking around feeling like, oh, the edgy people can handle this fight. And then I thought, wait a second, this is not just the fight for the edgy people or for the people who are, you know, prepared for it. This is a fight we all have to be involved in. So I think that was part of why I poked my head out of my shell. Because I just felt like, if I walk away from this, like it's, it's, it's not okay. It's not okay to let other people fight this fight, and to just say, Oh, I'm good. I'll just, you know, I'll just take the hit. Other schools will book me, and they do, um, but it just felt like I'm not walking away from this fight. It's too important.

Sarina Bowen

Right? Do you think so? It reminds me of something weird that happened to me a couple years ago where I got actual like, people telling me to off myself on my social media, posts like for a thing that I actually didn't do. Yeah, it was because a big piracy site got shut down, and I had once given a quote about this thing, and then the internet decided that I had, single handedly, it was so dumb, but that because it was so very dumb, and I still, I went through that same thing that you described, where you just want to curl up in a ball, and why, Oh, my God. Like the things people are saying to me, they're so terrible. Like, how did I get here? But, but after, you know, I don't know, 12 hours of pain, I it actually made me, like, stronger afterwards, because it was this realization that, um, I thought if I ever was canceled, it would be for something I actually did, or some, some objectionable thing I actually said, like, some mistake that I that made, and I've been such a striver my whole life not to ever offend anyone. And so it was clarifying, like, oh, wait a second, you know, the internet might yell at me for no reason at all. So maybe I should stop tiptoeing around on eggshells and worrying that, like a meteor is about to hit my house, because, you know, it might, but I just don't have to worry so much about it anymore. Like, do you think you'll be able to come to a place where that might actually help you, like not worry about it anymore?

Erica Perl

Yeah, absolutely. I think you're 100% right about that. They, you know, we, I do. I can't speak for other people, but I do walk around trying to make sure everybody is happy. And you get to a point where somebody is unhappy despite your best efforts, and you have to. Just be like, okay, they're going to be that way, and they're going to be unhappy, but I gotta do what's right for me and what's right. And you do gain power. You do gain power from doing that. You gain, I mean, and it was funny, because, so, you know, when I wrote about this, and the other thing that I was really concerned about is I didn't want the librarian to get hurt as a result of any Yes, so I had to be really careful. Because I, you know, I was really fired up at a certain point about, you know, I waited until I got actually paid, like, till the check arrived and the check cleared to actually put anything out there, because I was still scared that they would change their mind and it would, you know, all go away. But when I decided I wanted to say something about it, I really wanted to be careful, because I didn't want anyone else to get hurt. But I also felt like I wanted to say what had happened to me, because it, you know, it did happen, and because it did make me feel better to say, like, we can do this, to say to people like you can you, I did this, you can do this, and to warn other authors about protecting themselves from this kind of attack. So, yeah, so I do. I do think that, like, if you walk around trying to make sure that you don't, you know, that nobody is offended, that nobody is hurt, that nobody you know you may end up hurting yourself in the process, right? You gotta, kind of like, you know, there comes a point.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, I'm sure I felt so much more anxiety through the last whatever decade of trying to be somebody the internet doesn't hate, then I really needed to feel.

Erica Perl

So true. We put that on ourselves, and I don't really know why, but we need to stop. I agree. Yeah, yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

If everyone likes everything you're doing, you're not, probably not doing anything.

Erica Perl

Well. And the other funny thing to you know, to Sarina’s point about things that you don't like. I read. So I wrote this, I wrote this piece, and it was published in the School Library Journal, and it got a lot of additional it just got shared a lot more than I had anticipated. So all of a sudden, people who I didn't think, I assumed it would be seen by librarians and by authors, and that was, you know what I hoped, because those were the audiences I was trying to speak to about what had happened. But it ended up getting through social media and beyond, getting shared and reposted by so many people, which was wonderful. And also, I did get to see a whole bunch of, you know, critical comments as well. And the funniest thing to me was that so many of the people who had something to say about it. Clearly hadn't read the piece. And that really, that really struck me, because, like, what you said, the internet does not care what actually happened. The Internet does not care what you actually did. People were so willing to chime in and say what the you know, lots of people said nice things, but there were people out there who just wanted to say why I was, you know, should, should, you know why I just was completely in the wrong, without having engaged in the piece at all, like the basic information was not in there.

Sarina Bowen

Right. So in, in other words, if the internet doesn't care enough to read what the story is before they comment, then you author Erica Perl, do not have to care what the internet thinks, essentially, which is not the same as not caring what anybody thinks and not wanting to be a good person and never do harm like that. It's the separation of that, that was the hard lesson, right? You know, yeah, because you care so much about writing quality things that are suitable for children, and...

Erica Perl

Oh, I agonize over every word, and then you, yeah, you put something out, and people are just like, let me tell you something. And they're like, Wow, and you didn't even read it. And of course, I don't engage. Just to be clear, I very much do not engage. Did not answer any of those comments, but just watching it go by, it definitely is a lesson. And you know what? There are going to be people who have things to say, and they may not be very well informed, and you just gotta stick to what you're doing, because they you know, the internet, as you say, the internet does not care. But if you get… if you let them suck you down, you really let them take away your power and your happiness.

Sarina Bowen

Right? Well, I'm glad you didn't let them do that, and they certainly didn't take away your power, and I'm really impressed by how you handled it, and what a lesson it can become for other people who might hear this. So that thing about how the governing law of your contract was your own state is pretty powerful. I signed a lot of contracts, and that that's never true of any contract I sign a lot of publishing contracts have New York State listed because, I was told by, actually, by The Authors Guild, and they know these things that New York State is has a lot of judges that understand copyright law really well, like IP law is litigated. You. Frequently in New York, and kind of, that's why, that's why that's done, but also that's where my publishing houses are. So that's an interesting thing to think about in terms of speaking contracts, though.

Erica Perl

Yeah, I mean, so I have a literary agent who handles all my publishing contracts and I feel it like this. This has been an eye opener for me, just in terms of reading contracts. You would think that, since I went to law school, I would, you know, go over my contracts with a fine tooth comb. I don't know about you. KJ, I've become way too lackadaisical about it, and just been like, looks good to me. When do I get paid? And that's not the way we should do things. In a perfect world, we should read our contracts carefully and understand what we're signing both in terms of... and I trust the people who represent me, so I think that's part of it. Like they're very good at their jobs, and I know they've thought about things that I may not have even thought about. I mean, sometimes there are these funny contracts. I don't know if you guys have these, but in the children's book world, there are always these really funny clauses in our contracts about, like, the potential that your book will become an amusement park ride or something like that. You're like, yeah, okay, good one. I look forward to the day that I ride on the three little guinea pigs. But you know…

KJ Dell'Antonia

Well, you say that, and then maybe you become the person. I mean, my first book did actually go all the way to becoming a TV show, and I signed that contract with the people who were optioning it. I mean, I skimmed it, yeah, and I have learned since that, yeah, I would have done, I would have, I would have done that differently, and that is a totally different, it's a different podcast. But the important thing is that if you get a contract, do read it, and if there are things that make you go, huh? People will sometimes cross those out. I mean, some places are just like, Nope, this is what this is going to be, but you probably have more. I think we all feel like we have no negotiating room, because please take my thing, please pay me to option, please publish my thing. I you know, I'm a supplicant, just begging you. And if they want the thing, then you should ask for what you want, and if you don't get it, that's fine. But then you also know the parameters of what you do have. And I will add that at some point, I went back and read that contract and was like, You know what? They didn't give me this thing they said they would give and they had to go back and fix a bunch of stuff. So, you know, nobody cares more than you. You gotta read it.

Erica Perl

No, totally, totally, totally true.

Sarina Bowen

I hope that somebody listening to this is like negotiating her very first school visit contract, and is like googling "school visit contract sample", and comes up with this.

Erica Perl

Totally true. I mean, interestingly, I so I actually, when I was, you know, when I was trying to figure out what to do about this situation, I knew that this school had had author visits in the past, and so I did a little bit of digging, and I found an author that I, you know, we're not close friends, but it was someone that I could reach out to and connect with who had visited the school, you know, a year or two before. And I reached out to this person and said, Can I, you know, can you show me your contract? You know, what did, mostly because I wanted to verify that the librarian had signed contracts before. And this person, who is a well published, award winning, awesome author, said to me, oh, you know, I don't really use a contract. I just send an invoice after I do a school visit, I guess maybe I should. And I thought, yeah, you should, because if, if I had done that, I would not be getting anything. I would be… I would not have been able to fight this. I mean, okay, maybe I could have fought this successfully over a lot of time and a lot of energy, but I would not have been able to walk in and be like, hello, here's a document... I win!, and the only reason I could do that is because I had a contract. If you don't have a contract, you're just you're really at a disadvantage. And I really it's very lucky that that person didn't have this experience, that they went to the school, did a presentation, got paid, you know, set an invoice, got paid in the end. But for many authors that you know you're putting yourself in a position that you don't have to be by going in without a contract.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah I was just gonna make that point. We, I mean, we are collegial, friendly people, and we don't like to have necessarily, to say, well, yes, but I need a contract in place. And I actually have once been given a contract for a podcast appearance so to be fair, we don't do that, but we need, you need contracts in place for a lot of reasons. And you can write something really simple and short and have it work out and be, you know, and be just fine and be better than nothing. You also sometimes need a contract, because sometimes it's not the person you're dealing with. It ends up being the problem. You know, if something goes wrong, it's possible that their insurance company is going to be your problem, or their partner or their, you know, next to Kin, I don't know.

Erica Perl

No absolutely,

KJ Dell'Antonia

Just better to have.

Erica Perl

And, I mean, this is something, you know, I. It's funny, because I'm not, I'm not really a very adversarial person, despite the fact that, like, I went to law school and was a courtroom lawyer for several years. I, like, you know, I don't want to have a fight with people. I want to work things out. But you have a contract for when you can't work things out, you have it for, like, the worst case scenario. I mean, I've been, as I said, I've been a published author for 20 years. I've done a gazillion school visits. I love doing school visits. I, you know, I seek out these opportunities. And they, you know, by and large, are amazing. Like, for me, for the kids, for the educators. Like, I always leave there feeling just so happy with how it went, and I get wonderful notes about them, and so, like, it's like a really important and satisfying part of my work life. I've never had anything like this happen before. It just, it just doesn't. It's just a routine thing. I set up a contract. The contract gets shoved to the side. I go to the school, I present my work. I signed books. I meet kids. It's a fabulous, fun day. I go home. A check arrives in the mail, or they give it to me when I'm there, like, the end, it's it. The contract is never even something. It's not a thing. And that's what's nice, is that it's just, it's like, it's a safety net. But sometimes you need a safety net. If you're on the high wire and you fall you're pretty psyched, but that safety net is there.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So do we think the librarian is, like, not, hopefully, gonna suffer any... well, I mean, she's the librarian for a county that's gonna do this, so she's probably got her own problems.

Erica Perl

Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for this librarian, because, you know, having an unsupportive principle is, you know, nobody wants to have a boss that doesn't back them up. That doesn't say, you know, I mean, because this librarian had gone to a lot of trouble and put together a whole lot of programming around the visit. Because, like, the best school visits are the ones where you have a really engaged librarian who does things like, sets up a Battle of the Books, and, like, you know, gets the kids to, like, make decorations for the school, and like, does all this fun stuff to get the kids really, you know, animated and energized about the visit that really, that kind of librarian you're lucky to have. And this principal clearly didn't value this librarian, and that's a really lousy position for this librarian to be in. I have connected with this librarian since I received my check, just to check and make sure everything is fine. My understanding is that she read my piece. She felt good about it. She was grateful that I didn't name her or the school in anything that I wrote about it, because I wanted to protect her from any sort of backlash. So I think she's, I think she feels as good as she could about it, but she still has to work in a place where this goes on. And I mean, the other thing I should say, without saying too much about this place, is it's not, it wasn't an isolated incident there, within this county and within a lot of counties right now, there were other things that involved book banning or, you know, content being censored or withdrawn or challenged in ways that that are one person's action that impacts an entire community.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, so this one mom, whoever the heck she was...

Erica Perl

We don't know that it's a mom. I'm just gonna say we had a parent. We don't know.

Sarina Bowen

You're right. Some parent is doing that thing that you know, Authors Against Book Bans are putting all their energy toward stopping, which is this one person, whoever they were, prevented an entire school from meeting you, and cost her school or his school the whole fee and the trouble of involving their lead counsel. So I suppose we can hope that just maybe the school learned something from this experience. But, you know, I don't know how much hope I have about that.

Erica Perl

Yeah, the sad thing is that I think probably the lesson that this principal in particular learned is... don't have any more author visits, is, don't put, you know, don't, don't go down this road. So not only did this visit not happen, and that, the other thing about when you did what you just, just described is accurate. These kids didn't get to meet the author. These, you know, none, and it happens in secret. The other thing that's really kind of galling about this is that it's, you know, probably the families did not, you know, there wasn't this happened, as I said, 28 days before my visit, probably just sort of quietly got taken off the school calendar. And the kids, you know, sort of maybe a kid said whatever happened with that other visit. But there was not any sort of, like, to my knowledge, public conversation that happened at the school. It was just sort of like this one parent complained, and then the principal dealt with it, and then it just went away.

Sarina Bowen

Wow. And that lack of public discourse is just so chilling.

Erica Perl

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

The 30 families who would have really, you know, probably more, who really would have wanted you, and who would have been outraged that this happened, didn't get a chance to say...

Erica Perl

No ,absolutely not. They didn't even know. And they probably don't know the school had 400 kids, so a lot of families.

KJ Dell'Antonia

What I have learned recently, you know, I met some people that moved into our community, and they were talking about our schools, and I was in a conversation where I sort of did not know what I had gotten myself into, and I very quickly realized they're spoiling for this. These people, they are sincerely they're sending their children to school with their antenna out, hoping that somebody is going to do something offensive so that they can, they as in the same way that maybe we would really like the opportunity to stand up for what we believe in, they're looking for the chance to do these things. And it was surprising and strange to be in that conversation, but, you know, as a firsthand...oh, okay....here we are…

Erica Perl

Yeah. I get that people on both sides of this issue all come from the same place. They love their kids, they want to protect their kids. We all love our kids and want to protect our kids, but the way in which this is being represented, and the decisions that are being made based on those laudable objectives are hurting other people and are oftentimes, as I said, so far away from the actual information. I mean, in this case, I mean, I should also add like, I don't even like, the only way in which kids even encounter the book in question in my presentations is it's an image on a slide. And I say, these are some of the books I write. I don't routinely read it out loud, and even when I do... as I said, it's got three instances of the word they or them, representing, you know, like snail hid in their shell, that kind of thing. I've never had a kid raise a hand and say, why is snail using they/them pronouns? Like it's just not a thing. It's a complete non issue. So I'm not saying that, you know that we shouldn't have books that talk about gender for little kids. I think that's it's… I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but I feel like these families that were so scared of the impact that my work would have on their kids really spent no time actually thinking about, like, what were they afraid of? What was, you know, what did they think would happen? And, you know, yeah, so, as I said, I think they come, they may come at it for a good reason. They want to protect their kids, but protect them from what exactly, and how does this? How does this help?

Sarina Bowen

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. I'm not even convinced of the...

Erica Perl

Of the good intentions? Yeah, well, maybe I'm, maybe I'm being too generous.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I mean, you know, there's an intention there, but I think it sometimes can be to be noisy and to put your foot down and to make the point that you don't know who you're dealing with here.

Erica Perl

Yeah, I'm sure that's true, too. I like to believe. I like to see the good in people. I had a hard time believing this was actually gonna go away, because I thought we could work it out. Obviously, we couldn't. So, yeah, I'm not...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, you could have taken that slide out. I mean, I'm fine. I'll leave this book out, whatever.

Erica Perl

It's funny. I have had instances where people have, you know, had wanted to talk to me about, like, my actual content. Like, I have a book called Chicken Butt. I have had schools that are concerned about that word, and so, you know, I've talked to them about it, but I won't take it out. Chicken Butt is in all my presentations, for a reason, because I really do I emphasize with kids that, no matter, you know, when you have ideas, you should write them down, even if they're the kind of throwaway ideas that don't think like they're going to go anywhere this could become a book, and you just never know. So for me, it's a really important point to make and Chicken Butt it's just the vehicle through which I make it and but when I have that conversation with a thoughtful human with a principal who actually has an open mind, the answer routinely has been, Oh, I get that. Okay, yes. Like, maybe we'll have to listen to kids saying Chicken Butt on the playground for a week. But it's worth it, because I see why you're doing that. There's actual intentionality So, and I also have had...

KJ Dell'Antonia

I'm just picturing the process over snail, quail, yeah, no, I whale too. You're like, Okay, I need rhyming animals.

Erica Perl

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I got the...

Erica PerlYeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Ok cool, right, right, right, right. Snail's name is snail whales, nail, and then, oh, I need Wait. Is snail a boy or a girl?

Erica Perl

That's exactly... my initial draft... they were all...

KJ Dell'Antonia

I can't, because it's a character.

Erica Perl

This is, yeah, no, this is the thing about...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Do I put a pink bow on the shell? I mean, it's just Yeah, and you didn't even pick snail like, I wish to make a point, about...

Erica Perl

No, not at all. My initial draft.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Snail rhymes.

Erica Perl

Right, absolutely. And they're so they're, I mean, Sam Ailey did the art. They are so dang cute. So, yeah, I'm very happy with them. And...

KJ Dell'Antonia

I mean, nobody is picking like, nobody intentionally going, I'm gonna go for cute animals, people will love, is gonna go for a quail.

Erica Perl

Yeah.

KJ Dell'AntoniaNot that quails aren't great, but it's just not like, you know, there aren't many stuffies.

Erica Perl

It's true.

KJ Dell'Antonia

There should be more, my little quails.

Erica Perl

There should be more quail stuffies in my world.

KJ Dell'Antonia

We need more quail.

Sarina Bowen

I have to say...Now I kind of want the book where I am told why snail is a they, because biology is the most fascinating thing. And you know, so much of the gender discourse in this country is flattened into, you know, so...

KJ Dell'Antonia

When a snail grows up and wants to make more snails.

Erica Perl

It gets very complicated very fast. I will tell you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

It really happens in a totally different way.

Erica Perl

Well, it's funny, because in the book, the actual, the first, this is a series, so there are actually three books out and one coming. But in the book, when they first meet snail, they mistake snail for a rock. So snail is, you know, they have confusion about snail, because snail, as you can see, I know this is a podcast, but for those who are listening, snail appears on a surfboard, because, of course, and they assume that snail is a rock. And so snail actually has to clarify who they are in that moment, like, I'm not a rock, I am a snail. And that is really, you know, I think some might see that as sort of me echoing the other issue. But it doesn't. It's just basically snail gets mistaken for a rock and has to establish that they are, in fact, a snail. But snail will be the first to tell you that their pronouns are not the most interesting thing about them. They ride a surfboard, folks.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, it's a surfing snail, not just that's not a regular snail. It's a cool snail.

Sarina Bowen

I like snails so much already, and I really like how well you tell the story, and how you waited until it really had reached its point of, you know, satisfaction to tell it, and you pick such a great venue, the School Library Journal, to make your statement and and because you did that with such care, so many people are going to receive this lesson. And it's just fantastic. I'm just so glad you could join us today. What is your newest book?

Erica Perl

Oh, that's such a good question, because I'm often working on many books at once. So there is another Whale, Quail, Snail book, which is called Whale and the Birthday Rocks, and that is coming out soon. I wish I could tell you when, but I often forget this stuff. So Whale and the Birthday Rocks is coming out soon. I think that might be my next book. I feel like it's coming out before the year is out, but I'm not. Don't quote me on that, because I often have multiple books happening at the same time. Can I say one other thing that I forgot to say and probably should have said earlier, please do, which is just that I had some I had wonderful guidance along the way, as I was struggling over this, from individual friends who were wonderful, and from just people who do this work all the time and know what they're doing, like you've mentioned, a couple of them, The Authors Guild authors, Authors Against Book Bans and Pen America. And ultimately, I ended up donating the fee that I got to Authors Guild and Pen America, no sorry, to Pen America and the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom. Those were the two organizations that I chose to donate my fee to because those, those four groups that I just named, and probably others that I'm not remembering at this moment, all have actual human beings who were wonderful and talked to me and offered me support and explained to me what other people were going through, and contextualized this in the bigger kind of world that we're living in. And so that was really, really helpful at a point where I was feeling super alone in this. So I just, I wanted to say that, both to say that I didn't do this by myself, and also that if anyone else is going through this, there are people out there who can be really helpful. And that's where I would point you.

Sarina Bowen

That is a super point. In fact, The Authors Guild members have a portal that they could go through with a problem like this. And the reason that portal is there is because when you log in as a member and go through that Legal Help Portal, you are authorizing the Author's Guild to be of legal assistance to you. It's, yeah, it's not because they just want to put up an internet wall between the human and the author or so anyway, anybody who walks through that portal, those things, whatever you put there, whatever trouble you're having, will be seen by a real human being, and you will get a response,

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. And it will be privileged, I mean, that's important. Why? They, once you walk through that portal, they know you've asked for their presentation, and your conversations become confidential, which is cool.

Erica Perl

Wait, sorry, Two more shout outs that I didn't need to have. One is my publisher, Simon and Schuster, who also was really great, and was there and communicated with The Authors Guild while I was going through this, which is really nice. Like they looped my editor, people looped the legal people in, and they talked to The Authors Guild, so that was all super helpful. And the independent bookseller that would have supported the school visit, because oftentimes schools work with independent booksellers, so I also connected with them, and they knew a lot about the ground situation in their community, and that was incredible. I mean, they were supportive and wonderful, but they also told me things about what was going on that opened my eyes to the fact that this was not an isolated situation.

Sarina Bowen

Fascinating.

Erica Perl

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

All right. Well, this was fantastic. Thank you so so much we love...

Erica Perl

Thank you for having me.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Sharing this. It's, you know, it's the good news, right?

Erica Perl

I mean, it is. It felt good to have a little bit, a little win, you know, a win for the little guy, the little snail, um, to share with people at a time where we're feeling, I'm often day to day feeling very, you know, frustrated about everything that's going on out there. So if I can help people fight their own fights, I want to do that and thank and thank you for all that you do through this podcast, and in many ways to do that that's super helpful. I appreciate it.

Sarina Bowen

We try.

Erica Perl

Yeah.

Sarina Bowen

We try. In between, hanging on trying to get some words on the page, which feels really hard this year.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh, my God, it does.

Erica Perl

Yeah, yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So, all right, should we shut this one down?

Sarina Bowen

We should, because we have those words to get to.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Until next week everybody keep your butt in the chair, even if it's a chicken butt, keep your chicken butt in the chair and your chicken head in the game.

Sarina Bowen

The hashtag AmWriting podcast is produced by Andrew Perilla. Our intro music, aptly titled “Unemployed Monday,” was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

Hi all, Jess here. This episode was Sarina’s idea, and when you listen you will understand why. It can be hard to focus on the work, whether it’s editing, world building, conjuring meet cutes, or translating research-based hope for the next generation. That said, it’s important that we keep creating and putting our words out into the world. We hope you are able to keep working while navigating the a balance between consuming, processing, and reacting to the news cycle and shutting the world out in self preservation.

Stuff we talked about

Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Writing and the Creative Life by Kate McKean

Kate Mckean’s website

We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter (release date August 12, 2025)

The OpEd Project

Authors Against Book Bans

Possession by A.S. Byatt and the film I adore based on the book

A Complete Unknown film

Hamilton, Non-Stop (“why does he write like he’s running out of time?”)

On Writing by Stephen King

All In by Billie Jean King

Permission by Elissa Altman

Meditation for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

HEY. Did you know Sarina’s latest thriller is out NOW?

Rowan Gallagher is a devoted single mother and a talented architect with a high-profile commission restoring an historic mansion for the most powerful family in Maine. But inside, she’s a mess. She knows that stalking her ex’s avatar all over Portland on her phone isn’t the healthiest way to heal from their breakup. But she’s out of ice cream and she’s sick of romcoms.

Watching his every move is both fascinating and infuriating. He’s dining out while she’s wallowing on the couch. The last straw comes when he parks in their favorite spot on the waterfront. In a weak moment, she leashes the dog and sets off to see who else is in his car.

Instead of catching her ex in a kiss, Rowan becomes the first witness to his murder—and the primary suspect.

Digital books at: Amazon | Nook | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play | Audible Physical books at: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indigo | More paperback links here!

New! Transcript below!

EPISODE 448 - TRANSCRIPT

KJ Dell'Antonia

Listeners who I know are also readers. Have I got a summer book for you, if you haven't yet ordered Dying to Meet You. Sarina Bowen's latest thriller with just enough romance you have to so let me lay this out for you. Rowan Gallagher is a devoted single mother and a talented architect with a high profile commission restoring a historic mansion for the most powerful family in Maine, but inside, she's a mess. She knows stalking her exes avatar all over Portland on her phone isn't the healthiest way to heal from their breakup, but she's out of ice cream and she's sick of rom coms. Watching his every move is both fascinating and infuriating. He's dining out while she's wallowing on the couch. The last straw comes when he parks in their favorite spot on the waterfront. In a weak moment, she leashes the dog and sets off to see who else is in his car. But instead of catching her ex and a kiss, Rowan becomes the first witness to his murder and the primary suspect. But Rowan isn't the only one keeping secrets as she digs for the truth, she discovers that the dead man was stalking her too, gathering intimate details about her job and her past, struggling to clear her name, Rowan finds herself spiraling into the shadowy plot that killed him. Will she be the next to die? You're going to love this. I've had a sneak preview, and I think we all know that The Five Year Lie was among the very best reads and listens of last summer, Dying to Meet You, is available in every format and anywhere that you buy books and you could grab your copy, and you absolutely should…right now.

All Talking

Is it recording? Now it's recording, yay, go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm gonna wrestle some papers. Okay, now, 123,

KJ Dell'Antonia

Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia, and this is hashtag AmWriting podcast the weekly podcast about writing all the things, short things, long things, pitches, proposals, fiction, non fiction, memoir. This is the podcast about finding a way to get your work done, and that is sure what we're gonna talk about this week.

Jess Lahey

I'm Jess Lahey. I am the author of The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation and you can find my journalism over at The New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic.

Sarina Bowen

I'm Sarina Bowen. I am the author of many contemporary novels, including Dying to Meet You, which is brand new right now.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yay!

Sarina Bowen

Yay. Thank you.

Jennie Nash

I'm Jennie Nash, I am the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company on a mission to lead the emerging book coaching industry, and also the author of the Blueprint books, which help people get their books out of their head and onto the page.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And also in your past life, the author of a lot of other books.

Jennie Nash

I know indeed.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I think it's worthy. I do. I'm KJ Dell'Antonia, I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of three novels and two non fiction books, and the former editor and lead writer of the mother lode blog at the New York Times. We have all had a number of careers. And the reason I brought that up, Jenny is that I was just interviewing Kate McKean, who has a new book about the mechanics. Like, it's a great book. It's called Write Through It, and it's sort of like everything we've ever talked about the podcast on the podcast, all the how to stuff all rolled up into one book, which is really cool. But I was telling her that I kind of have a unspoken motto of only taking writing advice from people who have not published a book, very judiciously. Now my freelance editor is not someone who has, or, I think I don't know if she even wants to publish a book, and she's amazing. So with with some thought, but my point being that you have also published many, many, many books. So if anyone out there hesitates around that don't, don't. Yeah, all right, that was a really lot of introductions. We got something to talk about today, and I'm going to demand that Sarina announce our topic, because she came up with it. Okay.

Sarina Bowen

Well, my topic is how to be present and devote yourself to your writing in a world that is so loud and confusing and it feels like whatever you're working on can't possibly matter as much as what's going on in the world, and all my writer friends are struggling with this right now.

Jess Lahey

It's, it's hard, especially when the work that I do, the work around like writing about kids and parenting and stuff, requires a fair amount of optimism and requires a fair amount of like, it's gonna be great, and here's what you have to do in order to make it be great. And it's really, it's been very hard for me lately to to be in that head space.

Sarina Bowen

Well, Jess, I would argue that, like, at least you're literally helping people. And some of us are fighting meet cutes and first kisses.

Jess Lahey

Okay, you are no but you are so helping people, because over and over and over again, what I hear from your readers and from readers of happy kiss, he a and kissing books that they are the the self care and the reprieve that they really need.

Sarina Bowen

Okay, you you just are. You just gave, like, the point, the point at the top of the notes that I made for this discussion, because people keep saying that to me, and they're not wrong. But for some reason, it hasn't been enough lately, and I, um, I was struggling to figure out why. And then over the last 48 hours, in a feverish rush, I read this Karin Slaughter book that's called We Are All Guilty Here that doesn't come out until August, but please pre order it now and do yourself a favor, because it's so good.

Jess Lahey

I love her books.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, so I had the opportunity to have that same experience from the reader side of the coin, which is that I totally lost myself in this fictional world. It It mattered to me as a person to work through those problems, um, in the way that a novel has a beginning and a middle and an end and and I think that part of my big problem right now is that I can't see an end to any of the stuff that's you know happening. So it was helpful to me to have the same experience that my readers described to me, to be like totally sucked into something, and to feel like it mattered to me in the moment.

Jess Lahey

Well…And to add on to that, I had a fantastic sorry KJ and Jenny, we're just we're off on our little happy tangent here. But I had a wonderful conversation with a fan recently in on one at one of my speaking engagements, and she was apologizing to me for feeling like she had a really close relationship with me, even though we hadn't met. And she said, and the reason for that is that you're in my head because I'm listening to your audiobook. And I said, You do not need to apologize to that for that to me, because I have the same experience. And she said, the thing that was nice, you know, because I'm such a big audiobook fan, I feel this weird, parasocial, fictional connection to this person, because it's not just their words, it's also their voice. But the thing that she said was really sweet was she listened in her car, and her car became a place of refuge and a place where she knew she was going to hear a voice that would make her feel like it was going to be okay. And so even though I hear that and I know that, and I've experienced it from the other side with the audiobooks that I listen to, it's still, it is still very hard to look down at the empty page and say, How do I help people feel like everything's going to be okay? And it's, it's a difficult moment for that.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I have been thinking about this too, because I think we all are, and let me just say that this is not just a, you know, we're not, we're not making a grand political statement here, although we, we certainly could. This is, uh, it is a moment of some global turmoil. Whether you think this global turmoil is exactly what the universe needed or not it is still... um, there's a lot.

Jess Lahey

It's just a lot, and it's all the time, and it's like, oh, did you hear this? Did you hear this? And I feel like I'm supposed to be paying attention, and then if I pay attention too much, I feel like my head is it so, yeah, it's just a lot.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So what I want to say is, I think we have to get used to it, and I think it can be done. And I take some encouragement from all the writers who wrote their way through World Wars, who wrote their way through, you know, enormous personal trauma, who have written their way through, you know, enormous political turmoil, in their own countries, both as you know people who are actually writing about what was going on, but also as people who were not, I happen to be a real stan of the World War II books about, not like the drama of the war, but then the home that keep the home fires as they as they would say, stuff like The Diary of a Provincial Lady in Wartime and Angela Thirkell. And it's just, this is what was going on. There's some stuff... I can't think of all of it, but anyway. I love that reminder that life went on, and I think we have had a pretty calm few decades, and that that's been very lucky, but it's actually not the norm. So we gotta get used to this kids.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, I actually, I just flew home from a trip, and Tim was watching on the plane. Tim was watching a film with Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. You may know Wilfred Owen as the person who wrote, you know, Dulce et Decorum Est, the whole thing, these are the world war two poets and a world war one poet, sorry, and yeah, they had a lot going on and they were writing poetry. Yeah.

Jennie Nash

Well, I knew from the moment that Sarina posed this question that I was going to be the voice of opposition here today, because I am seeing this and feeling this great surge of creative energy and people wanting to write, wanting to create, wanting to raise their voice, whether it is in opposition or as an act of rebellion or as an active escape, or just as a thing that they've always wanted to do so they're finally going to do it. It feels similar-ish to me as the pandemic did, in that way. And you know what I was thinking about Sarina, is that you are in the both enviable and also not enviable position of having done this a really long time and and you you know how it goes, and you not that it's wrote by any means, writing a book is never wrote. But the the creative process is not new to you, I guess, and I have encounters with a lot of writers through the book coaches I train who are just stepping up into this and just raising their voice and just embracing that. This is a thing that they could do. And this is a, you know, like I just, I've seen people, you know, a lot of dystopian fiction, obviously wanting to be written, climate justice, social justice, you know, books from people who previously marginalized, even like satire about the crazy stuff going on in education, you know, in all genres, all realms, I just feel the people doubling down. And so I wonder if it's, if it's, you know, the writer friends that you talk to are largely in that same boat as you very accomplished and in it. And I don't know it's my conjecture, because I just, I'm really feeling the opposite.

Jess Lahey

Actually, can I? Can I? Can I verify that through something else? So KJ and I have both mentored with The OpEd Project. It's about raising all voices to publish op eds in newspapers, not just, you know, the people that we're used to hearing from. And they put out an email for their mentors, because they said, This moment is generating so much interest in writing op eds, so that's a good thing too.

Jennie Nash

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, I don't know i i also have to say that I personally have made a choice that is inspired by Oliver Burkeman, which is I'm not paying attention, and I know it's a luxury to not pay attention to the news, and I know that that it's a privilege and maybe not always a good thing, but I just made a personal decision that can't right now, or you don't want to, for what it's worth, so I feel a little ashamed about that, to be honest... I feel a lot of times that I'm not doing enough when I catch a glimpse of what's happening or what's going on, or my husband is a voracious consumer of the news, so I it's not like I'm not getting news. I just get it filtered through him and through my children, for sure, and and I would also like to just give a shout out to this podcast, because sometimes through this podcast, I listen to Jess and Sarina, On a podcast you recorded a couple weeks ago about pirate the pirate site episode, and learned so much, and it was so great, you know, so I don't know. I have to say that too, that maybe my stance is coming from a place of not being fully... pulling a little over my own eyes, I guess.

KJ Dell'Antonia

No, I think it's great that you are finding something that you're seeing like a surge of of positive energy. I mean, part of me, as I'm listening to you guys, wants to go well, but you know, nothing I'm I'm doing is a voice of protester opposition, but that's okay. We don't have to be voices of protester opposition. And we have to remember that most of the people in our country do not oppose this. So it's a little bit of a weird I mean, it's it's a weird moment that one's that one's tough, but it's also true. It's not, it's just change. It's just, it's just turmoil. But I love your point that there's, um, there's excitement and energy in turmoil. Maybe this is also a question of sort of where you are in your life, like, where, whether, the turmoil is exciting or stressful, or, I don't even know where I was going with that... okay.

Jennie Nash

Well, but I, I think there's, I've been thinking just a lot about AI and where it's going and what's going to happen. And some days I worry, and some days I fret, and some days, you know, I don't, I don't think about it or whatever, but, but I, the thing I keep coming back to is you can't keep a creator down. You know, the creators want to create. And it's the the process of that, the the creative process, whether somebody doesn't matter what they're writing and and Sarina, that speaks to where, where you are. You know, they could be writing a meet cute, or a first kiss, or what have you, but the fact that they want to be a creator in a world that's on fire is, to me, the hope... the sign, the sign of hope. You know, I actually I'm about to take a trip to Amsterdam, where I've never been, and of course, we're going to go to the Anne Frank House, and I may reengage myself with that story, and thought about it and looked at it, and it's like just the the urge to create, the urge to put it down, the urge to do the thing. And maybe that was an act of protest as well. But, you know, not, not a meet cute, but I just, I just, I believe in the power of the creator and and of that. And Sarina, you're so good at it, at that, at that process, and putting yourself in that process, and being in that process, and it makes me sad that you're questioning it in a way.

Sarina Bowen

Well, you know, I don't know. I actually kind of disagree that, that we can look away right now, because there's a lot at stake for for the for the world that writers operate inside and AI is really important, because there's a lot of super important litigation going down right now about what what is legal in terms of using our work to create AI and to not pay us for it. But also, there are other writers who are being silenced and having their student visas, you know, rejected and and it's only work of other people that is pushing back on this. So it's in some ways, I I can't really say, Oh, it's okay for me to look away right now and go back to this scene, because there are moments that matter more than others, but but in order to not give up my entire job at this moment, because it's so distractingly difficult, what I find I've had to do is figure out which sources really matter and which parts of my day are productively informational, and which parts are just anxiety producing. So by by luck, I went on this long vacation, long for me is like nine days, but we'd been planning it forever because one of my kids is overseas, and we were going there at his exact moment of having a break. So I had a vacation in a way that I haven't in a really long time. And I found that being off cycle from the news really affected my the way that I took it in. And it improved my mental health, even though I was ultimately about as well informed as if I hadn't left but I didn't have any time in the day to, like, scroll through the hysteria on threads. I could only take in the news from a few, like, you know, real sources and and that was really informational to me, like I didn't.. I had not processed the fact that how I take in the necessary information affected whether or not it merely informed me or also made me feel like everything was lost. So that that was pretty important, but also just the fact that that I've also been trying to be out in the world more and be where people are, instead of, instead of looking at my computer screen. And it's not like a work smarter, not harder thing, but like, choose your moments. You know, I believe that we still need to be engaged at this moment and to ask ourselves, what is possible for us to do. But that doesn't mean we have to scroll through all the stress online all day long in order to get there. And to me, that's that's what's made the difference.

Jess Lahey

We've had a rule in our house for a little while now that I'm not allowed to bring up any newsy things or talk about any newsy things after a certain point in the evening, because it messes with Tim's sleep. He would wake up, you know, churning about and thinking about whatever it was that I talked about from the news most recently. So any of those outrage moments are just not allowed in our house in the evening. And I think that's a really healthy barrier to put up and realize that there are points in my day when I can handle it and points in my day when I can't.

KJ Dell'Antonia

It's also possible that the thing that I could most usefully do to change things that I think should be changed is to give money to other people who are working to change them. Because, you know, we can't all... shouting on social media?, not, not useful, right? I'm not gonna run for office, personally. I do have a family member who does that sort of thing, and I love that, but I'm probably not going to, I guess, check in with me in 10 years. I'm, you know, there's only so much I when I think about, okay, what could I possibly do? Most of it is I can give money to people who are doing things that I want done, and the only way I have money to give to people who want things, who are doing things that I want to get done, is to do my job, which is, is to to write books. So there's that.

Jess Lahey

I would like to highlight, however, that Tim and I have both been periodically calling our representatives and having some really, you know, it's obviously not the representative themselves or our senator that we're talking to. We're talking to, you know, someone in their office, some college kid in their office, but the conversations have been fascinating. I've learned a lot just through those conversations. And they don't just sort of take your message and then hang up. They're willing to have a conversation. And it's been, it's been really fascinating. So calling your representatives is a really worthy thing to do.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, many decades ago, I was that person, and therefore I'm a little cynical about it.

Jess Lahey

Well, I do want to give a shout out right now, I've been watching one of my former students who ran for Mitt Romney's Senate seat in Utah as a Democrat, which is an impossible task, but she did really, really well, and she just got to open for Bernie and AOC at the at a thing in in in Utah. And so watching her, or watching people who are, you know, really getting engaged, and by a lot of them are younger people. That's and, you know, my thing is younger people. And so it circles back around to the more supporting I'm doing of people who are younger and people who are energized and excited about getting in there and writing the op eds and speaking and running for office, that has been another place of reprieve for me.

Jennie Nash

So I would love to to ask Sarina about... No no, because something she said, you know, when she said, I I disagree, it just it got me thinking, because I wanted to defend myself, and I don't know, and say, Well, no, I'm not I'm not that terrible. I'm not whatever. But I been listening to you talk, I was realizing that I I really have prioritized my own mental well being over anything else, and in terms of checking out of the things, and I've heard you talk about this before, on on a podcast, but my default response, like on the piece you talked about, about writers and being under attack and what's going on, that's just one tiny thing that's going on in the world of chaos. But that tiny thing I do tell myself I can't do anything. I'm just one person, you know, what? What can I really do? And therefore, then I don't do anything. So I do the bare minimum. I do the bare minimum, you know, like I give money to Authors Guild, right? You know, but it, I'm just going to put myself out there as the, the avatar of the person who says that and doesn't do anything and and then, to be perfectly honest, feels is a little smug when you're like, I'm dying and I'm wrecked and I'm whatever, because you're informed and you're actually doing things, and I'm like... oh, you should be like me and and not do, and then I feel bad about myself. So I just want to put that back as a conversation piece, because I know you have thoughts about that, that one person can't do anything.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, so I often feel like there's a lot of problems I would like to solve and and if I tried to take on all of them, then I would be paralyzed, like there would be nothing I can do. And also, there are moments when we have to really pull back and and put our oxygen mask on before assisting others like that is a totally legitimate thing to do. And when I had this experience of going on vacation, and then it was such a big reset for me, I thought, Oh, you dummy, like, you know, that's like a thing I need to keep relearning is that, oh wait no, sometimes we really do have to drop out for for a little bit of time, because we will be more energized afterwards, but, but I bet that that one thing that you're supposed to do will announce itself to you fairly soon. You know what I mean? Like it just because you're having this moment of pulling back and needing to do that doesn't mean that that's a permanent position for you. Like, I don't, I don't believe that, like, because, because I know you care. So...

Jennie Nash

Yeah, yeah. But it's, it's just interesting the different, the different reactions and responses. And I often find myself saying something to my husband, which I'm not proud to share. But the thing that I say is, where is our leader?, who's stepping up?, whatever the topic is, or the area or the realm is like, who's who's going to save us? I I'm looking for somebody else to be the solution.

Sarina Bowen

Well, but, but that that's important though, because part of that is just recognizing that, that without a power structure, who knows what to do? Like, I've been lucky in that, like, I've spent a lot of time on conference calls with The Authors Guild, and I've found that I respect those people so much that you know, when the CEO of The Authors Guild, Mary Rasenberger, has an idea, you know that it's always worth hearing out and not everything you know gets done or becomes a priority of of the but, but I know who to listen to, and that wasn't always true, you know. So I've also subscribed to the emails from Authors Against Book Bans. That's another organization that has a lot of energy right now, and they're doing a fantastic job of paying attention. So, you know, it's, it's okay to pick one little realm and, and that's lately been my solution. Because, yeah, we're not we, we need leaders and, and the reason we're all we're so frustrated is because the lack of true leadership, the lack of leaders who can say, I made a mistake. I don't know everything. I don't have all the answers. Like, that's, you know, that's the kind of people we need in the world, and they're pretty thin on the ground right now. So, yeah, I totally hear what you're saying.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So, I mean, why do we have to say that's useful? I mean, how are we... We're all still working. I mean, yeah, you know, you can listen to Jenny and I trying to write our book every week. And I happen to know that, you know, Sarina is chowing is, you know, nibbling away at new drafts, as is Jess. So we're doing it. We're just distracted.

Sarina Bowen

Well, I always say that everything about writing, you have to learn more than once, like you learned it on a project, and you figure something out and you're like, Oh, right. And I think this is another one of those moments when how to reset yourself, how to. To you know how to find that moment of peace is, this is maybe the the lesson of the week, like, even if you don't, even if you don't write the best chapter of your life between now and the middle of of May, you know you can turn your attention to paying attention to your inner voice and how, how am I feeling right now? And how could I feel better? Like, do I need to go meet a friend in a coffee shop to work? Because that has been a real boon to me lately. Just being changed my scenery change the hours when I look at my inbox, that's another thing that I've done. Right now, I asked my assistant to please watch this one inbox, because I can't watch it myself right now. It's too much of people pulling on my arm. So just, you know, to turn some of the small levers that we have in our lives with regard to how writing fits into your life and see what's working. Like, it's okay to, like, break your strategy a little bit to see, you know, if you can shake up the problem.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I've been trying really hard to answer the voice in my head that says... I just can't do this right now with, well, okay, maybe, maybe you could, like, what if we just sat here for another 10 minutes? Like, what if you just, okay... I hear you like, to sort of like, be the other side for myself, like... hey I hear you, that sounds really rough, but what if we just did this anyway? Just, just tried. And you know, it's, it moves, it moves.

Jess Lahey

Along those same lines. What's been saving me is, as you all know, anyone who's listening to this for a while knows I love, love, love the research process, and I have a very big stack of books to get through, that is research, formative, sort of base level research, foundational research for this thing I want to write and and hearing other people's ideas, and hearing how other people put ideas together, and that just fuels me. And then on the fiction side, I've been and I hadn't even realized I've been doing this until we started talking about this topic. I have been watching a lot of movies I love about the act of creation. I re watched one of my favorites, “Possession” with Jennifer Ehle, and it's just one of my favorite films about… it's based on the the A.S. Byatt novel, Possession, and it's about poets. And then I was watching a movie about a novelist, and I was just re-listening to the new Bob Dylan movie a complete unknown, and hearing about other people's creative process fuels things in me. And I even just listening to the Bob Dylan movie while I was watering the garden, I was like, Oh, I could go, I can't write music, but, but I can still write these other things. Wait, hold on, I'm a writer. And then you start realizing, oh, that creative process is accessible to me too. And you know, whether it's the creative process that changes the world, or the creative process that gives you an outlet. Selfishly, either way, I think it's, it's important, and so I love digging back into and I've talked about, you know, re listening to Amwriting sometimes when, when I need that boost.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Isn't it funny that if Stephen King says, well, I spent, you know, 2016 not doing something, but, but like writing this new book. We're all like, yay, you do that, we love you for that, and that for all of us, we're just like, oh no, you should be... I mean, we gotta, we should do what we do.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, I guess I always think about, there was a moment when I first I saw him, I was so lucky to get to see Hamilton on Broadway, and I remember just that line about writing like you're why does he write like he's running out of time, that idea that like the stuff just is coming pouring out of you, and you've got to put it somewhere before it's over. You know, I love that feeling of desperation, and I get that from listening to other people's creations and other people's research and other people's creative acts. It's, it's good.

Jennie Nash

That's very cool. That is very cool. I I don't know, I guess I'm really good at, or lately have been really good at, at turning off, turning off the inputs, just because I have to too many input puts that will just do me in. And so for me, it's catching myself, catching myself floating over to social media, or catching myself clicking into something that I don't really want to read like you're saying, Sarina, at this this time of day, you know, I sit down to lunch and I don't, I don't want to read that thing. So setting setting aside time to engage with that is like the, the only way that I'm able to do it. And I'll try to choose to read something longer, a longer form thing, or or listen to a podcast. Rather than sound bites or snippets of things. So I'm trying to be self aware about not getting pulled down into the sound bite things. That's, That's what I mean by disengaging is, you know, not going on threads at all. I'm not going on... I sort of can't even look at Facebook or even Instagram. It's just all too, too much, and especially, especially Instagram, where, you know, you'll have all these calls to action, and then... bathing suits. I mean, maybe that's just me, right?

KJ Dell'Antonia

No, you're right. You're right. It's very...

Jennie Nash

Jarring. you know...

KJ Dell'Antonia

You can't control which bits of it like, at least, if you're looking at The Times, you're you know... or The Wall Street Journal, you're getting a section. Instagram is like, this terrible thing just happened here by this Jenny K quitter...

Jennie Nash

It's very jarring. So I don't wish to be there, and I do have to give a shout out to Substack. How great is it to be able to read things without all the noise and distraction from the people that you choose, who are smart and saying smart things. That's that's the thing that I choose, that I really like and kind of toward what you said Jess, happened to be reading the memoir from Billie Jean King called All In.

Jess Lahey

It's so good!

Jennie Nash

And and it's, I mean, talk about just a person who lived her values and made massive change, and understood how change is made, and is paying it forward in her life, and it is so inspiring. And it's, it's not quite, it's not quite the creative act, but it, I guess it's creation of change, but I find it hopeful and inspiring, and I think that's where I come up with the the question of, who's gonna who's gonna save us? Like, Where's, where's our person to lead? Like, like she was at the time when women's... not just athletics, but equality. She did so much for women's equality, and still is, you know, so it makes me hopeful that such people will be rising up and and I will be able to identify and support them.

Jess Lahey

I just finished listening to and reading on the page. I did it both ways. Permission by Elissa Altman about having the courage, it's a memoir, and the courage to create. And she it, she also articulated for me, just how wonderful it is to... I don't know, even if it's not out for mass publication, sometimes writing things down that are the stuff you've gone through and the way you're feeling that's just worth it in and of itself. But anyway, that was a lovely book I highly recommend, Permission by Elissa Altman.

KJ Dell'Antonia

But also I just want to say, and this is sort of suddenly hopped into my head. So I'm working on a book, surprise! Um, I'm trying to do something bigger and different that says a lot of things, and I have thoughts about it and and, um, I actually think I need to shut down input... for... I'm not gonna, I can't do this if, if there's a lot of stuff pouring into me, all the time, and I, I think that's, I think that's fair. I think sometimes, I mean, I was thinking about the person who wrote Permission, and I was thinking, You know what I'll bet she didn't read a lot of while she was writing that? People shouting at her that, that, you know, the better thing for her to do would be to churn butter in a nap dress. I think it probably It took some time to do that. And these poets that we're talking about, they're not writing a poem. Oh, you know, line by line. In between reading thread's posts, they're they're putting their time and energy into their work, and this is kind of what we've been saying all along, like, like, moderate it, choose your things, pick pick your moments. And maybe, you know, some time of quiet to hear what you think about what's going on, as opposed to what everyone else thinks about what's going on, and to let that, to give yourself permission for that to be whatever it is. Maybe it's not what we think, you know? Maybe, maybe its something different. That's okay. So I, I want to shout for, for that, for, okay, do, turn it off, work on a thing.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, I feel like if, um, Jenny's point about taking your news from social media is totally different than taking your news from the front page of your favorite newspaper. And I guess to KJ's point that if we turn off the voices that are serving us the least well at this moment, what we might find is that there are more hours in the day to both get our work done and then have a minute to say, what else could I... what else could I do? Is that donating my time somewhere or just getting my own house in order? You know, I find I have more time to do things that matter when I am spending less time in the loud places that aren't serving me personally.

Jess Lahey

Agreed.

Jennie Nash

So well said.

Jess Lahey

I think we should end it there, mainly because we're we've run long, but, I'm really grateful for the four of you, I was going to my last point was going to be that my saving grace has been realizing recently that that it's the people in my life that I want to invest in. I had a realization someone told me some news of via someone else, and I didn't realize how disconnected I had become from the people that are real in my life, and how much more attention I was paying to people I don't know anything, people who I don't know that I have a parasocial relationship with. And so I'm my I have sort of a mid year goal, which is to make sure that the people who are actually in life real important to me, are most important to me. And so I've pulled back from those parasocial relationships and gone toward the real relationships, and I'm grateful so much for the three of you. I feel like you all rescue me in moments of doubt. So thank you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yay! People are a good use of time, as our friend, Laura Vanderkam says. So Jess shouted out the book Permission. I think if anybody else has a useful book for this moment, I want to offer up, as we have before, Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It is a series of four weeks, worth of basically three page long thoughts on how to deal with our own inevitably limited lives and personal resources. And I love it. Does anybody else have anything that would maybe serve people in this moment?

Jess Lahey

Sarina. Sarina, nothing to serve Jenny. Jenny has the Billie Jean King. I mean, the Billie Jean King...that stuff is fantastic. Yeah, she's amazing.

Jennie Nash

She's amazing.

Jess Lahey

All right. Well, thank you so so much everyone for listening to the podcast. We're great. So grateful for you, because you're why we get to keep doing this. And this is fun, and we love lowering our… sorry flattening the curve for a learning curve for other writers. So until next week, everyone, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. The hashtag AmWriting podcast is produced by Andrew Perilla. Our intro music, aptly titled “Unemployed Monday,” was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

Joan Fernandez is a former senior marketing executive and general partner of the financial powerhouse Edward Jones. In 2018, she retired from a 30+ year career to be a full-time writer. Since leaving the corporate world, she’s become a member of the Historical Novel Society, the Author’s Guild, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA). In April 2020, she founded a Historical Fiction affinity group within WFWA that grew from a handful of people to nearly two hundred authors. Her debut novel, Saving Vincent: A Novel of Jo van Gogh, has just come out — and I had the great privilege of coaching Joan at two points in her long process of writing this book so I had a front row seat to the deep work she did to bring this story to life.

Writing about a real person has some particular challenges, and we get into that here.

I’m so excited to share our conversation today.Links from the Pod:

Historical Novel Society

the Authors Guild

Women’s Fiction Writers Association (WFWA)

Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware

Find Joan at www.joanfernandezauthor.com, or on IG at @joanfernandezauthor

Writers and readers! KJ, here. If you love #AmWriting—and I know you do—and especially if you love the regular segment at the end of most episodes where we talk about what we've been reading, you will also love my weekly #AmReading— find it at kjdellantonia.com or kjda.substack.com or by clicking on my name on Substack, if you do that kind of thing. Your #tbr won’t be sorry but also:

DID YOU KNOW SARINA BOWEN’s LATEST BOOK IS OUT NEXT WEEK? That means if you preorder NOW—next week you gets to do a happy dance!

Rowan Gallagher is a devoted single mother and a talented architect with a high-profile commission restoring an historic mansion for the most powerful family in Maine. But inside, she’s a mess. She knows that stalking her ex’s avatar all over Portland on her phone isn’t the healthiest way to heal from their breakup. But she’s out of ice cream and she’s sick of romcoms.

Watching his every move is both fascinating and infuriating. He’s dining out while she’s wallowing on the couch. The last straw comes when he parks in their favorite spot on the waterfront. In a weak moment, she leashes the dog and sets off to see who else is in his car.

Instead of catching her ex in a kiss, Rowan becomes the first witness to his murder—and the primary suspect.

Digital books at: Amazon | Nook | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play | Audible Physical books at: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indigo | More paperback links here!

Jess here with Sarina Bowen to help simplify and demystify author contracts. Let’s start off with a wonderful resource called The Authors Guild. They have sample contracts on their website

The Authors Guild Sample Contract

Sarina made a lovely outline to prepare for the episode (because of course she did) so I’m dropping that here.

* You’re not “selling” your book. You’re licensing it.

* Grant of rights

* Term length

* Which territories

* Which formats

* Territories

* North American

* World English

* World

* Formats and sub rights

* Print and digital and audio

* Sub rights like “first serial”

* Translation MAYBE

* Time limits

* X years

* The life of the copyright

* Financial remuneration: advances and royalty rates. WHEN is it paid? What percentages?

* Advance and payment schedule

* On signing

* On acceptance of the work (after an edit)

* On publication

* A year after publication

* Manuscript delivery and acceptance. What happens if people are unhappy.

* Other clauses

* Copyright stipulation

* The Option Clause

* The Next Published Work Clause

* Cover approval vs consideration or collaboration

* Narrator approval vs consideration

* Indemnification

* What are reserves against returns?

* Reversion terms: bankruptcy, failure to publish, failure to pay, and out of print

* Red flags:

* Film rights, even if they say “non exclusive”

* Derivative works

* Lack of reversion language

When a former NYT journo who now writes novels (that would be me, hi) gets together with a current NYT journo now writing novels, they—we!—cannot stop talking about the challenges, advantages, schedules, pros and cons of book leave and what it is about fiction that lights some journalists up, and turns some off. It’s the good, the bad and the overcome-able, and a class in how people who know they can get the work done also flail, and yet still get the work done.

Mentioned on the pod:

Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff

Twice in a Full Moon, Christina Lauren

#AmReading

Liz: Naked in the Promised Land, Lillian Faderman

KJ: Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik

Follow Liz on Instagram: @lizzyaharris

Hi #AmWriting listeners, Jennie here! Today, I'm talking to Jane Friedman, who is one of the most trusted voices in the world of publishing.She has advised and served organizations such as Writers Digest, The Chicago Manual of Style, The Editorial Freelancers Association, the Alliance of Independent Authors, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She writes two must-read newsletters for industry professionals. One is her personal newsletter, and the other is The Bottom Line (previously called The Hot Sheet), where she provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals. The reason I wanted to speak with Jane on the podcast today is that she has just released an updated version of her book, The Business of Being a Writer, which digs into the nuts and bolts of the writing life, including the work of getting published and choosing how to do that, and the work of making money. It is one of those must-read books for writers who are serious about making a mark.

Jane offers so much information, some tough love, and also a reason for hope, and I'm so excited I’m talking to Jane about her own writing process, and her advice for writers.

Links from the Pod

Jane’s Trademark situation via Writer’s Digest

Jane’s The Bottom Line Newsletter

The Author’s Guild (for AI info)

Simon Willison’s Things We Learned About LLMs in 2024 (via Substack)

Make Art Make Money, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens

How to Reform Capitalism, Alain de Botton

The Gift, Lewis Hyde

Dana Gioia

Alan Watt’s Out of Your Mind

Find Jane via her website: www.janefriendman.com, or on Instagram at @janefriedman

Hey listeners: This week, everyone gets a taste of what paid supporters will get more regularly—a special Booklab: First Pages episode. Each month (and sometimes more often), we’ll choose two “first pages” to review. A first page, for our purposes, is the first 350 words of your book—fiction, non-fiction or memoir. We will read the page aloud on the podcast and discuss with a single thought in mind: Would we keep reading?

First pages are incredibly important in every genre. If you can’t grab a reader on that first page, you might lose your chance of grabbing them at all. On the podcast, we’ll read the page aloud and then each cast our “vote”—would we keep going? Then—and this is the most important bit— we’ll discuss why or why not. Were we dying to know what would happen next, or turned off by an info dump? Ready to learn what you have to teach us or ready to see what’s on YouTube? Totally on board with a character or uncertain why we were there in the first place?

In this episode, we discuss a high-action page of sci-fi/fantasy and then a memoir, and in both—even though we KNOW we told the writers to give us only 350 words… we want more. Not more words—more from THESE words. And we have ideas for how to make that happen.

The opportunity to have your first page reviewed is available to our Sticker and Sparkly Star Sticker supporters only. (That’s anyone with a monthly or annual subscription via Substack). Always, there’s one central question: Would we turn the page? We tell you why or why not, and help these generous, brave writers to make their first pages irresistible—and their examples will help you make your first page sing.

This episode is for everyone! But Booklabs (like the one we released in December, discussing a novel with another great first line: Every expensive hotel has its own scent and a memoir of parenting an adult child with addiction) are usually for paid subscribers only. Find the rest HERE.

So if you haven’t—yet—decided to support the podcast we know you love, now’s the perfect time. BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE.

I want you to put my first page to the test… but not until I listen to all the others!

Not only do paid supporters get Booklab episodes and the ability to submit first pages for consideration for a future episode of Booklabs, they also get monthly AMA’s with your hosts (This month is with KJ, coming April 25th). And…. formal announcement coming, but Jennie and I (this is KJ) realized last month that we’ve both finished a Blueprint and are starting to draft our manuscripts. We’re doing a (mostly) weekly series we call Writing the Books (WTB for short), and the first very very personal episode is coming your way April 15. Those will be paywalled, so that we can share everything.

Want to submit a first page? Paid subscribers, click HERE for details.

Social media is all aflutter over an article by Alex Reisner in The Atlantic: The Unbelievable Scale of A.I.’s Pirated Books Problem. In this episode, Jess and Sarina cover the news and its ramifications for authors.

You won’t want to miss this discussion about the lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI. We discuss problems and remedies, and the formation of legal markets for A.I. training. Like the work by HarperCollins on a paid licensing deal.

We also discuss the root cause: ebook piracy, and author reactions. Including this heartfelt one from author Julia Sykes.

Sarina has also written more about piracy, and how to move toward a world where it’s not as prevalent.

Join us for all the latest news!

Michael Dante DiMartino graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Film and Animation. His directing credits include the primetime animated series King of the Hill, Family Guy, and Mission Hill. DiMartino is the co-creator of the award-winning animated Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel, The Legend of Korra. From 2002 to 2014, he served as executive producer and story editor for both series. He continued Korra’s story as the writer of the graphic novels Turf Wars and Ruins of the Empire. His other projects include authoring the fantasy novels Rebel Genius and Warrior Genius as well as creating and writing the Audible Original fiction podcast, Sundown: A Time Capsule Society Mystery. His latest novel is the YA coming-of-age story, Both Here And Gone.

Currently, DiMartino serves as the co-Chief Creative Officer of Avatar Studios, developing new content for the Avatar-verse.You can find out more about Michael by visiting his website www.michaeldantedimartino.com, on Facebook /MichaelDanteDiMartino, or on Instagram @mike_dante_d