One of the writing skills I am asked about the most is, “How do I get emotion on the page?” People ask this no matter what genre they are writing, because no one wants to produce a manuscript that is flat and unengaging. Emotion is the key, but figuring out how to inspire your reader to feel something is a tricky thing to learn and an even trickier thing to master.

In her debut novel, Slanting Towards the Sea (Simon & Schuster, July 2025), Lidija Hilje has mastered it. The story feels so raw and so real—and English is not even Lidija’s first language! It’s a remarkable achievement.

I’m excited to speak with Lidija about her path to publication and how she figured out how to get the emotion of her characters onto the page.

Links from the Pod:

Article from Jane Friedman

Guide on Literary Fiction from Lidija

Lidija’s website: www.lidijahilje.com

Author Accelerator book coaches Barbara Boyd and Nita Collins

Hey everyone, it's Jenny Nash. This episode happens to feature an Author Accelerator book coach. Author Accelerator is the company I founded more than 10 years ago to lead the emerging book coaching industry. If you've been curious about what it takes to become a successful book coach, which is to say, someone who makes money, meaning, and joy out of serving writers, I've just created a bunch of great content to help you learn more. You can access it all by going to bookcoaches.com/waitlist. We'll be enrolling a new cohort of students in our certification program in October, so now's a perfect time to learn more and start making plans for a whole new career.

Transcript below!

EPISODE 456 - TRANSCRIPT

Jennie Nash

Hey everyone, it's Jennie Nash. This episode happens to feature an Author Accelerator book coach. Author Accelerator is the company I founded more than 10 years ago to lead the emerging book coaching industry. If you've been curious about what it takes to become a successful book coach—which is to say, someone who makes money, meaning, and joy out of serving writers—I've just created a bunch of great content to help you learn more. You can access it all by going to bookcoaches.com/waitlist. That's bookcoaches.com/waitlist. We'll be enrolling a new cohort of students in our certification program in October, so now’s a perfect time to learn more and start making plans for a whole new career.

Multiple Speakers:

Is it recording? Now it's recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Alright, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.

Jennie Nash

Hey writers, I'm Jennie Nash, and this is the Hashtag AmWriting podcast, the place where we talk about writing all the things; short things, long things, fiction, nonfiction, pitches, and proposals. Today I'm talking with Lidija Hilje, the author of the novel Slanting Towards the Sea. And what we're talking about is how to capture emotion on the page—the most elusive thing in the entire writing universe. Lidija lives in Croatia. She's a former lawyer who I know because she became a book coach through Author Accelerator. This is her first novel, and it's something else. As a longtime book coach, it’s really hard for me to read for pleasure anymore, because it's so hard not to see the writer at work and the seams of the creation. But Slanting Towards the Sea—I saw none of that. I fell wholly into the story and became lost in it; the olive trees and the sea, the pain of these people and this love triangle, and also just the love that they had for life and each other. It's almost unbearably raw—the way life itself can feel sometimes. And yet, since I know Lidija and her story to becoming a writer, I also know how much work it took to create this feeling and emotion. I'm so excited to speak with Lidija today, and so excited for people to hear about her and her story. So welcome, Lidija. Thanks for coming onto the podcast.

Lidija Hilje

Thank you so much for having me and for this incredible introduction. I'm so honored.

Jennie Nash

Well, before we get started, I want to read the jacket copy for Slanting Towards the Sea, so that our listeners can hear the bones of the story that you wrote. Is that okay if I read it for our listeners?

Lidija Hilje

Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Jennie Nash

Okay.

Ivona divorced the love of her life, Vlaho, a decade ago. They met as students at the turn of the millennium, when newly democratic Croatia was alive with hope and promise. But the challenges of living in a burgeoning country extinguished Ivona’s dreams one after another—and a devastating secret forced her to set him free. Now Vlaho is remarried and a proud father of two, while Ivona’s life has taken a downward turn. In her thirties, she has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing father. Bewildered by life’s disappointments, she finds solace in reconnecting with Vlaho and is welcomed into his family by his spirited wife, Marina. But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the carefully cultivated dynamic between the three is disrupted, forcing a reckoning for all involved. Set against the mesmerizing Croatian coastline, Slanting Towards the Sea is a cinematic, emotionally searing debut about the fragile nature of potential and the transcendence of love.

That’s it! What a—what a—what a summary, right? So I want to start by talking about the genre of this book, Lidija. As a book coach, you specialize in helping people write literary fiction. And you're extremely articulate about defining exactly what it is. And I'd like to just start there, by talking about how you see this novel, where it's positioned and, um, and your sense of it in, as a—in the genre, um, categories, if you will. Um, and I'll share with our listeners before you answer that English is not your first language—which is something we're going to talk about from a writing perspective, but just from a listening perspective, to give people some context for that. So let's talk about—let's talk about genre.

Lidija Hilje

Yeah, well, genre is one of my favorite topics as a book coach, and so naturally it is something I love talking about. So the first book I ever wrote, which is now safely shelved in a drawer at the bottom of a drawer, was women's fiction. And the reason why it was women's fiction was that because I was learning how to write, I was learning how to weave a story together. And in doing so, I was trying to find some commonalities in stories—like how stories work, how you develop them, how you develop a character arc, how you wrap it up towards the end. And—but my intention always was to write literary. I was just not very good at doing it. And so I kind of—like all the feedback that I got throughout my—from developmental editors—it was like geared towards kind of channeling the book towards women's fiction. And this is something that really still strikes me as a book coach: how different it is to coach literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction, which is more formulaic. So basically, that first book is safely shelved. And when I started writing this book, I was working really hard at trying to make it not be formulaic. And actually, one of the book coaches from our community helped me. I had a conversation with Barbara Boyd where I outlined my story for her, and she said there was this moment where I kind of did something in my outline…what could basically be called a cop-out—so that… I killed a character, basically, so that the…you know, that the book would close neatly, right? And so she called me out on it and said—because I talked to her specifically because she coaches literary fiction but didn't like or coach women's fiction—and I thought that perspective was something I needed. And so she said, "Why are you killing that character?” And that was the wake-up moment for me, because that was the moment when I realized that in doing so, that was the typical moment where a writer kind of goes toward the genre. And where the interesting thing in the literary fiction genre lies is exploring, you know, what happens when you don't kill the character—when you don't take the easy way out. And so, genre-wise, what I, you know—I run a book club for writers, and we read a lot of literary fiction. And so, I was constantly trying to figure out, like, what is it about these books that, you know, define genre? And in studying these books, there are several things, and I could talk about this, I guess, for centuries, but I'll try to...

Jennie Nash

I—I love it. Let's do it.

Lidija Hilje

So basically, in literary fiction, there are many things that genre fiction also has. There are themes, there are character arcs—you know, a character might grow, though not necessarily. But basically, it's much less clear than in genre fiction. In genre fiction, for instance, you have—especially in women's fiction—you will have a woman who is shy and then she becomes confident toward the end. Or you have a horrible, you know, self-obsessed character who learns their lesson toward the end of the book. It's really clear-cut. The reader can latch on to what the problem is without thinking too much about it. And literary fiction does the opposite. It fans out a little bit. It touches on many different things that kind of seem unrelated, but they are related. And this is a problem in writing it, as well as coaching it, because as a coach or as a writer, you have to be aware of all these things. You have to beware of how these things tie together so that you have the idea of this through line that goes throughout the story, whereas the reader might not be catching on as fast but does have the confidence that you, as the writer, are going to get them there, if that makes sense.

Jennie Nash

Oh, it makes so much sense. So when you were working on—I actually remember reading some opening, maybe the opening chapters of the novel that has been shelved. When I read those pages, they struck me as if they had that feeling of literary fiction. Was that your intention with that novel as well?

Lidija Hilje

Yes, it was. It was just that I was unable to... I came to writing late. I mean, I was always a writer in the sense that I was always writing something, but I came to writing fiction and specifically books very late. It was 2017 when I started writing that book in Croatian. And the first, you know, contact with any craft or writing happened in 2019 when I finished the draft and I translated that book into English, and I started looking for ways of pub... you know, publishing that book and realized that the first draft is not the last draft. Like that was the—like it was—sometimes it's so funny to think like how recently I didn't know anything about publishing or writing at all. So basically, I did want that book to be literary fiction. I always wanted to do, you know, to write the type of fiction that I wrote in Slanting [Slanting Towards the Sea], and obviously I hope to, you know, hone my craft in the future, but it wasn't—it wasn’t on that level. And the first developmental editor that I worked with in 2019, she was giving me all the logical advice that you can give someone, which is... hone the character arc you are telling here, show, you know, all those things that we tell our clients when we work with them as book coaches. But what it did is it completely stripped the literary part from it, and it made me write in scene, which is not how literary fiction is written. You know, like, one of the differences between commercial fiction and literary fiction is that you don't necessarily write in scenes. You write in summaries, and you write in postcards, which is the type of a scene that goes deeper instead of forward, if that makes sense. So you're not kind of—nothing changes for the protagonist, the protagonist doesn't realize anything, they don't decide on a new course of action, nothing new happens, but the reader's understanding of the character happens. And this is also true when you're looking at the character arc on the, you know, scope of the whole novel. Like in literary fiction, it will often be that, you know, that the character doesn't change much in terms of, like what I said before—she was shy and she stopped being shy, right? It will just be that the reader's understanding of the character deepens. And so my first book was an attempt at literary fiction, but it was not an execution. You know, the execution didn't really match that, and I feel like the advice that I got from my early developmental editor was just kind of trying to put me in the confines of commercial fiction. Which is... you know... understandable. You know, and I'm great— I'm even, like, today—I'm grateful for it because you first have to learn how to walk and then you can run, right? So I did have to go through the process of learning how to write a good scene, of learning how not to tell, of learning how to hide the seams that you—that you were talking about—you need to hide your fingerprints as a writer. And that was my learning book. I learned a lot from writing it, but by the time I was done with it, it was not—it didn’t—it was not a bad book, and I got a lot of full requests for it, but it was not—it did not end up being what I had hoped for it.

Jennie Nash

So, in 2017, when you started that book, you said you came to writing late. Do you mind sharing where you were in your life, if you want to share your age or what you were doing in your life, just to give us some context for what you mean by that—by coming to it late?

Lidija Hilje

So yeah, so 2017 was one of the hardest years in my life, I think. I think it's just the moment where I was around 35, I think. I would have to do the math, but mid-30s. And I had just been fired for the second time after my second maternity leave. And, you know jobs in my profession, which is—I was an attorney—were scarce, and I opened my own law firm. And I sat there in my law office, you know, a woman working as an attorney in Zadar, Croatia. It was not, you know, I was not having like flocks of clients, you know, going through the door. And you had to sit there from 8am to 4pm, which is our work time. And I had, um, ii had um... I started writing basically to pass the time. And I was writing just the scenes that I was interested in that, you know, brought me joy and then I, you know, wrote the intermittent scene, and the book grew and grew. And by the time I had finished it, which was a year and a half later, you know, it became... It just became a thing that I was—it took over it took over my whole life. I could not, you know and financially it was a difficult time for us as well. We had reached—my husband and I, like I said mid 30’s—and we had kind of peaked career wise here in Croatia. So basically, what people don't understand about Croatia is that even if you're a brain surgeon, or if you're a lawyer, or if you're a programmer—like my husband—the money you make is not much more than the average wage. And so, you know, we were at the top of our game professionally, but not earning enough to make ends meet. And so we had started thinking about moving to Ireland basically, which is the, you know, IT hub for the... in Europe. And in thinking about it, I was sitting in my law office and I was basically crying my eyes out thinking if I go there, I'm going to be stripped of my identity as an attorney. I had been working toward that for basically 15, 20 years. And in trying to get over that pain of working towards something that in Ireland, it's not going to mean anything because, you know, the legal system is so very different and my use of language was not, you know, it's still not really good. Like professional English is not the same as this spoken English, you know, everyday English. And so, in kind of trying to accept that we are going to move and I'm going to be stripped of that identity as a lawyer, I was, in a way, you know, to make it easier for myself, I started accepting all the things that I didn't want to look at, which is I hated my job.

Jennie Nash

Right, right.

Lidija Hilje

I loved being in a courtroom, like that was a good part of it. But everything else, you know, the intellectual part of it, like thinking about law, applying law to a certain case was interesting to me. But everything else was horrible. And so, once I accepted that, and my husband got a job, you know, like working for... as a freelancer for an outside company, and we could stay in Croatia, I was like, "And what am I going to do now? I can't go back to being a lawyer." And so, because his wage was a little bit more than, you know, for the first time, he could afford for me to go, you know, to take a year off and to see what I could do. And so, for a while, I interned at a foreign literary agency—that didn't go anywhere. Then I wrote, you know, a copy for a startup that didn't end up, you know, paying me. So that was kind of like—I was at the end of my rope by the, you know, toward the end of that year. And then I encountered the Author Accelerator program for book coaches, and I had during that year I had connected with writers and I have realized that basically the legal knowledge really translates beautifully into book coaching. So it was kind of like, you know, working on a story, or if you're working on a case, or working on a book, it's kind of a similar thing, similar logic applies. And so it was a… you—you know, it was, I know I'm mixing a little bit the books coaching and legal and, you know, writing careers...

Jennie Nash

No, it's fascinating.

Lidija Hilje

But they are so intertwined in my life, yeah.

Jennie Nash

I mean, it's fascinating the way that you trained yourself on story, basically. And I remember the conversation when you approached Author Accelerator, because you were nervous about being able to meet the requirements of our program because of your language—that English is not your first language. But I, I mean, we have a system whereby it's you try it, you know, if—if you'd meet the requirements, you meet them and if you don't, you don't. And it struck me that your grasp of story was so profound. That I didn’t know... you know, it was one conversation about your grasp of the written language. But, um, you were... you were very nervous about your ability to do the work of book coaching in another language. And it's just interesting from where we sit now, so I want to circle back to the book itself and the novel and what you accomplished in it, because it really does have the thing that so many writers are always trying to do, and they talk about it—it is so elusive. Which is this capturing this feeling, emotion, letting the reader sit in the mirror of what those characters are feeling, and you feel it your own self, and that it, you know, when it, when it works, it's, it's like a magic trick. And it strikes me that you came at that very deliberately. It was not accidental. Is that fair to say? Would you believe that?

Lidija Hilje

I think I always wanted to write about... I always wanted to write quiet stories. And for quiet stories to work, you have to make the quiet things loud in a way. And the loud things are the emotions. And so yes, yes, it was always my goal. I was not always good at it... in writing emotion. But yeah, like during that process of writing that first book, I struggled with it a lot. I struggled with what I guess happens a lot of the time when we are writing is that we're trying very hard for the reader to see things the way we are seeing them. And this counter-intuitively causes the very reverse effect. You know the reader—is the more you're trying to make them listen to you, the more you're trying to, you know, impose your view of things on them, the more they resist. So the trick is basically, and I'll make it sound very easy, it's not easy at all to execute, but the trick is to kind of, you know, to try to find a way and to deliver that emotion without judgment. Like, this is what I'm feeling, or this is what my character is feeling. And not trying to explain it, not trying to get compassion, not trying to get the reader to feel anything. Like, you're just putting things out in the ether, and you're allowing the reader to do their own math. And this is something you can do in literary fiction, which is more open-ended, right? And the readers of genre fiction, I do need more hand-holding in that sense that they will not maybe work as hard as the literary reader. So yeah, I did work very hard. And, you know, the first book, the “shelved” book, really got to a point where I couldn't do that work anymore. But when I started Slanting [Slanting Towards the Sea]… the literally... the first scene in Slanting [Slanting Towards the Sea], came out the way it did. Like that's…

Jennie Nash

Oh wow!

Lidija Hilje

It didn't change. We had this meeting of writing friends and one of them said, let's exchange, like, let's read 500 new words and I was not working on anything. I had been focusing on book coaching at that moment—that was 2021. And I went to the moment in that room when she is thinking about her ex-husband, you know, when the protagonist is thinking about her ex-husband, and it just came out the way it is. I don't think I changed basically more than three words since that scene came out the way it is. And so...

Jennie Nash

Oh, that's amazing. I want to... I want to read some of the lines from that opening scene, if I can, to give the readers... I mean the listeners a sense of what we're talking about. So here's how Slanting Towards the Sea begins.

I open his socials and sift through his photos. I know their sequence like I know the palm of my hand. Better even, because I can never memorize what my palm looks like, how the life line twirls into the love line, how it begins tight and uniform, but then turns ropey. It scares me to look at it, to trace the lines, to see where they might lead me in years to come. But I know Vlaho’s photos by heart.

And it goes on from there. It's, it's just, it's so haunting. And, and the whole, the whole novel is, is that, has that feel to it. So when did you, when did you know that with this story you had it? You knew with the other one that you couldn't get it back, or that it wasn't going to happen. When did you begin? Was it after the sharing of that scene where you thought, oh, I've got this?

Lidija Hilje

I knew that I could write a scene, but there's a difference, you know, a postcard. I would call this a postcard. This is the typical example of a postcard, a scene where nothing changes for the protagonist and she doesn't understand anything new, but it kind of deepens the reader's understanding of, you know, her situation. So I knew I could write it, which is something I struggled with, with the first book, but I—there's a long road from doing one good postcard and then, you know, writing an entire book, which in literary fiction you have this additional, you know, challenge. You do a ratio basically of normal scenes and summaries, and postcards, and you have to maintain that ratio throughout the book. So, um, yeah for the... relatively early in the book I had submitted that first scene for some competitions. And I got great feedback. It won a critique match, writing a competition in the literary fiction category. And it was long listed in the BPA Pitch Prize in the UK. So I knew that... you know... you know... that the opening of the book was working. So that was good. But from then on, it was such a struggle, because you read the book, and so you know, it has dual timelines; it spans 20 years. I was struggling so bad trying to figure out whether I should do, you know, the past in flashbacks? Whether I should alternate timelines? How do I set this massive story up, which has, you know, the past, and, you know, the present, which happens over a span of... I don't know... five or six months in the present timeline. So I struggled with it a lot. But the thing that I struggled with the most was accountability. So basically, for the first year and a half—for the first year—I wrote, I think, maybe 150 pages. They were not very well set up. I was unsure of them, and I would always push the book backwards to work on client stories. And so what really changed the game for me was when I—I have this program that I run in summertime and one of our book coaches was in that program, Nita Collins. And after the program ended, we partnered up. And so she was my accountability—you know partner, as well as…you know, feedback giver and cheerleader and all the things. And so, you know, I still struggled with how to set up all the things and how to build up the narrative, which I think is really hard for people to coach literary fiction, because you can basically only offer solutions that are kind of geared towards tropey, right? So the author really does have to do all the work, in that sense, but she was absolutely instrumental in terms of me getting the pages down and just seeing if the pages hit the mark or didn't, why they didn't, you know, talking to her, just voicing, talking about the book. And so this went on for a year and within one year I had a full first draft and from then on it was a quick revising process and within three months I had three agent offers. So it was a fast process from then on, from having the first draft, to getting an agent.

Jennie Nash

Well, big shout out to Nita Collins and the Author Accelerator community. I love that a connection happened for you guys. It's really beautiful the way you describe it. So can you explain why you decided it was time to go out to agents? With the first book you decided... this is not going to go anywhere. I'm putting it aside. And with this one, very soon after you finished the first draft, you decided to pitch. What was that decision-making process like for you?

Lidija Hilje

So I want to be completely honest. I didn't shelve the first project because I thought it was not, I could not get it to a level. I was convinced that it was on a level, and I had pitched it, but I had been rejected over 100 times. So basically the industry decided for me that it wasn't going to happen. And one of the things that was really hard for me in that first book is that I set it in the US, which I've never been to the US. So it made it very difficult, but I felt like if I set the book in Croatia, I would, like the cultural perspective would overpower the quiet narrative. And I thought that I couldn't do it. And so I, you know, in Slanting [Slanting Towards the Sea], this is the base of the book. Like, it's, you know, I've found a way to weave the cultural perspective as seamlessly as I could. But the pitching process—I basically... I had the first draft done when I had decided to pitch the book. It was a little bit—to be honest, I was a little bit hasty. I had applied for The Muse & the Marketplace conversation with agents. You could...

Jennie Nash

Like the speed dating.

Lidija Hilje

Yeah, like the speed dating. And so I purchased a few tickets for that. And this was done for two reasons. The first one was to, you know; give myself a goal to work towards—to kind of make it all go faster. And the second goal was to see how the industry looks at this. And if there are any issues that they have with the, you know, with the book or with how it's set up, I would rather know sooner than later. And so, because they were reading not just the pages—they were reading, like, 10 pages, a synopsis, and a query letter—which I would also wholeheartedly recommend writing during the writing phase. Preferably, you know, toward the end of the first draft, you would have to do the pitching materials, because they inform so much of... they make you really focus on what the book is about and kind of drawing out the themes and the plot and kind of parsing all those things out. So I told myself: if I go there, and if I get some, you know the best thing that could happen is I could get some full requests. The worst thing that could happen was they will tell me that I'm not there, that my writing is not there, and that the and/or that the book doesn't hold together. And so what happened is, I was... I had just finished my first draft, but I knew that the ending wasn't right. I had the wrong ending. So I knew I had to rewrite the last third of the book, at least. And I went on to that conference, and out of five agents I had talked to, four had requested a full manuscript—toward, like, when I had it. So it was a huge, you know, confidence builder, and that summer I really, really—I can't, it's really amazing what happened—I just, I was so energized, and I just, you know, I don't know, it's like a visit from the muse, even though it's just work. But it felt—I felt very inspired, and I completely rewrote the book, basically, and that gave it the ending that it needed to have, which was also one of the fights against the genre confinements which I had kind of put on myself. So yeah, so that was the decision that I should be doing that, and at the same time, I wanted to be, like, 100% sure that when I sent the manuscript out, it would be finished—that it would be the best that I can make it by myself, you know, and, you know, for Nita to read it, for a couple of beta readers that I've really trusted—and they have the same taste in books that I do—to read it. And only with that feedback was I really ready to send it out to agents.

Jennie Nash

So—the—we'll get to what happened with the agents in a minute. But I want to return to something that you said about the culture of Croatia and the role that it has in the story, and you called it foundational. And it really feels both the setting of the country, meaning the land, there's... there's a lot you write about, um, the sea, and the food that comes from the sea, and the winds that travel, um, both on the sea and on the land, and there's olive trees that play a large part in this story. So there is a lot about the country itself, and then there's, there is a lot about the, the culture and the, the changing bureaucracies and politics and things that are going on. And it's interesting that you spoke in your own life about contemplating leaving the country, because your characters at some key points, contemplate leaving as well. So there's—there was very much about the constraints of the world of this place, and that's part of what the, you know, it's interesting that you talk about it as your concern was that it would overwhelm the story, but it's part of, for me, what the container in which that emotion happened. It felt not separate from the story, but a really critical component of it. The way these characters lived on the land, and in this place, and what that allowed them to do,—or to be—or not be and how they bumped up against it. It was... It's really like you have a historian's grasp of that, your world, was that something you were conscious of while you were writing as well?

Lidija Hilje

Yes. I was always worried about writing, you know, a Croatian perspective. Like that was always a big concern for me because I, you know, when you're looking at literature and what interests readers, it's either, you know, the book set in the UK and US, which is kind of the clear narrative, it doesn't, it's, it's a pervasive culture that we all understand when it kind of becomes invisible, or, you know, a background noise, it doesn't really affect the narrative. Whereas the other interesting things that readers, when they want to travel somewhere, they will want to go somewhere exotic, you know, whether it's Nigeria or, you know, Eastern Asia, Japan, China, you know? So it felt like Croatia is different, but not different enough, you know? And so it's, it's kind of like almost like it makes the reader constantly forget that they're in Croatia, while at the same time kind of jarring them when you remind them of the differences, and this was one of the, one of the, you know, key points of my work with Nita, was when she would just notice things like, what is, you know, what is the, why are there, there are no dividers in the hospital between the beds? And it's just like... and now I realize that I have to explain how our hospitals look like, and it's not like yours. Or the difference in the tides, which in America are, you know, over, over, I don't know how many feet, and in Croatia they're just, um, and we talked about it when you were here in Zadar as well. So it's just like, it's very similar to America, but not quite. And that was very frustrating at times to try to depict. But on the other hand, in writing Ivona, I wanted to, I feel, I have felt and still feel a lot of frustration with my country. I love it, but I have been planning, like there have been multiple, you know, periods in my life when I had hoped to leave, just because how frustrating it is to live here sometimes with the bureaucracy and just the way the mentality is here and everything. So basically in writing her story, I wanted to air out those grievances in a way. To give them voice, to examine them, to see what they are, and like everything, you know, it's not black or white, it's the way we are here, and it's also the way I am, you know. I notice this when I interact with people from other areas, and they say that us Croats and, you know, Balkan people are very, you know, always like, always complaining about something, which is true, we are. And so, yeah, so it's difficult. It's difficult because I wanted that to be a part of the story. And at the same time, you know, there, you know, there is the possibility of the American reader who doesn't see that it's a part of the culture here, basically. That they could look at Ivona, and say, you know, why does she just not snap out of it?

Jennie Nash

Hmm…

Lidija Hilje

And, you know, it's almost like saying to me to snap out of the issues that I had as I was like, trying, you know, like banging my head against the wall, trying to get my career going, and t's not working. Like whatever you're, you're trying—like it's easier for me to make it in the US, never having set a foot there, than in Croatia.

Jennie Nash

Right.

Lidija Hilje

I mean, my book is being published in the US; it's still not being published in Croatia, just for the record. So it's really hard, and it's really hard to make that a part of the book, but not have it, like, weigh the book all the way down. So it was a process. It's like all the things you try and miss and, you know, sometimes you go overboard, and then you have to pull back, and you have to be careful not to go too deeply into your own experience and just feel that the character is separate from you, and obviously she has some different issues than I had and a different occupation, but a lot of her grievances are mine as well.

Jennie Nash

Well, that yearning and, can… I guess confusion really does come across. The how will I, how will I live? How will I love? How will I spend my days? I mean, these are the questions of our life, and they're the questions of this character in—as she goes through what she's experiencing. That they're, they're both mundane questions and, and, you know, the most profound. And, and the way you capture it... I mean, that was just to circle back to my initial idea of talking about how to capture emotion on the page, you know, which is the work of a novel. That's what it's for. That's its point. And it's just so hard to do. And you just did it on so many levels in a language that's not your first. And it really is just extraordinary and moving. And in preparing to talk to you today, I read a lot of the early reviews—people who got advanced readers copies, 'cause the book comes out in July, 2025, and we're speaking a few months before that time. So it's not fully out in the world, but it's enough that, um, I can see that reaction rippling through the readers and, and certainly through the, um, professional, um, colleagues and, you know, who've blurbed the book. But this idea of it being—the word people kept using was “moving.” And there was a lot of words like “tender” and “haunting,” you know, people really felt what it sounds like you intended them to feel. So how, from where you sit now, how does that—how does it feel to have gotten that feedback from some of the writers you admire? And to know that it did… it works doing what you want it to do? How does that feel?

Lidija Hilje

Oh, it's, it's impossible to talk about that because I guess I'm typically Croatian in the way that it's easier for me to sit in my failures than to sit in my successes. So it's absolutely incredible. I mean, when you get a blurb from Claire Lombardo, who is, you know, I absolutely adore her books and I think she's insanely talented, you know, and for her, you know, she used the words “humane,” and that really—I was so moved by that. So my… kind of my goal is for, for people to see the humanity in these, these characters. And so it's really, it's really amazing. It's, it's beyond, you know, some of the, you know, I got really great blurbs from authors I really, really deeply admire: Thao Thai, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Amy Lin, and Madeline Lucas, and as well, you know, Claire Lombardo, whom I mentioned. It's really incredible. It's so life affirming for me, you know, to be able to do that. But like I said, it's always, you know, when I'm reading the reviews, which I probably shouldn't be doing, I'm always focusing on the few that are not—just not feeling it. And then I have to remind myself it’s not—this is not a book for anyone, for just everyone. And it's, you know, it's a journey. It's still, like you said, early days. I'm learning to be an author, to grow an even thicker skin in that sense. But yeah, it did feel great to get those beautiful reviews. And I'm so grateful to them for reading and donating their time to me.

Jennie Nash

I mean, it's so not fair what I want to say. It's so not fair. But I want to ask anyway. Quite a few of the reviews said they can't wait for your next book, which, you know, it's like you're not a machine. You've just done this one. But are you thinking about that? Are you… do you have thoughts about that?

Lidija Hilje

Yeah, I am trying to work on my new book. But, you know, I'm admiring the writers who put out a book a year. That's definitely not going to be me. There's an insane amount of work in putting the book out. You know, there's invisible work that goes behind the screen, you know, that people don't see, but it’s happening and it takes up a lot of time. And there's also this emotional, you know, it's, it's—it’s difficult sitting in, like… you're trying to make this your career. You wrote your heart on the paper and you're offering it to the world. And now you're suspended in this period when you put it out and you're waiting to see how it's received, whether someone tramples on it or whether it's upheld. And so it's a difficult, emotionally difficult place to be in, and I'm one of those writers who struggle to create when I'm not, you know, when I'm feeling… when I'm feeling stressed. So work on my second novel is going slowly. I’ve gotten to page 100, but then I realized it needed, you know, I needed to make some changes, so I'm back to page 30. So it's a, you know, it's a—it's a process. I think, you know, writing literary fiction takes time. It takes self-examination; it takes a lot of reading of other people who have done it successfully—the type of novel that you're trying to execute. So, so yeah, I'm trying to work on it, but, um, but it may, it may be a while.

Jennie Nash

All right. I know—that's why it wasn't fair to even ask. Um, so back to… I just want to pick up the story back to—you got the three or the four, um, agent requests, and you, you finished the novel, and, um, and you pitched to them. Can you just share what all unfolded? Because… it was pretty extraordinary.

Lidija Hilje

So, basically, what happened was I didn't pitch all the four agents that had requested the pages. I had the first querying experience, which is what I said—you know 100 rejections. I took a long, hard look at it and realized that many of the time I was querying the wrong agents, genre-wise, which, you know, I was not aware of at the time. So a lot of those rejections were basically because I was querying a women's fiction book to literary agents. And that was one thing. And the other thing is… I was pretty, you know, unselective with whom I was querying the first time around. And the second time around, I was really intentional with the type of agent and their reputation and the connections within the industry—you know, just much more aware, approaching it much more professionally in terms of, you know, just wanting a good fit that would actually be able to do something for me, you know, to sell the book. And so a friend who had, you know, she had given me a referral to her agent—that didn't pan out. I gave that agent a month, an exclusive. And when that didn't pan out, I basically sent the query to my now agent, Abby Walters, at CAA. And, you know, it was a form on the website. I didn't even write her an email. It was just a form. So I didn't think that anyone would read it, basically. And I got—quickly I got like five or six requests, right out of the gate, those maybe first 10 days. And by the end of the second week I had gotten an offer of representation from Abby. And I followed up with the rest of the agents. The total, uh, the total number of, uh, full requests ended up being, I think, maybe nine out of 20, 25 queries. And, uh, I got three offers of representation, um, from fantastic agents. And, uh, deciding was hell. I was—I was—it was horrible to be in a position where you had to say no to an agent that you admire and that you would genuinely love to work with, but you know, for some reasons I chose Abby and I'm really happy with working with her. She's fantastic. I—I, you know, love her to death. And yeah, so that was the story of getting an agent. It was—it was—it was pretty quick and painless, I have to say, the second time around.

Jennie Nash

Right, from 100 rejections with the first one to—to nine full requests and three offers on—on this one, that's an extraordinary swing, for sure. And I love the—the way that you approached it the second time with that intention. It just says everything about the kind of person and writer you are, and the book landed with Simon & Schuster and will be coming out soon, and I can't wait to share it with our listeners. It's a beautiful, beautiful novel. I just—I cherished reading every page, and we had the really great good fortune of my taking a vacation to Croatia and coming to your town and meeting you and walking through the town with you, and I treasure that for so many reasons. But having read the book, I felt like I could taste it and see it in a really special way, having had a tour of your city with you. So that, for me, was just a special—a special part of it too.

Lidija Hilje

Thank you so much, Jennie. But actually, you kind of were a part of that, because when I thought about the places where Ivona would take a seer to, you know, to see, I had our tour in my—you know, on my mind, because I was thinking, like, what would she show someone who's from another place? Like, where would she take him? And it wouldn't be the things I showed you. I mean, I showed you some of the big things that you have to see when you're here. But I took you to the places that are more intimate to me, like more personally important to me.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Lidija Hilje

And so this is—this is what's behind the scene where she shows him her school. And, you know, so, yeah… you know, real life.

Jennie Nash

Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. Well, yeah, I did get to see where you went to school and where the law office was. And—and one of the things that's really stayed with me was we went to a bookstore and it… Um, and it—just knowing what your life in books has been, Lidija, and how you've studied them and how you've worked to become a writer of the caliber that you are. And that bookstore was so small, and it had mostly books in Croatian, and it was not anything like the kind of bookstore that one would think would spark a major literary career. And it… that just has stuck with me, because you—you made your own bookstore, right? You found your own literary community. You found your own career and way, and it's just been a joy to watch and to cheer you on. And thank you for coming and talking with us today.

Lidija Hilje

Thank you so much for having me, and all the encouragement over the years. I'm really grateful for that as well.

Jennie Nash

All right, well, until next time, for our listeners—keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Jess Lahey

The Hashtag AmWriting 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.

I’m a big fan of Nathalia (Nat) Holt’s books, and am so excited to have the opportunity to talk to her about her new book, The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda.

I first met Nat when her book Cured: The People Who Defeated HIV came out and I attended a book event at Dartmouth Medical Center. She is so smart and curious and in this episode we will be talking about the process of researching elusive history, where her ideas come from, and who gets to tell what stories.

Nathalia Holt’s website

Transcript below!

EPISODE 455 - TRANSCRIPT

Jess Lahey

Hey, AmWriters! It's Jess Lahey here. I am so excited to talk about a new series that I am putting out there on the Hashtag AmWriting platform called From Soup to Nuts. I interview and work with and mentor an author—a nonfiction author—who has subject matter expertise and a killer idea, frankly, that just knocked me sideways. This author really thinks this is the time and place for this idea. And I agreed, and I asked her—I begged her—if I could mentor her through this process in a series. We're having to work together on agenting and proposal and all the stuff that you've got to do, from soup to nuts, to get a book out into the world. This series, From Soup to Nuts, is subscriber-only. The first episode is free, so you can go back and listen to that. That's for everyone. But if you want to join us for the whole process and learn from her mistakes—and learn from the stuff that I'm working on right now too—you have to subscribe. So consider supporting the Hashtag AmWriting podcast. It helps us bring you stuff like this—these extra series—not to mention the podcast itself. Alright, it's a lot of work. Help us support our podcast and these extra bonus series. By becoming a supporter, you'll get a sticker for it. You'll get your hypothetical, figurative sticker for being a good Hashtag AmWriting.

Multiple speakers:

Is it recording? Now it's recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause… I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.

Jess Lahey

Hey, this is the Hashtag AmWriting podcast. This is the podcast about writing all the things—writing the short things, writing the long things, writing the queries, the proposals, the poetry, the fiction, the nonfiction. This is the podcast actually, at its heart, about getting the work done. I am Jess Lahey. I am your host today. I'm the author of the New York Times best-selling The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation. And you can find my journalism at The New York Times and The Atlantic and The Washington Post. And today I am interviewing an author I respect deeply. I have known this author since she wrote her first book, which overlapped with some work that my husband does and some work that I had done in a previous career, and she has gone on to have a glorious and enviable career in nonfiction. My dream has always been to be one of those people that can, like, get curious about a topic and then just go off and write about that topic. And this is what she does. So Natalia—NAT—Holt, I am so excited to introduce you to our listeners. They are deep, deep, deep lovers of the nuts and bolts and the geeky details of the writing and the process. So welcome to the Hashtag AmWriting podcast.

Nathalia Holt

Thank you so much. I'm excited to talk to you today.

Jess Lahey

So we have a book on HIV—the first book, Cured, which is the way that I got to know you. Also, full disclosure, we share an agent. Laurie Abkemeier is our agent, and I think she actually may have introduced us in the first place. Yeah, your first book—yeah, your first book, Cured, about the Berlin patients. Really interesting—if you've never heard of the Berlin patients, listeners, just, just Google it. It's really a fascinating story. I'll go over—I'll go read Cured. Cured is all about the Berlin patients. And then we have The Queens of Animation—the women behind, sort of, the way Disney does what they do. And—and—and then we also have Rise of the Rocket Girls, which is another fascinating book out there about the women behind a lot of the math and the planning and the work that was done to get us into space. And so when I heard about your new book, I'm like, "Oh, NAT's working on a new book. Great! What women are we going to talk about this time?" And it's such a departure for you, and it is such a fascinating topic for you. And, well, for me, it’s like—it’s deep in my geeky, Jess-book-loving nonfiction zone. Could you tell us a little bit about it and where the idea came from for this book?

Nathalia Holt

Sure. The book is called The Beast in the Clouds, and it's about an expedition that the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt took in 1928 and 1929. And they went to China and Tibet in search of the giant panda, which at that time was unknown to Western scientists. And even in China, there were very few people that were aware of where this animal lived, what it ate—so little was known. So during this time period, the 1920s, you have all of these expeditions going to China, trying to find this black-and-white bear that no one is really sure exists. It's just a crazy period of history, because you have all of the other bears at that time—even polar bears—were known and even were in zoos. But the panda was not, and many people even thought it would be a ferocious bear. They thought this was going to be, you know, a combination of polar and black bears.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, yeah.

Nathalia Holt

So that's what the Roosevelts are going to. And so the expedition ends up being torturous, deadly. They're going through the Himalayas. They're not very well prepared. They lose all their food. They're attacked. They get lost. Just every crazy thing happens to them. But it's also a journey of transformation. They're documenting all of the ecology around them, and it really ends up changing their own worldview. And so it was such a fun book to research and to write. And I spent a lot of time also going into many of the other ex—many of the other members of the expedition, which was—which was fun, and maybe a little bit different than other books in this genre. But yeah, for me, you know, it's scary to be writing a part of history that is very different than what I've done before—but it's also fun.

Jess Lahey

Where'd the germ of the idea for the book come from? Because I had never heard this story before. I guess it had just never occurred to me—like, where do we—how do we know about the panda bear?

Nathalia Holt

Yeah, it's not a topic that has been written about much before, and I came across it while I was researching my last book, which is called Wise Gals, and is about women that helped form the CIA. And as part of that book, I was looking into the Roosevelts' role in World War Two. And it's so confusing when you research the Roosevelts, because they all have the same name. It's just Theodore and...

Jess Lahey

Actually, I have to tell you, Tim's a huge fan—my husband, Tim, who you also know, is a big fan and has read a lot about—and he's like, "Well, which Roosevelt?" So you—and I'm like, "Oh, that's a really good question. I don't know which Roosevelt... like, the adventuring ones." He's like, "Well..." [unintelligible]

Nathalia Holt

Yeah, there's so many of them, and they all have the same name. And so as I was trying to parse out son and father—who are both named Kermit Roosevelt and both served in World War Two—I kind of stumbled across this expedition that the elder Kermit Roosevelt had taken. So he and his older brother, Theodore, who were the sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and so it just kind of—it came from there. Just sort of came from wanting to learn more about it. And I always love a challenge. If there's a topic that's difficult to research, that seems impossible to find anything about—I'm there. I want to know everything.

Jess Lahey

Yeah. So, okay, so here's a—really a question that I—well, first of all, you and I are both research geeks. I just—I have said I could just keep researching books and not actually write the books. I just love that process. So aside from the easy answer, which is Google, like, where do you start with a story that hasn't been told yet? How do you start diving into that story, and where do you find information?

Nathalia Holt

It's difficult, and it depends on the topic. For this one, I went through a number of different archives, and that was great. I was able to get old letters that the Roosevelts had. But I really wanted to bring in other voices. I was really, really persistent in my desire to bring in Jack Young, who was this young, 19-year-old, Hawaiian-born translator and naturalist on the trip. And I was fortunate enough that I was able to track down some interviews he had done with another author back in the 1990s, and I just was persistent. I just pleaded until I got these tapes and was able to get all these interviews with him. And then I also contacted his daughter, who lives in Hawaii, and was able to get his unpublished autobiography. And it gives such an interesting perspective, because Jack Young went on and became a very impressive person and really deserves a biography all of his own, but he was also very close friends with the Roosevelts. They had a real connection—a real bond. And you get a different sense of the story when you're hearing it through his descriptions of what it was like, because he is young, and he is sort of really documenting things for the first time. And then, in addition, I was so lucky with this book because I was able to also get the field journals from a scientist that was on the expedition, as well as all the writings from another naturalist. So it was fascinating, because there were so many different accounts of the same events, which really lets you go into detail about what it was like, what people were feeling, what they were seeing. And I don't think I've ever had that before—where I have so many different accounts of the exact same events.

Jess Lahey

That's really cool, because it gives you that ability to, you know—if we went with just Jack Young's account, then you've got the Jack Young lens. And as you well know, history gets to be told by certain people, unless someone like you comes along and says, "Oh, wait, this account has not been brought to the surface," whether it's the women who are the animators at Disney, or whether it's the women who are part of NASA. So how do you—if you go into something like this and you have a limited number of perspectives—it sounds like you had a fair number of perspectives going into this, but since the documentation happened—usually tends to happen among the more powerful, the more privileged people—how do you manage getting a full perspective on an event like this expedition when you may have limited perspectives?

Nathalia Holt

That is the real challenge, because it's easy to get the Roosevelts’ documentation.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nathalia Holt

I have all of their journals, all of their letters. I am able to get into real detail about what this expedition was like for them. Even the difficult parts—for them—they really documented that, and everything has been saved. For the others... it's much more difficult, and it really requires that persistence of being able to get the letters. Being able to get the autobiography was really key, because he goes into so much detail about what things were like. And these interviews that he did were also really, really helpful, because he goes into a lot of his feelings about what it was like to be with the Roosevelts on the expedition, about how he felt… Because his father was born in China, his mother was born in San Francisco, he himself was born in Hawaii—which, at that time, is not part of the U.S.—he feels like he doesn't have a country. He doesn't know where he is. So when he's in China, he can speak all of these languages, but he's still struggling to connect and be able to talk with people, because there are so many dialects.

Jess Lahey

Yeah.

Nathalia Holt

And so to be able to get into what that was like, and how he felt—just gives such a perspective—a different perspective of the expedition than perhaps what is usually had in these kinds of books. And he also talks a lot about the guides on the expedition, which was really interesting. There were a lot of women that were part of this expedition. Half of the guides, who kind of act as Sherpas—they, you know, they carry things, they lead the way, they guide the route, they make camp. And so there are just some great moments with these guides—especially the women guides—where they are just protecting from crazy marauders that have come down and have attacked the group. And lots of great moments like that. That was really interesting to document. And in addition, another thing I was able to get for this book is—there was actually some early video and a lot of photographs that were taken.

Jess Lahey

Oh my goodness.

Nathalia Holt

By one of the members. And that is just such an incredible thing—to be looking at video of this expedition in the 1920s—it's just amazing.

Jess Lahey

Okay, so geek question here, since this is definitely what our listeners like the most. So I haven't laid hands on the book yet, because it's not out yet—did you put photographs in the book? Were you able to get access to photographs, and did you put them in the book? And I ask that because whenever I write a proposal or we're working on a book proposal, we have to indicate whether or not there's going to be artwork, and that changes things in terms of budget, and it changes things in terms of permissions and stuff. And I was curious about—I’ve never dealt with that side of it before, but maybe you have.

Nathalia Holt

I have. I've always sent photographs, and I love it. Because I feel like it helps when you read the book—especially a book like this.

Jess Lahey

Yeah.

Nathalia Holt

You know, when I'm describing what they look like, and where they are, you want to see it with your own eyes. And so it's really interesting to be able to see those photographs. And I had so many, and it's always a challenge to parse out—who has the permissions? Where do they come from? Finding the photographs—this always takes forever. Fortunately, this particular book was maybe a little bit easier, because a lot of the photographs are out of copyright, that had been published at that time. So that was nice. But yeah, no, it was still just a mess, as it always is. It's always a mess to figure out who do photographs belong to. I feel like I would love to become a lawyer—just for that moment in researching a book.

Jess Lahey

That's a whole layer I've never had to go into. And it was easier for me to—rather than just say, "Yeah, I'd like to include this one thing," and then I realized the nightmare that's ahead of me in terms of accessing and getting permission and all that stuff. I'm like, "Eh! Let's just stick with what we got in the print." But, for something like this—and especially when you're writing about, for example, animation, or if you're writing about, you know, this expedition, and there's art available—you know, it sounds like it's really, really worth it for that aspect. I mean, that's definitely something I would want in this book. So I think I know the answer to this question. This is a heavily loaded question, but are you—when it comes to research and it comes to what you include in the book—are you an overwriter or an underwriter? Or do you land pretty much—like, when you're doing your editing, are you like, "Oh no, this was the perfect amount to include?"

Nathalia Holt

Oh, I'm a terrible overwriter.

Jess Lahey

Oh. So am I!

Nathalia Holt

It's really a problem. But I worked very hard on this book at cutting, and it was not easy for me, because I do always tend to go way overboard. I'm always over the word count that I'm supposed to be at—with the exception of this book, where I did a very good job of cutting it down and really trying to focus and not, you know, getting too distracted.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, we joke all the time with my other co-hosts and friends that my—like, my history sections in both of my books could have been half of the book or, you know... and all the stuff that ends up on the floor ends up getting told in cocktail parties. You know, "By the way, did you know how many, you know, kegs of beer there were on the ships that came over? I do. Can I share? Because I did all this work and I've got to put it somewhere." And there's this weird—there's this weird line between, "Look, look how thorough I am. Can I have an A+ for how thorough I am?" versus what your reader might actually be interested in. I keep some of my favorite notes from my former editor, and she's like, "Yeah, the reader... no. Reader doesn't care. Not going to care. You know, this may be really fun for you, but maybe not for your reader." So—but I can imagine with something like this, you know, the details of the flora and fauna and all that other stuff—it would be really easy to get off on tangents that are not necessary for the core mission.

Nathalia Holt

Yes, absolutely. But in some ways it was easier than my past books, because it only takes place over a year, which is incredible. Most of my books take place over decades, and the cast of characters is much smaller as well. And unlike some of my past books, I feel like I need to include everyone out of fairness—which is kind of a weird way to approach a book. I don't recommend it. That's not the way to do things. But yeah, if you're really just looking at a few—a handful of people—over a year, it's much easier to stay on track. So that was a good exercise for me.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, there's a—there's a line I love, where David Sedaris talks about the fact that what it takes for him to purchase something is if the clerk at the store has gone to the trouble to take it out of the case, to show it to him, and then he feels like he has to buy it because he—someone went through the trouble. And same thing for me. If, like, someone's going to go to the trouble to be interviewed, then cutting that entire interview, or cutting that whole through line, or whatever that person is a part of, is incredibly painful to do. And then I feel like—I feel obligated. So it's a difficult—it's a difficult balance, you know, between what your readers are going to actually want and what makes for a good book, versus doing right by the people who spent time talking to you. It's a hard balance to strike. Alright, speaking of being in the weeds and geek questions—so I'd love to talk to you a little bit. I was just—I'm mentoring someone for a little series we're doing for this podcast, sort of from soup to nuts, from the beginning of an—from the inception of an idea to getting a book out. And the very first thing she did was send something to me in a Pages document. And I had to say, "Hey, you might want to think about using Word or maybe Google Docs, because, like, I don't have Pages." So—some details about how you work. Number one, do you have a preferred app that you like to write in? Because I'm a Scrivener gal.

Nathalia Holt

I mean, I prefer Word because I feel like it is the most universal. It's the easiest to send to people... and so that's what I go with.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, I use Scrivener only because it allows me to blank out the rest of the world really easily. Okay, and then organizing your research. This is something—the question of organizing your research, how you know you're done researching and really just need to actually start writing the words—are the two questions that I get the most. Because the research could go—especially on a topic like this—could go on forever. So number one, given this voluminous research that you had, how do you organize your research? Do you use folders on your computer? Do you use folders in—you know—how do you do all of that?

Nathalia Holt

I do folders on my computer, and then I also do hard copies that I actually keep organized in real folders, which helps me, because then, if I'm going into a specific topic, a lot of times it can be easier to actually hold on to those documents and being able to see them. So I do both. Um, and...

Jess Lahey

Has everything pretty much been digitized in this area? Do you feel like—or do you have to go into rooms and, like, actually look at paper documents, and sometimes they don't let you scan those? So, you know, how does that work for you?

Nathalia Holt Yes, it's very difficult if they don't allow you to photograph them. Usually they do. Usually you can. So I have always had to digitize documents, and there's so many different ways to do it, but now it's much easier just to use your phone than anything else, which is great. Very happy about this development. And yeah, I think—I think maybe that's part of the reason why I do like to print things out is because that's how I was first introduced to the material, so it can be useful for me. But there's way too much material to print everything out. I mean, there's so many hundreds, thousands of pages even. And so it's always just going to be sort of key documents that end up making their way into the actual folders, and then the rest—it's just, you know, organized by topic. Make sure images are separate, by person.

Jess Lahey

So then, how do you know you're done? Like, how do you feel like you're at a place where I now know enough to come at this from—to come at the storytelling from an informed place?

Nathalia Holt

That is really a good question, and I'm not sure I can answer it, because I feel like you're never done. You're always going to be researching. There's no real end to it.

Jess Lahey

But you have to start. Well, and this—this takes—this is separate from the question of, like, how much research—how much research do you have to have done for the book proposal? Like take it for example, for example, The Addiction Inoculation, where I needed to learn, really, a whole new area... that was a year-long process just to write the proposal for that book, and then another couple years for the book. So, for me—and I'm very happy to say—I got to ask Michael Pollan this question, and he had the same answer that I feel like is my instinctual answer for this, which is when I start to say, "Oh, I'm starting to repeat. Things are starting to repeat for me," and/or, "Oh, I already knew that," and so I'm not finding out new stuff or encountering things I don't already know at the same rate. It's starting to sort of level off. Then I feel like, "Oh, I've got this sort of, like, you know, mile-high view of the—of the information," and I maybe have enough in my head to start actually being an expert on this thing.

Nathalia Holt

That's a good answer. That sounds responsible. I'm not sure that I do that, though. I think for myself, there's not a bad time to start, because it's going to change so much anyway, that for me, I almost feel like it's part of the learning process. Is that you start to write about it, and then as you go along, you realize, "Oh, this is not right. I'm going to change all of this," but it's all just part of helping you move along. And I think even from the beginning, if you start writing even just bits and pieces of how you want to write the scene, you want to think about this or outline it, that can be helpful, and it doesn't matter, because it's all going to change anyway.

Jess Lahey

That's true. I actually find I write—the way I write is very specific, in that each topic I'm going to write about in a chapter has a narrative arc, story that goes with it. So I—that narrative arc story gets written first, and then I drop the research in as I go along. But I remember, with The Gift of Failure, a book came out that had a key piece of research that then I had to go back and figure out, "Oh my gosh, this impacts everything." And so I had to figure out how to sort of drop that in. And I couldn't have done it at any other time, because the research didn't exist or I hadn't found it yet. So that's a tough thing to do, is to go back and sort of link the things to something new that you think is important. But the research part is just so much fun for me. Again, I could do that forever and ever and ever. Do you? So the other thing I wanted to ask... and this is selfishly... do you have large boxes in your home of all the research that you feel like you can't get rid of, even though you wrote the book, like, five years ago, ten years ago?

Nathalia Holt

I do not. I pare down.

Jess Lahey

You do?!

Nathalia Holt

After time, yes. It's hard to do, though, because it's hard to throw things away, and I definitely have folders that I keep. They're just full of things that I can never get rid of. And obviously it's all digitized as well, but there are things like that that mean a lot to me, that I can't get rid of.

Jess Lahey

Well, there's actually—this was a very selfish question, because I actually just went through and finally got rid of a whole bunch of stuff that... I felt like it was at the heart—it was the main research for The Gift of Failure, and I used it to mulch my gardens. I put—and so it was like this metaphorical kind of, like, knowledge feeding the thing that I care about the most right now. And so I used it to mulch all the paths in my gardens and create new garden beds and stuff like that. But I'm always curious about that. Like, I every once in a while see something on, like, "X"—what used to be Twitter—or someplace like that, like, can I get rid of the research from the book I wrote 25 years ago? Or is that too soon? Well, so when exactly does the book come out? Give us your—give us your pub date.

Nathalia Holt

It comes out July 1st.

Jess Lahey

Okay. And I have to say... cover is gorgeous. How did you land on that cover image?

Nathalia Holt

Oh, I really didn't get much say.

Jess Lahey Okay.

Nathalia Holt

The one thing I—I mean, you know, they have whole people that have skills that do these things, but one thing I was very passionate about was keeping the brothers on the cover in their expedition gear. So originally, the publisher had wanted them to be in suits on the front, and I just hated it. I hated it so much, because I feel like they need to be on the trail. You need to see them as they were on the trail. And so that's one thing I really pushed for. And I was fortunate that they—they listened, and they were okay with that.

Jess Lahey

Well, I'm just—I mean, this book is going to have such a great place alongside books like The River of Doubt and other, you know, really wonderful books that are about the expositions—that the expeditions that get taken by these historical fixtures—figures. And I'm just—I'm so excited for this book. I'm so happy for you about this book, because it is just—when I started telling people about the topic, they're like, "Oh, I would read that." And I'm like, "I know! Isn't that the best idea?" And that's part of the magic, is coming upon the really cool idea. And so I'm just really, really happy for you and really, really happy about this book and excited for it.

Nathalia Holt

Thank you. Oh, that's so nice to hear, especially because this was a very difficult book to get published. I mean, there was a real moment where I wasn't sure I was going to find someone that would...

Jess Lahey

Well, can you—I didn't want to ask it. You know, this is—having—doing a podcast like this, where we often talk about the mistakes, we talk about the blunders, we talk about the stuff that went wrong. It can be really, really hard because you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you, or you don't want to, like, make anyone think that this book wasn't anything other than a 100% lovely experience from beginning to end. But I would love to talk about that, if you're willing.

Nathalia Holt

Oh, sure. I don't really have anything bad to say about anyone. I think it's—I think it's understandable that people wouldn't naturally think I would be the best author to write this. I haven't written other books like it, and so it was a difficult book to sell. It wasn't easy, and it definitely crystallized to me how important it was that I write it. I really felt like this was my purpose. I really wanted to write it, and maybe it's good to have that moment, because it really makes it clear that this is something you need to do, even if it's not easy, even if it's tough to find a publisher. And I was fortunate that I did. You know, luckily, there was an editor that—sort of at the last minute—believed in it enough to give it a go. And yeah, it's just—it always feels like a miracle when the book comes to fruition and is actually published. It just seems as if that could never really happen, and this one was a difficult road to get there, for sure.

Jess Lahey

Well, especially since a big part of the proposal process is trying to convince someone that you're the—you're the person to write this book. And in this case, it's not so much because you're a subject matter expert going into it. It's that you're a really good researcher, and you're a meticulous writer and a meticulous researcher, and most importantly, this story speaks to you. And I think, you know, some of my very favorite nonfiction books that I recommend over and over and over again—narrative nonfiction—it's clear in the reading how excited the author was about the story, and I think that's part of the magic. So I think you're the perfect person to write it. I don't know what they could have—because if you are—if you're fired up about the story... And as an English teacher, and as someone who's had to convince middle school students why they need to be excited about this thing I want to teach them, the enthusiasm of the teacher is part of what can spark the engagement for the learner. So I think that's a really, really important part of any book. Plus, you got to—you're—as an author, you're going to have to be out there talking about this thing, and so you better love the topic, because you're going to be talking about it for ages.

Nathalia Holt

Yes, absolutely. I mean, no matter what, this is many years of your life that's dedicated to a topic. But I think it's—it’s a good lesson in general, that you can write in one genre and one kind of book for years, and then it might not be easy, but it is possible to actually break out of that and find other topics and other things you want to write about. We grow. We all change.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, one of my—one of, as our listeners will know, Sarina Bowen, one of my co-hosts and one of my best friends—she’s—she has written romance forever and ever and ever, and she's like, "You know what? I want to write a thriller," and it has been a really steep learning curve and also a huge effort to sort of convince people that she can do that too. But it's also really, really satisfying when you show your chops in another area. So—and I had an—as I was going through sort of the details about this book, and reading about this book, I was thinking, you know what this would be really, really good for? An exhibit at someplace like the Field Museum, or like an exhibit of—oh my gosh, that would be incredible. Like, if this is a story that hasn't been told, and there's a lot of art, and there may be video and photographs and all—and journals—man, that would make for an amazing—if anyone out there is listening, that would make for an amazing museum exhibit, I think. And of course, everyone's listening to me.

Nathalia Holt

That would be amazing.

Jess Lahey

Everyone is listening to me...

Nathalia Holt Oh, well, they should.

Jess Lahey

All right. Well, thank you so, so much. Where can people find you? And is there anything else you'd like to talk about that you're working on or that you're excited about? Besides, you know, just getting this book out into the world?

Nathalia Holt

You can find me at nathaliaholt.com and on Instagram and Facebook and X @NathaliaHolt. And yeah, right now I'm pretty much focused on this book. I have something else percolating, but it’s still away a good days. So it’s the fun research part. Isn’t that...?

Jess Lahey

You will notice I did not ask you what's next, because to be asked what's next when you haven't even birthed the thing you're working on now can be a little irritating. So as someone who's aware of this inside baseball, I didn't even. Later on—privately—I would love, because I'm a big fan, big excited about your work, and love, love introducing people to your work. So I think—and also, one of the things we talk about a lot on this podcast is having books that are exemplars of good research, of good storytelling. I have a stack of books that I keep near me when I need to dissect something to get at—oh, this person did a really good job with, for example, historical research, or this person did a really good job of using their expert voice, and I need to tap into that today. I think your books are—would be excellent, excellent selections for our listeners, for their pile of exemplars for really well-done research and telling other people's stories—historical stories that occur in a sort of in a modern context. Your books are really dissectible, and I know that's super high-level geek stuff, but they’ve really helped me become a better storyteller as well.

Nathalia Holt

Thank you. That's so kind of you. I really appreciate that.

Jess Lahey

All right, everyone—go get the book, read the book. Don’t forget to pre-order, because that really matters to us authors, and don’t forget to review it wherever you purchased it, once you have read it. And Nat, thank you so much. And I apologize for calling you Natalia at the top of the hour. I'm so just so used to doing that—Nat. And until next week, everyone, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

The Hashtag AmWriting 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.

Our goal words, as a reminderSarina: presenceJess: growthJennie: Teflon™KJ: inner compass

#AmReadingJess: Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins ReidKJ: The Spy Coast by Tess GerritsenJennie: Shakespeare: The Man Who Plays the Rent by Judi DenchSarina: Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez

Transcript below!

EPISODE 454 - TRANSCRIPT

KJ Dell'Antonia

Hey, writers. KJ here announcing a new series and a definite plus for paid supporters of Hashtag AmWriting it's Writing the Book, a conversation between Jennie, 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, Jennie and I are both trying to, quote, unquote, play big with these next go rounds, which is a meta effort for Jennie, as that's exactly what her book is about. And we're basically coaching each other through creating 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 Booklab: First Pages, episodes, and come summer, we shall Blueprint once again. So sign yourself up at AmWriting podcast.com

Multiple Speakers:

Is it recording? Now it's recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Alright, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Hey, listeners, its KJ here. And this is Hashtag AmWriting, the weekly podcast about writing all the things, short things, long things, pitches, proposals, fiction, nonfiction. This is the podcast about getting that work done. And this week we're all here with a mid-year check in, but still introduce yourselves, people.

Jess Lahey

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

Sarina Bowen

I'm Sarina Bowen, the somewhat exhausted author of many romance and thriller novels, and my brand new one is called Dying to Meet You.

Jennie Nash

I'm Jennie Nash. I'm the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator and the author of 12 books in three genres. And today, not so tired. So you know, day by day.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yay. I'm KJ Dell'Antonia, the author of three novels, most popular, which is The Chicken Sisters, and the most recent is Playing the Witch Card. And also the former editor and lead writer of The Motherlode at The New York Times, which feels like a total past life, And this is our mid-year "Are we achieving our goals?" check-in, and I badly wanted to make fun of Jess, who said she had to go get her notebook—so she would know her goals. But then I didn't realize I didn't have to, I didn't know mine, so I had to go get my notebook. So now I can't, and it's pretty much a crushing blow to me. So anybody achieved anything so far? I can't. I can totally believe we're six months into the year. It's been a really long six months, and also, I haven't done anything. Okay, that's me.

Jennie Nash

KJ, you were saying that. Actually, it's funny, because you were saying that about was it January or February? You kept saying this month is lasting forever. You think you're just having that year.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I am.

Sarina Bowen

Aren't we all though?

KJ Dell'Antonia

I thought we were all having that year, but maybe not.

Sarina Bowen

I'm looking at my goals page here, and I'm kind of astonished to see that I really am accomplishing a lot of them, because every day feels like such a battle. You know, it's I have write a romance, write a thriller, plan another romance, and maybe revise this one other thing. And, man, I'm doing it. I have written the words count for one entire book, even though neither of them is finished yet, but I'm, I'm chugging along. The other stuff I wrote down for doing at home and in my personal life is sort of happening, but it just feels, um, it feels hard, like the weight of the world is weighing down on my week. And so it's actually kind of lovely to look at this and see like, oh, okay, yeah. Well, we're getting some of this done.

Jess Lahey

That's why we do this. That's why it's nice to check in. And I think it also, you know, it's, it goes back to a long time ago. We used to talk about accountability buddies, or accountability bunnies, as we have called them sometimes. And I think it's just great to have them, not just to hold you to task when you're not doing the stuff, but to help you, help you remember that it's important to check in and realize that we are getting the stuff done it may not look exactly like what we were expecting, and in fact, mine going forward, I'll go ahead and go next, because mine looks so different from what I expected it to be, and yet it's going really well. But before I move on, Sarina, is there any chance you could share with us for the big picture like mile high view, what was your word for this year?

Sarina Bowen

Well, I did just notice that I left...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh! I have it your word was "present". I wrote them down. Your word was "present".

Sarina Bowen

You know. And I am. I am not doing a terrible job on presence. I'm not doing a bad job.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Jennie, your word was "Teflon".

Jennie Nash

That's what I thought. Let's stick with Sarina a minute, though, because I'm fascinated by the fact that the way you're describing that you're feeling, and the fact that you achieve these goals and you feel like you're doing well, all of that happened despite the fact that you didn't think it was... like, it's just the daily actions that that lead up to the goals, right? I mean, that sounds silly, but that's like you sit down and you do the work, and you achieve the things.

Sarina Bowen

I guess I do. And part of what's disorienting about this year is that I'm actually writing less overall, and I am going more places. You know, presence means my presence is in several different states and countries, and so that it feels disorienting because I've had to be better at switching from working on the novel, to being on vacation with my family, to working on the novel, to doing a book tour in May, which was super time consuming. But I guess, you know, with some hiccups here and there, like I've been able to switch tasks in a way that is getting it done.

Jennie Nash

That's very cool.

Jess Lahey

It's also nice every once in a while, you know, to look back on those stickers that are on the calendar. And for those of you who have joined us recently, we haven't really talked about stickers in a long time, but our sticker thing is, you know, we all tend to have the same kind of plan book, and on our calendar we get a sticker if we reach whatever goal it was for that day. Often it's a word count goal, and it's really nice to be able to look back... well, I guess it depends on the month, but generally speaking, it's really nice to be able to look back at the calendar and see those little stickers. Plus at the first day of every month, we have a little text thread where we decide what the sticker is going to be, what kind of vibe we're feeling that month, because we do have a lot of stickers. There's a lot of stickers, but Sarina has been killing it with her stickers, and I'm very impressed with her.

Sarina Bowen

I do love to flip back and see how, you know, like, last month, it's like, oh, look at the good job you did. That's so pretty.

Jess Lahey

People ask me all the time if that undercuts that… you know, one of the things I talk about in The Gift of Failure and when I'm speaking at schools, is about, you know, trying to use the carrot and stick method to make kids do what you want them to do. And you're we're not supposed to rely exclusively on extrinsic motivators. We're supposed to rely on things that make us like want to do the thing for the sake of the thing itself. But when you when you reward yourself with something. It is an intrinsic process. And I think that the sticker, for us anyway, has been such a now, it's been going on for a long time, and it's such part of our language as a group of people, and it is really rewarding to slap that sticker on there.

Sarina Bowen

I really believe you about intrinsic versus extrinsic goals, because I know for sure that no sticker chart I ever made for one of my children was any damn good, but like but mine is for me, and that's why it works.

Jess Lahey

Do you know that there's an exception when it comes to sticker charts? There is one situation in which sticker charts work really well for kids, and that's potty training, because there appears to be something about getting out of the diaper and into big boy or big girl panties/underpants, that makes them intrinsically motivated to do it. So if parents out there hearing this and thinking, oh man, sticker charts don't work, and they don't over the long term, but for potty training, for some reason they do anyway, I think it's great. And plus, when we buy the stickers, we're just envisioning all that writing we're going to do. And so when you put the little sticker on there, it's our nice little reward. Am I going next?

Multiple Speakers:

[Overlapping voices]: Yeah. You go next. Go for it.

Jess Lahey

Alright. So my year, my word this year, was a really appropriate and very topic specific, uh, one for me, and my word this year was "growth". And many of you know, I went back and went back to school and I got my master gardening certificate, and I'm now in my intern phase. I have to do two; I have to do 40 hours of volunteer work over the next two years to get my full certification. Working on that. But all things, looking back the first six months of this year, which is when this class ran, and when I was doing studying like I had to study botany and entomology and all that sort of stuff, I have grown a lot this year. In other news, I also after 10 years of debating and planning and learning, I finally got a beehive. So I now have bees, and I have my gardens going. So for me on that side, growth is crazy. And then in terms of my goals, something really interesting happened. And this is another reason having other writers or creatives in your life so important. So I was really struggling with the book proposal I actually wrote. I completed it, and my agent was liking how it was going, and everything was good. And then I just realized through the process of writing it, that it wasn't feeling like the right thing for me to be writing right now. And Sarina had planted an idea in my head months before about something she really wanted me to write like it occurred to her that it would be a really good idea, and I poo pooed it at first, and then I let my brain sort of ruminate on it for a bit, and I realized, oh my gosh, you're right. This is such a great topic. So I started again, which is fine, it's my book proposal. I can do what I want people, don't look at me like that all of you people. They would never do that because they don't look at me like that. I started with a new topic that's really exciting for me, and also requires a lot of growth for me. This isn't like something I could just spit out because I already know the material, and I it's caught... it's forcing me to have to grow in some ways, especially as doing statistical analysis and things like that. And thank you, Sarina, because I know at the moment you mentioned it in the first place, I dismissed it. And I didn't mean to sound dismissive, but you were right. It was a really good idea.

Sarina Bowen

Wow, I didn't know. I mean, I remember this conversation so well, but of course, like it's kind of your friend's jobs to spit ideas at you, like nobody is under any obligation to weigh them. But I find that when people spit ideas at me, I often have an early No, and then it it almost always takes till later until I'm like, Oh, wait...

Jess Lahey

Yeah. Well, it wasn't until I do what I do as part of my process, which is to think, okay, from that angle, that's interesting. What would the chapters be? Let's say, just for fun, if I were to think about this, what would the chapters be? What might my introductory chapter look like? Oh, wait, there's that anecdote that would fit really well here. In fact, yesterday, I got a spam email that I saved because something in that email triggered an idea about something. So it's really... this one has been fun, and I have to credit Sarina with this one. So my goals are going to look a little bit different. But then this other thing happened, which is, I decided to start this new series for this from soup to nuts series that's sort of like a I have a really interesting idea for a nonfiction book. What do I do now? And you can get on that series if you if you become a supporter, because episode one was free, and the rest are going to be for supporters. And I'm guiding this person through the entire book process, the book proposal process. And I realized, aha, if I'm doing this in real time, this is a fantastic excuse for me to be doing the sections I'm assigning to her at the same time. So I'm working through my new proposal for this new idea at the same time she's working through her proposal, which also gets me in a really nice headspace for discussing those sections with her. I have to be very deep in those sections. She's working on her introduction right now and thinking about agents that she's going to query. And while I don't have to query an agent, I very much have to write the introduction. So we've been going back and forth on that, and it's caused me to have to think very deeply about mine too. So it's all, I think this is one of those, like, you know, right thing, right time. I like it. I'm happy, even though I haven't met the goals. I'm very happy.

Jennie Nash

Are you sharing what your topic is? The new topic?

Jess Lahey

Not yet.

Jennie Nash

Okay.

Jess Lahey

Not yet. Soon, I maybe, maybe for our end of the year, check in. I will.

Jennie Nash

Okay.

Jess Lahey

I don't want to lose the juju.

Jennie Nash

My Word of the Year, thank you for reminding me was—thank you for reminding me was “Teflon.” And the reason for that was I had been involved in a trademark battle last year that was very upsetting to me, and I was wanting to step into my power, I think, is what that word “Teflon” meant, and not be pushed around by the winds of fortune, but to stand strong, in what I was doing, and who I was, and what I was standing for. That's what that's what “Teflon” meant to me. And here in the mid-year, oh, my tangible goals were, I wanted to write a book this year, a book about writing and KJ and I have been doing a series where we have been chronicling that progress. And where I stand today is, I feel great about it. I feel great about it, and the process of writing it has been kind of aligned with that idea of Teflon, of keeping really understanding what I want to say, what I believe, stepping into that power. That's actually what the book is about as well. So it's very meta, and it's been hard, much harder than I thought it was going to be, and also much more satisfying than I thought it was going to be, which is nice. And my other goals had to do with my business. I needed to get my business into... the way I describe it is to get it into integrity. I, at the end of last year, 2024, I did a last chance sale on the price that my book coaching certification course was priced at, and the intention was that I needed to raise my price a lot to bring it into integrity with what we were offering and what it was. And I made those moves. I had that and end of year sale, I raised the price, and I joined a business mastermind of other entrepreneurs in nobody's in a space topically close to mine, but a lot of people are in spaces that are similar-ish and the they're all women. Well, that's not true. There's we have one man and are in our cohort, but just people really trying to step into their power as entrepreneurs. And and I've been really giving myself over to this, the work of this business mastermind, and to learning from the coach who's running it. And in terms of Teflon, it feels like all, all of a piece, all the same thing of becoming who, who I am, and really tapping into what I believe. And I've been really surprised at how much more there is to learn. My own brain, my own habits, my own tendencies, my own fears and weaknesses and strengths. It just as it just is really surprising to me, the older I get them, that there's still so much to learn. I don't, I don't, I guess I must have thought it so in some part of me that that you get to a place where you think you know everything, and it's just not true. It's just not true. So I've been really enjoying the learning, and I feel that my business is coming into a place that I always wanted it to be, and the word I would use for that is easeful, full of ease. And that doesn't mean that it's easy, but that it there's an elegance to it and a naturalness to it, and it keep using this word integrity, but it feels like a business that has a lot of integrity. And so I, too, Sarina, feel proud of this year so far and that I have done what I set out to do, and I find it curious that I have already raced to put in new goals and bigger goals and more goals, even for this year, that that it's not enough just to reach the big goals. So that's another topic, perhaps for another day, but kind of aligned with stopping to celebrate that you have achieved those things. I tend to be really bad at about that, and I just keep back filling new goals and new things. And, you know, the goal post keeps moving, but, yeah, I feel good about where I sit.

Sarina Bowen

Well, fantastic. My....

Jess Lahey

Super happy for you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Big surprise in opening my notebook is that I too, am exactly on track to achieve my goal. Because my goal, at least the only one in capital letters, is "COMPLETE NOTHING", and I, I, in fact, am exactly on track to complete nothing this year. I did put some things under that, which is, I do want to draft about a book, but draft means draft. It says that right here on this page; it says draft does not mean finish. So, um...

Sarina Bowen

And are we drafting?

KJ Dell'Antonia

We ,Well, we are sort of barely drafting, but we are, we are we are pulling together a book that is harder than the last ones that I have pulled together. I think, um. And my other goal for this year was my word was, well, they're words, but it was "inner compass". I am supposed to be stopping looking at other people to compare what I'm doing. I'm supposed to be letting other people, you know, do their thing without feeling responsible to it, listening to myself, not absorbing the tension of the world around me, and I, I am definitely still working on that. Like that has been a daily preoccupation of mine, is to work on this book, not some other book, not some more appealing book, not the book that some friend is is working on, not the book that I just read, that I really liked, but this book. Yeah, I'm I am doing it. I can't. I'm striving towards enjoying that process, right? Yeah, yeah. I want. I want. I don't want to be living so much in the world right now. That's and that's not actually a commentary on the world. I just think I need to write this book out of my own head. So it's kind of hard.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, it is hard, but it's also, you know, for me, sometimes reassuring, to find ways to block the other stuff out. I mean, I had to make a very specific choice this year to get off Instagram. I'm not off completely, but I'm on it a lot less because I was finding myself. We've talked about this before. We've talked about jealousy and we've talked about FOMO before, but I had some friends who had terrific success with a book, and they absolutely 100% deserved it. And the they got insane media. And every time I went on there, I would see them or someone else and get... I felt it happen in me, in that moment, I felt myself go. But why didn't I get that? Why didn't I do that? And I had to, and I turned to Tim and I said, I have to stop going on Instagram, because it's making me feel really bad about myself, and about and not good for my friends who are having these incredible successes. And so, you know, I think it's just a maybe it's because I'm not putting a book out this year or whatever, but I it was, it was forcing me into a bad place. So sometimes shutting that stuff out, man, it's been good. And you know, my new favorite thing to do, instead of going into on Instagram, is...

Jennie Nash

Bees!

Jess Lahey

And I sit, I know! I go up and I sit with them. And I was just talking to my dad about this. He said, you know, he was watching the bees with me. And he said, you know, you could, like, if you put a chair up here, you could just sit up here for a long time and watch the bees go in and out and see how much pollen is on their legs and all that sort of stuff. And I said, oh, no, I do that. I sit up there, and it's like “Bee TV”, and I watch them go in and out and in and out and in and out, and I just watch what they do. And that's I'm trying to anytime I feel the need to, like, get on Instagram. I'm like, No, go, and watch the bees instead. That's more fun anyway, and it doesn't make you feel bad about yourself.

Jennie Nash

I love that “Bee TV”. Come on. That's great.

KJ Dell'Antonia

They're pretty cool. I also love like, you know, like the this is where my head goes, and this is the thing I want to stop. Don't put, like, a camera on them and monetize them and, like, make them famous, viral bees, you know, like... ‘Come watch the bee camera channel and you can relax’. And like, I, I mean, you know, we totally do that, if you if you want to, but like, I need to stop having those thoughts about everything. Yeah, like, I have chicks? Should I be putting them on Instagram so everyone can see my chick? They're just they're chicks. I have chicks. It's fine to have chicks, without having chicks loudly, right?

Jess Lahey

Well, I actually had a really interesting— speaking of that. I had a very interesting moment where I realized I had been listening to music when I was gardening, and sometimes I’m listening to books. Shout out to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new book Atmosphere. I couldn't gobble it down fast enough. But I also can't hear what the bees are doing when I'm listening to something. So I can't and I have to listen, because you can tell when they're starting to get upset by the sound of their buzzing. Not it gets louder, it gets more intense. Little things happen, and so you can sort of back off or use the smoker and calm them down a little bit. And it's been really nice. And so I've taken the ear buds out of the ears, but in the defense of the people who have gone before me doing this and took the time to film it, I've learned a ton from them. So I'm very grateful to a bunch of people who. Did think to turn the camera on the bees, but I'm not going to be doing that myself.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, that wasn't meant to like, you know, yeah, no, no, no there. And I was just watching a YouTube video to show me how to set up a smoker. I mean, you know, yeah, all that stuff is great.

Jess Lahey

Yeah it's, there's a I had to do something in the hive that really scared me. I had to get rid of some extra comb that was sticking up, and it's going to make the bees mad when you do it, because things are going to die, and I'm going to squish some things. And so I watched like, 10 instructional videos by other people on how to do it, so I'd covered every angle from an educational perspective. And Tim was like, “I have never seen you this intimidated to do anything... like you're so fearless”, and I'm like, but it’s the bees. I'm freaked. I'm going to hurt the bees. So I watched a lot of videos to do that, and that was great. I learned a lot. So anyway, ah, but no, I will not be monetizing my bees. Those are for me. Those are for me. Alright. How's everybody feeling? Everybody good? I think this is good. Because you all going into this, people are like, oh, no, I'm afraid to look at my word. What if I didn't accomplish anything? And I think all of us are sort of leaving this feeling like, Oh, we did some stuff.

KJ Dell'Antonia

This is good, yeah, at least being the person that I, that I that I wanted to be this year.

Jennie Nash

KJ, loved that you put complete nothing like you were trying to give yourself a break, right? You're trying to let yourself just be different, kind of be than bees, but and maybe you haven't allowed yourself that, but it gives you so much leeway, right? And drafting a book to your point is, there can be a lot of definitions of that.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, and I don't know, I just and I think it possibly has to do with having been in such a prominent and high profile position earlier in my career that I have this tendency to feel like, if I'm not getting feedback, I'm not doing anything. Like if I'm not sort of constantly, you know, loudly announcing myself to people, and telling them what I think, and what I'm doing, and how it feels to be doing the thing, and maybe what they should be doing, then I'm, I'm, you know, like, who even am I? And I can name like, writers that I want to be like, that are not like sort of living hugely and putting their chicks on social media unless they want to, like you could tell the difference between people who really want to and people who don't. And but I am scared that I am not as good as those writers, and therefore I should probably just stick to being a shouty person begging you to pay attention to me and I, yeah, um, I'm definitely just sort of trying to figure that, figure out my way within that world right now.

Jess Lahey

Fair enough. Yeah, sometimes you need to do that.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah.

Jess Lahey

Alright. Well, I like it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Okay. Well, we know Jess has read something good lately because she mentioned, yes, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere. Atmospheric?

Jess Lahey

Loved it. I listened on audio, by the way, and there are two female audio book narrators, one whom you probably have heard of a million times, Julia Whelan, who's everywhere, and she's fantastic. And then the other one I'm going to look up so that I can come up with it. But um...

KJ Dell'Antonia

While you're looking her up, I wanted to say... I was trying to figure out why I'm not going to read this, this book. I like, love Taylor Jenkins Reid, I've loved her last ones, and I was, I don't like, I only like space books if they're like, set in the future, and space is sort of under control. Other than that, a space book, to me, is like a water book. And I, I don't, I don't like it. It's too much scary, okay, too much scary, unwieldy stuff. So I don't plan on reading this.

Jess Lahey

It's just so you know, it's hardly about space. And by the way, the other narrator, narrator is Kristen DiMercurio, and it is a it is a romance, it is an adventure, it is a thriller. It's all those things, and it's just, she's, she really, the language is really, she's the language is just great.

KJ Dell'Antonia

But also, there's plenty of books. It's fine. If one does not interest you in this moment, read a different book. It's all good.

Jess Lahey

Absolutely.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Jennie Nash

I'm so curious. I know this is a ridiculous question to ask any writer, but how she lands on her topics. Because, like, tennis, you know, Malibu, celebrity space, like, it's so great, and...

Jess Lahey

She had to do a lot. Lot of research for this book, because there's a lot of really highly technical stuff, and her protagonists are highly technical people. And so yeah, that she had to do a lot of research.

KJ Dell'Antonia

The Book Riot people pointed out that she's kind of the queen of women doing jobs.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, But to also Lauren, Christina Lauren, also, they are big fans of like, they're, you know, agents, they're dude ranchers, they're, you know, they hop from thing to thing, and that's one of the things I enjoy about them. It's sort of like I could do this, or I could do that, and you get to, like, sample all these different lives through the characters that they do as well. Anything else people have read?

KJ Dell'Antonia I just finished the book.

Multiple Speakers:

[All laughing]

KJ Dell'Antonia

Thank you. I just finished Tess Gerritsen’s The Spy Coast at Sarina's recommendation, and it was so good, just really endlessly, just really entertaining. And not a low stress read, but a really great read. I'm going to read the next one.

Jess Lahey

It's on my list too.

Sarina Bowen

Then I would like you to know, that the next one I actually feel might be even better.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh, can't wait.

Sarina Bowen

Because she's done such a fantastic job of setting up this pretty unusual group of people. And in the second book, she really like... not eases, but sort of sinks into it and let’s, lets the strange setup really play out in a way that is totally charming.

Jennie Nash

Well, I've had rocky personal things going on in the last month, and so my reading has been sort of interestingly. I've gravitated towards different things that I might normally and there's a book that I've been gravitating toward at night when I want to sort of turn my brain off and just get ready to go to bed. And it's called Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench. And it is the most charming book you will ever read. It's, it's Judi Dench talking to her friend, Brendan O'Hea about the roles that she's played over the years, the Shakespearean role she's played over the years. And so you'll get a chapter on like Lady Macbeth. But it's, it's just Judi Dench riffing about like that time when Anthony and, you know, Sir Anthony, and she's talking about, you know, like all the famous actors, and it's, and then she's, you know, Brandon will ask her, Well, how do you play the scene when she's, you know, washing her hands or whatever, and she'll just say these very charming things about... it's just so fun and insightful, and you can just, it's almost like reading poems. They're just little snippets of, oh, now we're going to read about when she played Titania. And it's just so great. So it's just nothing but total delight. And it also makes you realize the incredible work that actors do. So...

Jess Lahey

I may have to do that one on audio, because I'm assuming she reads that one, and oh my gosh, that would just be an amazing audio read.

Jennie Nash

She does. And my daughter listened to it and said, it could not be more charming. Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Sarina, have you read anything lately?

Sarina Bowen

I am in a big drafting phase and not a big reading phase, and everything I checked out of the library ends up being recalled before I finish it. It's just really pathetic over here.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Well, I'm going to, I'm going to do one for you then. We both read, Say You'll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez. And we enjoy Abby Jimenez.

Sarina Bowen

Yes, we did!

KJ Dell'Antonia

We both enjoyed the heck out of that one. And also it has lots of career in it. If you like a hot vet. Yeah, that’s a hot vet book.

Sarina Bowen

It was darling. And what we especially loved about it is how much she gets out of a book that, on paper, not a whole lot happens, which sounds like a condemnation of the book, but it's absolutely not. Like she just doesn't need... big drama to make this book fantastic. And that was just really skillful.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, no, it's, it's excellent, huge fun. Alright, kids, we would love to hear, if you, I mean, go back, look at your goals from the beginning of the year. Are you also surprisingly achieving what you set out to achieve? Um, or, you know, do you want to regroup? What's going on with you? We would, we would love to hear back. If you hit the show notes and comment in the in the comments, we will absolutely talk back to you, because, you know...

Jess Lahey

Yeah, yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That's our idea of fun.

Jess Lahey

Might even have to do a little chat thread in, in, in Substack when this comes out. Well, we'll see how it goes.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, I don't know. People don't seem to love chatting or comments. I can't figure this out. We cannot figure out how to talk to y'all, but we would like to. We're trying. Okay?

Jess Lahey

We very much miss some of the forums part of it, but we'll figure it out. Alright. This has been fantastic, and 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.

This is the how-to book you need right now, the one with “am I ready to query” and “what does my platform need to look like” and “what if no one buys my book” and “what happens if someone buys my book”. We have a great episode, talking about creating this book, writing this book and living this book—because Kate McKean is not only a very experienced agent, she has also lived the answer to all those questions and that’s part of what makes it special.

Follow: Kate McKean Agents and Books

Also find her at agentsandbooks.com

And buy this book! Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life

#AmReading

Kate: Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks into the Forest (Dark, feminist and rage-y)

KJ: Francesca Segal, Welcome to Glorious Tuga (not any of those above things)

Alison Espach, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance (somewhere in between)

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.

Transcript below!

EPISODE 453 - TRANSCRIPT

KJ Dell'Antonia

Writers and readers, KJ here, if you love Hashtag 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 Hashtag AmReading email. Is it about what I've been reading and loving? It is. And if you like what I write, you'll like what I read. But it is also about everything else I’ve been hashtag am doing, sleeping, buying clothes and returning them, launching a spelling bee habit, reading other people's weekly emails. Let's just say it's kind of the email about not getting the work done, which I mean that's important too, right? We can't work all the time. It's also free, and I think you'll really like it. So you can find it at kjdellantonia.com or kjda.substack.com or by clicking on my name on Substack, if you do that kind of thing. Or, of course, in the show notes for this podcast, come hang out with me. You won't be sorry.

Multiple Speakers:

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 going to 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. This is the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done. And I interviewed someone last week, who told me that they did not realize I did the introduction live, to which I was like, "Wait, does it sound the same to you every time?" Because I don't know, in my mind, I go off on a tangent every single time. So I am KJ Dell'Antonia, as you probably know, author of three novels and a couple of nonfiction books, and former editor at the New York Times, and, gosh, I have, I have done a bunch of things, but I'm not going to tell you about them right now, because I am really excited about my guest today, who is Kate McKean, and she is the creator of Agents and Books, which is a Substack slash, an email newsletter. For those of you that are not Substack users, you don't have to know what that is to get this, but I'm telling you fundamentally that if you're listening to my words right now, you should be signed up for that, and you're probably going to need the book that we're talking about, which is called Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life. It is excellent. It is all the books that I relied on deeply when I got into this industry, rolled up in one book, which doesn't mean you won't buy all the others, because we're writers, and that's what we do. We buy books about writing. We're supposed to right? But I feel like sometimes that's what we do, we buy books about writing, anyway. All right, I'm done introducing, Kate I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for coming.

Kate McKean

I'm really happy to be here. I'm excited to chat.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, this is going to be good. So this is, this is the book that anyone who is considering traditional publishing needs as both an encouraging guide to how hard it is going to be to get to all the points that you need to get to be ready to even try to traditionally publishing, and then to the process of traditionally publishing. This is how do you know when you're finished? This is how do you know when to pitch? This is how do you pitch. This is how do you deal with the inevitable rejections when you are pitched, this is what happens next. This is the good news and the bad news and the other news and all the news. And the blurb on the front is that it is a wildly generous guide. It is from Sarah Knight, who I adore, and it is! That is, that is most accurate...

Kate McKean

Thank you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Blurb that I have ever read, I think, or...

Kate McKean

Sarah was so kind to read. I know she reads the newsletter too, and we know each other from way back when she was an editor at Simon Schuster. And I could not be more grateful that she said the kind words she did.

KJ Dell'Antonia

She's amazing, and they are and you this is a generous book. So I do have questions, but first I just have to gush for a while. So...

Kate McKean

I’ll take it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I have kind of an unspoken policy of being very judicious in taking writing advice of any kind from someone who has not published. And there are 100% exceptions to that. I have an amazing freelance editor who she reads and she edits and wow. But there are also people who write books about writing from a place of having written things, and that's about it. And. And you know that truly, I mean, first of all, you're, you're an agent, you've, you know, you've been in this industry, you've got masses of experience. And secondly, although this is your first published book, it is not your first finished book, it is not...

Kate McKean

Not at all.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Even your first pitched book. It's not the book that got you an agent. And you are so generous in sharing those experiences with people, and they're going to help.

Kate McKean

I hope so. I mean, it's not lost on me that the first published book I have about writing and publishing books, and I even say it in the book. You know, I've tried to sell several picture books and several novels, and maybe I'm just not a great fiction writer. You know, it's very possible that is true. We'll find out. I don't know. I do have a picture book coming out in 2026, so one of them did eventually work. It's coming out with Sourcebooks, and I'm very excited. It's, you know, I know that people probably think, Oh, well, you're just, you're an agent. You could just, like, walk into a publisher and get a book deal like my friend. I am sorry that it's not true. If it had been true, I would have written 50,000 books by now, because I actually really, I mean, it's my job, but I also like doing it myself, but I'm not. I'm not special, you know, like I'm special and privileged because I know all the ins and outs, but I'm not. Nobody's just like rolling out the red carpet and handing me 1000's, billions of dollars to write a book.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, what I have said about about my fiction writing experience was, and I feel quite certain it was true for you as well. The thing that I had, and I will own it, is that I knew the people that I was sending my query to would look at it, because they knew who I was. That actually just meant it had to be awfully good, because it also means they're going to remember who you are. And if it sucks, they'll remember that next time. Whereas, if you don't have that particular thing and you send out a query that that sucks, the agent is not going to remember your name. So the next time you roll around and you send a better query, it's going to be fine, but the next time that writer rolls around and sends a better query. People are going to be like, well, yeah, I don't know.

Kate McKean

Yikes!

KJ Dell'Antonia

This was not so great.

Kate McKean

Yep!

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yikes! I got to do this again. I got to send another tactful rejection to this person that I so they're coming into it with... So it's good...

Kate McKean

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Because you know, people read it and it's not the slush pile and yay. And it's bad because people read it.

Kate McKean

People, people really do think that it's who you know and publishing, and of course, that helps, like you just said.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

But also, you don't want to send your books to your best friends. Like, Jim McCarthy at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, who my agent is—Michael Bourret at Dystel Goderich & Bourret. Jim is one of my best friends in the entire world, in my life. Like, I do not want Jim to be my agent, even though he's fantastic, because I prefer Jim as my friend. Michael and I have been friends for more than 20 years. Jim and I are much closer. And it's not like, oh, I could just throw away my friendship with Michael, but we just know each other in a way that would lend us to be able to work together really well. And I...

KJ Dell'Antonia

My agent is my friend...

Kate McKean

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Because she's my friend, but she was my agent first. But I have a friend, a really good friend, that I have dinner with regularly, that's an agent we ditch about, dish about, and we just have, you know, and I don't want her to be my agent, because then we couldn't talk so much smack about…

Kate McKean

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

You know, among other things, and yeah. So yeah. I mean, I do like to to start. I like to remind people that it is actually not who you know in this it's faster to get people to read something if you have a way in, we cannot deny that. But people are actually out there looking for great things. You just have to write a great thing, which you know that's hard.

Kate McKean

Impossible sometimes.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Or impossible sometimes. All right, so how did you decide to do... write through it? Did it seem like kind of the obvious thing? Or did you feel like, oh, that's been done. Like, how, how did you come to this one?

Kate McKean

I, I definitely started the newsletter with the idea in the back of my head that maybe this could turn into a book. Because I had, I had turned newsletters and Twitter feeds and Instagrams and all kinds of things like that into books for 20 years. So obviously that was in the back of my head. But I also knew that there are, as you said, tons of other books about writing and publishing out there, and who am I? And what different thing could I bring to the table? And so I started Agents and Books with just a clear goal of, like, writing posts that were like the nuts and bolts of publishing, so that people could have them in this one little place, you know? And it's not the only place in the world you can learn about publishing. But I was like, I want a little place where, you know, if you can click through and find out about option clauses and query letters and, you know, all the little commission rates and royalties and what's earning out and all these things that you could kind of go to one place and click around and see if you could find it, and that was the goal. And then I also ended up talking a lot about the feelings of writing, because they go hand in hand. You know, it's like you're going to write a bad query letter if you are terrified of writing a query letter, and you're going to put agents on these pedestal if you are terrified of agents that you know, like there were these magical beings that can, like, take our magic wands and bestow the power of publishing on you, like we can't... we're just people who like books like, so I wanted to demystify things. I wanted to like, share the nuts and bolts, but, and I wanted to let everybody know that everybody feels this way, like everybody is terrified, everybody hates it. You know, no one is alone and that that felt like the right tack to take in a book, because I guess I hadn't seen that before, or what hadn't, you know, come right out and said it, you know, like, here's how to write query letter, and here's how not to lose your mind while you do it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

You know, because the same, that’s the same thing, and I thought about it for a long time, you know, to try the right pitch, honestly, for the book.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, no, I can. I mean, one glorious thing that this has going for us at the moment, even besides that, is that it is very timely and immediate. Because I can give you some things about writing query letters that are probably somewhat out. I mean, they're good, but they date quickly. So it has that. But also, you are right. I've not seen that combination of both. Here's how and here's how not to be so terrified that you screw up, and here's how to feel when they start coming back. Or, you know, here's how you're going to feel, because you really don't need me to tell you how to feel. But here's some thoughts on like how to deal with that, and the fact that it has happened to everyone, and also the fact that it has happened to you. Um, I'm that's terrible. I wish you had every single success, but also, since you didn't, I am so grateful that you put that in here.

Kate McKean:

I mean, my—you know—my beloved book of my heart, literary adult novel, didn't sell. And okay, it did. It didn't. I don't... I can't... I can't magically make it a book. It might be flawed. I don't know. I haven't read it in, like, four years, and I'm fine with that. Um, but I'm going to—I'll just—I'm going to... I'm going to write another one, you know? Because what are the options? Like, I really—I had a moment when my adult novel didn't sell, and I was like, I might—what if I never publish a book? Like, this was my dream. Like, since I was eight years old, I wanted to be a published author. I wanted to see my book on a shelf with my name on it, and what if I don't? Like, what if that just will never happen to me? And it kind of—you know—punched me in the stomach, and... This is telling in so many ways, of the assumptions I was making and the privilege I had and all of these things. But you know that punch in the gut could have made me stop and just be like, "Well, I'm not willing to face that, so let me decide..." Or, if I really want it that bad, I got to go do it again. And just—I'm choosing to do it again. And I cannot control if I publish any more books, except by writing them.

KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.

Kate McKean

And then that's all I can do. And then I have to hand it over to the other forces in the world to see if anybody likes it. And then, you know—I mean, people got to buy this book, like... but not—I mean, it's not going to be great if nobody buys this book, which, you know... I—it... I can only control so much of that too. But I hope people do.

KJ Dell'AntoniaAt least ten people need to be sitting down and clicking right now. It's Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life, Kate McKean— is it Kian or Keen?

Kate McKeanKeen.

KJ Dell'AntoniaKeen. Kate McKean.

Kate McKeanYeah.

KJ Dell'AntoniaM-C-K... you know, what if you just start with "writer"... I mean, honestly...

Kate McKeanThere's only two Kate McKean’s in the world on the internet. So I'm one of them.

KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd I feel like, if you just sort of go "agents," "books," "book," "K," you're going to come up with this. Because...

Kate McKeanYep.

KJ Dell’Antonia:

Yeah. That's what's going to help. And the other thing that I really like about this book is the honesty about all the time that you spent not writing, and I mean, you've already said it, but, and it is true. My number one favorite, well, one of my favorite writing books, which nobody else, as far as I know, has ever read, is it's called something like “87 reasons your book won't sell” [78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might]. It's, you know, and it's in its 80… and 15 why it might and the number one reason, the first reason, chapter one, is because you haven't written it yet. You can't sell that. But, I mean, yeah, proposals, fine. That's but, and that's in here if you're writing nonfiction, it's in here to talk about how to do a proposal. But even that, if you haven't written your way to a good proposal, that's not going to sell either. So...

Kate McKean

And the fear of being late or too late, or you hang missed the bus is so tied up into that, because I'm going to be 46 this weekend, and I my first ever book will be coming out after I have turned 46 and if you had told me at 26 I would have, like, lied down on the floor and cried. That I had 20 more years to wait to get published, because I thought it was going to happen. You're not, you know, all of the bravado and the ego is you have when you're in your 20s and who's, you know, patted on the head for their whole life and told they were a good writer by every English teacher, you know, bully for me. But like the I didn't write any books, you know, like, I didn't write any books to get published until I was in my 30s, and I couldn't have spent any more time doing that because I was trying to build my career as a literary agent. And that wasn't, that wasn't on purpose. I just had to pay the rent too. So, you know, it was I didn't. I dragged my feet for many, many years, as I write about in the book, and then I had a kid, and then you get... you have so little time that you have to choose so deliberately what you do that it can sometimes make you more productive. And so when I had all the time in the world in my 20s as a single person in New York City, living the life of putting everything on credit cards and being in massive debt and not making any money in publishing, but still having buckets of time. I didn't do any meaningful work, and I didn't write a book in my MFA program. I did write a book's worth of stories and essays, but not anything that could have been published as is, and nothing that I used as a springboard for a longer piece, and that’s just what happened. That's fine too.

KJ Dell’Antonia:

Yeah.

Kate McKean

But I'm not late. This is, this is, I needed to be this person to write this book, and then we'll see what happens next.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. I mean, you know, you can't start any sooner than today if you're starting and but I did. I just I appreciated that this book kind of starts with, go ahead, read this book, but also finish your book. Write what you're writing, like, read it. Get ready, daydream, hope for the best, but also find a time, sit down, get some work done, which is, of course, what we say every week on the podcast, because if you don't do the work, yeah, there's nothing. There's nothing anyone can do for you. Well, I mean, I suppose you could become a famous person and then hire someone else, but that is presumably not anyone trajectory, yeah, that's, that's, that's different. That's, that's not the same thing, all right, so what? What was the hardest bit of writing this? This has got a chapter on pretty much anything anybody could imagine. How to read a book deal, how to query, how to you know, how the editors work, how books are sold, all those things. What was the toughest bit?

Kate McKean

The tough bit, honestly, was the what happens after the book sells. And because I realized that I had, I had a view of it for my seat as a literary agent, and every publisher does it a little bit differently and but I've only seen it through the eyes of the books I have sold. So I had to go and ask a lot of editors. I was like, Okay, this is what I think happens. Is this what happens like, when do you get first pass pages? And, you know, do I get? When does the index gain? You know, like, there were just questions I had. I had to make sure I had a consensus answer instead of the this is what happened to me answer, you know?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Right.

Kate McKean

Or this is my what I think answer. And so it just was, I had to make sure. I had to do more research about that than I anticipated, because I didn't want to make I wanted to make sure I wasn't wrong. You know? Hey, I had to make sure. But it wasn't a hard the writing process at all wasn't what I would call hard. I I'm a fastidious outliner, and I love an outline. Outline is my roadmap, like I know where I'm going in the morning I makes me happy. I'm happy to change it, if I have to, but I love it. I'm an outliner, not a pantser, and when I get going, I can go, but then there's just every other million things to do with a book, you know, like the nine times I've read, and then I recorded the audio last week, and which was so fun, but hard, very, very hard. But maybe it's a little bit like, you know, like you kind of forget the hard part after a while, but I don't have any, like, real pain points with the creation of this book. It was definitely hard. It is a lot of labor. It is a lot of time. There were many times where I was like, if I read this paragraph one more time, I will scream, but yeah, I’d do it again.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So it sounded as I as I read through it like, like, finding your structure was maybe a little more challenging than you expected it to be, because it seems like it would be pretty obvious, but then it sounds like there were things where you're like, well, maybe this goes here, or maybe it goes here. Did it surprise you how much you had to play with the structure in the editing?

Kate McKean

Yes, it because everything made sense when it came out of my brain.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Of course.

Kate McKean

You know, like I could, it makes sense to me that this linked to that and then get... you have an editor. My editor, Stephanie Hitchcock, was wonderful. She was like, oh, yeah, this part does not make any sense. And I was like, Oh, totally. If you step out of it and look at it through somebody else's eyes, you're like, Yeah, I didn't explain anything about, you know, royalty statements or whatever, right?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, the rule is if somebody else says it doesn't make sense, you have to listen. You don't have to do what they say to do to fix it, but you do have to, you have to... Yeah, because you can't hold the reader by the hand. Say, oh, no, no, no. See what I meant...

Kate McKean

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of times the way I wrote the outline was kind of the way it came out of my head and it made sense, but, you know, I’m in a vacuum.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So I'm torn between talking about the writing of Write Through It and talking about, of course, the contents, which are exactly what our listeners are going to be interested in. So tell me what in here to you, sort of answers the most questions that you get as somebody who gets a lot of emailed questions about this process, because you invite them by having, having an email or having, not by having an email address, which is not an invitation to send people questions. People questions, but by having the agents and plus and books email you, you've put yourself out there as a guide for people and there, I mean, I can name only a few agents in the business that do that, and a couple of publicists, and that makes you like, you know, it gives you a certain profile, and people ask questions. So what in here answers the most questions to you?

Kate McKean

I think, I personally, I would say the stuff about a platform, about the marketing stuff and platform. Everybody's worried about their platform. Everybody thinks they have to have 1000 followers on Instagram. Everybody was so worried about this. They and it's, it's shifting all the time. I mean, I hope, I hope we don't get 16 new social media platforms in the next month so that this isn't completely out of date, like things are going to change. I mean, Twitter completely changed while I was writing this book, but I but there's a lot about social media in there, yes, but there are so many other things that are your platform that people don't realize and they think that you have to have these numbers before you're allowed to write a book. And that's not how it is. That's not the rule. There isn't this, like, okay, where you get so many on this platform and so many on that add them together, it equals a book deal. Like, no, but it... the reason you need a platform is because you are going to do this marketing for your book, and that is also okay, because you are going to do it better than the publisher. A lot of you know angst about publishers don't market anything anymore, and nothing ever happens. And like they actually do, could they do more? Yes. I wish every book had a billion dollar marketing budget and 17 people to work on it, but that is not the industry we have. So...

KJ Dell'Antonia

There's not really anywhere to do this stuff anymore.

Kate McKean

Yeah, yeah, there's nowhere to do it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I mean the world... the world has changed.

Kate McKean

Yeah, there's, yeah, there's no news coverage for books, hardly anymore, you know? And algorithms are horrible, all these things. So, so if you have a way for readers to talk to you directly and get news from you directly, that's your primary marketing outlet. And so that's why you need it, not because the number equals book deal or validation or proof. It's because that's how you sell books. And it's not the only way, and it's not even a great way, but it is a way that readers need, even, I mean nonfiction 100%, it's like one of the most important things when you're writing nonfiction, and it’s getting to be more important for fiction. It's just also more it's useful when you're writing fiction, but it's just not as like, don't, don't even try until you've started a TikTok or whatever.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, I just, I just finished a novel that I completely enjoyed, Welcome to Glorious Tuga by — I think her name is Francesca. It's either Sega or Segal [Francesca Segal]. And after I finished it, I thought to myself, you know, I wonder, because, because I'm a writer, readers don't do this, but Is this her first book? You know, does she? Is she somewhere where I can follow her? Because I'm kind of interested in how she did this, I'd like to, and I went to look her up. And fundamentally, this is a person with very little platform that I can see. They turned out to be British. So that is, I think, a little bit different. But there wasn't an email that I could sign up for. There wasn't... I was willing to do all those things. I was kind of jealous.

Kate McKean

Definitely, oh, definitely.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

My wonderful assistant isn't on social media. And I'm like, Wow, what a life, that's amazing.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, so, I mean, so I there was very little point to that other than that, it's not, apparently required, and yet it's probably required of you. Sorry.

Kate McKean

Right, you're not the except…, like, if you don't want to be on a specific platform, then don't do it, because you'll make bad posts.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yes!

Kate McKean

Hate it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yes.

Kate McKean

Fair game, and also, if your market isn't on there, then don't go on there, or you don't prioritize that.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. But you can still find me on TikTok, and if you would like an example of how to not do something like that. That would be it. Yeah, there's about six things that are pitiful and sad, and I regret them, and I should go take them down, but that would involve looking at them again, and that would be really embarrassing for me. So I'm not going to do it.

Kate McKean

I mean, I'm not on TikTok. I do Instagram reels. They're horrible. Reels are like bad Tiktok’s from three weeks ago, but doesn't whatever. It's what I have chosen to do. But if, but to the writers out there, if you hate something like you can kind of maybe opt out a specific thing, but that doesn't make you the exception to every rule, right? Like, just because it's hard doesn't mean you get to bail out because everything's hard and you got to do hard things all the time. That's life. Sorry. So yeah. And also, I want to say too, if you are unsafe on a platform. Don't be there, no, but don't that's not a question. No publisher would be like; you should really be on Twitter. And you're like, I'm a trans person. I'm not going to go on Twitter. It is not safe for me. And they’d be like...they're like, yes, cool, cool, yeah, no problem.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah…definitely not. Yeah. So okay, that that doesn't surprise me. I thought you were going to say query letters, but...

Kate McKean

I was going to say query letters, but every it's, it's so much, there's always so much query letters.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah and there's others, there's, there's more of an answer to that, like...

Kate McKean

Yeah, yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

You know, there is a way to do that. There's an accessible, checklist-able, figure out, able, learnable process for that, I would argue that there is not that for social media and platform.

Kate McKean

100%.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That is a really is a it's constantly changing, and it's different for everyone which query letters really, they do change, but they are not different from everyone. Do not make your quality query letter different from everyone else's. That's a bad idea.

Kate McKean

No. It's so annoying. It's, it's, no one is going to be wowed by the inventiveness of your query letter, and it’s like sending a singing telegram to apply for a job. You're like, No, don't. Don't do that. No one wants to hire you, if that's what you're going to do.

KJ Dell'Antonia

What is… can you... can you give us an example of someone getting creative with a query letter, just for fun that is not going to out the person?

Kate McKean

You know, I would say that. Now, everyone is much more educated about query letters, and so the random stuff doesn't happen as often. The memorable things are people doing. And these are the general examples you'll get too. It's like writing the query letter in the voice of your character, which is like, okay, but I'm not signing your character up. I'm signing you up. I would like to talk to them please, you know? And then there's the inexplicably, inexplicably short ones that are like, here's my book. Thanks. You're like, I need context. Like, even when you go to the store to buy a book, you have context for what you're shopping for you know what section you're in. You know if it's a hardcover, paperback, whatever you have context. And if you do not give me context for a query letter, I don't know what you're talking about. And then the ones that really get me too are the ones that are like, you're probably going to hate this. I'm like, okay, cool. You just made the decision for me. Thank you. I have to make 400 decisions today, and now it's 399 Cool. Thank you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so get that one right. But social media, there is no recipe, but at least there is some advice in, in Write Through It. And yeah, I can't, I can't say enough about how much I suspect most of our listeners would really benefit from and love this book. If you have not, yourself, been in the industry for 20 years, and even if you have, you're going to get stuff out of this. What I got out of it, and what I desperately needed was somewhere, I think, towards the end, you talk about how, you know, 20% of the way into a draft, you're going to hate it, and then with 20,000 words to go, you're going to hate it. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm there. I'm hating it. We joke around the podcast that we need to create, like, a, like a book growth chart, sort of like for babies, like, oh, you hate your book. You're right on target. Feed it some solid foods next.

Kate McKean

Yeah, exactly.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

And I get a lot of when you go to write another book, you you're like, wow, yeah. And that's what did I forget. Did I ha, but I did it before. You don't know, you don't know how to write this book. You wrote that book, and it's different every time. And that's like a learning curve that you don't get to until you write your first one, whether it's published or not. But like everybody feels this way, my clients, who are graphic novelists, feel this way. My novelist, my, you know, picture book writers, like every single writer I talked to has been like, oh, how do you do this again? Whoops, I forgot.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, yeah. I like you, and I'm a fan of the outline or the blueprint, or, you know, how, however you do it. And I have just hit a point where I need to go back and redo that and that's hard. I would really much rather just chug along the path that I have set for myself. But sometimes you can't do that.

Kate McKean

That's writing too. It's like, the word count doesn't go up, and that's the metric we all want to use about our productivity. But then you have to stop for a week and do your stupid outline or whatever, and you're like, but I didn't get any work done, but you did, because then the next two weeks you can just write a billion words. And yeah, you know, you built a fire, so...

KJ Dell'Antonia

And yet, the process is hard and slow, and also hard and slow, and even when it's fast, it's still slow, and even when it feels easy, it'll be hard later. Yeah, and I liked that. That was that that's all in here, but not in a bad way, in a Hello, this is what you have signed up for.

Kate McKean

Yep.

KJ Dell'Antonia

In a “Welcome” kind of way.

Kate McKean

Yeah, it's you're in the club. Yeah? Everybody hating writing and not being able to stop.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, yeah.

Kate McKean

It's the thing we love to hate the most.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I don't hate it when it's going well, I don't, I don't hate it, but, man, it'd be nice if it were easier and faster and more like, I don't know, walk in the park, okay. But it's not. All right, well, so the book is Write Through this, I'm sorry, Write Through It, and it's wonderful, and I've said that about 56 times. So anything else that people should know about why they should go right out, I would recommend getting it in paper, because I think you're going to want to scribble on it, and I also think you're going to want to go back to it a lot. But you know, y'all do you. It's available in all the formats; apparently it was read out loud, too.

Kate McKean

Out loud by me.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah!

Kate McKean

I think that it's useful to have as in print. And I did write it thinking that you'd go back and forth and be like, Okay, well, today I'm writing my query letter, I’ve got to go to chapter three or whatever. And the other thing, the other reason I wrote this book, is that if you are a writer, and the people in your life know it, or if you're an editor or freelancer whatever, and they want to ask you questions about publishing, you can just give them the book like I literally wrote it as like a favor to my friends who are writers and editors, whose uncle corners them at the family reunion and says, ‘So I want to write a kid's book.’ And you're like, ‘Okay, I would like to go talk to my cousins, but here, I — here's the book for you.’ You know?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Kate McKean

It is the service I am providing through this book. And so if you want to avoid having people email you to say, can I pick your brain. Be like, oh goodness, I'm just so busy. But you know what? You should have Kate's book, and just send them a link.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I love this. I love this. For all of us, it is absolutely going to fill that need. So maybe you want to have three so you can go and hand one…

Kate McKean

I mean, I think good plan, it’s a great idea. Just buy a case, stick it in your house.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, maybe put it in the back of your car. You never know when you're going to need this.

Kate McKean

No, I think it's a it makes a great gift for all occasions, even if they're not writers.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Probably they'd like to be... everybody. Like, there's some statistic about how many people want to write a book. So, yeah, you could just do it.

Kate McKean

What the saying? That grads, dads, and there's another one...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Dads, grads, and...

Kate McKean

Something like...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Mom! Its Moms, Dads and Grads. I know that doesn't wrap run, but that's the Book Riot podcast that, um, that I will yeah and...

Kate McKean

Yeah, this is a big book buying season. Is like, Mother's Day, Father's Day, graduation. So you know what? I think everyone...

KJ Dell'Antonia

For your graduate and your mother and your father who want to write books, I love it, all right. Well, this was fantastic. You can obviously follow Kate on Instagram. We'll throw that in the show notes, but also have multiple links to her agent's, and books, email, slash Substack, depending on how you like to consume these things you should be getting it. Yeah, that's, that's, that's that. Now, the one thing we always like to end a podcast with is asking people what they've been reading and loving lately. So I hope that's not throwing you under the bus because you can't think of anything because you've been doing this, but I bet I am wrong. So it'd be lovely if it's something people can get either now or soon, because I can see you playing out...

Kate McKean

I just, I pulled… I just re-read my clients, Madeleine Roux’s [inaudible] hard novel called A Girl Walks into the Forest. It is out on the same day that mine go out.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh wow!

Kate McKean

I know it's very exciting. And Maddie Roux has written like 25 books. We have been together a long time, and this book is amazing, and it is dark and it is full of feminist rage, and it is has, like, a Baba Yaga character in it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Awesome.

Kate McKean

And it's just; it's kind of the book we need right now to, like, kind of burn stuff down. So I highly recommend pre ordering it. I loved reading it again all in one place, like I read your earlier draft, but now I can see it again, and, like, I just re- read it as I also wanted to, you know, keep up with my clients work, but I wanted to read it because it was good. Like, it's just good.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Great, amazing.

Kate McKean

I'm like, hugging the book right now.

KJ Dell'Antonia

You are. Yeah, no one will see, yeah I know I've been waving your book around this entire time, and no one sees any of it, but it increases our the enthusiasm level in our voice, or something. So that's fantastic. Well, I mentioned Welcome to Glorious Tuga, which is a saga about it's like a bunch of people. I don't even know how to sell it, other than it's kind of like all creatures great and small set on a tiny island where people can only get off and on for half of the year with, you know, lots of animals and lots of fam…, of people interaction and but also one protagonist who sort of brings you through. And I gosh, if I can't come up with, and I love this book, and I have, I'm having trouble coming up with a great way to sell it, but I hope somebody, I hope somebody does it, because it's super fun. So there was that, but I mentioned that in my last podcast. So I also want to add Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach. That was her book before The Wedding People. It is vastly different. It is a single POV, first person narrative of a girl who loses her sister in a car accident at I think, the age of 13, and her ongoing and continual relationship with her sister's boyfriend who was driving at the time, which sounds really awful. But it's not sad. It's weirdly honest. It's a fantastic exploration of not just grief, but like people, and how we think and how we aren't who we think we are should be. But it is not The Wedding People. It's really different, which I found super interesting. So since y'all are writers listening to this, you might find it interesting, too. All right.

Kate McKean

Excellent. That sounds great.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Thank you so much for talking to me and everyone out there who is listening, buy Write through it. And also keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Jess Lahey

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.

Karen Dukess’s first book, The Last Book Party, was wildly successful by any measure—sold at auction, Indie Next pick, Discover New Writers pick… you probably read it. The second…

Didn’t sell. Not as in, not very many people bought it but as in, no publisher published it. She spent the requisite couple years or so, her agent signed on but… no takers. She felt like she was the only person in the whole entire world that that happened to… until she started asking around. Turns out, you know how people say writing books is hard? And publishing is tough? They’re right!

Never fear, Karen lived to tell the tail. Her next novel (do we call it second or third?), Welcome to Murder Week, is wonderful and available in a bookstore near you (and as you’ll hear, I loved it and it’s the perfect page-turner but not-anxiety-producing read for a swimming pool, beach, airplane ride or couch). But the real joy is that Karen is willing to dish. You’ll hear:

What happens when you want to be a bullet journal sticker getting writer with your butt in the chair but you’re just … not.

How to have fun writing a book that maybe no one will want (and why you’d better).

How Karen found the right mindset to keep going.

Karen’s one rule as a beginning writer who couldn’t quite get the hang of 1000 words a day. Links from the Pod:LauraPalooza

Karen Dukess, The Last Book Party

Zibby Events

The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray

#AmReading

Karen: The Original, Nell Stevens

KJ: Welcome to Murder Week

Karen’s Substack Keep Calm and Carry On, a Substack from Karen Dukess or find her on Instagram @karendukess, or her website www.karendukess.com

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 452 - TRANSCRIPTJess Lahey

Hey, it's Jess here. A few years ago, I got to go to Laura Palooza. Laura Palooza is the conference that is run by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association. I was invited because I wrote about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie books, and at the very beginning of The Gift of Failure, there's a mention in the opening chapter. And I was invited to go, and it was fantastic. And I got to meet Dean Butler, who had played Almanzo, which was quite a moment for me, because I had been quite in love. Anyway, this year's Laura Palooza 2025 is going to be taking place July 8 through 11th, 2025. Laura Palooza 2025’s theme is prairies, pioneers and pages. If you want more information on attending Laura Palooza 2025, you can go to L-I-W-L-R-A — L-I-W-L-R-A dot org slash laurapalooza. I will be putting it in the show notes for whatever episode this ends up on, and it's going to be really, really great. I'm jealous that I can't go again because it's not going to be near me. It's going to be in De Smet South, I hope that's how you pronounce it, South Dakota. But they're going to even have, like, a feature on the fashion at the time. They're going to have a section on planes, claims and all those land deals, a beginner's guide to mapping homestead claims. It's going to be cool, challenging gender norms. Laura Ingalls in fiction, and Rose Wilder Lane in reality. Folklore, fiction or forecasts, separating and linking science, storytelling and mythology in weather, lore, that's going to be by Dr. Barb Boustead, who has been on this very podcast. She's fantastic. Laura Palooza 2025... July, you should go, you should sign up. It's really fun. They're going to be doing a field trip also to the Ingalls Homestead, I believe. Check it out. It's pretty cool.

Multiple Speakers:

Is it recording? Now it's recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm going to 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, in short or really actually, usually long. We are the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done. And I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of a bunch of novels, the most popular of which is The Chicken Sisters, and the most recent is Playing the Witch Card, and you should read them all. And I have with me today a guest that I'm really excited about for a topic that you all are going to love. So, with me today, I have Karen Dukess, and she is the author of The Last Book Party, which you might have read in 2019 because it was unmissable. It was everywhere. It was an Indie Next. It was a Discover New Writers pick, it was...it was all over the place. And that is partly what we're here to talk about today. And we're also here to talk about her new novel, Welcome to Murder Week, which I have just read and enjoyed, but mostly we're here to talk about the six years in between. So, welcome. I am so glad to have you here. So, Karen and I have met in person. We met at a Zibby book event and at an event for the amazing Annabel Monaghan, who also has a book out this summer. The lovely thing about the universe is that nobody reads just one book.

Karen Dukess

That is true. Thank you.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So, you can be like, yes, read Annabel's book, read my book. Read. I mean, anybody who reads? I mean, yeah, there are people who read just one book, it's probably not going to be ours. Oh, well, people seem to like the Bible. I don't know that's a popular one. See that? A lot around a lot of Crawdads, also see that. Okay, so anyway, tell us what the story of the long six-year journey between your very, very successful debut novel, and what is about to be your very different sophomore novel.

Karen Dukess

So, I feel like I have an upside-down writing career in that most people write a lot of novels that don't get published before they write a novel that gets published, and mine went backwards. So, The Last Book Party was my first novel, and I wrote it...Didn't... I wrote it, finished it when I was in my early 50’s, around 54 -55, spent about four years writing it, and I had done a lot of writing before, then stopping and starting and thinking that. I must not have what it takes, because this is too hard. I didn't realize that novel writing just is hard, and that is the way it is for all but a few unicorn people. So that novel, I was so happy when I finally finished it. I was so satisfied to just finally have written a novel, and I was truly thrilled, and I I felt like, if it doesn't get published, I'll publish it myself. I'm just so happy to have achieved this goal. And then it sold incredibly quickly. It was unbelievable. I mean, it was like beyond my wildest dreams. It went to auction. It sold very quickly for a good advance, and the publishing experience was great, including the fact that they were originally going to publish it in 2020, but they decided to bump it up to 2019 I don't know why. But I was like, sure, I've waited to my 50’s to get this book out, like the sooner the better. And then I dodged the bullet of waiting all these years to publish a novel and have it come out during the pandemic. So, the paperback came out in the pandemic, which wasn't great, but I still felt so grateful that I had gotten this book out before then. So, then I started working on my second novel, which later someone had given me some someone, a friend...it might have even been Annabel. Someone gave her the advice that your second novel, don't make it very, very personal. And I kind of wish I had gotten that advice, even though I'm not sure I would have listened to it. But the thing about a second novel, and I don't know if you experienced this, KJ, but if you have success with your first novel, the second novel is scary because you're like, was I a one hit wonder? You know, was it a fluke? Can I do this again? And people would say, well, you know how to write novels now. And I'd be like, no, I know how to write THAT novel. I have no idea how to write another novel. And the novel I wanted to write at that time was drawing on the many years I spent studying and living in Russia and working as a journalist in Russia. I was in Russia in the 90's, and I wrote a novel that was about an American woman's journey in Russia and some American journalists in Russia. But it was set in Russia in 2017 and with flashbacks to the 90's, and it was hard to write. It was not fun. I think I had, like, sitting on my shoulder this sort of like, oh, can she do it again? You know that kind of thing. And I knew that the luck I had the first one, like, you know, I knew it was unlike, unluck, unlikely to be like that again. Plus, I had this sense of like, this is my Russia novel. And even though it wasn't a novel like, directly about Russia, it still was my chance to sort of give my take on things there. So, I think I also had sitting on my shoulder, like all the journalists I know knew in Russia, and people that studied Russia and the real Russia experts, and what were they going to think of my take?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh, yeah.

Karen Dukess

So it was, it was not writing, sort of like joyfully, it was a tough novel to write. And then it was also, it was fiction, but it was sort of personal, midlife kind of novel. So, there was just a lot of baggage with that novel. And the writing of it was tough, you know, it was just, it took longer than I thought it it just, I just remember a lot of sort of hair pulling, kind of, you know, those writing days. I had a lot of them. I finished it. My agent said he loved it. I don't think he loved it as much as the other two novels I've written, but, you know, he was ready to send it out on submission. But as I was finishing it, I was getting more and more concerned, because I finished it right around when Russia invaded Ukraine. And my novel, which was set in 2017 Russia, now things were so different, and they had been increasingly becoming different. Suddenly it felt very anachronistic, because I wasn't writing with these big current events in mind. Plus, there was this whole kind of like, oh, Russia, yuck, nobody, you know. And I felt that too. So, I was nervous about it, and my agent was like, just finish it. You've spent this much time on it. Let's finish it and see what happens. And so, we sent it out, and the response I got was kind of... Uh not great, you know, it went to my publisher first. They'd write a first refusal, and we're like, this novel. It about American woman in Russia right now, it's just not the right time. And, you know, there may have been other things about the novel as well, but it was kind of a, like, not a good sell. So, we sent it out to maybe five or six more editors, you know, I got lovely rejection letters, you know. Well, I really enjoyed it. This part was so interesting. But, yeah, I don't know, I don't know how to market this novel right now. And it was, you know, it was crushing, of course, but it also kind of echoed my feelings about the novel. The whole thing gave me a knot in my stomach, yeah, so my agent said, well, we haven't really exhausted the possibilities yet. We can send it out another round, or you can revise it, or you can set it aside. And I felt really sure at that point that I just wanted to, I didn't want to keep submitting it. I just felt like not the right time. And it was disappointing, but it was also kind of a relief, because if someone had decided to publish that novel, I think I would have been really nervous for the whole time before it came out.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I think the only thing worse than having your second novel not published is having it published to like, you know, universal hatred.

Karen Dukess

Yeah exactly.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Or just, or just to your own disappointment, you know?

Karen Dukess

Yeah. And then there's a long lead time between the time and novel gets accepted and the time it gets published. And to just feel like, nervous that whole time, I just...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Karen Dukess

So, I was relieved and disappointed. And I remember very well thinking like, oh, well, this is what people talk about. When they talk about, you have to be able to deal with rejection as a writer, because I hadn't dealt with it yet. I had been so lucky, and I really had this sense of like, all right, well, now I get to find out if I'm really a writer, like, can I deal with this and or can I not? And so, I was like, I'm going to write something else. But I was determined to write something very, very different. Like, I needed the whole experience to be different, yeah, and it ended up being kind of liberating, because I went on a trip with my sister to England. We went to the Peak District in England for a week. We rented a little cottage, and this was right before the novel went on submission, I think, or maybe right after, maybe it was on submission, I don't know. So, it was around the time when I wasn't feeling good about the novel, but I wasn't sure it was like a dead deal yet. And we had this absolutely fantastic week in the Peak District, where I was my first time traveling in the English countryside. I'd been to London, but I'd never been in the English countryside, and I felt like I was just stepping into the pages of all my favorite English novels, like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. And also, like I was stepping into scenes of every BritBox masterpiece, mystery thing, I had written, you know, think, oh my god, there's a vicar. And just really, I was in a... my sister, we have similar reading tastes, and we were just both in this mood, like everything was just kind of entertaining us, and we were laughing at ourselves for seeing England through all these fictional characters. So, when I came back, I think I came back, and that's when I kind of realized this Russian novel was dead or shortly thereafter. And I thought, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to write something about Americans going to England. I want to continue that mood. And I really felt like, if I'm going to do now that I knew you could spend years writing a novel and have it not get published, which I knew intellectually before, but I didn't, hadn't experienced it. I I just felt like, if I'm going to spend another couple years writing a novel like fun has to be the number one thing. It just has to be fun. I'm like, not going to be miserable again. I can't do something like the Russian novel again. I have to just entertain myself and make myself happy, and hopefully it will entertain other people and make them happy too. And that's how I landed on the idea of sending these writing about Americans that go to England to solve a fake murder mystery, which is what Welcome to Murder Week is about. And I just had such a good time writing it. And I wrote it quicker than I've ever written. I wrote it in a little over a year, and it was honestly delightful. Like, I couldn't believe it. Like, writing could actually be really fun.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Who knew? The result is also delightful. It just, it's, it's kind of like every warm and lovely book setting on to you you've ever read. It is it Is that I really enjoyed it, So...

Karen Dukess

I'm so glad.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I don't know what the Russian novel was like. That doesn't sound fun.

Karen Dukess

I mean it wasn't really heavy, because I'm not like a heavy writer... like it still had...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Right.

Karen Dukess

In it, and it had emotion, etc., but I'm not sad that it's not out.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Karen Dukess

Let's put it that way, yeah. So, yeah, this one was just fun. And I, you know, my initial idea was to send a group of Americans to England. Initially it was going to be a writing group. I like the idea of putting characters together who would not ordinarily know each other, but to have them together in a space and then a friend of mine said, Okay, so that's an idea. You're going to send some writers on a writing retreat to England, and what are they going to do there? Like, write? Like, that's not very interesting. And that's how I, kind of, you know, ended up moving to this thing where I could have them participate in this weeklong, solve a fake English village murder mystery. And I could have, you know, the villagers, some of them participating in this, and some eagerly participating, some cynical and send a bunch of Americans, you know, Britbox crazed Americans, to compete in this thing. And, yeah, that's, that's how it ended up. And it was fun.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I, yeah. I mean, it reads like you had fun. I, as someone who has... so Playing the Witch Card has like a big game sort of Halloween event at the center of it. That would be really hard to do in reality. This is kind of like that.

Karen Dukess

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Like, this is like the dream murder week, both from some of the point of view of someone who might want to put one on and from someone the point of view of someone who might want to go and do one. It's not, it's um, you know, it's not. Sometimes you read these and they're like, they're like, silly and hokey. It's like, very sincere, super fun murder week that anyone would wish that they could do that likes that kind of thing. Anyway, I yeah, I totally enjoyed it. All the characters were really fun. I could see that you must have had fun writing it.

Karen Dukess

I did. And I also, you know, people often say, like, write the novel you want to read. And I really did that with this because I wanted it to have so it has a fake mystery, but then it has a real mystery as well.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Karen Dukess

Like the main character, thirty-four-year-old Cath, little do you know, she goes on this trip because her estranged mother, before she died, booked them on it, and she's sort of reluctant to go, but can't get a refund. And then I sort of developed this whole story about she teams up with her house, shares a cottage with people to solve the fake mystery, but that she also solves the real mystery of why her mother wanted her to go, her late mother, and that was sort of like the writing the story you want to read. Because I like light and funny, but I also like something that has, like, some emotional heart to it, like I wanted to try to story that was fun, but that has something going on. And the more I wrote, the more Cath’s serious story became part of the story, I think, in the first deeply satisfying, yeah, and the first version, the first draft that my agent read, and I had never shared a draft before with him, and, you know, I think I was just hoping he would be like, it's almost perfect. And he was like, well, I think Cath is the hardest story. I think you need to develop that more. And then I went back and did and sort of... blended the two. So, the whole experience was just, yeah, of course. Now I'm like, can I have fun again?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yes, yes, you can. Nobody ever tells me my first draft is perfect, and I really hate that.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, I know. I think it's, I don't even know if I should have shared it with him, like, I just wanted him to say, like, it's amazing. And he was like, yeah, it could be really good.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Well, but you just want them to know that you're doing, yeah, I'm a I'm going to share the first draft of the thing I'm doing with my agent, and it might be a terrible idea, but I'm going to do it anyway, because I want her to know I'm doing a thing. And yeah, I'm excited. And yeah um...

Karen Dukess I also think that, like, you know, when I said that, it was liberating, in a way, to sort of have the experience that I had with the Russian novel. I think it was also maybe by the time, you know, getting to the third novel, or maybe it's getting to my age. I felt sort of like, I think I gave my permission, myself, permission to write a novel that, yeah, it has a serious story at the heart of it, but it's not like a deeply serious book, you know? And I think there's a tendency to think like, you know, I would look at the world around me sometimes, when I was drafting it, and feel like there's so many serious things to write about, and I'm writing this funny story, like, is that super fluffy? And, you know, it was like, this is what I wanted to write? That's okay, you know? I don't have to prove anything. Like, here is my serious tome. You know, I really just wanted to give people like, an emotional, amusing, heartwarming experience. And that is okay.

KJ Dell'Antonia

It is funny how locked we get into that, both as writers and as readers, this idea that if it's not serious or experimental or deep or dark, it's, I don't know, somehow not worthy. There was somebody was reading somebody's Substack the other day, and they were sort of deeply apologizing for the book they had recommended, which sounded really amazing. And I was like, why you, you know, you clearly enjoyed this, and it sounded great. And I don't. I mean, as a reader, I don't want to read things that are dark and deep and serious A. all the time...

Karen Dukess

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And B. sometimes not at all.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, I do like to read dark and serious, but I've learned that I don't like to write that like writing a novel is, it's always so much more time than you think. I mean, even this one was quicker than usual. It's a lot of time, like you're living it. And I was just like, I can't live in a dark place, like I can read a dark book in a couple days, you know? And...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Karen Dukess

Wipe my eyes and move on. But...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Karen Dukess

You know...

KJ Dell'Antonia

A light one.

Karen Dukess

You could assume... but you know. When I'm writing a novel, I'm going to bed thinking about their the characters, and I'm thinking about it when I'm exercising, and it's just like churning in there, and I just don't want to be in a dark place for two years.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, and most of the time people, I mean, I guess it just depends on, on who you are. But a heart, it's hardly ever dark all the time. I mean, even people that I have known that we're going through some really horrible things have found, you know, levity and joy and pleasure in in some parts of it. And I think we all hesitate to say, well, that's everyone. Or you got to, you know, we don't want to impose that on every, on anyone, because that's kind of also where we are is, is this delicate dance of not wanting to expect anybody else to be the way you think they're going to be. But I it just seems like people find levity, even in even the worst, even in the worst moments. And people want, um, solace, you know?

Karen Dukess

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia Something... something pleasant... something.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, I work with an editor, kind of a more like a writing coach, like she doesn't actually edit, but she sort of helps me figure out the story and stuff. And there was one point when she was reading a draft, and there's a scene in the book. I don't know if it's a minor thing, but when my main character Cath, who there's a little romance in it. And when she's first together with this guy, and they're sort of rolling around in bed, the first draft that, the first version of it, she accidentally hit her head on the headboard, and then she's like, “Oh my god, are you okay?” And she was like, “no”. My coach was like, no, no. I don't want to be anxious that maybe this guy is a little violent. Like, no, no, you've got to take that out. I don't want to be anxious in the reading of this book. And it was such a minor thing that I think she was like...

KJ Dell'Antonia

And you had him hit his head instead, right? Yeah.

Karen Dukess

Because I don't think anyone was going to worry that she's violent. But it was funny. It was like, she was very much like this book is, there are books where you want the reader to feel anxious, but she's like, this book is not that I don't want anxiety in this book you know?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, yeah.

Karen Dukess

Like she's still concerned about Cath and her story. You can feel sad about what she learns, but not anxiety.

KJ Dell'Antonia

You know I think you've really put your finger on something, because that is exactly right. This book is a page turner, like you want to find out what happens. You want to be with the characters you want to it's a hang and it's like, like, I read something recently where, um, in the middle, you, I found myself sort of, I was still reading it because it was a good hang, but in the middle I was just kind of, like, I forget why we're here. I forget what I'm wondering. You're not really wondering anything, but I like it, so I'll keep this. Your book was not like that at all. This is a fantastic hang but you're right. It never, it's not... that's exactly right. It's not, it's not anxiety producing. And I think that's its own vibe. Like you can have romances that are fun and they're good, but they actually, you do have anxiety around, you know, like, how the characters are going to pull themselves out of this, or how they're going to feel or, yeah, and you can have them or you don't. I like that as, like, a sort of a line in the sand.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, yeah. And then I kind of thought about it as I continued, like, yeah, okay, that's right. We're not going to go to like, the really unsettling places.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah. I mean, even if you really want to know what would what will happen, and you really want, like, the things that happen to turn out in satisfying ways, but it doesn't feel like, if they turn out in some like, there were a variety of available options, none of which felt horrible.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, exactly.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Thank you for that. Thank you for a lovely reading experience. So, what else did you take away? Like, what else did you change between the drafting of the book that does not end up being published, which you know, for all we know, is actually great, but the timing was really bad. What should you change?

Karen Dukess

What changed for me... in writing?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, what are you changing? Did you change anything in your process?

Karen Dukess

Um, I think I, I don't know if it was completely because of the experience with this book, but definitely it fed into it. Um, I worked with the same writing coach on the Russia book, and she keeps saying that book will be published someday. I'm like, yeah, maybe, maybe not. I don't really care, honestly at this point, but one thing that she really pushed on me, which I discovered in the writing of murder week, was really true, is that to be open and playful and just really to be creative, I needed that. I needed to be in the right mindset, like, I know your thing is always butt in chair, butt in chair. And it is true, you have to, you know, you have to push yourself to finish a novel. It's not easy. And there are times when you just have to push forward. But for me, in the drafting of it, like the butt in chair thing, for me, is more important in the revising and the final draft, when it's like, you've got to get through it, and you've just got to keep sitting there and doing it. But when I'm in this sort of creating stage, when I'm not sure what the story is, when I'm in those moods where I'm just like, sit down and work at this like, I don't write good stuff. I just don't. And she would sometimes say to me, like, if I would talk to her, and I was really angsty and I was really self-critical, or I don't like what I've written, or I don't know where I'm going with this, or whatever , she was really she would very much say, like, when you're in that kind of mood, just walk away. Don't sit at your computer. Like, that is not the time for butt in chair. That is the time for just go do something else and like, lighten up on yourself. And that was really true for this. And I'm trying to remind myself that as I work on the next novel that you know for me, being kind to myself and feeling playful and open is when I'm going to write the best stuff and surprise myself. And that applies whether I'm writing like a serious scene or a funny scene. And the tricky thing about it is, you know, it's always a little scary to write, so it's like, Am I walking away because I need to lighten up my mind, or am I just plain procrastinating?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, or am I walking away because I just don't know how to...

Karen Dukess

So, I think that is something though, that I do feel like I write better from a free place than from a sort of, like, grim, determined place.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, that makes sense.

Karen Dukess

I think I was learning that and trying to learn that when I was writing the Russia novel, but it really came true with this one, which is why I think I was able to write it quicker, because it's actually, you know, the weaving together of the fake murder mystery and the real mystery and the arcs of all the different characters. Like, it wasn't simple putting all together, but yet it was simpler for me to write, because I was just looser about it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Right. I think you learned to trust that you would finish this, even if you didn't finish it today.

Karen Dukess

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Does that make sense?

Karen Dukess

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I, yeah.

Karen Dukess

And I just think, like, trusting the process is so important, you know. And I talk about this with friends in my writing group, you know, sometimes when you're like, working so hard to figure it out, because it feels good to figure the novel out before you write it, because then you don't have the anxiety of, what if I don't figure it out? But it doesn't always work best that way. I don't think, like, I think there are times for that, and there are times to just, like, just keep going and like, let it go a little and let some interesting things happen, and then you'll figure out how to put it all together for me anyway. But obviously I'm not a plotter kind of person, so...

KJ Dell'Antonia

I think, yeah, I think that varies. But what's what I'm really hearing here is that, like, even you knew, okay, if I don't, maybe I don't sit down today. That doesn't mean I'm never sitting again, down again. And I think that is, that's part of what I struggle with in my like 1000 words a day. Just, just keep doing it time. And I, and I think I, too, have come around to the idea that I'm going to finish it like...

Karen Dukess

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I'm not. I'm not suddenly, you know, just because I only got to 700 words today, that doesn't mean tomorrow I'm going to be like, yeah, I'm not a writer anymore. Oops!

Karen Dukess Yeah, exactly. Well, I think, and I think I've learned that, like, I can't tell you how many times, I mean, I've listened to your podcast forever, and, like, years ago, I would listen to it, and I would be like, Yes, I'm going to do the stickers, or, Yes, I'm going to do 500 words a day, or, Yes, I'm going to text a friend or you know, none of that stuff. I could never sustain it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

It doesn't work for you.

Karen Dukess

I have no routine; I have no methods. But what I've learned now is like, but I get books done, so it's okay, like, yeah, I will sometimes go a couple days where I don't write, or I will, you know, think I'm on a routine of 500 or 1000 words a day for a while, and then I'm not, and that's okay, because it's just like, I know that I can still get them done in my crazy way.

KJ Dell'Antonia

That is what we have tried to start saying more often, is, listen, this doesn't work for everybody. If you're doing something different and you're getting the work done, then you're great, yeah, if you're doing something different and you're not finishing things, then maybe try this.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, well I remember, like, when I was working on The Last Book Party, right before I got kind of serious on it, I was in a writing group, and I was starting, then I was like, I was learning in the writing group through, finally being in a community with other writers. So, like everybody struggles. Published writers struggle. Really great writers struggle like and that, and I loved reading interviews with writers like I couldn't get enough of interviews and essays about writer’s struggles, because I had to, like, keep convincing myself that like, my struggles didn't mean I wasn't a writer. But then there was one point where I remember making a rule for myself. And I was like; I am not allowed to read about writing if I haven't written that day. You know, spend a lot of time...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yes.

Karen Dukess

Working on your novel, but what you're actually doing is like, reading about writing and reading interviews and listening to podcasts. So, it's like, I cannot listen to KJ's podcast until I've done some writing. So, I've had to, I have had to make some rules.

KJ Dell'Antonia Yeah, well, that's, I mean, that's how you turned yourself into somebody who gets the work done, and now into somebody who has her own like now you have a way people ask you, so what's your process? How did you get this done?

Karen Dukess

I don't think anyone has tried my process, but yeah. And it can be different for every book, I guess, you know?

KJ Dell'Antonia

Horrifyingly, I think that it can when you see pointed out, yeah, you that you knew how to write that book, that is so true, and that has been a huge thing for me, is to realize that even after writing a bunch of books, people still struggle, it's still hard, every book is hard. Every book has, I mean, we have a joke among the podcasts, you know, because you get to a point where you're like, okay, I hate this now, and we'll all be right, right-on target,

Karen Dukess

Exactly.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Baby's developing nicely. Here's our 18-month checklist. Aww and you're crawling, and you hate your book. Yay!

Karen Dukess

Yeah, yeah. I don't think the process gets easier, but I think knowing that you can get through it makes it a little easier. Maybe it diminishes the panic a little bit like, you know, you'll figure it out. You'll figure it out.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Well, this, I mean, this has been great. I'm sure it's going to be inspirational for everyone. It is inspirational for me, because I also... so I have a book that I worked on for the last year and a half, and I, we didn't, we didn't try to sell it because, because it's not very good.

Karen Dukess

Are you still working on it? Or...

KJ Dell'Antonia

It's leaving, it's living. I make these gestures as though, like, there's like, a blobby object over here that is my, but is my finished, but also not revised and not good uh...

Karen Dukess

I had this theory about books, like, it's the same theory I had with au pairs.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Okay.

Karen Dukess

We had a lot of au pairs when my kids were growing up and I was working out of the home, you know, not writing. And I felt like every time I selected, you know, they would come for a year. One or two of them stayed for two years. But every time I selected a new au pair, it was in reaction to the problems of the other... the previous au pair. So, like, when I had an au pair that was like a horrible driver, so much so that we had to, like, get rid of her. Then I was like, okay, where is it hardest to get a driver's license? Germany. Okay, I'm having a German au pair, you know. Then I had, like, a German au pair who was great, but it was like, she was too, I don't know, whatever if I had an au pair, that was like, two lax, then the next one was like, oh, this person has, like, you know, worked in a boys school. I want that.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Right? yeah.

Karen Dukess

And I feel like, you know, I wrote Welcome to Murder Week because I had had this tough experience with this Russia novel. Then it was like, I'm going to do something really fun. So, and I don't know that I would have written that if I hadn't needed so badly to have fun. I don't know that I would have said, no, yeah, forget doing something, you know, serious or with some geopolitical things in it. I'm going to write a, you know, a murder week story. I don't know that I would have written it if I could have gone on that vacation and just had a great time and come back and not felt the need.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Written something else.

Karen Dukess

So, you know, maybe the one that's not working is going to lead you to write the next fabulous thing.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Well, I hope I'm already well into... I'm well into something else, but, yeah, it's, you know, you spend a lot of time on something, not everything works. It's one of the reasons this is a terrible job, and you absolutely shouldn't do it unless you know, you can't do anything else,

Karen Dukess

Exactly.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Or unless you really want to.

Karen Dukess

Yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

There. That's that. That's really good advice. That's going to make a great bumper sticker. All right. So have you read anything good lately besides Welcome to Murder Week, which, in fact, is what I will be raving about in just a second.

Karen Dukess

Um, yes, I read a book called The Original by Nell Stevens. It out in June. She's a British writer, and it's really good. It's sort of an also kind of genre, blending the way my book is, but it's very different. It's like a gothic novel. It's set in an old house in England in the 1800's and it involves an orphan who's being raised by relatives, and she has an incredible talent for painting forgeries, and she sort of has this secret business in selling forgeries, but it also involves an imposter who returns from abroad in the family, and there's a queer romance in it, and it's totally unlike anything I've read, and very compelling.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oof, I love that.

Karen Dukess

In a really compelling way.

KJ Dell'Antonia

And by the time people hear that, that this, this will either be out, or like, buy your next week self a present. That sounds great.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, it was very... it's very good. It's kind of like a rainy day book. You know?

KJ Dell'Antonia

I love that. Well, I already raved about Welcome to Murder Week, but I'm telling you all, it's a real it's a real joy. I want to compare it to things. But there's almost like it's, I'll think of things that I that I want to...

Karen Dukess

It's hard to compare because it's not a traditional mystery,

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, no, um, I feel like Clare Pooley's books are, and I can't even think of the titles of them, but that, yeah, that is kind of ringing the right bell for me. I don't know who else a little bit of the like the murder, like, if you really thought The Murder of Mr. Wickham was super fun, which I absolutely adored, that is completely different, and yet also it's the same, like, it's the same... I think the vibe we're looking for here is page turner, no anxiety. And I love that. I love that for all of us...in England.

Karen Dukess Yes, yeah.

KJ Dell'Antonia

So go grab this one. You're going to enjoy it, all right. Well, thanks so much. This was really fun. Thank you for being so open, and not just, you know, wandering around saying, well, I just it took me six years to write this because it's very good.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, I have to say, you know, I think that writers should talk more often about their failures. And by that...

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah.

Karen Dukess

I mean, like novels that they wrote and abandoned, or novels that they wrote and tried to get published and couldn't, because it was only until I wrote this Russian novel and didn't sell it, and I would mention it to people. Then all these writers I knew, and people I knew, you know, would suddenly tell me about their own published novels. And I was like, why did I know about this beforehand? There's no shame in it... you know? It's a tough business. It's a tough business. The writing is tough; the publishing is tough. And now I'm like, oh my god, like so many writers I know have novels that did not get published, and for whatever reason. And I'm sure many of those novels are great novels, and but knowing that you know the journey of being a writer, just like I don't know a single author who hasn't like lost their editor at some point, you know, their editor leaves. Then they find a new, you know, be assigned to a new editor. That happens everybody, and I realize how many people have novels that did not see the light of day, and it was comforting to know it. So, I think people should be more open about it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

I think we just are afraid that, you know, a reader will hear, well, I don't know if she's capable of writing something... that doesn't work, maybe it's not very good, which readers aren't listening to anything. They can barely remember our names. They just know if the book sounded good and someone pressed it into their hands.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, had a great cover.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Yeah, had a great cover. Yeah, all, all of the things, and it's just, it's, it's just a little scary to admit, because I guess one of the scary things about it, of course, admitting that that has happened means it could happen again. And hey It could! Oh well.

Karen Dukess

Yeah, but I've survived it. So...

KJ Dell'Antonia

You've survived it, you would survive it again. And also, it didn't happen this time. Welcome to Murder Week is great, and everyone is going to be sitting with it by the pool looking very happy. This is my wish for you. All right?

Karen Dukess

Thank you. Thanks so much KJ.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Oh, thank you. Hey, anywhere people should follow you? Oh, you have a Substack. What is it? I love it!

Karen Dukess

I have a Substack. I mean, I think on Substack you can find it by my name Karen Dukess, it's, I don't know... it's called, “Keep Calm and Carry On”, but I think you can just look me up by name on Substack, and I am on Instagram more often at Karen Dukess, as I post about books that I'm reading all the time. Obviously, there'll be a lot of quarter week stuff, but I try to, you know, I'm reading eclectically and all the time. So, I'm always posting about books. Those are probably the best places to find me. And I have my website with all my events on it.

KJ Dell'Antonia

It'll be linked. It'll be linked.

Karen Dukess

Great.

KJ Dell'Antonia

Hopefully I can get to something... all right. Well, thank you so much. And all you listeners out there, I mean, you know you do you, but in some way, keep your butt in the chair, hey and or your head in the game.

Jess Lahey

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! Jess here. As an author and host of this podcast, I hear “I have a great idea for a book!” a lot, and while I believe everyone has a story to tell, I’ve only been knocked over by these book pitches twice. The first was the idea for the book Raising Empowered Athletes: A Youth Sports Parenting Guide for Raising Happy, Brave, and Resilient Kids by Kirsten Jones (pitched to me at speaking event in 2015, published in 2023) and the second was last week, in a conversation with this week’s guest, Dr. Megan.

I’m SO excited to introduce you to our new series, “From Soup to Nuts,” and its subject, Dr. Megan. She’s a therapist, speaker, and hopeful author who presented me with that aforementioned great idea for a book and a hook for a speaking career. She’s the right person to write this book, there’s a hole in the market for it, and it’s timely.

So….now what?

Over the next weeks and months, I will be mentoring Dr. Megan through her proposal, querying an agent, and planning ahead for a potential speaking career whether or not she sells the book.

This week, we talk through the preliminary process of getting to a book’s why and wherefores while crafting the introductory section of the book proposal (see resources below) and researching potential agents.

This first episode is for all subscribers, but the rest of this series will be available to supporters only. Please consider supporting the podcast so you can follow along (and learn from) Dr. Megan’s planning and writing process.

Resources we mention:

While I am not an Author Accelerator book coach, I do find Jennie Nash’s book, Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book incredibly useful and asked Dr. Megan to read it. We will be referring to it from time to time throughout this series.

Introductory section of a book proposal. Since we will be referring to the proposal for The Addiction Inoculation as a reference, I thought it would be helpful to make that available to #AmWriting Podcast listeners. Click through to Jess’ website to download.

Jess’s episode: What is a “Comp”?

Dr. Megan’s assignment: write the introductory section of her book proposal, identify and research potential agents, and compile a list of agents she would like to query.

Geeky footnote: “From soup to nuts” means “from beginning to end” and refers back to the practice of serving soup at the very beginning of a formal Western meal and nuts at the end. As a former Latin teacher, I prefer the saying “ab uvo usque ad mala” or “from the egg to the apples” in the tradition of Roman meals, but regardless, this series will cover everything from the beginning to the end of Dr. Megan’s book process.Additional links from the Pod:

Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot & The Sequel

Vicki Hoefle, Duct Tape Parenting

Op Ed Project

Nadine Burke Harris, The Deepest Well

Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child

Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm

Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation

ICYMI: Sarina’s latest thriller is out in the world!

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 | AudiblePhysical books at: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indigo | More paperback links here!

New! Transcript below!

EPISODE 451 - 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 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 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 in 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.

Multiple Speakers:

Is it recording? Now it's recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.

Jess Lahey

Hey, this is Jess Lahey, and this is the Hashtag AmWriting podcast. Hashtag AmWriting is the podcast about writing all the things, short things, long things, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, book proposals, queries. It's about the publishing industry. This is the podcast about getting the work done. I'm your host today, this week. My name is Jess Leahy. I am the author of The Gift of Failure, how the best parents learn to let go so their children can succeed, and The Addiction Inoculation, Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence. I had a column at the New York Times for three years called the parent teacher conference, and I've written for The Atlantic and The Washington Post and numerous other outlets. Okay, today we are going to be talking with someone I am identifying for now as Dr. Megan. We're going to decide later on whether or not we get into her full name and all that stuff. But she is being super brave by coming on this podcast, because this podcast is going to be this episode of the podcast is going to be the first in a series. I met Dr Megan, I've been on the lookout for someone like her with a book idea like hers, with an aim towards, you know, an idea of wanting to be a speaker like her, and I just am really excited to mentor her through the process of hopefully getting an agent, hopefully getting a book deal and hopefully becoming a speaker, and we're just going to work our way through it. I also have been looking for someone like Dr. Megan, because I really wanted to pick someone for you so that we can mentor, someone who is dedicated to the process, interested in doing all the homework and is not going to, like, give up halfway through, and this is someone who's really dedicated to this series. I'm hoping you can learn as much as possible. As always, this podcast is about flattening the learning curve for other writers. So that's what Dr. Megan has offered to do with us... again, super brave, like the people who do the First Page's Booklab and submit their work. This is a really vulnerable position to be put in. And so, over the next hour, however many months this takes, we're going to be following her trajectory as an author slash speaker and see how it all goes. This first episode is going to be free for all subscribers to the Hashtag AmWriting podcast. And after that, we're going to be putting it under the umbrella of supporter podcasts. So, if you would like to follow along and learn from Megan's journey, go ahead and hit the support button and figure out a way to support the podcast, because we're you know, we're here because of you, and we're here and grateful for your support. So, with that, I'm going to introduce you to Dr. Megan, she is a therapist, she is a speaker, she is a wannabe author. She's someone who has a lot of experience in her field. She wants to write a book that is squarely in her field, related to her life, related to the life of her patients, her clients, and she is exactly the right person to write it. And it is a book that is needed right now. And so, with that, let's get started. As I promised. I have a hopeful, potential, exciting phase. new author here with me today. One of the reasons that I wanted to do this sort of it's not really book coaching, because that's not my domain. I'm not a Author Accelerator book coach. I also, but I get asked to do this a lot, and I get asked specifically about the speaking piece of it. So, I wanted to get our listeners started with how we met. I would love for you to explain how we met, and you don't have to get specific about places, but how we ended up in the same place together, because there's a reason I decided to work with you, and a reason that I thought that your potential book idea has a lot of a promise. And so anyway, could you tell our listeners how we met?

Dr. Megan

All right, this is a good question. Let's see. So, we met before you knew me. I met you via the Hashtag AmWriting podcast.

Jess Lahey

Okay.

Dr. Megan

And then when I was... I think it was just after finishing my doctorate, I found your book The Gift of Failure. So, then I met you there. But then, since I moved about almost three years ago now, and as part of my move, I thought, oh, I'm going to career shift. I've been working as a therapist for about 17 years with kids and families. And I love doing speaking, I love disseminating information. And I've been sort of marinating on this idea of a book... I don't know, probably five years and anyways, and I started emailing some people, and the majority of people actually don't answer said email. So I went to the librarian, and I was trying to get the scoop on those people at the library, and they're like, Oh yeah, yeah, Jess Lahey? She's super nice. She totally answered. Like, okay, I'm just going to cold turkey email her from the website, like she probably won't respond, but I just thought it was sort of a fate moment that you even we lived in this same small town, so it just all kind of perfectly collided.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, and I think your approach was really interesting, because you came at it from the perspective of someone who has done a lot of work to learn stuff in the first place, and you, when we got together, the book that you told me about, just hit all of the it, my alarm bells went off this, the like, oh my gosh, this needs to be a thing. And the last time this happened was when I met Kirsten Jones, who wrote Raising Empowered Athletes. So, I met her. She came to one of my book talks in California. Right after The Gift of Failure came out and she started, she met me by saying, you know, I want to write something like The Gift of Failure, but for parents of athletes, which I was like, oh my gosh, yes, you have to write that book. And when you told me about the book that you want to write, I immediately thought, this book has to happen. Now, here's the tough part. As anyone who is thinking about writing a book knows you can't just throw your idea out there, let alone the title, which you have. And the title, essentially was what sort of struck me in the first place, but we can't give away the title. We can't give away the main idea. So, listeners, I want you to think about when KJ and I originally talked about the book The Plot. There's a book by... it's a book called The Plot. And the essential idea behind this book, and there has now been a follow up called The Sequel, both of them really brilliant. The idea behind The Plot was, student comes to a teacher with a plot that is so good it can't fail. And the idea is that, like, well, it doesn't matter. No matter what I do, this is going to just be a thing and it leads to murder, but I do promise not to murder you in order to take your book idea and publish it for myself in that book, though the author correlates is her last name, manages to not talk about the plot while talking about the plot, which is the unfortunate place we're in where we have to talk about this really good idea that I think is there's a hole in the market, which we'll get to later. We're going to talk about market analysis later, it's as someone who's been in this speaking in this area and writing this area for a while, there is a place for this book, and this book really needs to happen. And I think, but what I think is fairly irrelevant here, because this has to be about what you think. I think you are the perfect person to write this book. So, with that I decided this would be a great way to teach to do, almost like a mentoring series for listeners who would really like to just not just write a book, but also build a speaking career around that book, which you very much want to do. So, we're going to do today a sort of get to know you, get to know what you've done, and why I thought you were sort of prepared to start this process. Because KJ and Sarina and Jennie were like, but is this person ready? Like, are they going to do the things? Are they ready? Is this going to be like a one off, and then she'll disappear into the night? Has she done the work? Is she prepared? So could you talk a little bit about some of the work you've done, like, you know, you talk about the fact that you have done the professional work, and that this book is going to be very much tied to your professional work, but in terms of writing, which is a very different thing, and then speaking, which is, on top of that, a very different thing, sort of why do you think that it's the right time for you to write this book?

Dr. Megan

Well, I feel like all of the pieces have sort of fallen a little bit into place lately, because I thought the right time to write this book was actually two and a half years ago.

Jess Lahey

Oh, that's always the right time with any book which is always the case. But I will tell you, from experience that I think that when you're doing the searching and when you're doing the research and when you're doing the pondering, the book happens at the right time. I happen to think that which is another way of saying you can procrastinate. But it's not that. It's, you know, it's the processing part.

Dr. Megan

Yeah, and I feel like the process keeps aligning for me with this book, because I had this idea and I thought, Oh, I'll move and here I will sit in my new home writing a book, because now I don't have a bunch of clients, and I'm not as busy once everything is perfect, once everything is right, exactly, yes. So, so it turns out that's not a thing.

Jess Lahey

Right.

Dr. Megan

And so, I was really sort of dragging my feet. And so, I, as part of my licensing requirements as a therapist, I had to take some classes. So, one of the classes I took was “Writing a book for therapist”. And so, I did that, and I thought, Oh, that's really interesting. So, then I reached out to the person who taught the class, and they said, what else do you do?

Jess Lahey

Right. Now was that a full on, full length, like...?

Dr. Megan

That class was just kind of a short, like, two hour continuing education.

Jess Lahey

But you had to do writing prompts. You had to do the work; you had to do the writing...

Dr. Megan

Yeah, I had some low... yeah, like, low level prompts, okay, just like, sort of marinate, get your idea going, kind of prompts. And so, I thought, oh, that was really helpful. It made me realize that the missing element for me as a creative is, I need structure.

Jess Lahey

Right.

Dr. Megan

And so, we, when we met, I was like, oh, homework, bring it on. Because I actually, I love homework, because I think it gives you some structure around the creativity and gets things flowing. So anyway, so I reached out, and then she said, Oh, I have this class, and it is once a week for eight weeks, and every week you turned in different things, and it sort of ranged an arc from solidifying your idea writing your introduction, but also like making a faux book cover, or making a faux blurbs, or thinking about, how do you use something like Amazon to look at what categories might your work be in which I think is a beautiful gateway over to the Blueprint Book.

Jess Lahey

Right. So, I gave you a copy of Jennie Nash's Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book. All of the books are great, but I think, and I'm, again, not a Author Accelerator book coach, but I thought it was really good starting place for the process of thinking about the like, why me? What is my book? What is my purpose? Who is my audience? You know, who's my ideal reader, all that kind of stuff. So, having looked at blueprint for a nonfiction book, what parts for you have sort of resonated either because they were overlooked in other classes or other preparation that you've done, or you think actually will hit at what you need to work on for this??

Dr. Megan

I like it because, I think it's really useful in the learning process to keep asking same questions in different ways. So, every time it kind of elicits a new response, a new thing to think about, a new way to connect it. And so, you know, I originally had this book idea, and I wrote down, I think several years ago, 10 chapters...

Jess Lahey

Right.

Dr. Megan

And then through the class, I was like, oh, wait, no, no, there's a narrative quality. It needs to be in parts.

Jess Lahey

Right.

Dr. Megan

How does the parts become within one thing? And so, but then in doing this book and looking at it, I feel like the most valuable piece was also the why. Like, why me? Like, really? Because I think to be an author feels vulnerable. To be a therapist is sort of vulnerable, but not really, because you're not, actually, you're encouraged not to share as much about yourself. And so...

Jess Lahey

Oh! That's interesting I hadn't thought that.

Dr. Megan

You know...

Jess Lahey

But that's a really important part of this process.

Dr. Megan

Yeah, and it got me really looking at and comparing, do I really love this thing? Okay, if you thought of your book with other writers in the same category as sort of a conversation, not like as competition, but as collaboration, like, where do you sit with that?

Jess Lahey

Right.

Dr. Megan

And to me, that kind of prompt is very helpful because then I, even, you know, as an artsy person, was like, Oh, how do I, like, imagine yourself, like, if you sat at your Knights of the Round Table, who are your people? Like, who would you want there? How would that go?

Jess Lahey

And that gets at when you're thinking about, obviously, we're going to have to talk about, you know, market analysis and comp titles and things like that. That also helps you realize, because you're going to have to write this section, which is like, what's out there, and why is my book going to be different or and also thinking, and I've talked about this before in other episodes, in another episode, and I'll link in the show notes to that one, not just the books that have been successful in this area, and how your book will be different from those. But also, you have to think about like, which books didn't work, and you have to explain why your book is not that.

Dr. Megan

Yes, yeah, without yeah, without being like a show and fraud, right kind of person. But also Yeah, because there's a million people that I think are super brilliant that have written parenting books, but either they sound like too therapist-y or like, are there a little, like light on the actually, how does this work kind of thing, and also accepting you can't be all things to all people.

Jess Lahey

Right, right.

Dr. Megan

So, the part about who's your audience, I thought, but, but I think the really golden nugget in that first part too, is the why, and so I even did that writing exercise, like, why this book? Why me? Why now? Kind of questioning. And I thought that was really helpful, because I wrote that more in, like a talking way, because I think some of those same things filter into an introduction for a book, but by writing it in an unpolished way, I feel like I reignited sort of the passion for the subject.

Jess Lahey

Right. Oh, that's so good.

Dr. Megan

So, I feel like it's missing...

Jess Lahey

And a lot of that's going to happen during the book proposal process as well. I mean, when you first were full disclosure, we're recording this at my house, because it's just easier to have two people in one space, and we're in my office, and I showed you all of the bookshelves that are filled with the books for the book for the book proposals that I've written and decided that I don't want to write right now, because I think that's really, really helpful. And as onerous as the book proposal process is, it's incredibly revealing. It helps you see what's working, what's not working, what you want to write, and what you don't want to write. So, I'm really excited for you to get really immersed in that process. Okay, so your why coming into this like, given that you're going to have to have a bit of an elevator pitch for people, what is your WHY for this book?

Dr. Megan

I thought about this in different ways. Okay I was a sort of neurodiverse kid—dyslexic, ADD—and therapy was super helpful to me as a child. And as a, you know, what Elaine Aron might call a highly sensitive person, I just think there's all these... I was so lucky, because I had a school for dyslexia, and I had all these opportunities in my childhood and as a therapist, I found myself working a lot with these kids that you might be like oh, ADHD learning like that's not normal but it's actually very normal. And within that there's just such a wide way people can be. And I just sometimes think as a culture a society we get so binary, and I just feel like that gets people really locked into either "oh no big deal" or "ooh super problematic thinking". And my big why is, there are easy solutions to helping understand your child. So, my really, my, why is I feel like there's, there's answers out there, and it drives me bananas, if you're like, oh, I don't know what to do, or there's just nothing. So, I feel compelled to do that.

Jess Lahey

So the nice thing about that answer is and I tend to bring... because it's my experience the so when I was thinking about The Gift of Failure, the big why was because I want kids to be able to learn to the best their ability to be engaged, to be motivated, all those sorts of things, but also that they're having conversations with their parents about what really matters to them and all that sort of stuff. So for me, there was no one writing at that intersection of parenting and education in this particular way, and because you have cred, not just as someone who grew up neurodiverse and as someone who works with neurodiverse kids, you have that sort of both sides of the table thing going on, which I think is a really, really, not just a great why, but a really great answer to why me.

Dr. Megan

Yes.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, yeah, to the why me question we're going to be talking about in future episodes, and about owning your expertise. So, I want to give you some homework.

Dr. Megan

Okay.

Jess Lahey

To think about, things and, oh, and I have a I even brought, I have a little notebook for you I get, I got you a little notebook. So, okay, so when it comes to your why, it sounds like you have a sort of a really good hold... a handle on that, but you're going to be asked definitely, during blueprint for a nonfiction book, and during our conversation to be re-articulating that lots and lots of times, people are going to be asking you about what you're working on, and that can be a really, really great opportunity. It's sort of like when, when you have to do interviews about your book, you're not going to want to go like, let's assume all of this goes well, and you're going to get to start doing interviews about your book. You need for now to be the time that you're articulating those really good answers, like, who is this book for? Why? I mean, the question I get in every interview is, give me a bit of your background and why you decided to write these books. And you want that answer to be great. You want that answer to be concise. You want that answer to not be rambling. And that's sort of your, you know, your elevator pitch sort of thing. The other thing that we talk a lot about, KJ and I, have talked about this a lot, is I like to have a stack of books that are the “voice I'm aiming for. So, I've had, there was a book called Duct Tape Parenting when I first wrote The Gift of Failure, and she just was really brave. The author of that book was, like, really not concerned with people yelling at her and saying, you're wrong, and she would just have this brave voice. And that was my brave voice book. And then I had another book that was like my owning your expert voice book, and so that they gave me a sense of on the days when I really needed them and I needed... because one of the hardest things for first time authors to do is to own their expertise. This is also something that comes up a lot in The OpEd Project, a group that I have worked with and mentored with for a while, where they help people who wouldn't normally get the chance to write op eds, to write op eds. And Katie Orenstein, the founder of that, said, a big part of that is helping you own your expertise. Like, yeah, why do I deserve to be the person talking about this? And I think, especially, as you said before a therapist and not having the opportunity to sort of talk about you, that's going to be incredibly important. So having a book for that, and sometimes we refer to them as, like our dissection books. So, here's the thing, you want, a great book that helps with the, no, I have the right to say these things, and I'm correct. And then the owning is sort of, and it could be the same thing owning your expertise book. And then you need to find a book whose format is really great for this topic. So, like, and it doesn't have to be exactly modeled. Your book doesn't have to be exactly modeled on that. But find a book that you feel like, really, if you want to integrate narrative arc, if you want to have it be straight up research, if you want this research and the narrative arc to come together, if you want to do storytelling, find the book that you think is like, yeah, this is what I'm aiming for in my book. Find one of those books, because being able to dissect how that person does that. Sarina does it sometimes, like when she switched over to thrillers from romance, she needed to be able to say, okay, well, how long are how many pages are we spending on exposition? How many pages are we spending on research? And for me, I found a couple of books that I thought just did a really good job of organizing in the way I wanted to organize it. So having a stack of those books as well is going to be really important.

Dr. Megan

To my book stack...

Jess Lahey

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Megan

In my kitchen. Okay, good, because that's...I have three kids, and by about 9:30 most people are asleep, and no one can, you know, trouble me for a glass of water, et cetera,

Jess Lahey

Right.

Dr. Megan

So, I have, like, a big stack, and that is what I think has been really interesting. When I first got here and thought, oh, I want to write, and I was just really feeling blocked and unclear. My other passion is painting. And so, I got really into painting and studying art. And how did people craft things, you know, like, studied with other artists, looked at things, and I realized in this writing process how similar it is to the painting process. And in a painting, often I'll do an under painting of a color that might be radically different from the rest of the painting, but I feel like it sets the tone. And what I felt like was really useful in working on the writing has been like, oh, permission to be creative about it and to look at other things. So, I literally very neurotic...I counted like, number of words per page, and then would like, multiply them, and then I made a list, like, in a chart, like, how many pages are each of these books in this category?

Jess Lahey

Oh my gosh.

Dr. Megan

Just to kind of get the structure in, very much a similar process in artists, where you're like, oh, how does this person use light in a painting?

Jess Lahey

Right.

Dr. Megan

And I think that's where I feel like, by putting creativity, like, using those same dynamics has been really empowering, because it's that same sort of thing for me, just finding, yeah, so the more, the more I do that, the better it becomes, because it invites a whole new structure you might not have thought of, or...

Jess Lahey

Okay, whatever. So, and we'll talk about this eventually, but at a certain point, all of the charts and the graphs and stuff are going to have to give way to this, like really big, creative and word output. So, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now, we're in the planning stage, and then the last thing I need you to think about is, and I don't think it's too early to start thinking about this, is, you know, how is this going to translate into speaking, and how we're going to do an entire podcast just on the planning? You know, obviously, you don't even have a book yet. You don't even have an agent yet, any... all of this stuff.

Dr. Megan

Yeah.

Jess Lahey

But, but... and we're going to talk about all this stuff, but in order to really be able to pitch yourself as a speaker, because I think there's even the possibility the speaker thing could happen without the book thing. It's going to happen most effectively, obviously, with the book thing. But it's since that's what you really want, we're going to start planning for that speaking career while the book is also happening. Right?

Dr. Megan

I'm in.

Jess Lahey

Okay, all right, so you've already done what I was going to give you homework about. So, I think, I think what you need to start thinking about is...I have given Megan a copy of The Addiction Inoculation book proposal, right?

Dr. Megan

Uh-huh.

Jess Lahey

Okay, so the reason it's not that I think that my book proposal is all that, but my agent...

Dr. Megan

But it is.

Jess Lahey

Laurie Abkemeier, just is amazing, and she helped shape that. So, I think it's a really good starting place. And I think the first section, the introductory section, I think would be a really great place for you to start. Unless you have anything, you think would be another great place for you to start. I want to take your input into this as well.

Dr. Megan

No, that seems good. Yeah. Because in this class I did, we had to write the intro and the first thing, but then when I read what you had, I was like, whoa, there's so much more.

Jess Lahey

Yeah.

Dr. Megan

There's so much more.

Jess Lahey

And all of the things we've talked about go into that introductory section, like, why me? Why this? Why now? And I think the why now when it comes to your plot, and I'm sorry again, listeners that we have to be a bit vague, but I think why now, with your title and your subject matter, I think it's a really great time for this book as well and it and without linking it into, you know, popular culture references and stuff like that, I think it's really important to help basically, I like to think of this section as the section that the editor, potential editor will have to go to the group at her publishing house to pitch to say, can I buy this book... and for how much... that section really is, here's why this author is the right time, why it's the right time, why this is the right author, why there's a there, this book needs to be written, what the hole is in the market. And I think that's going to be a really important part of that for you.

Dr. Megan

Yeah, and that's where it felt like, oh, now this doctoral thing that I did 10 years ago is coming into play, because they'd always be like, what are your gaps in the literature? And you have to get really granular about it. And so...

Jess Lahey

Oh, over and over again, I've been like, oh, wait, I can go back to that other thing I wrote in order to pull some of the pieces from that. So, this is very helpful. Okay, so for just the two of us, that's going to be the first thing I would love to see from you is that introductory section, sure, and then we're going... this podcast is going to be from here on out. This introductory level is going to be for everyone from here on out. This is going to be for supporters. But if you want to follow along on the journey, we're going to remain vague, like I said about the topic, simply because we don't want anyone to take it. And we are going to keep things a little bit vague on some fronts, but for the most part, we're going to get really specific, like I'm going to we're going to be talking about querying agents. We're going to be talking about the what the query format is like and finding an agent. I mean, that's the first place we have to start for you, and I have some ideas, but I'm going to give you some homework around that as well, which is, and I think you may have heard this before on our podcast, because we've talked about it, but look at the books that you really, really admire in your genre, and then look at the acknowledgement section, because people thank their agents, right? So, for example, if I am looking at a stack of books, I recommend a lot. So, for example, I really love, you know, like Nadine Burke Harris’s The Deepest Well, and Ned Johnson's The Self-Driven Child, and uh, Dan Siegel's Brainstorm, and Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation, those books sort of hit the tone and the topic that I would be writing about. So, who are their agents? Because those agents are clearly open to topics that are similar. Now, you don't want to go for someone who's written, who's published, or, you know, sold, the exact same thing, but you want someone who's hitting the spirit of the and is someone that is reputable and that you're also going to find by looking at who authors you respect thank in their acknowledgements. So that's a good starting place. So that's your other assignment.

Dr. Megan

Okay.

Jess Lahey

You can go to the library and do that. You can go clearly you have stacks of books at your house. You can borrow any of my books you would like. But let's start looking for potential agents to pitch this idea to, because a query is like, almost like a mini it's like a super mini version of your idea, and if they like it, they're going to ask for more. So, we need to have that more ready for when you query. Nonfiction is a little different from fiction, and for those of you have been listening for a long time, you know that if you're going to query a fiction agent, that agent is going to ask for a full manuscript, which so you better have finished it if you're going to pitch a fiction agent. It's not always the case, but mostly the case. But with nonfiction, the idea is you sell the book with a proposal. So, an agent in this arena is going to be expecting that maybe you have chapter summaries, maybe you have a sample chapter. So those are going to be our early goals for this sort of thing. But I think baseline introductory section is going to be the best place to start, and getting an idea of potential agents is the other great place to start. So how does that sound for you?

Dr. Megan

Super exciting, slightly intimidating.

Jess Lahey

Okay.

Dr. Megan

Because what if...I'm like, oh no, what if they love it, and now I've got to, like, crank out this whole book. Like, oh my gosh!

Jess Lahey

Yeah. Oh, it's scary. Like, The Gift of Failure stuff happened really fast. I got my dream agent who had been chasing, I don't know if you know this story, but I chased her for 10 years. I knew she was the right agent for me, but I kept sending her projects that weren't quite right, and The Gift of Failure happened to be right, but everything happened really fast after that. So, I've done like a crash proposal and agent acquisition, but I've also done, you know, the slower version, The Addiction Inoculation version. So, I totally get that each piece of this can be really scary, especially when it needs to happen fast and there isn't any urgency. It's not like you know, but we're also going to talk about articles that you could start writing for the media that will start being test balloons for this idea, because it helps if you have an article that does well on the topic that you're addressing.

Dr. Megan Yes, and that would be maybe a whole umbrella conversation, but, yeah, I actually was wondering about that, because...

Jess Lahey

And that could be a whole episode.

Dr. Megan

Of all these links to the amazing articles. And I'm like, oh no, you haven't done any of that, like, you know, sort of, but not really.

Jess Lahey

We'll do a whole episode on that, and especially on how to pitch those, how to think about those. And yeah, we'll be doing a whole entire episode on pitching articles that are in line with what you would like to write for next book. There are lots and lots of authors who do send up these test balloons to see what sticks. I know lots of them that do that, and there's a balance to me made between including content for the potential book and still sending up that test balloon. So, we'll talk about all of that in a separate episode, but for now, looking for potential agents writing that introductory thing, and then we're going to get together in like two weeks or so, and we'll start, and we'll start talking about actual... we'll actually do stuff.

Dr. Megan

Amazing, yes!

Jess Lahey

Because this book needs to happen, I'm really excited about it. I know you're excited about it, and I'm really just honored to be a part of helping in any way.

Dr. Megan Mutual and likewise, and this is super exciting.

Jess Lahey

And the dogs have pretty much behaved themselves today, so hopefully they'll continue to behave themselves. All right, if you want to get the rest of this series, and I think, I think I'm going to call it something like, I have an idea now what? That kind of idea, but if you want to be a part and listen to the rest of this series, you're going to have to become a supporter of the podcast. Becoming a supporter of the podcast gets you other stuff too, like First Pages, the Booklab thing that we just recorded a bunch of episodes. I don't know if you've ever listened to Booklab, but we get submissions from very brave listeners who give us their first pages, and then we talk about whether or not we turn the page, and we critique them, and it's really fun. And then you get other bonus materials as well. So, think about becoming a supporter, and I'm really excited about this new series. So, thank you for being a guinea pig, because it takes a lot of bravery to do that.

Dr. Megan

Well. Thank you. I'm super excited and nervous and excited.

Jess Lahey

All right, until next week, and this is for you specifically, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. The Hashtag AmWriting 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.

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!