In today's January Bonus Episode, Bianca interviews Jami Attenberg, author of 1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. They discuss Jami's 1000 Words of Summer newsletter and the idea of being a good literary citizen; the essays from Jami's latest work; writing for other reasons than to get published; remembering why you write; battling with imposter syndrome; the false concept of an expiration date as a writer; writing as strength-training; the need to live in order to write; and why writing isn’t a process that has to be efficient.

After which Bianca interviews Jo Salas, author of Mrs. Lowe-Porter. They discuss the inspiration and research behind Jo's latest novel; the challenges of writing a character with dementia and how life experiences can lend themselves to writing; how Jo balanced the use of historical source materials and fictional representations; one of the chapters in Jo's novel where a fictional character has a conversation with the woman writing her; the struggle to make your writing a priority; and Jo's non-traditional journey to publication.

Finally, Emilie Sommer of East City Bookshop provides the invaluable service of suggesting comp titles to our listeners.

If you’re looking for our usual Q&A segment, that now gets published as part of our end of the month Substack newsletter. Subscribe to get access to that, and so much for free: https://theshitaboutwriting.substack.com/

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To ask a question, go to: https://sayhi.chat/TSNOTYAW

To connect with Emilie Sommer go to https://www.instagram.com/emiliegsommer/ and you can find East City Bookshop at https://www.instagram.com/eastcitybookshop/

More information about Jami can be found at https://www.jamiattenberg.com She's also on Instagram at http://www.instagram.com/jamiattenberg and Twitter at https://twitter.com/jamiattenberg

More information about Jo can be found at https://josalas.com/

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