Dennis connects via telephone with his longtime friend Jude Hopkins to discuss her new novel Babe In the Woods. Here’s the official blurb: After living in Los Angeles, Hadley Todd returns to her hometown in rural New York to write and be near her father. Hadley hopes to channel her recent L.A. heartbreak into a play about the last moment of a woman's innocence. But she seeks inspiration. Enter Trey Harding, a young, handsome reporter who is the perfect spark to fire up her imagination. In the interview, Jude talks about how the novel began as a riff on Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, why she decided to make her heroine Hadley more complicated than most rom-com heroines, and why she decided to not aim for the HEA or “happily ever after” market. Jude also talks about never giving up on her dream of having a novel published and wonders why so many people do give up on their dreams. Jude and Dennis also reminisce about times they spent together in LA; recording song parodies, going to game show tapings, trying and failing to see David Cassidy perform at the Ambassador Hotel and crafting outgoing messages for Dennis’s answering machine. Other topics include: why Jude’s glad her parents ignored her growing up, when she fell in love with literature, why she loves teaching, being disillusioned by Alex Trebek, meeting Tina Turner and Paul and Linda McCartney when she worked at Capital Records and that glorious moment when she first held her finished novel in her hands. https://www.judehopkinswriting.net/