Pen Pals Pod

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In this late-season check-in, Krisserin and Kelton answer a listener letter from Paige, a new mom asking whether to return to her pandemic-era novel or start one of her shiny new ideas. Their answer surprises even them — and leads to an honest conversation about burnout, creative momentum, and how to use stolen writing time when life refuses to pause. Plus: Dungeon Crawler Carl, and the listener survey you really should fill out.

Books mentioned in this episode:

- Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
- Nora Goes Off Script by Annabelle Monaghan
- Unstuck by Ramona Ausubel 
- The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
- The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

Krisserin and Kelton are running on fumes — sleep-deprived, burned out, and staring down a summer deadline that feels impossible. Enter Amanda Fletcher: writer, breathwork practitioner, PEN Center USA Emerging Voices fellow, and one of the most magnetic people in the Los Angeles literary community. Amanda shares her winding path from born storyteller to mathlete to kinesiology major, and the losses that knocked her off course — including her mother's death by suicide when Amanda was 24. What followed was over a decade of addiction, a broken neck, and eventually the writing classes and recovery community that brought her back to the page. Amanda explains how she discovered breathwork in early sobriety, why she believes our stories are imprinted on our nervous systems, and how the same limiting beliefs that block our creativity can be unlocked through intentional breathing. She guides listeners through a simple breathwork exercise they can use before a writing session, and makes the case that getting unstuck as a writer might start with getting out of your head and into your body.

Follow Amanda:
Instagram: @theamandafletcher
Email: [email protected]
Website: amandafletcher.me

Amanda's upcoming virtual breathwork sessions:
Tuesday, June 2 at 6pm PT

Saturday, June 6 at 8am PT

Saturday, June 20 at 8am PT

Saturday, June 27 at 10am PT

Tuesday, June 30 at 6pm PT

Books Mentioned in this Episode:
"The Ogress and the Orphans" by Kelly Barnhill 
"Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke 
"White Oleander" by Janet Fitch 
"The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield 
"A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey 
"Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter" by Heather Fawcett

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

Krisserin checks in from a Kansas City hotel room fresh off an unexpected ER visit in St. Louis — chest pains, a CT scan, and a lot of unanswered questions — while Kelton battles a household plague of sickness, broken blow-dryers, and postpartum burnout. The two trade brutally honest book reviews: Krisserin DNFs the buzzy bestseller Yesteryear (great concept, rough execution), while Kelton grinds through the literary sci-fi of The Other Valley and falls head over heels for Heather Fawcett's Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter. They dig into what makes good writing actually good — from research depth to character arcs to the controversial no-quotation-marks device — and commiserate over nepo babies in Hollywood, the guilt of not writing, and the importance of just taking care of yourself when life is beating you up. This week's goals: a spa treatment in Vegas and some middle grade fiction in the mountains.

Books Mentioned in this episode:

"Yesteryear" by Caro Claire Burke
"The Other Valley" by Scott Alexander Howard
"Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter" by Heather Fawcett
"Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke
"Dungeon Crawler Carl" by Matt Matt Dinniman
"The Ogress and the Orphans" by Kelly Barnhill
"The Bear and the Nightingale" by Katherine Arden

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

This week on Pen Pals, Krisserin and Kelton sit down with debut novelist Alli Hoff Kosik to discuss her buzzy new novel, Too Blessed to Stress — a sharp, funny, and unexpectedly tender story about Christian influencers, megachurch culture, and the complicated women behind perfectly curated feeds.

Alli shares how a pandemic-era fascination with influencer culture inspired the book, why she wanted to approach her characters with empathy instead of judgment, and how social media, capitalism, faith, and performance intersect online. They also discuss writing motherhood into real life, balancing creativity with burnout, MFA programs, multiple POV novels, and the challenge of building a writing life while raising small children.

Plus: Secret Lives of Mormon Wives comparisons, parasocial internet rabbit holes, writing routines, podcasting, and whether Krisserin and Kelton actually sound the same.

Books Mentioned in This Episode
The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Maame by Jessica George
Love by the Book by Jessica George
Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
Long Bright River by Liz Moore
Nightshade by Eli Raphael

Find Alli Hoff Kosik
Website: Alli Hoff Kosik Official Website
Instagram: @allihoffkosik
Substack: https://allihoffkosik.substack.com/
Podcast: Is This a Thing? with Abby Wolfe
Buy Too Blessed to Stress on Bookshop.org

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

Krisserin and Kelton are running on fumes—and they're honest about it. Both hosts arrive at this week's accountability check-in feeling ragged: Krisserin is limping toward summer with a fried brain and a work trip on the horizon; Kelton is two years postpartum, pausing her newsletter for the month, and trying to remember what living feels like. Their respective goal updates are modest and real: Krisserin squeezed in two revision sessions (one of them in the car), while Kelton wrote 2,500 words—just not on her novel.
 
Krisserin and Kelton spend most of the episode answering listener mail. Kelly Barrett's six questions become the backbone of a wide-ranging conversation about AI (how they use it at work, why neither uses it for their own writing, and what happens when you catch your home assistant lying), reading life (when, how, how much, and what to do when a book isn't working), and self-publishing as a real option rather than a last resort.
 
Plus: dream therapy intake forms, artist dates in rural Colorado, thrift store prices that are absolutely not okay, and goals for a week when one spouse is heading into the mountains.
 
Books mentioned:
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Coyote America by Dan Flores
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
Sevenwaters Series by Juliet Marillier
 
Big thank you to Kelly Barrett for her very thoughtful listener letter. She writes the newsletter Practice Not Perfect at kellybarrett.substack.com. 

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

Krisserin and Kelton sit down with writer Rachael Maddux (Life Expectancy: A Memoir, The Void, Third Person) to talk about what happens when a book you’ve spent 14 years writing never sells through traditional channels — and how you decide to make it exist anyway. Rachael walks us through her journey from first draft to cold querying agents to three years on submission to ultimately self-publishing through Ingram Spark. They get into the real mechanics: ISBNs, the difference between fulfillment and distribution, what your agent can still do for you after a book doesn’t sell, and why self-publishing still carries a weird “stank” in literary circles.

Plus: writing groups as lifelines, reading as a writer, mortality as a muse, and the moment you realize your friends actually showed up. Also featuring a very special cameo from Krisserin’s mom, Kennette.

Find Rachael Maddux
Website: rachaelmaddux.com
Instagram: @rachaelmaddux
Life Expectancy: A Memoir — Bookshop.org | Amazon

Books Mentioned in this Episode
Mary Magdalene Once Upon a Time by Kennette Canary — Amazon
Book of Claire by Kennette Canary — Wattpad
The Star Who Lost Her Shine by Alex Huey Evans (debut picture book, coming Summer 2026) — alexhueyevans.com | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
The Keeper by Tana French
Works by Clarice Lispector

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

Krisserin and Kelton barely make it to record — 15 minutes late despite trying to be 30 minutes early — and that kind of week sets the tone. Kelton's survived two weeks of Colorado spring break without daycare, while Krisserin's mom is in town and the two have been watching movies and running around together. A conversation about Hamnet opens up a question that runs through the whole episode: who is a book actually made for?

That question gets personal when Krisserin responds to a listener letter from Sarah — a writer and loyal listener — who gently pushed back on her offhand comment about not reading male authors. Krisserin takes the feedback seriously, sits with it, and comes back with something more honest and nuanced than the original remark: not every writer is for every reader, and that's okay. When she's reading for pleasure and escape, she knows where she reliably finds what she's looking for. Kelton weighs in with her own reading year and they find their way to something they both actually believe.

The accountability check-in brings the theme back around to their own writing: the what-if exercise from Ramona Ausubel's Unstuck unlocked something for both of them, Krisserin shares feedback on her short story from her mom and from Kelton, and Kelton floats a summer writing project that is quietly one of the most charming ideas they've discussed on the pod.

Books Mentioned:
- Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
- The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
- Starling House by Alex Harrow
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
- Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
- Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
- James by Percival Everett
- Unstuck by Ramona Ausubel

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

Kelton is on a record-breaking week — 5,563 words across three chapters — after ditching Scrivener for the freedom of a Google Doc. Krisserin finished two short stories and sent them to beta readers, though she's staying up until 1:30 AM to do it (thanks, Juliet Marillier). Then they're joined by a very special guest: Ramona Ausubel, Krisserin's former PEN Center USA Emerging Voices mentor and beloved teacher of writing.

Ramona is the author of the National Book Foundation Science and Literature Prize-winning novel The Last Animal, a Barnes & Noble monthly pick, and winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Electric Literature, and The Paris Review. She's taught at Tin House, Bread Loaf, and multiple MFA programs including the Institute of American Indian Arts and Bennington, and she's currently a professor at Colorado State University.

Her new book — Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page — is a creative companion for writers at every stage of the process, and it's out now.

In this conversation, Ramona talks about why getting stuck is a feature of writing, not a failure; how she thinks of the whole process as learning to stop and start again with grace; and why a life full of interruptions is actually the substance of the work. She shares practical techniques from the book — the "20-minute doorway," revising thread by thread, and the concept of "structured play" — and what it means to follow a small doorway when you can't see where you're going.
 
Plus: pantsing vs. outlining (Ramona does both, in sequence), how she realized a character needed to die two drafts after the book sold, what it means to be a writer who takes herself both very seriously and completely unseriously, and why the treatment you give your work — not its subject — is what makes it yours.

Follow Ramona Ausubel:
• Website: ramonaausubel.com
• Instagram: @ramonaausubel
• Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page — available now wherever books are sold, or order at bookshop.org

Books Recommended by Ramona:
• All Souls by Christine Schutt 
• We the Animals by Justin Torres 
• The Houndling by Xenobe Purvis 
• Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell 

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

Spring break writing wins, a faux lip ring verdict, and the announcement of a big summer challenge: both hosts commit to finishing their first drafts by Labor Day. Krisserin wrote three times this week and Kelton locked her gothic novel's timeline and finally wrote the prologue she didn't know she needed. They also get into Kazuo Ishiguro's “Never Let Me Go” (craft: yes, ending: no), Juliet Marillier's “Daughter of the Forest” series that BookTok surfaced from 1999, the screen-time-as-wealth discourse, and why a playwright's Japanese jail stint made them briefly reconsider their productivity strategies.

Books mentioned:
The Possession of Alba Diaz by Isabel Cañas
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
Unaccustomed to Grace by Lesley Bannatyne
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios

Krisserin attended Rachel Hochhauser's birthday book signing in Studio City and wrote 3,300 words on her middle grade love story. Kelton got a rejection with feedback from her dream agent — a thoughtful no that somehow made everything clearer, even if the proposal still needs a full rework. Both hosts are sitting with that particular in-between feeling: not stuck exactly, just parked on the side of the road with their thumbs out.

Which makes the timing of this week's guest feel almost cosmically right. Lauren Khan is a literary agent at Fine Print Literary, host of the Prose Pros podcast, and a psychological thriller author currently querying her own debut novel The Gold Coast — which means she is simultaneously building her client list and watching her own query tracker obsessively. Lauren found her way to agenting after years as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, a pregnancy, a move to Florida, and the realization that the skills she'd spent years developing in big law — contracts, negotiations, client communication — were exactly what the publishing world needed more of.

The conversation covers everything: why Lauren queried before her manuscript was technically finished (and why she tells clients not to do this), how she accumulated 15 full manuscript requests by refusing to self-reject even the agents she was most intimidated by, and what it felt like to leave her first agent — going from agented author back to just a writer — and why she knew she had to do it anyway. She breaks down what she looks for in a query (comps, a one-sentence pitch, and a back-of-book-style summary), what makes her close her Kindle and not want to pick it back up the next morning, and why no agent is genuinely better than a bad agent, even when turning one down feels terrifying.

Plus: Krisserin and Kelton compare their wildly different plot homework (one spider-web on an oversized Post-it, one color-coded Excel spreadsheet), both celebrate actually completing their goals this week, and Kelton gets perspective from a new therapist who knows the literary world — and had the receipts to put her timeline in context.

Learn more about Lauren Khan:
Website: https://www.laurenjpkhan.com
Query Lauren: https://QueryTracker.net/query/laurenjpkhan
Instagram / TikTok: @laurenjpkhan
The Prose Pros Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-prose-pros/id1835741861

Books Mentioned in this episode:
God of the Woods by Liz Moore
In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead 
One and Only by Maureen Goo 
It's Different This Time by Josh Richard 
Every Summer After by Carley Fortune 
Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum 
Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino

Write to us:
[email protected]

Follow us:
Instagram: @penpalspod
TikTok: @penpalspod
YouTube: @PenPalsPod
SubStack: penpalspod.substack.com

Follow Krisserin and Kelton:
TikTok: @krisserin, @keltonwrites
Instagram: @keltonkin, @keltonwrites
Kelton's Substack: Shangrilogs
Krisserin's Substack: krisserin.substack.com

Music by Golden Hour Oasis Studios