The 7am Novelist

Today, I’m talking to Chital Mehta, author of the recently released novel, Have You Seen Romit, to be released in October. R.O. Kwon called the novel: “A gripping, intensely moving portrayal of a woman whose ferocious love for her children ends up clashing with how others expect her to behave. I loved spending time with the rule-breaking Usha and with the complicated world Chital Mehta has conjured. Vivid, fresh, and resonant.”. We’ll be discussing how Chital experimented with point of view in the novel, writing her first draft in third-person, revising it in first person, and returning again to third person for her final draft.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one month. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

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To find Mehta’s latest book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Chital Mehta is an award-winning South Asian writer whose stories center around motherhood, family dynamics, and immigration. She won the Boggs Fiction contest for her story, “Damaged Gifts,” and her story “The Weight of Happiness” was a Finalist for The Pinch Literary Awards. Her novel, Have You Seen Romit?, was the winner of the 2025 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, judged by R. O. Kwon. She is an alum of Tin House and VONA. She holds an MFA from Lindenwood University. She lives in Delaware with her husband and children.

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Today, I’m talking to Courtney Maum, literary citizen extraordinaire, educator, writing coach, and author most recently of Alan Ops Out. She says the book took an “obscene” number of drafts because she couldn’t distance herself from her female character, when the story needed this character to be wildly different. She needed, as Courtney calls it, to “fictionalize” her fiction.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one month. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find Maum’s latest book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Along with her latest novel, ALAN OPTS OUT, Courtney Maum is the author of five previous books, including the romantic comedy TOUCH (A New York Times Editors’ Choice) and the memoir THE YEAR OF THE HORSES, chosen by the Today show as one of the best reads for mental health awareness. Creator of the groundbreaking publishing guidebook BEFORE AND AFTER THE BOOK DEAL and the bestselling Substack newsletter by the same name, Maum is an educator and writing coach hellbent on preserving the joy of art-making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. In addition to her advocacy work for writers at The Author’s Guild, Courtney runs a workshop in New Mexico where she combines twenty years of experience in advertising with a deep love of craft to help writers boost their confidence and industry know-how. Learn more and sign up for her writing classes at CourtneyMaum.com

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Today, I’m talking to Hank Phillippi Ryan, author of the upcoming thriller Mother Daughter Sister Stranger. Hank had sent what she calls a “best-it-could-be” draft of the book to her editor, when her editor turned it back around and told her to cut an entire point of view. That’s a tough message to hear when an author thinks they’ve already crossed the finish line. How did she do it?

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one month. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find Ryan’s latest book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN is the USA Today bestselling author of 17 thrillers including MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER and ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS, the 2026 Mary Higgins Clark Award winner. She’s won every major mystery award, and her thrillers are translated into multiple languages worldwide. Her fiction is inspired by a lifetime of investigating true crime as an on-air reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, winning multiple journalism honors, including an unprecedented 37 Emmys. A TedX speaker and in-demand literary moderator, national reviewers call her “a superb and gifted storyteller.” A Chicago native with Indianapolis roots, Ryan lives in Boston.

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Today, I’m talking to Trisha Blanchet, author of the recently released debut, Murder Like Magic. Trisha is a former journalist, and I know plenty of journalists who are great with cranking the pages out. But Trisha often found that she just needed to slow down and give more. So we’ll talk about how she did it.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one month. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find Blanchet’s book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Trisha Blanchet is the author of Murder Like Magic (Crooked Lane Books, Aug 25, 2026) and The Neath Trilogy (Herrick’s End, Herrick’s Lie, and Herrick’s Key). She’s also the producer and host of A Mighty Blaze Podcast, which features interviews with authors, and the founder of Operation Delta Dog: Service Dogs for Veterans. Trisha is a member of the Tall Poppy Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and ITW.

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Today, I’m talking to Andrew Ridker, author of his upcoming third novel, Everything Must Go, which will be released next year. We’ll be discussing voice and how a writer might retain one’s voice while crossing into a new genre. This seems a particularly tricky issue, because different genres often demand different kinds of voices, but of course as a writer still wants their work to sound like themselves.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one month. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find Ridker’s latest book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Andrew Ridker is the author of the novels Hope and The Altruists. His third novel, Everything Must Go, is forthcoming from Viking. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Le Monde, Bookforum, Guernica, Lit Hub, and on his Substack newsletter, Half Sour. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Andrew is the founder of the Prospect Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Today, I’m talking to Alexis M. Wright about how she’s built a writing career through literary citizenship. She’ll share concrete examples of how one act of service or connection tends to cascade into the next. For Alexis and others, being a good literary citizen is as career-defining as the writing itself.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one month. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Alexis M. Wright is a writer whose essays have appeared in The Common, Shenandoah, and The Maine Review, with work recognized as notable in the Best American Essays. Alongside her writing, Alexis has built her career through deep community engagement: she reads for Ploughshares, teaches at organizations like The Loft Literary Center, has interviewed the leadership of The McCormack Writing Center (formally Tin House) for Electric Literature, and has worked in arts administration supporting writers and artists at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a passionate advocate for the idea that a writing life is built not only through publication but through service, connection, and showing up for other writers and the institutions that sustain them, relationships that open doors that publishing alone cannot. Alexis is represented by Julia Kim at The Rights Factory and is at work on her debut essay collection.

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Today, I’m talking to Rachel Kousser, author of Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great. As a Classics professor, she had to make a big adjustment from argument-focused academic writing to story-focused narrative nonfiction. Her writing partner, Ilyon Woo, was critical to her success.

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one month. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find Kousser’s book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

RACHEL KOUSSER writes and teaches about Alexander the Great, ancient iconoclasm, and the representation of gender and power in the Mediterranean world. For her work, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts. Her most recent book is Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great (HarperCollins 2024). She’s also published articles in Art Bulletin, American Journal of Archaeology, and Res: Archaeology and Aesthetics as well as two books with Cambridge University Press. Rachel is currently the chair of the Classics Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Brooklyn College. She has a B.A. in Classics and Art History from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

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Today, I’m talking to Peter Ho Davies about the difficult task of writing about your loved ones. He struggled with this both in his recent novel and in the memoiristic frame he created for his book The Art of Revision. And he’s still struggling with it with his new work-in-progress. What advice does he have for us to get through it?

Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one month. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find Ho’s latest book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Peter Ho Davies’ most recent books are the novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Art of Revision: The Last Word, his first work of non-fiction. Other books include the novels, The Fortunes, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award; The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Booker Prize, and a London Times bestseller; as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. A recipient of the PEN/Malamud and PEN/Macmillan awards, his fiction has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and Granta and been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he currently directs the Helen Zell MFA Program at the University of Michigan.

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Kelly J. Ford returns to the 7am Novelist to talk project management, finding your genre, and not giving up.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find Ford’s latest book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Kelly J. Ford is the Anthony-nominated author of Real Bad Things; Cottonmouths, a Los Angeles Review Best Book of 2017; and The Hunt. An Arkansas native, Kelly writes crime fiction set in the Ozarks and Arkansas River Valley.

Today, fabulous fiction duo Patricia Park and Desmond Hall talk about how writing is like exercise, how to invest in your writing career, and the importance of finding a great teacher and writing community.

I don’t charge for subscriptions, but if you’d like, you can support my work with with a small donation here.

To find Park and Hall’s latest book as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.

Desmond Hall is the author of two award-winning YA novels, including most recently Better Must Come, which was a top ten In the Margins book pick, CariCon Award for best Caribbean YA novel, and won honors for the Massachusetts Book Award.

Patricia Park is the author of The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Re Jane, a Jane Eyre retelling; Imposter Syndrome, a Gotham Book Prize finalist; and most recently, What’s Eating Jackie Oh?

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