#AmWriting

• How to Capture Emotion on the Page

  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 FriedmanGuide on Literary Fiction from LidijaLidija’s website: www.lidijahilje.comAuthor Accelerator book coaches Barbara Boyd and Nita CollinsHey 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 - TRANSCRIPTJennie NashHey 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 NashHey 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 HiljeThank you so much for having me and for this incredible introduction. I'm so honored.Jennie NashWell, 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 HiljeAbsolutely. Thank you so much.Jennie NashOkay.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 HiljeYeah, 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 NashI—I love it. Let's do it.Lidija HiljeSo 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 NashOh, 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 HiljeYes, 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 NashSo, 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 HiljeSo 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 NashRight, right.Lidija HiljeI 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 NashNo, it's fascinating.Lidija HiljeBut they are so intertwined in my life, yeah.Jennie NashI 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 HiljeI 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 NashOh wow!Lidija HiljeIt 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 NashOh, 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 HiljeI 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 NashWell, 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 HiljeSo 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 NashLike the speed dating.Lidija HiljeYeah, 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 NashSo—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 HiljeYes. 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 NashHmm…Lidija HiljeAnd, 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 NashRight.Lidija HiljeI 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 NashWell, 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 HiljeOh, 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 NashI 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 HiljeYeah, 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 NashAll 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 HiljeSo, 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 NashRight, 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 HiljeThank 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 NashYeah.Lidija HiljeAnd 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 NashOh, 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 HiljeThank you so much for having me, and all the encouragement over the years. I'm really grateful for that as well.Jennie NashAll right, well, until next time, for our listeners—keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. Jess LaheyThe 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

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• In Search of the Beast in the Clouds with author Nathalia Holt

  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 websiteTranscript below!EPISODE 455 - TRANSCRIPTJess LaheyHey, 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 LaheyHey, 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 HoltThank you so much. I'm excited to talk to you today.Jess LaheySo 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 HoltSure. 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 LaheyYeah, yeah.Nathalia HoltSo 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 LaheyWhere'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 HoltYeah, 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 LaheyActually, 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 HoltYeah, 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 LaheyYeah. 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 HoltIt'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 LaheyThat'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 HoltThat is the real challenge, because it's easy to get the Roosevelts’ documentation.Jess LaheyYeah, yeah, yeah.Nathalia HoltI 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 LaheyYeah.Nathalia HoltAnd 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 LaheyOh my goodness.Nathalia HoltBy 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 LaheyOkay, 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 HoltI 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 LaheyYeah.Nathalia HoltYou 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 LaheyThat'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 HoltOh, I'm a terrible overwriter.Jess LaheyOh. So am I!Nathalia HoltIt'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 LaheyYeah, 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 HoltYes, 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 LaheyYeah, 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 HoltI 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 LaheyYeah, 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 HoltI 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 LaheyHas 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 LaheySo 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 HoltThat 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 LaheyBut 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 HoltThat'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 LaheyThat'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 HoltI do not. I pare down.Jess LaheyYou do?!Nathalia HoltAfter 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 LaheyWell, 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 HoltIt comes out July 1st.Jess LaheyOkay. And I have to say... cover is gorgeous. How did you land on that cover image?Nathalia HoltOh, I really didn't get much say.Jess Lahey Okay.Nathalia HoltThe 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 LaheyWell, 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 HoltThank 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 LaheyWell, 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 HoltOh, 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 LaheyWell, 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 HoltYes, 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 LaheyYeah, 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 HoltThat would be amazing.Jess LaheyEveryone is listening to me...Nathalia Holt Oh, well, they should.Jess LaheyAll 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 HoltYou 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 LaheyYou 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 HoltThank you. That's so kind of you. I really appreciate that.Jess LaheyAll 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

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• Ep 454 Mid-Year Check-In

  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 JimenezTranscript below!EPISODE 454 - TRANSCRIPTKJ Dell'AntoniaHey, 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.comMultiple 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'AntoniaHey, 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 LaheyI'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 BowenI'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 NashI'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'AntoniaYay. 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 NashKJ, 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'AntoniaI am.Sarina BowenAren't we all though?KJ Dell'AntoniaI thought we were all having that year, but maybe not.Sarina BowenI'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 LaheyThat'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 BowenWell, I did just notice that I left...KJ Dell'AntoniaOh! I have it your word was "present". I wrote them down. Your word was "present".Sarina BowenYou know. And I am. I am not doing a terrible job on presence. I'm not doing a bad job.KJ Dell'AntoniaJennie, your word was "Teflon".Jennie NashThat'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 BowenI 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 NashThat's very cool.Jess LaheyIt'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 BowenI 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 BowenI 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 LaheyDo 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 LaheyAlright. 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 BowenWow, 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 LaheyYeah. 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 NashAre you sharing what your topic is? The new topic?Jess LaheyNot yet.Jennie NashOkay.Jess LaheyNot yet. Soon, I maybe, maybe for our end of the year, check in. I will.Jennie NashOkay.Jess LaheyI don't want to lose the juju.Jennie NashMy 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 BowenWell, fantastic. My....Jess LaheySuper happy for you.KJ Dell'AntoniaBig 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 BowenAnd are we drafting?KJ Dell'AntoniaWe ,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 LaheyYeah, 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 NashBees!Jess LaheyAnd 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 NashI love that “Bee TV”. Come on. That's great.KJ Dell'AntoniaThey'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 LaheyWell, 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 LaheyYeah 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'AntoniaThis is good, yeah, at least being the person that I, that I that I wanted to be this year.Jennie NashKJ, 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 LaheyFair enough. Yeah, sometimes you need to do that.Sarina BowenYeah.Jess LaheyAlright. Well, I like it.KJ Dell'AntoniaOkay. Well, we know Jess has read something good lately because she mentioned, yes, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere. Atmospheric?Jess LaheyLoved 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'AntoniaWhile 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 LaheyIt'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'AntoniaBut 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 LaheyAbsolutely.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Jennie NashI'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 LaheyShe 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'AntoniaThe Book Riot people pointed out that she's kind of the queen of women doing jobs.Jess LaheyYeah, 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'AntoniaThank 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 LaheyIt's on my list too.Sarina BowenThen I would like you to know, that the next one I actually feel might be even better.KJ Dell'AntoniaOh, can't wait.Sarina BowenBecause 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 NashWell, 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 LaheyI 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 NashShe does. And my daughter listened to it and said, it could not be more charming. Yeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaSarina, have you read anything lately?Sarina BowenI 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'AntoniaWell, 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 BowenYes, we did!KJ Dell'AntoniaWe 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 BowenIt 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 LaheyYeah, yeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaThat's our idea of fun. Jess LaheyMight 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 LaheyWe 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 a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

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• The Ultimate How To: Write, Pitch, Maybe Publish with Kate McKean from Agents+Books

  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#AmReadingKate: 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 - TRANSCRIPTKJ Dell'AntoniaWriters 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'AntoniaHey, 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 McKeanI'm really happy to be here. I'm excited to chat.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, 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 McKeanThank you.KJ Dell'AntoniaBlurb that I have ever read, I think, or...Kate McKeanSarah 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'AntoniaShe'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 McKeanI’ll take it.KJ Dell'AntoniaI 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 McKeanNot at all.KJ Dell'AntoniaEven 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 McKeanI 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 McKeanYikes!KJ Dell'AntoniaThis was not so great.Kate McKeanYep!KJ Dell'AntoniaYikes! 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 McKeanYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaBecause you know, people read it and it's not the slush pile and yay. And it's bad because people read it.Kate McKeanPeople, people really do think that it's who you know and publishing, and of course, that helps, like you just said.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Kate McKeanBut 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'AntoniaMy agent is my friend...Kate McKeanYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaBecause 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 McKeanYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaYou 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 McKeanImpossible sometimes.KJ Dell'AntoniaOr 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 McKeanI, 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'AntoniaYeah.Kate McKeanYou 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 McKeanAnd 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 McKeanAnd 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 McKeanBut 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'AntoniaYeah. 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 McKeanThe 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'AntoniaRight.Kate McKeanOr 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'AntoniaSo 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 McKeanYes, it because everything made sense when it came out of my brain.KJ Dell'AntoniaOf course.Kate McKeanYou 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 McKeanYeah, 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'AntoniaSo 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 McKeanI 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'AntoniaThere's not really anywhere to do this stuff anymore.Kate McKeanYeah, yeah, there's nowhere to do it.KJ Dell'AntoniaI mean the world... the world has changed.Kate McKeanYeah, 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 McKeanDefinitely, oh, definitely.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Kate McKeanMy wonderful assistant isn't on social media. And I'm like, Wow, what a life, that's amazing.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, 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 McKeanRight, 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'AntoniaYes!Kate McKeanHate it.KJ Dell'AntoniaYes.Kate McKeanFair game, and also, if your market isn't on there, then don't go on there, or you don't prioritize that.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah. 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 McKeanI 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'AntoniaYeah…definitely not. Yeah. So okay, that that doesn't surprise me. I thought you were going to say query letters, but...Kate McKeanI was going to say query letters, but every it's, it's so much, there's always so much query letters.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah and there's others, there's, there's more of an answer to that, like...Kate McKeanYeah, yeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaYou 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 McKean100%.KJ Dell'AntoniaThat 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 McKeanNo. 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'AntoniaWhat 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 McKeanYou 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 McKeanYeah, exactly.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Kate McKeanAnd 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 McKeanThat'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'AntoniaAnd 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 McKeanYep.KJ Dell'AntoniaIn a “Welcome” kind of way.Kate McKeanYeah, it's you're in the club. Yeah? Everybody hating writing and not being able to stop.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, yeah.Kate McKeanIt's the thing we love to hate the most.KJ Dell'AntoniaI 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 McKeanOut loud by me.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah!Kate McKeanI 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'AntoniaYeah.Kate McKeanIt 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'AntoniaI 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 McKeanI mean, I think good plan, it’s a great idea. Just buy a case, stick it in your house.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, maybe put it in the back of your car. You never know when you're going to need this.Kate McKeanNo, I think it's a it makes a great gift for all occasions, even if they're not writers.KJ Dell'AntoniaProbably 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 McKeanWhat the saying? That grads, dads, and there's another one...KJ Dell'AntoniaDads, grads, and...Kate McKeanSomething like...KJ Dell'AntoniaMom! 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 McKeanYeah, 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'AntoniaFor 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 McKeanI 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'AntoniaOh wow!Kate McKeanI 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'AntoniaAwesome.Kate McKeanAnd 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'AntoniaGreat, amazing.Kate McKeanI'm like, hugging the book right now.KJ Dell'AntoniaYou 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 McKeanExcellent. That sounds great.KJ Dell'AntoniaThank 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 LaheyThe 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 a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

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• The Gift of Failure: Author Version

  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:LauraPaloozaKaren Dukess, The Last Book PartyZibby EventsThe Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray#AmReadingKaren: The Original, Nell Stevens KJ: Welcome to Murder WeekKaren’s Substack Keep Calm and Carry On, a Substack from Karen Dukess or find her on Instagram @karendukess, or her website www.karendukess.comDid 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 LaheyHey, 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'AntoniaHey, 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 DukessThat is true. Thank you.KJ Dell'AntoniaSo, 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 DukessSo, 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'AntoniaOh, yeah.Karen DukessSo 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'AntoniaI think the only thing worse than having your second novel not published is having it published to like, you know, universal hatred.Karen DukessYeah exactly.KJ Dell'AntoniaOr just, or just to your own disappointment, you know?Karen DukessYeah. 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'AntoniaYeah.Karen DukessSo, 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'AntoniaWho 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 DukessI'm so glad.KJ Dell'AntoniaI don't know what the Russian novel was like. That doesn't sound fun.Karen DukessI mean it wasn't really heavy, because I'm not like a heavy writer... like it still had...KJ Dell'AntoniaRight.Karen DukessIn it, and it had emotion, etc., but I'm not sad that it's not out.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Karen DukessLet'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'AntoniaI, 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 DukessYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaLike, 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 DukessI 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'AntoniaYeah.Karen DukessLike 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'AntoniaYes, yes, you can. Nobody ever tells me my first draft is perfect, and I really hate that.Karen DukessYeah, 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'AntoniaWell, 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'AntoniaIt 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 DukessYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd B. sometimes not at all.Karen DukessYeah, 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'AntoniaYeah.Karen DukessWipe my eyes and move on. But...KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Karen DukessYou know...KJ Dell'AntoniaA light one.Karen DukessYou 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'AntoniaYeah, 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 DukessYeah.KJ Dell'Antonia Something... something pleasant... something.Karen DukessYeah, 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'AntoniaAnd you had him hit his head instead, right? Yeah.Karen DukessBecause 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'AntoniaYeah, yeah.Karen DukessLike she's still concerned about Cath and her story. You can feel sad about what she learns, but not anxiety.KJ Dell'AntoniaYou 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 DukessYeah, 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'AntoniaYeah. 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 DukessYeah, exactly.KJ Dell'AntoniaThank 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 DukessWhat changed for me... in writing?KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, what are you changing? Did you change anything in your process?Karen DukessUm, 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'AntoniaYeah, or am I walking away because I just don't know how to...Karen DukessSo, 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'AntoniaYeah, that makes sense.Karen DukessI 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'AntoniaRight. I think you learned to trust that you would finish this, even if you didn't finish it today.Karen DukessYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaDoes that make sense?Karen DukessYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaI, yeah.Karen DukessAnd 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'AntoniaI 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 DukessYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaI'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'AntoniaIt doesn't work for you.Karen DukessI 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'AntoniaThat 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 DukessYeah, 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'AntoniaYes.Karen DukessWorking 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 DukessI don't think anyone has tried my process, but yeah. And it can be different for every book, I guess, you know?KJ Dell'AntoniaHorrifyingly, 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 DukessExactly.KJ Dell'AntoniaBaby's developing nicely. Here's our 18-month checklist. Aww and you're crawling, and you hate your book. Yay!Karen DukessYeah, 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'AntoniaWell, 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 DukessAre you still working on it? Or...KJ Dell'AntoniaIt'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 DukessI had this theory about books, like, it's the same theory I had with au pairs.KJ Dell'AntoniaOkay.Karen DukessWe 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'AntoniaRight? yeah.Karen DukessAnd 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'AntoniaWritten something else.Karen DukessSo, you know, maybe the one that's not working is going to lead you to write the next fabulous thing.KJ Dell'AntoniaWell, 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 DukessExactly.KJ Dell'AntoniaOr unless you really want to.Karen DukessYeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaThere. 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 DukessUm, 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'AntoniaOof, I love that.Karen DukessIn a really compelling way.KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd 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 DukessYeah, it was very... it's very good. It's kind of like a rainy day book. You know?KJ Dell'AntoniaI 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 DukessIt's hard to compare because it's not a traditional mystery,KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, 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'AntoniaSo 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 DukessYeah, I have to say, you know, I think that writers should talk more often about their failures. And by that...KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Karen DukessI 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'AntoniaI 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 DukessYeah, had a great cover.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, 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 DukessYeah, but I've survived it. So...KJ Dell'AntoniaYou'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 DukessThank you. Thanks so much KJ.KJ Dell'AntoniaOh, thank you. Hey, anywhere people should follow you? Oh, you have a Substack. What is it? I love it!Karen DukessI 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'AntoniaIt'll be linked. It'll be linked.Karen DukessGreat.KJ Dell'AntoniaHopefully 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 LaheyThe 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 a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

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