Meg Mason, SORROW AND BLISS
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[2:03]Meg Mason is the author of sorrow and bliss, a novel.
[2:06]She says in her bio,
[2:08]Meg is a writer to begin with of newspapers.
[2:11]The financial times and the times London.
[2:13]Then of magazines.
[2:15]Vogue, El Marie Claire, GQ, Sunday style, and the New Yorker's Daily Shouts.
[2:19]Now, she is a writer of books.
[2:21]Her first novel, UB Mother, was published in 2017.
[2:25]Then, sorrow and bliss first published in Australia in 2020 and the US in February 2021.
[2:31]It will be released in the UK in June.
[2:34]Welcome Meg.
[2:35]Thank you so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books to discuss sorrow and bliss.
[2:40]Thank you so much.
[2:41]It's such a pleasure.
[2:42]Would you mind telling listeners what your novel is about?
[2:46]Sure.
[2:47]I'm getting better at this.
[2:48]It's so difficult to tell someone in such a short, you know, I'm like,
[2:52]I can kind of do an elevator pitch as long as the elevator is stalled.
[2:55]That's kind of where I'm up to.
[2:56]It has to be a stuck elevator.
[2:58]To me it's a love story about Martha and Patrick.
[3:01]It's the love story kind of told from the very beginning of their relationship
[3:04]when they're teenagers, when they first meet each other.
[3:06]All the way to Martha's early 40s when the book opens and things seem to be
[3:11]on their last legs in terms of their relationship.
[3:14]Within that, it pivots on mental illness is a strong theme that runs through it.
[3:18]That is why, you know, we've arrived at the point where they both seem to be
[3:22]at their end.
[3:23]And then I think as well through exploring that it's a coming of age because
[3:28]I delay coming of age because Martha at 40 kind of had to make these decisions
[3:32]that finally foster to grow up in a way that I think a lot of us experience.
[3:37]I think, you know, the idea that a coming of age occurs when you're a teenager,
[3:40]you know, just about to enter college 18.
[3:43]You drive across country.
[3:44]That didn't do it for me.
[3:45]Do you know what I mean?
[3:46]That's not when I grew up.
[3:47]It was much later than that after life.
[3:49]I had it's kind of way with me.
[3:51]Do you know what I mean?
[3:52]Like marriage and children and all of those things.
[3:54]That's what forces you to kind of feel like, oh, no one's coming to save me.
[3:57]You know, no one's coming to rescue me.
[3:59]And you're faced with these decisions of how do I proceed.
[4:02]And I think that's where we meet Martha.
[4:04]So it's those three things tied together.
[4:06]Wow.
[4:07]And where did this book come from?
[4:09]Where did the idea come from?
[4:10]And by the way, I love you have a whole passage in here.
[4:13]When she is thinking, when Martha is thinking about writing
[4:16]and is annoyed that people always think that her autobiography
[4:20]is autobiographical.
[4:21]And I'm like, well, I can't ask her now if it's autobiographical.
[4:25]I don't know.
[4:26]Because her character says it's not autobiographical.
[4:29]I think there's a little joke through there that I guess they snuck them in.
[4:35]This is my third book.
[4:36]And I guess I kind of, you know, the extent to which Martha is, you know,
[4:40]there are parts of her that, of course,
[4:42]are based on things I've experienced.
[4:43]And I think all of us have a really tricky relationship with that question.
[4:47]Because I always feel like if anyone wants to ask me anything,
[4:50]then I'm lucky because, you know, they could also equally well,
[4:53]not be interested in it nor the book completely.
[4:55]And so, you know, I think it's an interesting question.
[4:58]I've asked it of authors myself as a journalist.
[5:00]But it's so hard because we're so, you know, it's that mixture.
[5:04]It's imaginary.
[5:05]I'm answering it for you right now.
[5:06]It's partly imagination.
[5:10]It's partly, you know, things that you've seen or witnessed.
[5:12]And especially for me, you know,
[5:14]this kind of ties into where the book came from.
[5:16]But this was my Hail Mary path of a novel.
[5:19]This was going to be the last one.
[5:21]It wasn't even going to exist.
[5:22]And so anything that I'd felt heard seen,
[5:25]it all went in there within these characters.
[5:28]But then it's like,
[5:29]I think both is so insecure and so prideful.
[5:32]It's a funny combination, which I think.
[5:33]And the lot has kind of talked about that we have these enormous egos.
[5:36]And yet we're so insecure.
[5:38]That when someone assumes that it must just be you with the names changed,
[5:41]you feel like you don't think I'm capable of doing anything other than,
[5:45]you know, the thinly veiled things.
[5:47]So, you know, that's why it's, you know,
[5:49]uneasy and that's why it's not a little reference instead.
[5:52]I guess anticipating the questions slightly.
[5:55]But no, I'm very happy to answer it.
[5:57]Where the book came from is, I guess,
[5:59]like the ash heap of my career would probably be most realistic way to describe it.
[6:04]It's just, yeah,
[6:06]the part in summary is that I spent all of 2018 on a novel that I got to the end.
[6:11]And I knew it had been wrong since maybe February.
[6:14]And I couldn't just give up.
[6:16]And then the more words you acquire, you know, that you build,
[6:19]then you can't give it up once it's 40,000.
[6:21]And then, you know, at 60,000, you're like,
[6:24]oh, I wish I'd just got rid of it at 40.
[6:26]You know what I mean?
[6:27]It keeps going.
[6:28]And it keeps going.
[6:29]And you know, as a writer, especially if it's your first book,
[6:31]you know, it's hard.
[6:32]You know, it's not, you know,
[6:34]there will be bad days,
[6:35]but there was only bad days.
[6:37]And that showed so clearly on the page.
[6:39]And I arrived at the end.
[6:41]It was sort of June and a week.
[6:42]I think it was, you know,
[6:44]85,000 words by then.
[6:45]And it was just bad.
[6:47]It was just, you know,
[6:48]and it wasn't me being like, oh, it's terrible.
[6:50]And I want my publisher to tell me it's great.
[6:52]It was, I didn't even want how to read it,
[6:54]which is what the notes said that I attached to it.
[6:56]And then, yeah, it was just that I was showing it to her to be like,
[7:00]I tried.
[7:01]And so I'm quitting having tried.
[7:03]And how do I give you an advance back,
[7:05]especially in advance that I had spent many months ago.
[7:08]And that was going to be tricky.
[7:10]So she was amazing.
[7:11]I don't know how publishers do it because, you know,
[7:14]to mop up the emotion and to just sort of tell you it's going to be all right.
[7:18]And to not put any pressure on me to be like,
[7:20]we'll go away and redraft it.
[7:21]You know, start over and do it again.
[7:23]She just let me go.
[7:24]And I just, you know, it sounds so dramatic and ridiculous,
[7:27]but I did have this grieving period because this is what I wanted to do with my life.
[7:31]I remember writing my first novel when I was eight.
[7:34]And, you know, it's still somewhere in a shoe box on my granny's word processor.
[7:37]She used to, she was to love dick.
[7:39]I went into her little study for hours and hours and hours to, you know,
[7:43]work on my, work on my craft.
[7:45]And anyway, so then of course, you know,
[7:48]a few weeks past and the idea that became that first section in the book,
[7:53]and Martha and Patrick in a wedding, I just, it just came, you know,
[7:57]those little scenes and pictures just drop into your mind.
[7:59]I don't know where.
[8:00]And I wrote it down and then somehow it just opened some sort of like it,
[8:04]I think, but again, it was months until I had showed anyone, told my publisher,
[8:09]even considered it as a novel, but because that's where I think that tone comes from
[8:14]and that kind of very compared to what I've done before,
[8:17]the tone is quite straight.
[8:19]There's no novelizing in there.
[8:21]It's just so me trying to perform to an audience.
[8:24]It's just, I just let Martha tell this story of hers as though she was speaking to you.
[8:28]So, you know, if I was chatting to you,
[8:30]I wouldn't be ramming my sentences full of adverbs and, you know,
[8:33]exciting adjectives instead of just walking and sitting and eating,
[8:37]which is what, you know, that sort of language she uses.
[8:40]So I think, but I'm so glad that that was the upshot of that work style,
[8:44]because I think that the danger with a book about mental illness
[8:48]illness is that it would be overwhelming if I was trying to perform with the writing as well.
[8:53]You know, this material can be really heavy and it's quite emotional in and of itself, of course.
[8:58]So if I was trying to amp that up instead of turn that down with this funny,
[9:02]per se, a language, I think people would be like, oh, gee,
[9:05]you do anybody kind of chapter two.
[9:07]It's too hard.
[9:08]I think I need some nor ephron.
[9:10]So it's somehow that's how it evolved.
[9:12]And here we are, I guess.
[9:14]Wow.
[9:15]Well, that was a really interesting answer.
[9:17]Thank you for that.
[9:19]Wow.
[9:21]Well, I think that this type of writing deserves just as much credit.
[9:25]I mean, this was an, like, you get immersed immediately into Martha's consciousness
[9:29]and you go through it all with her.
[9:31]And just because the words aren't SAT words aren't multi-syllabic in every,
[9:36]chance doesn't mean it's not as effective.
[9:39]I mean, I think that's your point as well.
[9:41]But I don't know.
[9:42]I found it.
[9:43]You're reading it thinking, like, oh, this is so unliterary.
[9:46]This is amazing.
[9:47]It doesn't feel basic at all.
[9:49]In fact, it feels like, so you're so witty.
[9:52]Like, I love that sort of, like, British wit.
[9:55]I don't know how you all, like, somehow.
[9:57]It's so much funnier than anybody in America.
[10:00]the way your sense of humor. I'm just going to go group it as an entire nation or something.
[10:04]Oh, do it. Absolutely. I'm so happy to be class because I'm actually, well, I'm a New
[10:08]Zealand born right about a live in Australia. So I guess they have somehow from being
[10:13]in London for a few years. I'm not British then Commonwealth. I guess Commonwealth. Commonwealth,
[10:18]I'm sorry. I didn't know that. Fine. No, no. It's British humor. But somehow I've
[10:23]absorbed it. I think that's what I, you know, the stuff that you watch or read is your, you
[10:27]know, a teenager. And that was what I completely lived on. So all of that sort of
[10:31]thing French and so on. There's an all of that. But I was nervous about it coming out in the
[10:35]US because it's portrayed as a British, not sorry. It's portrayed as a funny story. Like, that's
[10:41]kind of in all the materials. But I'm like, not, not laugh out loud. Do you know what I mean?
[10:45]Like, can we just tell everybody? It's not, there's no jokes in there. Do you know what I mean? There's
[10:49]no callbacks and build ups and all of that sort of thing. It's just those little observations
[10:53]and absurdities. And I've always think of it as it's the British office compared to the US
[10:59]office TV show. So if you didn't like the British office and it was too dark, maybe, you know what
[11:05]I mean, it's going to be more of a struggle. But if that's what you, if that's your flavor, then I'm
[11:10]glad that people enjoy it. Now why? Even like your really subtle scenes like when Patrick asks
[11:17]Martha if she like, she's like, do you like old movies? And she's like, no, no one does. And he's
[11:22]like, okay, want to go at 730? And she's like, of course. Yeah. But you had like, no, he said
[11:30]she said it's just like, perfect. And I was just funny. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And it helped as
[11:35]well to kind of have that personality of hers to fall back on when there seems like she finally
[11:41]acquires this diagnosis after 20 years of searching or 15 because you know, the last five she
[11:46]gave up and decided it was just her awful personality in that she's a terrible person. And that
[11:50]was what was informing all her decisions. But she reaches this moment where the psychiatrist
[11:56]she sort of finally found makes this pronouncement. And I was glad to have her ability to kind of
[12:03]reduce that moment right down to a joke rather than her having to express that, oh my goodness,
[12:09]you know, the mystery of my existence has been solved because we don't talk like that. We would
[12:13]never say that in the context of a doctor's office. We would say what she says, which is, oh, well,
[12:17]if it's that I hope it's the 24 hour kind, you know, because you diffuse that emotion that's
[12:22]too extreme a lot of the time. And I sort of so is glad to have that function to rely on the
[12:27]men. Of course, there's has to stay who takes it a level further in terms of the darkness and the
[12:32]the humor and that sort of things that they're very good. They were a good pair to be able to
[12:36]explore and fall back on. And tell me what part of the mental illness piece attracted you to
[12:42]writing about it. There were so many scenes like even when she's flushing the pills down the toilet
[12:47]for instance, or when she's first with Jonathan or the moment where she's back in the house and
[12:52]she finds like an old discarded expired prescription for whatever. And she's like, I'm just going to take
[12:57]this and see what happens. Yeah, all her time on the couch and just, oh my gosh, you just like wanted
[13:03]to I felt like I wanted to hug her so many times and like, oh, that's good at her mom. Yeah,
[13:08]cross the face. Yeah, yeah, she's tricky. Celia, mother's tricky. I think it's because I had read
[13:16]somewhere a long time ago that women will face a much longer journey to get a diagnosis than men
[13:23]with particular conditions that I researched into when I thought I might use one real condition and
[13:28]they are not the kind of a malgum that unnamed amalgam that I'm it eventually went with for
[13:33]all sorts of reasons. I had read that, you know, in some cases, not with anxiety and depression,
[13:38]but with the more complex the schizophrenia is all bipolar. Usually it will take a man say on average
[13:43]five years or something to find a diagnosis. A woman will be looking at upwards of a decade because
[13:48]there's that residual, I guess, you know, discrimination or imbalance in the medical system where
[13:54]she's hysterical. She's hormonal. She's permanent, permanent stroke. She needs a baby. You know,
[13:59]whatever it is, we don't, I think. And still to this date of a degree, necessarily get the same
[14:05]acknowledgement of being aware that something is wrong because men don't really go to the doctor
[14:10]unless they're, you know, sort of on death doors or if they come in, they must be serious. But if
[14:15]we come in, we had a free morning and decided to, you know, go chat to the doctor about some tiny
[14:21]invented conditions. So I think I wanted to explore the difficulty of her actually not so much
[14:26]what the condition was like, but what it was like to try and find that and to be misdirected
[14:31]and to be dosed up with things that didn't work and she knew it was making her worse or doing
[14:36]nothing and the trial and error and that because that's exhausting if, you know, for people who I
[14:41]think have been through that or people with any kind of chronic pain, migraine or whatever it is
[14:46]to try and find someone who will listen to you and not patronize, you know, very first up do you
[14:51]see her going to when she's just experienced this kind of mental collapse at 17, which she
[14:56]describes as the little bomb going off in her brain, he sort of, it's like, it's so obviously
[15:01]glandular, or what we call glandular fever. I think that's mono in your country. So obviously
[15:05]mono, I'm not even going to test for it. And there's no medication I can give you, but, you know,
[15:09]you know what teenage girls are like, they love a tablet. So he's an iron tablet or give you
[15:13]something to swallow kind of thing. And so she leaves feeling mad from that first moment, you know,
[15:18]minimize. And so I think that was the part of mental health that interests me rather than the
[15:22]ins and outs of necessarily what it feels like from the inside, which I'm maybe not so qualified
[15:27]or didn't feel so qualified to present as fact. That's funny. You say that because in the book,
[15:33]I don't think you changed it to mono. So I was like, what because then you said, you know,
[15:37]oh, father, like, oh, she's been kissing too many boys. He's like, have you been kissing boys or
[15:42]something like that? And she was like, no, and I was like, why would she be kissing? Anyway,
[15:45]now I understand. I just missed that reference. And you know, another element that I thought
[15:58]was so poignant throughout the book is her relationship to the sort of unborn child along the way,
[16:04]right? This fetus that she always refers to. And you have the moment when she's on the,
[16:09]the double decker bus with her head to the window. And she sees like a mom with a book propped up
[16:14]on her belly, which I feel like I could do these days, even without a baby in my belly. And like
[16:19]another mom comes over and they're chit chatting. And she's like, okay, right then, not enough kids,
[16:23]you know, and then of course things change and change again, all the stuff. So tell me a little
[16:28]bit about her, you know, ambivalence, I guess, and fear. I feel like a lot of it was fear.
[16:34]Yeah. Well, she is she is instructed by sort of, I guess it's doctor number two who
[16:39]prescribed her something. And this is still in her very late teens and says, if you take this,
[16:44]you need to be really careful not to get pregnant because this is unsafe for a fetus.
[16:49]And I think in the way that, you know, as we get older, especially at my age now,
[16:54]I've learned that doctors, you know, I mean, bless them for all that they do and all of their
[17:00]hard work and sacrifice for us and care for us. But there are doctors who I guess make these
[17:06]pronouncements is if there's truth. And I think when your mother's age, you just accept them,
[17:10]you don't question that's a doctor. They know they, they certificate to all over their wall. And
[17:15]so I would just take that, you know, advice or that diagnosis wholesale when you get older,
[17:20]you know, especially I guess if you've had children and there's that massive opinion and
[17:23]conflicting opinion and like actually I know I instinctively know and I will go and find a doctor who
[17:29]will listen until, you know, that's kind of acknowledged. But she takes us truth that these
[17:35]pills are dangerous. And even though she will come off those, there's something about that message
[17:39]that she absorbs that the pills are dangerous. But the extension of that is that she is dangerous.
[17:44]And she has this condition that she doesn't understand, but develops this sense within herself
[17:49]and then stokes it and expands it that she would be dangerous as a mother and that she would be
[17:54]unsafe to a child. And so this is whether or not she even wanted children of their age,
[17:59]which we're far too young to kind of imagine ahead that much, she goes into marriage and into that
[18:04]age with that preknowledge. And so that informs all her decisions and she decides that it isn't safe
[18:11]and she has a brief kind of flirtation with the idea when she in that disastrous first marriage to
[18:16]Jonathan who's this very charismatic, you know, art dealer who creates this sense of her being
[18:22]amazing. And he's the first woman to kind of, you know, and they're so wrong for each other. You
[18:26]can sort of see it from the disastrous public proposal, which doesn't suit her at all to, you know,
[18:32]their very quick marriage and very short engagement. And he sort of tells her, it'd be amazing.
[18:36]Let's do it. And she briefly wants to believe that maybe she's the person that Jonathan thinks
[18:41]she is. And so she goes off a medication instantly crashes. And then it sort of proves to her,
[18:46]I can't live without this medication. You know, it's true. I never should be a mother. And so
[18:51]I think the function of that for her. And she's obviously someone who isolates herself and puts
[18:56]herself outside regular, I guess female experience. She doesn't have a lot of female friends because
[19:01]as she gets other, they all have children. And you know what? It's like it's hard to keep finding
[19:05]that common ground, whether you're the mum with who can only talk about your kids. And you've got
[19:09]this single gorgeous friend who blows in and tells you about the big night she had before,
[19:13]either the night before. And it's hard to find that commonality. But it pushes mother outside the
[19:18]female experience. And so she ends up feeling disconnected from other women who've done that and
[19:23]become mothers. And then of course a challenge is her relationship with Ingrid who is crazy for
[19:28]Thailand is just busting out these babies every kind of 18 months. So that's, I guess that
[19:33]relationship, but then there's a twist in it where we find out what her relationship has really
[19:39]been like to motherhood. Well, you mentioned at the beginning. So now I have to go back to this
[19:46]that you're coming of age was more at age 40 with kids and everything else. So yeah,
[19:52]what was the turning point for you? Did something happen or was it just growing up or tell me if
[19:57]there was a man? Yeah. Yeah.
[20:00]No, definitely. Well, I mean, really, the opposite to mother, I got married when I was 22. So at this point, I've nearly been married for more than half my life.
[20:08]And I had my first daughter when I was 25. So I almost have no experience of being an adult without also being a mother.
[20:16]But so I, I guess almost a case of, you know, if you don't have that extra decade, I guess to explore who you are and do all of those things and focus on yourself, because you're focusing on this little baby instead.
[20:29]And then has to do came along, you know, two and a half years later, you just get absorbed into that. And you do, I think would it be safe to say that we all lose a little bit of identity or we all kind of have our essential self fully broken down by that experience that we have to rebuild ourselves. So it wasn't until they were teenagers where I sort of emerged from that tunnel and went, Oh, like, I never did that growing up things. I guess I better do it now, because, you know, it's not like you don't develop maturity as a mother, but I think is a person.
[20:59]I was stopped at 25. That's where my exploration of my own character had, you know, had taken its temporary 15 year pause. And so I kind of had to look at myself and be like, am I still acting in ways that I was at 25, especially in my marriage. I think because you know how that.
[21:15]And this is what I put into my own Patrick, but you know that dysfunction, whatever your dysfunction is in your relationship, that got built in very early. Like that was probably already there before there was even a ring on your finger.
[21:27]And so if you don't address that, it becomes so embedded and you find that 15 20 is like, you're still acting out of that one place about one disappointment that never was resolved. And so I think there was a lot of that that was waiting for me on the other side of children.
[21:42]So then it was like, okay, I'm going to take a pretty cold look at, you know, who I am and weed out some stuff that should have been weeded out a long time ago. So
[21:50]I think is that it was that slow development of like, and feeling when I hit 40 that like, oh, I am a bit more of a grown up than I was. And I do actually know stuff about, you know, how things work and that sort of stuff.
[22:04]Reminds me of the seed and wind. She goes to breakfast book kind of breakfast, but she's still in the bridesmaids dress and everything that's happening.
[22:11]And he's taking forever to order and she was so happy because she didn't. I love to you said how she's tired of people letting her go. I'll let you go. I'll let you go. I'll let you go. She's like, no, I want somebody to have me stay. I want him to stay.
[22:22]Yeah, exactly. And she's like, I love that he took his time ordering and she's like, later on, if they're like anniversary, he said that she like grabbed the video from him and was like,
[22:31]I can't bear that thing anymore. That thing was so charming at the beginning. And now if you do that one more time, you don't know between a divorce space kind of look happening. So yeah, I think, but that's what I loved exploring about that long arc. You know, in a
[22:53]a relationship because there are of course, those intensely romantic proposal moments or whatever moment you sort of they're the highlights, but there's a lot of low light or at least midlights.
[23:04]It's like, you're together and you're at home and you're cooking dinner and where's the romance in that you have to try pretty hard to find it. But sometimes those greatest moments of connection are on the sofa on a walk.
[23:17]And I think that was fun to explore them and in between the start when you meet them and the end what happened in the middle is an interesting part to me.
[23:25]So Meg, what are you working on next? Do you have another novel in the work? I do. I do. I do. I'm in that face of my goodness and exciting. It's really exciting because I realize it's the only way to leave these characters behind is to go and find a new set of characters because
[23:44]Martha and Patrick in their whole world has been my world for two years and it's a real challenge to let them go and belong to other people and which is, you know, I'm so happy to do it.
[23:55]It's hard to break that connection because they do feel real even though when all of this day that I used to just think, oh my gosh, they've lost their minds that you made them up and now they're talking to you doing to me, but it actually happens.
[24:07]And so that's what I'm most enjoying at the moment is to find out who this next set of people are well getting to feel nostalgic about the last the last crew. But yeah, so I'm working away and there's some I'm writing for screen as well and doing bits and pieces like that.
[24:21]So it's busy, but for me, it's about creating that belief again that no one's ever going to see it because that was so key to my experience that I have to try and convince myself somehow, which is getting hotter and hotter because if people like you like getting the book out there, which I'm so grateful for, but I'm like, I have to pretend that I'm completely anonymous again.
[24:40]So I'll see how it goes. I just I started writing something the other day and I felt so panicked that people were going to see it that I eventually at the top of my document typed draft one of three.
[24:53]Oh, that's a good idea. I was like, I'll write two more. No one's going to see this one.
[24:58]That is such a good idea. And isn't it funny because George Saunders describes that. I mean, he's just my absolute icon in every single way.
[25:05]He describes it as having to self game that you have to trick yourself into doing this thing because I guess, you know, it's difficult work, but I think the tricky thing about it. I imagine if you're a surgeon.
[25:17]You turn out to your laparoscopic appendectomy knowing how you're going to do it. You know what I mean. You've done it 50 times before. You do it exactly that way again. That'll be a perfect job.
[25:26]You don't have to worry that maybe this time you've forgotten. Maybe your talent for appendectomies is left to you. Do you know what I mean? It was nothing left in the tank.
[25:34]But with that, as we sit down, we're having to recreate from nothing again. And again, every single day and to face up to that.
[25:42]What feels like those limitations and the edge of our talent that's not going to take us to the extent that, you know, we need to go.
[25:48]So I, my equivalent of draft one is great because I label like I name all my documents like you can do this. You've done it before and you'll do it again.
[25:59]So every time I look out, this is crazy. I mean, it's insane. A lot of madness goes down in this little shed that I work in. So, but whatever gets you there. Don't you think you find your tricks the longer you work.
[26:10]You, you find what works for you, but I might try that.
[26:13]That's what I write on notes to my daughter literally that you've done it before and you can do it again. You've got this.
[26:19]We just all need to like take the notes we leave for our kids.
[26:22]Exactly. We need to be around chilly.
[26:25]So true.
[26:26]Even if it makes you feel crazy.
[26:28]Yes. Well, I already feel crazy. But yeah.
[26:30]Do you have any other advice?
[26:32]You already were sprinkling in bits and pieces, of course, but any advice to aspiring authors.
[26:37]Oh, yes. No, I have definitely at this stage. I have definitely acquired a lot of tricks like that.
[26:45]I think it's about finding what works for you and then sticking to it and not waiting.
[26:52]Just if you can't write today, there's no way you're going to write tomorrow. Do you know what I mean? There's no perfect tomorrow coming where suddenly you'll sit down and there'll be this enormous flow of words.
[27:01]And you do hear lots of writers explain that it's a muscle, which is true and that you build it up as you keep going.
[27:07]I think definitely if you set a word target for yourself, maybe 500 because it's not impossible to face 500 words a day.
[27:17]And if you get, if you do a great 500, you'll have momentum in the next day. But if you're doing it, if you're having a terrible day, still just 500, you know what I mean? Like it's not too intimidating.
[27:27]I think that you need to do that 500 every day and turn up and I know with anything I'm doing. I need to work on it seven days a week because if you fall out of it for two days, it is so hard to get back in and you kind of then have to go and read over it.
[27:42]Remember where you were up to and that takes a week by the time you get to a certain limit.
[27:46]Even if you just look at it and correct some grammar or something just every day to turn up for the work because it just saves you a lot of reentry. I think it's reentry is painful and it's a lot of time spent doing that.
[27:59]I think that's what I've learned.
[28:01]But just to find your own way and then stick to that. Sounds like how I feel about the gym. It's like one day.
[28:07]It is off. It's like impossible.
[28:09]Exactly. You're doing it every day. Yeah.
[28:11]Another day. Exactly. I've never been to the gym before. Yeah.
[28:15]I basically don't know how to do this. Like this is too. What's going on? Yeah.
[28:19]Exactly. It's exactly. We took ourselves. We learned the tricks to get ourselves there.
[28:24]Well, thank you. Thank you, Meg. Thanks for talking about Sarah and Bliss. I really loved it.
[28:28]I love the characters too. So I see why you're very attached and, you know, maybe they can, maybe we can do some cameos in your next book. Like the Jefferson.
[28:36]Oh, like, you know, like this.
[28:38]You know, like this.
[28:40]For coffee.
[28:41]Yeah.
[28:42]Yeah. I'll write the story of the woman who had the canopy and will see Martha from the other side.
[28:46]Exactly.
[28:47]You know,
[28:48]That could be a fun exercise. Exactly. But thank you so much. I just, it's been lovely to chat to you and I'm so grateful to anyone who's read the book or pass the book on to someone or.
[28:57]You know, posted about it because it would, it wouldn't exist without all of that. So I'm really grateful. Thank you.
[29:03]Of course. All right. Take care. Bye bye.
[29:06]Thank you, Slumberkins for sponsoring today's episode. Again, use code Zibi 10 to get 10% off your first purchase.
[29:15]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
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[29:31]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.