Peng Shepherd, THE CARTOGRAPHERS: A Novel
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zivi Owens, the creator and host of the award-winning podcast that you're listening to right now
[0:07]Thank you so much. Called moms. Don't have time to read books
[0:10]It is a daily podcast
[0:12]365 days a year and each day we talk to an author about all of the things related to their career
[0:18]Their book their life and more in 30 minutes or less because who has time?
[0:22]I am now an author myself
[0:24]Although I wasn't when I started this podcast and you can get my new memoir book ends
[0:29]A memoir of love, loss, and literature wherever books are sold starting July 1st and my children's book princess charming
[0:36]You can learn more about me at zimbyones.com
[0:39]But really you're here to learn more about the authors and that is what we're going to do
[0:43]Also be sure to check out all the other podcasts in the zcast podcast network
[0:49]You can learn more at zcastnetwork.com and definitely check out those shows as well
[0:54]Pang Shepard is the author of the cartographers a novel
[1:01]Pang is the nationally best-selling author of the cartographers the book of M in the future library
[1:07]Her second novel the cartographers was USA Today bestseller a national indie book stores bestseller and
[1:13]was named to pick up the month by Good Morning America
[1:16]That was probably me real simple bustle the millions in Goodreads a best book of the month by Amazon Apple and Buzzfeed
[1:22]Her first novel the book of M won the 2019
[1:25]Newcom Institute for Literary Arts Award for debut speculative fiction and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon
[1:32]Elle Refinery29 in the Verge a best book of the summer by the today show and NPR on point and as an option for television a
[1:39]Graduate of the NYU MFA program. She is the recipient of the 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
[1:46]Pang was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona where she wrote horses and trained in classical ballet
[1:51]She has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur London, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York and Mexico City
[1:57]Would not writing she could be found planning her next trip or hunting local bookstores
[2:01]Welcome pung. Thank you so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books to discuss the cartographers. Hi
[2:07]Thank you so much for having me. I'm like obsessed with your cover
[2:10]I actually we were just talking about the sign behind me
[2:12]But I would like a sign of this, you know, you were you could almost even like write your own maps to wherever you're going
[2:18]I just love it. Oh, they're fun ever full of books in blue my favorite color libraries my favorite thing
[2:26]It's just pretty awesome. Oh, thank you. So can you please tell us in areas?
[2:30]What the cartographer is about and what inspired you to write it? Yeah, so I'd like to think of it as kind of a mystery
[2:38]novel with a touch of magic and it is it's about map making a family secrets and
[2:44]It follows a young scholar named Nell whose career was destroyed by none other than her own father after a fight
[2:52]They have over a strange map that he claimed was worthless
[2:55]But then he when he dies and Nell discovers that very same map hidden in his things
[3:01]She realizes that it contains like a deadly mystery that involves their family
[3:06]And so she sets out to uncover what both her and this map have been hiding from her for decades
[3:12]Well, and where did you come up with this idea? Where did this come from? Well, it I mean
[3:19]Maps are one of those things that I think we all are a little bit
[3:23]We're somewhere on the spectrum from curious to sort of obsessed with
[3:27]And I definitely fall more on the obsession side and so I had been wanting to write
[3:34]something about
[3:36]you know maps and libraries and archives and you know dark academia kind of all rolled into one and
[3:43]It wasn't until I had been thinking about this for oh, I don't know like set maybe seven years or something
[3:50]But I couldn't find a way into the story until this one day
[3:54]I was
[3:55]Having a conversation with a friend of mine and they were talking about this phenomenon in dictionaries where at dictionary
[4:01]Make for sometimes will insert a false word into the dictionary to basically protect against copyright theft because if you know
[4:07]Another dictionary comes out and it has your fake word in it
[4:09]The only way that that could have been possible is if they had copied your dictionary because it's a made-up word
[4:14]Yeah, and I was like that so cool like how you know fascinating that there's a there's a word in every dictionary that isn't real
[4:21]And you know if you're lucky enough to come across it
[4:23]You know you might not have any idea or you might go down a rabbit hole research and
[4:27]Then somebody else in the conversation said yeah, that's really cool
[4:31]You know that they also do that with maps and from there
[4:35]You know my imagination just went wow
[4:39]I wonder who the person's gonna be to go through the dictionaries now after listening to this to try to figure out
[4:44]Which word and their dictionary is not the right word?
[4:47]I know right
[4:48]So apparently there there's some hints
[4:51]They say that they tend to be hidden in the x's and y's and z's because those words are less commonly looked for
[4:57]You know people people don't look up x y's and z's as much so you should check those three letters first
[5:03]I feel like those are the most thumb-through for all scrabble references though
[5:07]That's true. Maybe that's a lot of that's a lot of points
[5:11]Yeah these days I don't play as much as gravel or even use paper dictionaries
[5:16]But I feel like for many many years our dictionary was very worn just for that reason
[5:22]Anyway, I don't even know my kids probably don't even know what scrabble is so sad
[5:26]Well onto the next so part of this novel involves the New York Public Library
[5:32]Which is one of my favorite places
[5:33]So talk about the inclusion of that how the setting took place and and and your feelings about libraries
[5:40]Well, I mean I you know of course
[5:42]I just love them
[5:43]I feel like I grew up in them
[5:45]You know and I was one of those kids who we we had to get all of my siblings library cards too
[5:50]So that they could check out you know double or triple the books that I wanted
[5:54]So we would all maybe like okay, which ones you know?
[5:57]Do you want us to get for you and pretend there for us and so I would get to go home with
[6:01]You know just an armful of books every every week and there's just one of my favorite things and so
[6:07]And then when I was older I was living in New York and it would go into that the main branch of the art public library
[6:13]Just all the time and it just feels like have you I'm sure you've been in there a couple of times
[6:17]It's it's just you know like all white kind of white or cream marble and there's gold fixtures
[6:23]And everything is kind of
[6:25]Glittering and the the shelves or these this old rich wood and they have all these cool lamps and reading tables and it just feels like
[6:34]exactly where you would set
[6:37]Like a dark academia mystery story, you know and so
[6:40]As I was building the plot for this book and a lot of it takes place in New York City anyway
[6:45]I just thought well all it's got to happen in the New York public library then you know it's just such a magical place
[6:51]I actually and I never talked about this but my first wedding was actually at the party was at the library
[6:57]That's so neat. I bet it was beautiful. It was really pretty. I have to say. Yeah. Maybe I can set you some private pictures
[7:03]I love it. I love to see it. Yeah, please
[7:06]It was beautiful. It was lovely
[7:08]But that was many many moons ago. Okay, so when you sat down to tackle the story and make it a mystery
[7:14]I am always curious if when you do that you know how everything is unfolding when you start
[7:20]Out to do it or do you have to go in and like go back and plot put little clues in afterward said
[7:27]You know how to do how did you structure it when you were writing the story? Oh my gosh
[7:31]It was pure chaos
[7:35]Because I yeah, I mean just it turns out it's really hard to write a mystery if you don't know what the mystery is because I am
[7:42]So I'm not a plotter or an outliner or a planner or anything like that. I just
[7:47]fly by the seat of my pants and I
[7:50]Am I am discovering the story as I write it and so most of the time my first drafts are
[7:55]In a shape that nobody can see it. I can barely even see it, you know
[7:59]It's so messy and that kind of works when you're writing
[8:03]Some other kind of books, but when you're writing a mystery it makes it
[8:06]Mean you just have so many rewrites because it's like every draft
[8:10]You figure only one thing out and then you got to go back and change everything else and you figure one more thing out
[8:15]Then you got to go back and change everything else. So it was it was a lot of extra pages
[8:20]I my editor and I joke, but it's not really a joke that the book
[8:24]I think the book is like 500 pages and we have 500 more pages of stuff that I was trying that didn't work out
[8:29]So I basically wrote the book at least twice
[8:33]to get you know everything
[8:36]Working and locked into play by order
[8:38]Yeah, my gosh
[8:40]So part of the story sets off with the pet the death of
[8:45]Nell's father
[8:46]What is your relationship like with your father? Is he alive and what is that like and I feel like if I were to have
[8:54]Written a novel and the mother had passed away my mother would be very upset about that
[9:00]Yes, yeah, so and there's kind of a funny story
[9:05]It's there's there's some drama in it, but it's kind of funny too
[9:07]But so my my father is alive
[9:09]We have a great relationship
[9:10]It's nothing like Nell and her father dr. Young's relationship in the book
[9:14]They're they've been estranged for seven years by the time the story starts and then he passes away before she can even
[9:19]You know, say anything to him let alone reconcile and so there they have had a super strain relationship
[9:26]But my relationship with dad is great everything's fine
[9:29]But at the time that I in the very very first draft
[9:32]I had named
[9:33]Dr. Young David Young and my father's name is David and I didn't quite make the connection
[9:39]And and also in the beginning I thought that David Young and Nell Young were going to be friends and teammates
[9:44]And they were going to discover their mystery together
[9:46]I didn't realize until many many drafts later that actually
[9:49]It was their fight in their estrangement that causes a lot of the mystery
[9:53]And so in the beginning everything was great David and now were friends
[9:57]David was a great guy in the book and then as
[10:00]The drafts kept going.
[10:00]He became more and more of a like a difficult,
[10:03]I don't want to call him the villain at all,
[10:05]but he becomes kind of an antagonist in a way
[10:07]because there's this secret and he's hiding it out of love,
[10:10]but there's a big secret that he's keeping from now
[10:13]and it's the source of a lot of their problems.
[10:15]And then I ended up, he dies of a heart attack in the book
[10:18]and then my own father had a heart attack now.
[10:20]Yeah, he's fine.
[10:22]He made it through everything's great.
[10:23]He's healthy now, but that's when I realized
[10:26]I got to change the guy's name
[10:27]because it was too many things
[10:29]and there was no way that I was ever going to be able
[10:31]to say to dad, it's just a name, it has nothing to do with it.
[10:34]So David Young's name is now Daniel Young
[10:38]and my father will hopefully be non-the wiser
[10:40]because Daniel Young is not based on him.
[10:45]That sounds like the idea for the next novel
[10:48]where everything the writer writes
[10:50]ends up happening in real life
[10:51]and what does she do about that?
[10:53]Yeah.
[10:54]I know, sort of like that movie,
[10:55]it was like a whole stranger than fiction.
[10:57]It's a great movie.
[10:57]It's a bad guy who starts to think that,
[10:59]that everything in his life is like being kind of narrated
[11:03]to him or it's happening to him outside of his control
[11:06]and at the same time a best-selling author
[11:09]is writing a book about a man with the same name
[11:11]and the same things are happening to him
[11:12]and the book becomes convinced that he is like in her book.
[11:15]So it's such a great movie.
[11:17]Oh my gosh, I'm going to watch this week.
[11:19]And there's this other, he goes to a literature professor.
[11:21]I'm writing it down.
[11:22]You've got it, yeah, he goes to this literature professor
[11:24]for help and he's like, I know this is going to sound nuts
[11:27]but I think I'm in a novel.
[11:28]And so the first thing the literature professor does
[11:30]is start asking him about what genre he thinks he's in
[11:33]because they're going to solve it in a different way
[11:34]depending on if he's in a murder mystery
[11:36]or a fantasy, it's really cute, it's very cute.
[11:39]Oh my gosh, I love that.
[11:40]Okay, great, thank you.
[11:42]Excellent tip.
[11:43]Yeah.
[11:44]So how did you get your start?
[11:46]Where was this library you went to growing up?
[11:48]Where did you grow up and how many siblings did you have?
[11:50]And then how did you end up writing
[11:52]and how did you get here?
[11:53]Yeah, so I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona.
[11:56]So this was one of the experiences of the Phoenix Public Library.
[11:59]Yeah.
[12:00]And we at the time, I have three siblings now
[12:03]but when I was two of them are 16 years younger than me.
[12:06]So at the time, I had only the one brother
[12:09]and so we got him a library card and we got my mom
[12:12]a library card and my dad also had a library card
[12:15]and that was our weekend plan.
[12:17]But I was one of those kids who I think I learned
[12:20]to read a little bit earlier than average
[12:22]and I just read everything and there comes a moment
[12:25]where you realize that somebody is writing the books that you're reading
[12:29]because at first it's just, they're just books, you know, they're just stories
[12:32]and then I had this, you know, wait a minute,
[12:35]somebody is making these, which means I could make these.
[12:39]And so that, I don't know, it's just,
[12:44]I told my mom that it was what I wanted to do when I grew up
[12:47]and it always remained that way even when,
[12:51]you know, we all have detours.
[12:52]I got a university degree and then a grad degree
[12:55]and something that was not creative writing because
[12:57]at a certain point you panic and you think,
[12:59]I don't know, I'm in a four groceryies
[13:00]and so I have to have a quote-unquote real job,
[13:03]even though writers a real job,
[13:04]but it's such a difficult thing to get started
[13:07]and there's not really a path or the way that there's a path to being
[13:09]like a lawyer, a doctor or an accountant, you know,
[13:13]and so I spent, you know, high school,
[13:16]university grad school studying other things
[13:18]and then I started working in the corporate world
[13:20]and at some point in my mid to late 20s,
[13:25]I realized that I was at the point in my corporate career
[13:29]where if I stayed on longer,
[13:32]I would get promoted to a certain point
[13:34]and the money would be good enough that I would just be,
[13:36]I would be too afraid to ever leave and to risk it
[13:38]and so I hit that moment of like I've got to try now
[13:43]because if I don't try now, I'll never try.
[13:45]And so I ended up quitting my job
[13:48]because I don't know how to do anything halfway.
[13:49]I couldn't just take night classes,
[13:51]like a smart person, I didn't just quit job.
[13:53]So I quit my job and I applied to and got into NYU's
[13:57]MFA and creative writing program.
[13:59]So I moved to New York, I attended that program
[14:02]and it was a big gamble, but it was really,
[14:05]I mean, it made all the difference to me
[14:07]because it was the first time in my life
[14:08]that writing was the priority
[14:09]and I felt like I had been given, quote unquote,
[14:12]permission, you know, to make it that priority
[14:14]because there were professors and other students
[14:17]my workshop waiting for my draft,
[14:20]you know, that I had to turn in for grade
[14:23]and to keep my student funding and all of that.
[14:25]So it felt, I think it taught me how to be
[14:28]a professional about writing so of a hobbyist
[14:30]and it also taught me how to finish things,
[14:32]which was really important.
[14:33]That is important.
[14:35]I feel like it's very easy to start things.
[14:38]Yeah, I feel like also, you know,
[14:40]once you finish the novel,
[14:42]then at least you know you can write a novel
[14:44]but that doesn't mean that that novel is actually
[14:46]a good novel, right?
[14:48]Like first you just have to learn how to do it
[14:50]or most exactly or maybe I'm just excusing that stuff.
[14:53]No, no, I think you're exactly right.
[14:54]And I remember on the first day of our first workshop
[14:58]my professor of that workshop, his name's Darren Strauss,
[15:01]he told the class that you think it's going to be the book
[15:04]that you're writing right now that is going to be
[15:06]the one that's published.
[15:07]But here to tell you it's not,
[15:08]you'll finish this book and that'll teach you how
[15:10]to finish something and it'll be the book you start
[15:12]right after you graduate that is maybe the one
[15:14]that gets published.
[15:15]And we all were like, no, that's not true.
[15:19]We're gonna, you know, this is the one
[15:22]we're gonna get it published.
[15:23]And then one by one, it turned out to be absolutely true.
[15:27]We all managed to finish and then discard the thing
[15:30]that we were writing in the grad program.
[15:31]And then there are at least I think four or five of us now
[15:34]who it's the thing that we started right after we graduated
[15:36]just like Darren said that became the thing
[15:39]that got published.
[15:40]So he was right.
[15:42]Darren's dress and I worked together
[15:44]on something for the Jewish Book Council.
[15:45]Oh really?
[15:46]Yeah.
[15:47]We had like all these regular meetings and anyway.
[15:50]Yeah.
[15:51]He's lovely.
[15:52]He's just the greatest.
[15:52]Wait, who were the other people who wrote books?
[15:54]Are they good?
[15:55]Did anything like were they?
[15:56]Yeah.
[15:56]So we had, we had Lenea Hart-Siker who wrote a kind of
[16:00]like a historical fiction, the touch of fantasy.
[16:04]It's a Viking saga.
[16:05]It's called The Half-Drown King.
[16:06]We had Yarsov Kalfar, whose first book was called
[16:09]Space Man of Bohemia.
[16:11]I think his next one's coming out soon.
[16:13]We had Rebecca Deanerstein, who wrote the Sunlit Knight
[16:17]and then her second book, Hex came out last year
[16:20]or something like that.
[16:20]I interviewed her.
[16:22]I think I interviewed her during the pandemic times.
[16:26]Didn't come after me.
[16:28]I feel like I did it.
[16:29]I did this Instagram live show I used to do
[16:31]first year of the pandemic or whatever.
[16:32]But anyway, yes, I interviewed her.
[16:34]Yeah, awesome.
[16:36]Wow, that's really neat.
[16:37]And so great to have that whole crew to talk to.
[16:41]Do you all keep in touch?
[16:42]I feel like that would be such a huge value
[16:43]of the program in general.
[16:45]Oh, it really is.
[16:46]We do all keep in touch.
[16:47]And it was a really special time for the debuts.
[16:50]Because we're all, I think, most of us are on our second
[16:52]or third book now.
[16:54]And so when we was all of our first books that were coming out,
[16:58]it was just we were all still reading each other's drafts
[17:00]at that point, even though we had ages that we had.
[17:03]And so it was just felt really, really like, you know,
[17:06]a tiny little family that came out of that MFA program.
[17:09]And we all still talk to this day.
[17:11]And, you know, sometimes you can pass drafts back and forth.
[17:14]So it's really nice.
[17:14]Oh, that's awesome.
[17:16]Wait, so tell me about your first book, the book of M?
[17:19]Yes, yeah.
[17:20]That was the one that I started writing right after I graduated
[17:23]just like Darren said.
[17:25]And it was a really wonderful and super different process
[17:30]from this book, the cartographers.
[17:31]Because with the book of M, it was really, really fast.
[17:35]It came out very fast and very little changed
[17:38]from the first draft of the final.
[17:40]I mean, there's a lot of rewriting cleaning it up,
[17:41]but very little about the story-paged.
[17:45]And because you have to finish your first book completely
[17:47]before you can sell it, which is different than subsequent books
[17:50]where you're just kind of selling like an idea or a pitch.
[17:53]At the time that we sold the book of M,
[17:55]I was, you know, really sure what the story was about.
[17:58]And it was very close to being, you know, finished and polished.
[18:01]And so yeah, it felt very fast, which is, I mean,
[18:06]I guess I just feel very lucky about that,
[18:08]that it went pretty smoothly and pretty quick.
[18:11]And then, you know, I got to see the other side
[18:13]with the second book.
[18:15]Amazing.
[18:15]Yeah.
[18:16]What did you do differently?
[18:17]Is there anything you did in terms of marketing
[18:19]or publicity or any decisions you made the second time
[18:22]where you're like, oh yeah, well, if that hadn't happened,
[18:24]I wouldn't have known X, Y, Z.
[18:26]Like things you said, oh, I should do more of this
[18:28]or less of this or?
[18:29]Yeah.
[18:30]So I, well, on the writing side, it was very different
[18:33]because we ended up, my agent and I ended up selling
[18:37]the cartographers to my editor on,
[18:39]it was, I mean, it's pretty much just like a one page proposal.
[18:43]And it barely even had a premise.
[18:45]It was just sort of like maps are neat, right?
[18:47]I don't wanna talk about maps.
[18:48]And I had like no characters.
[18:52]I had no story.
[18:53]I had no, I just kind of had this premise about a map
[18:55]that had a secret on it.
[18:56]And I didn't even know what the secret was
[18:58]about that.
[18:59]I mean, it was so bare bones.
[19:00]And so if there's something I learned
[19:04]between the two of them, it's that there's a difference
[19:07]between a story and a premise.
[19:08]And you can make a story out of a premise
[19:11]and I did do that with the cartographers,
[19:13]but it takes so much longer.
[19:14]And it's especially stressful
[19:17]when you were writing it on contract, you know,
[19:19]because with the book of them,
[19:20]I just wrote it until it was ready,
[19:21]then we sold it and it was ready.
[19:23]But with the cartographers, we sold a premise and not a story.
[19:26]And then I had to build the whole thing
[19:28]while on deadline and make it a mystery on top of that.
[19:31]So it was, it was a very different process.
[19:34]And I think I have learned my lesson
[19:36]because we've recently sold my third book to my editor,
[19:38]but I was halfway through the first draft
[19:40]before we sold it to her.
[19:41]So when she said, okay, what is this one about?
[19:43]I could actually say something about a story
[19:46]rather than just like maps are cool, right?
[19:49]So what's the third one about?
[19:53]The third one, it's about, it's kind of in the near future.
[19:56]It's a little bit of a kind of got sci-fi thriller vibes
[19:59]and it is a bit.
[20:00]out a huge reality TV show that helps you improve your life by altering the fabric of reality
[20:10]to make whatever you're choosing real, like actually real.
[20:14]So if you imagined that you'd had a different job, you suddenly will really have that
[20:18]different job.
[20:20]And the story follows a woman who's chosen to be the season three contestant and she's
[20:25]over the moon.
[20:26]Her life is going to change.
[20:27]She can't wait.
[20:28]But once the filming starts, things kind of take a dark turn because she realizes that
[20:32]she may not be as in control of the choices as she thought she was going to be.
[20:36]Interesting.
[20:37]All right.
[20:38]Excellent.
[20:39]Well, hopefully it's, yeah, it's still early days.
[20:42]I'm, well, I'm not quite even done with the first draft yet.
[20:45]I'm approaching and we'll see if that premise kind of holds.
[20:49]But it's, yeah, it has been, it's been more like the first book than the second book
[20:53]because I, I think I just had a better idea about it when I, when I started it versus
[20:58]the second book.
[20:59]So what is your life like aside from writing?
[21:02]Like once you put down the microphone today, like what, what are you doing next?
[21:06]Like what's your, what do you do for fun?
[21:08]Like what's your, what's your other stuff in life?
[21:10]Where do you like, I don't know, I don't have a sense of like what, what happens else?
[21:15]Yeah.
[21:16]No, I'm, well, I'm laughing because when I put down this microphone, I'm actually going
[21:20]to go write more of the book because the first draft, I have to finish the first draft
[21:25]by August 31st.
[21:26]So, wow.
[21:27]So I will, I will be right.
[21:29]I think because my writing style is so chaotic because I don't plan anything and I don't
[21:36]outline.
[21:37]I have found that the more that my routine is, is more of a routine, I, I think it helps
[21:43]me.
[21:44]And so I really do sort of treat it almost like an office job.
[21:46]So I will be, you know, at 9 a.m. I'm in front of my computer and I write or work on,
[21:53]you know, revision or whatever on the book until like probably like 2 p.m. sometimes 3 p.m.
[21:59]And then after that, that's when things get a lot more, you know, flexible, like either
[22:03]I'm reading a book I like or I go out into, so I recently moved to Mexico City.
[22:08]I'm, we're having the zoom from Mexico City.
[22:11]And so all, you know, go out and explore the city, get some good food.
[22:15]And I mean, that's, that's, so that's really what I'm doing now is just I, I write in
[22:18]the morning and then I try to take care of, you know, whatever other admin and, and then
[22:23]in the afternoons and evenings I go out and I just walk the streets and try, try a new
[22:28]coffee shop or like learn, you know, try to learn something about the city.
[22:31]So that's, it's been a lot of fun.
[22:33]Wow.
[22:34]Who knew?
[22:35]See, I would never have known.
[22:36]He's blank wall.
[22:37]So you could have been anywhere.
[22:38]I know.
[22:39]That's because the rest of this room isn't unpacked yet.
[22:41]That's good.
[22:43]Why did you move to Mexico City?
[22:44]Because well, I mean, at first of all, the city's just wonder, it's so wonderful.
[22:49]You know, it reminds me in a lot of ways of Mexico City.
[22:53]I mean, it's kind of so vibe, but it's that same, it's, it's just huge.
[22:56]It's got millions and millions and millions of people and every neighborhood feels very
[22:59]different.
[23:00]The way that every neighborhood in New York City feels very different has a different vibe.
[23:04]But on top of that, it is so much cheaper than New York City, which is really good for
[23:07]writer.
[23:08]And so yeah, so I've just been really, really enjoying it.
[23:12]Good for you.
[23:13]Just like go off and trying something new.
[23:15]I love that.
[23:16]It took me like 40 years to even like change my neighborhood.
[23:19]And I basically still haven't.
[23:20]So anyway, I take inspiration for people more adventures than me.
[23:25]Okay.
[23:26]Last question.
[23:27]What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
[23:28]Ooh, that's a good question.
[23:30]I would say to get to the end of your first draft as quickly as you can, even if it's
[23:38]messy, or even if you know that it's not right, the direction you're going, because
[23:42]there's something really important that happens when you finally have the whole thing.
[23:48]It's like, even if you have like 80% of your draft and you're trying to fix it, somehow
[23:52]you just have less of the view of the whole thing than if you get all the way to the end
[23:55]and you write the ending, even if it's bad ending and change.
[23:58]There's just something that happens about having that whole that makes it a lot easier
[24:03]to work with.
[24:04]I think.
[24:06]So if you can make it there, make it there as quick as you can.
[24:09]Yeah.
[24:10]So then you can go back and write another 500 pages.
[24:13]Okay.
[24:14]Thank you.
[24:15]It was for coming on Mom's End of Time to Read books.
[24:17]I really appreciate it all your time.
[24:19]Thank you so much.
[24:20]Take a time.
[24:21]Okay.
[24:22]All right.
[24:23]Take care.
[24:24]Bye-bye.
[24:25]Thanks for listening to this episode of Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[24:29]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and at Mom's Don't Have Time to Read
[24:34]Books.
[24:35]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[24:39]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[24:41]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan, that texture sound for the sound editing.
[24:45]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.