Kerri Maher, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS CALL
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
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[1:03]Carrie Maar is the author of All You Have to Do is Call.
[1:06]She is also the USA Today bestselling author of the Paris Bookseller, The Girl in White
[1:10]Gloves, The Kennedy Debutant, and under the name Carrie Majors, this is not a writing manual.
[1:15]Notes for the young writer in the real world.
[1:17]She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter and dog in the leafy
[1:21]suburb west of Boston, Massachusetts.
[1:24]Welcome, Carrie.
[1:25]Thank you so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books to discuss.
[1:28]All you have to do is call.
[1:30]Thank you so much for having me.
[1:32]I'm excited to be here.
[1:33]Does anybody ever like to sing the next line?
[1:37]And you'll be there.
[1:41]Not yet.
[1:42]But you know, events are to come.
[1:44]So fingers crossed.
[1:45]Yeah, there you go.
[1:46]Hopefully someone better than me.
[1:47]It's singing or and we may not want the song.
[1:54]Okay.
[1:54]All you have to do is call.
[1:55]Tell listeners that this book is about, please.
[1:57]So this book is a novel that is loosely based on the women of the real life, Jane
[2:02]Collective, who operated an underground women's health clinic in Chicago before row.
[2:09]And they they offered safe inexpensive abortions among other women's health services.
[2:16]They offered pap smears and some birth control counseling and some SGD testing.
[2:21]But really what they became known for was the the safe of worsens that they provided.
[2:25]And they started as a referral service in the sick late 60s.
[2:29]And they gradually sort of they took over the process to offer the abortions themselves.
[2:33]So it was this women helping women, you know, health organization.
[2:37]And when my novel opens, and I sort of took the idea of the Jane Collective and said
[2:43]it in Chicago and used some of the milestone moments of Jane, but made my characters entirely
[2:50]made up.
[2:51]These women are figments of my imagination.
[2:54]They are not based on the real women.
[2:55]And I always want to flag that for people because my first three historical novels were
[3:00]biographical fiction.
[3:01]You know, they were about Grace Kelly and Sylvia Beach who were real women.
[3:04]So the characters in this novel are not not real.
[3:08]You pointed out in the note that they were originally, I guess seven or eight and now they're
[3:14]seven women.
[3:15]And so it wasn't exactly the same and all of that.
[3:19]Right.
[3:20]Yeah.
[3:21]So for people who are versed in Jane lore, I did in my author's note is like the ultimate
[3:25]maya culpa before her jokes historical novel.
[3:29]And it's like here are all the ways in which I didn't follow the historical book.
[3:35]Like if you were to check my facts, these would not align.
[3:39]And you know, I did it on purpose.
[3:40]Yeah.
[3:41]So anyway, I went to the historical novel signing conference a few years ago and the keynote
[3:46]speaker was Dolan Perkins Valdez.
[3:48]And she gave this amazing speech and about, you know, how we all do our homework and
[3:53]where we are, you know, our conscientious writers.
[3:56]But in the end, we're going to make shit up.
[3:59]And like the room like stood up and cheered.
[4:03]Oh my gosh, I love that.
[4:07]So awesome.
[4:08]So what drew you to this topic?
[4:10]What drew you to this, the Jane collective, how did you?
[4:13]And yeah.
[4:14]Yeah.
[4:15]So, you know, this is such an interesting question because of course, this book is entering
[4:19]this very unfortunate and weird moment in the history of reproductive justice post-dobs
[4:25]of your post-dobs.
[4:26]But I actually got the idea for it way back in 2018, like the before times in many ways,
[4:32]I was driving to meet a friend for a movie.
[4:35]And I was listening to NPR as I usually do if I'm not listening to an audiobook.
[4:40]And I heard this amazing NPR sort of like narrative news story about the women of the
[4:44]Jane collective.
[4:45]And like as they were talking about the story, I just went, what?
[4:49]They did, they did what?
[4:51]Because, you know, part of the, what is remarkable about the real life of men of Jane is
[4:56]that they were women, very young women, actually, with no special medical training who
[5:01]learned to give this one procedure and to women in their hours of need, right?
[5:07]And so this was just really remarkable to me.
[5:10]I mean, I was like, what, like, you know, like someone like me did this.
[5:15]And I, you know, I stopped the car and immediately was like, because anyone written about
[5:19]them, you know, you fire up Amazon and you're like looking for other novels and no one had,
[5:24]you know, the cursory search I did at the time.
[5:26]And I just, I knew I had to write about them.
[5:30]It was, it was a journey, you know, from that moment to this moment.
[5:34]It does, you know, in some ways, it doesn't seem like a lot of time, but it felt like
[5:36]a lot of time as I was living it.
[5:38]You know, at that time, the Kennedy debut time, my first historical novel was about
[5:41]to come out.
[5:42]I was working on my second historical novel.
[5:46]So, you know, I, I didn't know how I was going to get to like write this really, pretty
[5:52]different kind of book.
[5:53]But here I am.
[5:54]I feel really, really grateful and lucky that we're here now.
[5:57]Yeah.
[5:58]It's amazing.
[5:59]Well, one of the things in addition to, you know, the abortions themselves in that
[6:03]whole sort of subplot and all not subplot, I mean, what am I talking about?
[6:07]I feel like there's this undercurrent of desire within a marriage that I found really
[6:12]interesting, where women and men, maybe their feelings are not as aligned after several
[6:18]years of marriage or is this person cheating?
[6:20]Is this person not cheating?
[6:21]Like, why is this person paying attention to me?
[6:24]Why isn't this person paying attention to me?
[6:26]What can I do?
[6:27]What am I doing wrong?
[6:28]All of this self-doubt that I, I don't feel like we get enough of necessarily in fiction
[6:34]for long-married people, how they feel about, you know, all the sexuality involved in
[6:39]that.
[6:40]So tell me a little more about that because I found that to be very interesting.
[6:43]Oh, thank you for asking me about this.
[6:46]You know, as M48, I was married for a long time and I've had, you know, I've been divorced
[6:53]for about five and a half years at this point and I've had subsequent relationships.
[6:56]And I've, you know, I have married friends and I have, you know, long married friends at
[7:00]this point and I have women, other women friends who have been single and partnered and
[7:05]broken up.
[7:06]And so I feel like over the last 10 years, especially, I've had some really fascinating
[7:12]conversations about what sex is life in midlife and the truth of that.
[7:19]And, you know, one of the emerging themes, and I was so happy when they're podcasts,
[7:25]you can do hard things also was really upfront about this.
[7:28]You know, being a woman in the marriage and being the one who is more amorous than your
[7:35]husband, which we're not socialized to feel is the quote unquote, right way, right?
[7:42]And so that was a dynamic I really wanted to explore in this novel and I got to do that
[7:47]within the Patty Matt marriage.
[7:50]And you know, and then obviously, so I knew that that was going to be a component of
[7:53]their story.
[7:54]I don't want to say too much about that because I don't want to give away any spoilers,
[7:58]but there was, I think an easy plot out that I could have taken in that marriage that
[8:04]I didn't want to take because I see that so much in fiction and all media really.
[8:13]And I really wanted it to be feel different and feel like a different kind of exploration
[8:19]of, you know, romantic sexual love in a long, long term relationship.
[8:23]So that was Patty and Matt.
[8:25]And then we have, you know, Veronica and Doug are having a different set of issues, you
[8:30]know, she's pregnant for most of the book, which, you know, presents its own set of, you
[8:35]know, romantic issues.
[8:38]But then of course they're having like real meaningful disagreements about about the
[8:43]work she's doing while she's pregnant.
[8:46]And I think, you know, one of the challenges that I ran into in exploring all of these
[8:51]relationships was, you know, how to make them satisfying to a 21st century reader without
[8:57]being anachronistic, you know, so these characters don't have the therapy speak that we
[9:04]have.
[9:05]They don't have, you know, the benefit of all the podcasts and all the things that we've
[9:08]listened to about adult relationships and so I'm like, okay, so how do I do that?
[9:14]So, you know, there were a lot of drafts, you know, for this reason and others of this
[9:21]I kind of, I mean, there's so many different characters and viewpoints and relationships
[9:25]and interweaving stories and perspectives and, you know, you bounce from rooting for this
[9:32]character to that character.
[9:33]So yeah, I mean, it's it's hard to pull this off.
[9:37]It's hard.
[9:38]It's hard.
[9:39]I'm not going to lie.
[9:40]So, you know, my, my, so my first three historical novels were one character, you know,
[9:45]one character.
[9:46]So it was one narrator in the Grace Kelly, it was, it was a dual timeline, but yeah, I hadn't
[9:52]juggled three points of view ever.
[9:55]I have five unpublished novels before, before that'd be a time.
[9:59]Yeah, I was like.
[10:00]a flag that for people because I don't,
[10:01]I don't want to ever come across as like,
[10:04]I'm the like, what's people say,
[10:06]the 20 year overnight success.
[10:08]You know, I wrote my first unpublished novel
[10:11]and the fifth grade, you know, I wrote and wrote and wrote
[10:14]and after college, I wrote and I wrote three novels
[10:17]and, you know, they got me various things along the way.
[10:20]I got into graduate school with one of them.
[10:22]I got my first agent with another one of them.
[10:24]So, but none of them sold until Kennedy.
[10:27]And so, and that was the sixth novel that I had written.
[10:30]But this was the, actually the very first novel I wrote
[10:33]out of college had three points of view,
[10:35]but I didn't braid them together.
[10:37]So it was really a new challenge for me,
[10:39]but it was fun.
[10:41]I mean, really, you know, with every,
[10:43]you're a writer, you don't want to do the same thing
[10:45]with every book, right?
[10:46]You want to set new challenges for yourself.
[10:49]You want it to feel fresh and exciting.
[10:50]And so juggling the three characters in this case
[10:53]was kind of the thing for this novel.
[10:56]Very cool.
[10:57]I love that.
[10:58]And thank you for sharing that about your past
[10:59]because it can be quite deceiving
[11:02]when people see overnight successes and all of that.
[11:05]I feel like sometimes when people ask me
[11:06]some of the main takeaways from this podcast,
[11:08]that is one of the things is that
[11:10]you should never expect your first novel to sell.
[11:12]Like the first novel is teaching yourself
[11:14]how to write a novel period.
[11:16]That's it.
[11:17]The second is like how to write it better.
[11:20]And the third is like, maybe this could be good.
[11:22]Like sometimes you can sell the third on,
[11:23]but like everyone is practiced
[11:26]and don't expect it to be the one.
[11:28]Like how could it be?
[11:30]You have to have all this,
[11:31]I've written a bunch of novels that are tucked away.
[11:33]And I mean, it's really, it's such an important message.
[11:38]I don't think honestly, published writers
[11:40]can reinforce this enough.
[11:42]Because there are enough stories of like the lawyer
[11:45]who wrote their first novel in them,
[11:47]get it by getting up at five in the morning
[11:48]and then they sold it.
[11:50]It's not like that ever happens.
[11:51]It's just not actually the norm.
[11:54]Most of the book will toil away either.
[11:57]I don't understand these writers because I'm not one of them,
[11:59]but I have friends who have like toiled away
[12:01]on the same novel for 10 years and then sold that.
[12:05]I could never do that.
[12:09]So I spent those 10 years writing three novels, right?
[12:13]And trying out a bunch of different genres
[12:15]and sort of like seeing what felt right to me.
[12:19]And none of no word, no word was wasted, you know?
[12:24]Every single word is a learning experience.
[12:28]You're, you know, as you said,
[12:29]it's you're learning how to write a novel.
[12:31]It's an apprentice novel, but I remember, you know,
[12:32]I was one of, I was 23 years old writing that first novel.
[12:35]With somebody said that to me, I flipped out.
[12:38]I was like, no, it's not.
[12:40]Oh yeah, I was like, no, no, no, no, mine's good though.
[12:43]And till, you know, until I was like,
[12:47]I racked with insecurity about it.
[12:48]But you know, it said curious tension.
[12:51]Yeah, well, it just is what it is.
[12:53]The six novels that you set aside also historical fiction,
[12:57]like did you always gravitate to that?
[12:59]No, so Kennedy was my first go a historical fiction.
[13:03]And it's totally amazing to me
[13:05]that it took so long for me to figure out
[13:06]that I should try historical fiction.
[13:09]I, you know, my first novel was a serious work
[13:12]of literary fiction that wrote right out of college.
[13:16]And then I went to graduate school.
[13:17]That that novel got me into graduate school.
[13:19]So I went to graduate school,
[13:20]I got an MFA in fiction writing.
[13:22]And I like wound up like rebelling against like having
[13:25]to only read Philip Roth and, you know,
[13:28]Don De Lillo and everyone else.
[13:29]I was like, I'm gonna write a romance novel.
[13:32]And so I did.
[13:33]I took one summer, I read a bunch of romance novels
[13:36]and I wrote one and I was under the mistaken impression
[13:39]that they would be easy to sell.
[13:40]It was not easy to sell.
[13:42]So, but it taught me, oh my gosh,
[13:45]I self taught myself so much about plot
[13:49]and character development.
[13:50]You know, I think romance novels no longer
[13:52]have the kind of like bad rap that they did
[13:55]when I was trying to write one
[13:57]or they've come a long way in the world.
[13:59]But that was a huge learning experience for me.
[14:02]My second, my third novel was a mystery
[14:04]in which mainly I found out that I am not hardwired
[14:07]to be a mystery novel.
[14:08]That requires a certain kind of like logic.
[14:14]And also darkness that I can't quite access.
[14:18]I'm just saying it out loud.
[14:19]And then I wrote two young adult novels
[14:21]and one of them was a paranormal
[14:23]and one of them was like contemporary.
[14:24]Because I was very immersed in the world of YA
[14:27]for a little while.
[14:27]I ran a literary journal and you wrote a whole
[14:31]advice book on writing for younger authors.
[14:33]That's so great.
[14:34]And the cover is so cool, by the way.
[14:35]It's like this loud math, very good.
[14:37]I think I might get it from my kids.
[14:39]I have 16, it's a fun, it's a fun.
[14:42]I'm actually on my sub-stack right now
[14:44]replying to each of the chapters in that book.
[14:47]Oh, that's interesting.
[14:49]I published it 10 years ago, it's shocking.
[14:52]And one of the things that I think is valuable
[14:54]about that book to anyone,
[14:56]young writers or old writers,
[14:58]is I wrote it before I had sold a novel.
[15:00]So it's very much from the perspective.
[15:03]It's like a writing memoir.
[15:04]It's like a bird by bird,
[15:05]you know, Annie Lamont type of book.
[15:07]But without, but it's from the perspective
[15:09]of someone who hasn't, quote, made it yet.
[15:11]And I think that perspective is valuable for people
[15:15]as they're kind of like trying to see their way
[15:20]through the weeds of the writing life.
[15:22]Interesting.
[15:23]So you're in Massachusetts.
[15:24]I've heard that they're, you know,
[15:26]in the bus area, particularly,
[15:27]there's this big community of writers
[15:30]and people who have really been helping each other out
[15:32]tell me about how your writing community has helped you.
[15:36]Well, so my first writer friends in this area
[15:38]were young adult folks.
[15:39]So actually, and they're two of my best writing friends
[15:42]and early critique partners still,
[15:44]when they die in a run and another woman named Kip Wilson.
[15:48]And they also both worked on the literary journal staff
[15:50]with me for many years.
[15:52]And so we're really tight.
[15:53]And now, you know, once I kind of entered the world
[15:56]of historical fiction,
[15:58]now I've gotten to know all kinds of new and interesting people.
[16:01]Jane Healy, who wrote The Beantown Girls
[16:03]among other novels lives nearby.
[16:06]Ginny Pye, who's got a novel,
[16:07]the literary I'm doing of, I think it's Vanessa Swan
[16:10]is coming out really soon.
[16:12]There's all kinds of people here.
[16:13]And, you know, and contemporary novels too.
[16:15]I actually did, when I did The Grace Kelly book,
[16:17]I was paired by a wonderful local bookstore
[16:21]with Laura Zigman.
[16:22]Oh, bro.
[16:23]Have you had her?
[16:24]Oh, several times.
[16:26]Yeah.
[16:26]Okay, yeah.
[16:27]So she writes contemporaries.
[16:28]So they put me as the historical novel,
[16:31]as her as this contemporary writer together
[16:33]for this like lovely evening kind of dinner
[16:36]with the writer's thing.
[16:38]And we just had the best conversation.
[16:40]She had just come out with separation anxiety,
[16:42]which, oh my gosh, I'm sitting,
[16:44]as I'm talking to you, I'm sitting here petting my dog.
[16:47]Oh, yeah, my dog, she's downstairs,
[16:49]but yeah, usually my dog's right behind me.
[16:51]So are you, are you right now in Southern California?
[16:55]Right now, I'm in New York.
[16:56]No, my kids go to school here.
[16:58]My little kids, at least, they're not so little,
[16:59]but yeah, I'm here most of the time, but, okay.
[17:02]Cause I've watched you know,
[17:03]you're opening of your bookstore in Santa Monica
[17:05]with great interest
[17:06]because my, I grew up in California.
[17:08]That's right, I read them.
[17:09]My family all lives now in Orange County.
[17:12]Got it.
[17:13]Yes.
[17:13]You always consider yourself a California girl or something.
[17:16]Like that, right?
[17:18]I do.
[17:19]Where did you grow up?
[17:19]I grew up right here in New York.
[17:21]Come on in.
[17:22]Yeah.
[17:23]Okay, so you're a real New Yorker.
[17:24]I am a real New Yorker.
[17:25]Native New Yorker, but I really feel like I would
[17:29]be living anywhere I grew up.
[17:30]Like I'm here because it's my home,
[17:32]not because it's New York.
[17:34]No, all right, I guess I mean.
[17:35]Yeah, 100%.
[17:37]Yeah, so that's, that's what makes it hard to leave
[17:39]even when I feel like perhaps we should.
[17:42]But yeah, well, I lived six wonderful years in Brooklyn
[17:45]and I wouldn't, it was lovely to be young in Brooklyn.
[17:49]Yeah, I lived downtown when I was younger in New York
[17:52]to I feel like I had a little bit at least.
[17:56]What are you working on now?
[17:58]So I am at the very early stages of novel number five,
[18:03]historical novel number five.
[18:04]It's going to be that working title is Summer of Love.
[18:07]And it's a dual timeline novel in set in California
[18:11]in the 1960s and the 2010s.
[18:13]So welcome back to that idea of new challenges,
[18:16]really ranked dual timelines,
[18:18]a little bit of contemporary mixed in with my historical.
[18:22]And it's about a family who owns a winery
[18:24]and the early part of the novel is set
[18:26]against the backdrop of the counterculture revolution
[18:28]in San Francisco.
[18:29]So, you know, Summer of Love, is that,
[18:32]so I was under the mistake and impression
[18:34]for a long time that the Summer of Love
[18:35]that that term referred to 1969,
[18:39]but it's actually 1967 when there was,
[18:42]and there was, it started with Vietnam War protests
[18:44]in San Francisco actually in the spring
[18:46]and it became this incredible like set of concerts
[18:50]in the hate-ashbury that summer of 1967.
[18:54]I thought it was 69, too.
[18:55]So who, I mean, look at that.
[18:56]I got some history in here today.
[18:58]And now the history in the book, that's why we knew it.
[19:04]Are there other people that you want to profile
[19:08]or like little dim ideas that you keep tossing around?
[19:12]There must be sense.
[19:15]You know?
[19:15]Yeah, there's one that I feel too superstitious
[19:20]to talk about, but that's, I think every writer,
[19:23]I floated this idea to my agent once
[19:26]and she was like, she's sort of sad
[19:28]and she was like, every writer has one of these ideas.
[19:32]You know, that like we're just kind of like,
[19:33]it's like, it's too big to describe all you have.
[19:37]And we haven't figured out how to describe it,
[19:39]but it's been, it's been carrying it around with us
[19:41]for decades.
[19:43]So I have one of those, but otherwise, you know,
[19:45]I've been really lucky.
[19:47]Like, I mean, since, I mean, I have those five
[19:49]unpublished novels, so I got those out of my system.
[19:51]I got those characters out of my system.
[19:53]You know, I got, I've gotten to write about, you know,
[19:56]three amazing real-life women,
[19:58]and now this set of characters.
[20:00]And as difficult as it was to make these women up out of thin air, I think that's where I'm going
[20:08]for now. I'm not kind of tossing around many other biographical sort of novel topics right now.
[20:16]And that's my dog. So many writers are doing it so well. So many fabulous women have been
[20:24]written about. So we'll see, but you never know. Life is long. And we read and we get inspired
[20:30]by the strangest things. Like, you know, all you have to do is call came from a news story. I
[20:34]listen to who knows where the next idea is going to come from. And so you have to sort of just like
[20:39]be out and about like the best things are not at your desk. You know, you just kind of like get out
[20:43]there. I think so. Tell me just a little bit more about your writing process and where you like to
[20:47]work. Like are you at your desk now where you get your writing down or do you like what's the
[20:51]process? No. Okay. Well, this is this is my zoom place. I would like an
[20:55]share with like a TV tray, believe it or not. Because I really like doing things in front of the
[21:02]gorgeous. That was the cover of the Paris bookseller. Yep. So, and this, and I'm very comfortable
[21:07]here. But no, so I, I kind of move around. I've got a, I live in a pretty small condo. So like,
[21:13]I had like a secretary desk in my bedroom. It's big, which I bought with the idea that I could
[21:19]close it. Yeah. Just look at the dresser. Do I ever close it? No. But anyway, that I do some,
[21:26]I do a lot of my writing there. Sometimes I write at my kitchen table and sometimes I write at
[21:30]my couch on my couch or just to my right. But as I get older, the couch is less and less of a good
[21:35]idea. My back is not super, super happy with that choice. So, but and I, and I'm really a morning
[21:41]writer. I'm not an early morning writer. I need to like sort of get up and caffeinated and get
[21:45]the dog walked. But I try to use those first two or three hours of the day to actually get the
[21:53]writing done. It's very hard for me to do, to, to push it to the rest of the day. I have discovered,
[21:59]and I want to know your answer to this question too, because you are juggling a lot. But
[22:03]one of the things I've learned about myself repeatedly, as if like I forget and I have to relearn it,
[22:08]is that if I let everything else expand to fit fill the day, it will be emails, the parenting,
[22:16]the teaching, whatever, all the things. Suddenly it's 7 p.m. and I haven't done any writing and I'm
[22:22]definitely not going to write up for 7 p.m. Whereas if I actually clear the deck and just say,
[22:27]you know, 9 a.m. to noon is for writing period, like, and put my blinders on, magically everything
[22:34]else does actually get done. Sometimes I don't get to the gym, but pretty much everything can
[22:40]still get done. So how do you do it? Well, I've only written one novel while I've been doing all
[22:47]the other eight million things I'm doing, and I literally had to take time, like, days away.
[22:55]Like I had to get out of my environment. Like I had a much harder time doing that than any other
[22:59]kind of writing, which I do, like, anywhere around the kids on a plane in the doctor's room,
[23:05]you know, whatever. But for fiction, I had to be like, I'm taking this day. And I couldn't even
[23:12]just take a morning. Like, I don't know. I had to take a couple of times, bigger chunks of time,
[23:19]and then I caught up the next day or I caught up that night. But I like you. I can't do anything
[23:23]at night. I'm sort of useless, except for emails. But yeah, I don't know. But yeah, you have to
[23:29]have to set it on a calendar and see the blank space there so that I know I have the room to like,
[23:36]you know, take a break and come back and take a break, you know. Yes, I put it in my calendar, too.
[23:41]If it's not in my calendar, then I haven't really committed to it. Yes. So I don't get to the gym anymore.
[23:47]I know, you know, we can't actually do it all. You know, that actually was a
[23:52]propos of this novel. I wanted to know if, you know, this idea of like women doing it all,
[23:58]could I use that phrase and have it have, but no, that phrase didn't come into the public
[24:05]sort of public consciousness until the 80s, the 1980s. Wow. So that idea of women trying to have it
[24:11]all was later than this book. Interesting. Well, maybe that's better. That's a pretty good
[24:17]try. But yeah, I mean, I'm just like planting that seed there for people who are going to read
[24:22]the book that they can know that that phrase did not exist for these characters. Interesting.
[24:27]So what is your, I know we've already talked about great advice and already, but if you had to
[24:32]leave listeners with some parting advice for aspiring authors in particular, that would have
[24:37]lined your people. That's the thing that I tell everybody. I mean, really, the biggest difference
[24:42]anything has really made along the way for me is having other writer friends at different stages
[24:47]of their careers, you know, sort of people who are further along, who could be kind of mentors to
[24:51]me, but also, and really importantly, having people peer friends who were slogging it out with me,
[24:58]who could, you know, I can text them or call them when I got a rejection that particularly hurt,
[25:04]who would swap manuscripts with me and give me comments. And I would give them comments, you know,
[25:09]just all the things writer writers do for each other at every step of the process. And now I'm
[25:15]really lucky. I have a whole, you know, I have writers all over the country who like all I have to
[25:21]do is call them. Yeah, I love it. You should start like a like a phone tree called all you have to
[25:29]do with call with like authors who agreed to be on call for like aspiring author questions. Like
[25:36]you should do and all you have to do is call day of like aspiring authors and get recruit all sorts
[25:41]of published authors to be there for like a hotline. What a great idea. That would be fun. That would be
[25:48]so fun. Yes. All right. The whole, I can see the whole branding with this whole cover look and
[25:53]feel and all that. Yes. Well, there was a part, there was a moment when we were talking about covers,
[25:58]I was like, couldn't we have a phone on it? You know, the call on cord never worked out. And I
[26:03]love the cover. I would, I wouldn't like that. It's really cool. Carry this was so fun. Thank you so much
[26:08]for chatting. And yeah, I hope to meet you in real life. Absolutely love that. Thank you again for
[26:13]having me on the show. My pleasure. All right. Have a great day. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode
[26:19]of moms. Don't have time to read books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[26:24]and at moms. Don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com
[26:29]and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so
[26:34]much to Steve and Ryan. Heck, texture sound for the sound editing. And thank you to Morning
[26:38]Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.