Rachel Kapelke-Dale, THE FORTUNE SELLER
[0:04]Welcome to Moms Don't Have Time to Be Books with Zippy.
[0:07]I'm the host, Zippy Owens.
[0:09]I am an author, my latest is blank, pub date March 1st and novel.
[0:13]I'm also a podcaster, obviously, a publisher, a bookstore owner, and so much more.
[0:18]If you love books, you're in the right place.
[0:21]In fact, we call it the Zippyverse, or really, the LA Times called it the Zippyverse,
[0:25]and we're going with it.
[0:27]Go to Zippy Owens.com to learn more and follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens.
[0:32]Rachel Capell Kappelke Dale is the author of the Fortune seller, a novel.
[0:37]This episode was guest hosted by Alicia Fernandez Miranda, author of My What a Fear,
[0:42]which is a Zippy Books title.
[0:44]Rachel Capell Kappelke Dale is the author of The Entrepreneurs and Co-author of Graduates in Wonderland.
[0:51]She received a BA from Brown University, where she wrote on the varsity question team,
[0:56]an MA from the University of J. DePelli de Jello, and a PhD from University College, London.
[1:01]How did you like that accent, right?
[1:03]Pretty good?
[1:05]She currently lives in Paris.
[1:07]Rachel, welcome to mom's don't have time to read books.
[1:10]Happy New Year.
[1:11]We're still in early 2024 here.
[1:13]How are you today?
[1:15]I'm great.
[1:16]Thanks so much for having me on.
[1:18]It's great to meet you and to talk with you and to be back on the pod.
[1:21]Well, I am extremely excited because this weekend,
[1:24]I dove into your book, which I had the good fortune to read early, probably the best thing
[1:29]about this job.
[1:30]And I just, it was such a page turner.
[1:34]Like I could not, I couldn't have stopped.
[1:37]And I have a very bad habit of reading the ends of books before I finish it.
[1:41]It's horrible.
[1:43]My New Year's relationship should probably be to change it, but I think it's impossible.
[1:46]But of course, I had to keep like, I was like, I don't understand.
[1:49]I have to go back.
[1:50]I have to go back.
[1:50]I have to finish.
[1:51]So yeah, it had me hooked.
[1:53]So congratulations.
[1:55]Oh, thank you so much.
[1:56]I'm really glad to hear that and delighted that it kept the tension going for you.
[2:01]Yeah, good job on that.
[2:02]So why don't we start with just telling listeners who aren't as lucky as I have been?
[2:07]What the fortune seller is about?
[2:09]Absolutely.
[2:10]So the fortune seller is a book about Ivy League, a question team in the mid-ots,
[2:16]which feels so weird to say still, and young tarot card reader who kind of
[2:23]infiltrates the team and brings a lot of tensions to the forefront.
[2:27]And yeah, and kind of the fallout from there, figuring out who she is and why she's there
[2:34]and what it means to the other girls on the team.
[2:38]So I know this is your third novel.
[2:40]And I also know you were already kind of, it was in the works when you were on ZB's podcast
[2:44]last for your previous book.
[2:46]What was the inspiration for this?
[2:47]And what's kind of some of the backstory about how you decided to come to this story of these
[2:52]girls and their drama?
[2:54]Well, there's so much about this book that I'd always wanted to write about.
[2:58]You know, I wrote horses myself when I was younger.
[3:01]I always thought that was a fascinating arena, not just to write about the animals,
[3:06]which I love, but to write about the class tensions within that world,
[3:11]because it is such a strange world.
[3:13]And the book gets into this where you have people who can be in it, who aren't born from money
[3:20]usually because writing so expensive, who can be in that world only if they put actual labor
[3:25]into it, working as grooms, working as instructors, things like that, and then the very wealthy.
[3:32]So it's a really interesting kind of point of class meetings.
[3:36]And so I always wanted to use that for a book.
[3:39]The title was actually something that came along before almost anything else in this book.
[3:45]And it came from one of my favorite books as a kid, which was the Emily of New Moon series,
[3:52]the Lucy Maude Montgomery series.
[3:55]She, the heroine, Emily, works for so long to be a writer.
[3:59]She's a kid with literary ambitions, as many kind of Victorian heroines are held down.
[4:06]Eventually, I think one of her first big successes is when she gets a title from an old
[4:12]piece she finds in a newspaper called Something Like the Stellar of Dreams,
[4:15]something very Victorian like that.
[4:18]And I, you know, that it kind of stayed with me and morphed in my mind into the Fortune seller,
[4:25]although when I went back and reread the book, it was totally different.
[4:27]I thought, I thought, what would I do with that?
[4:31]And again, you know, the classroom world had always been something that appealed to me as a
[4:36]place to set a novel for precisely those class tensions.
[4:40]And I thought, oh, that could be interesting.
[4:42]And from there, you know, I kind of, I set out almost with like a mad libs of things that I
[4:48]want to write about, you know, I wanted to write about Tara.
[4:51]I'd wanted to write, you know, a little bit about astrology.
[4:54]I wanted to write about what it's like to be a New York right after graduation,
[4:59]you know, without any money, in particular.
[5:02]So these things came together in various ways.
[5:05]I wanted to write a dog in there.
[5:07]I love putting a dog in my books.
[5:10]And yeah, and then kind of whittling and seeing thematically what works.
[5:15]And you know, I'm not sure I think so much about theme while I'm drafting,
[5:19]but in revisions, of course, that starts to come through.
[5:23]So my first draft's do tend to be kind of a hodgepodge of just things I like.
[5:27]Are you a pancer or a plotter?
[5:29]So did you already know kind of what was going to happen?
[5:31]Because the story is it really unfolds.
[5:35]And it's one of those great stories that when you go back after,
[5:38]you know, what's happened in my case midway through the book or another people's case
[5:42]when they actually finished, you know, you can see all of these beautiful kind of Easter eggs
[5:47]and little blues that were dropped throughout.
[5:49]So was that, is that how you write?
[5:51]Do you write based on an outline?
[5:53]Or are you more of like, let's see where this goes?
[5:56]So for a long time, I really was a pancer, but I ended up with a lot of novels,
[6:03]a lot of manuscripts that were just people sitting around and talking.
[6:10]You know, my I have ADHD, I think I've imagined that before.
[6:13]My brain will let me go 800 pages into a conversation I find interesting and nobody else cares
[6:19]about.
[6:21]I really, you know, but that's also where some of the gold is.
[6:25]So I like to kind of have a few months to a year before I start writing,
[6:32]actually writing on the page where I'm just kind of wool gathering and jotting things down.
[6:37]And the stakes don't feel as high as if I thought of it as like actual drafts.
[6:42]Right.
[6:42]But you know, but when I write in my notes app, you know, little moments or sentences
[6:48]or ideas for scenes, that's, you know, that's my, yeah, my wool gathering process.
[6:54]And then I range it into an outline.
[6:57]I have these absurdly complicated excel spreadsheets.
[7:00]I love to waste time, I needlessly organizing things that don't need to be that
[7:07]carefully organized.
[7:08]But that really helps me to with revisions because I can see what scenes are necessary to
[7:16]the structure of the book.
[7:18]I can see what scenes are no longer necessary.
[7:20]You know, they may have been early on.
[7:22]But you know, at a certain point, fall away, I can see, you know, the scenes that were in
[7:26]earlier drafts and things like that without having to go generalized from a manuscript.
[7:32]So yeah, I do end up plotting pretty carefully in the end.
[7:37]But I don't come to a novel with a predetermined plot.
[7:42]When I do that, the characters come out kind of, they come out very forced.
[7:47]You know, it has to, you have to kind of listen to the characters as you write and adapt
[7:53]from there because it's all about what they do in any given situation.
[7:59]And if the situation isn't right or what they would do, is it right?
[8:03]Then, you know, particularly with, you know, this novel where you have four girls or a novel
[8:09]like this, four girls from what I think are pretty similar backgrounds ranging from middle
[8:15]class to super upper class.
[8:18]Yeah.
[8:19]But I mean, they're four young women of the same generation all relatively comfortable
[8:25]plus men on up, you know, of the same race of the same education.
[8:31]I think, you know, the fear that I have going into that is that I don't have them differentiated
[8:38]enough to get their voices distinct, you know, and their voices really come from, you know,
[8:45]come out of the actions that they take.
[8:47]And as I kind of figure out the kind of people that they are.
[8:51]So as that develops over drafts, sometimes scenes no longer make sense.
[8:56]And they got to go, are you good at doing that?
[8:59]Are you good at killing your darling?
[9:01]I am.
[9:01]And the only reason for that again is just I know how my brain works.
[9:04]And if there's something, and I know that I will write, you know,
[9:08]I will write a 50 page description of a horse or a dog that
[9:12]works about, you know, and I'm like, well, I'm glad I know that dog.
[9:16]Okay, let's stick that out of the, the book and, you know, move up on the wall, right?
[9:20]You know, it would be owed to the dog.
[9:22]Exactly.
[9:23]I have a lot of documents on my computer that are just those darlings for another time,
[9:29]for another draft, you know, for a different, for a different project job.
[9:33]That's very good.
[9:34]So I mean, you mentioned this little bit, but, you know, this book is about this horse community
[9:40]where you have a number of different people coming from different parts of life and
[9:44]difference with this economic strata that can come together, but it also takes place in
[9:50]the Ivy League in this very upper echelons, very kind of locked off place of society.
[9:56]And you're talking about class and privilege and how they intersect there.
[10:00]and how difficult it can be to break in.
[10:03]So, you know, I mentioned I was at my in my childhood home with my parents.
[10:06]You are also at your parents house right now.
[10:09]So I was reading your book over the weekend.
[10:11]And then we were playing a lot of board games, right?
[10:13]So we're playing the game of life with my children.
[10:14]I don't know if you've played that game ever like in the last however many years.
[10:19]But you know, you start the way the game works now is that you get a salary card
[10:23]at the beginning. And if you start with a small salary,
[10:27]your chances of digging yourself out of that financial hole by the end of the game
[10:30]are like almost impossible, which is kind of similar to life.
[10:34]And I pulled out this quote that Rose said earlier in the book.
[10:37]So early in the book, Rose used the main character.
[10:40]She says, the idea that all of life was open to you,
[10:44]not just a little sliver of it.
[10:45]That all you had to do was go around pointing at things, experiences, people,
[10:50]saying, mine, mine, mine.
[10:52]The ability to choose, that was my idea of heaven.
[10:56]And so I was thinking about all of these things as I'm playing the game of life and losing
[11:01]miserably, are going to my children, my extremely competitive son who's like hiding his
[11:05]money under the beds and no one can see how much he has.
[11:08]But I went to Harvard for my undergrad.
[11:10]I graduated in 2004.
[11:13]A lot of these experiences are very relatable for me, believable.
[11:17]I met people like Cress, another main character in the book.
[11:20]And I saw that you also went to an Ivy, you went to Brown.
[11:24]So did you, you know, did you know people like this when you came into this world?
[11:28]Is this, is that part of the book also based on experiences that you had kind of coming into
[11:32]the Ivy League from wherever you were coming from?
[11:35]Yeah.
[11:35]So I is a great question.
[11:37]I, I should say that nothing in the book actually happened to me.
[11:42]You know, it's the vibes, the vibes did, but nothing, none of the murders or anything.
[11:51]Yeah, I, you know, I grew up with my parents are both professors in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
[11:57]And when I was leaving for Brown, I'll never forget.
[12:01]You know, my father said to me, you know, you're going to encounter people from backgrounds
[12:05]that you've never encountered before, you know, at Brown.
[12:09]And I thought, oh, my God, you know, what kind of great gets me talk is there, you know,
[12:13]this is so, but then you get there.
[12:16]And yeah, you know, it would have been, you know, expected that I would, yeah, you know,
[12:21]and again, like I was, we were, I was very comfortable as a child.
[12:26]Like my background was fairly comfortable middle class.
[12:28]And, you know, but it was expected that I would work a job for spending money, you know,
[12:33]and that, you know, when I graduated, this is, so I graduated, oh, seven.
[12:38]So I still know, I wasn't covered under my parents' health insurance.
[12:42]And so my mom was like, you're getting a job because, you know, health insurance is
[12:47]what a grand a month.
[12:48]And, you know, that's, you know, that's just what you do.
[12:52]But at the same time, you know, a lot of the people that I knew, you know, were on this spectrum
[12:57]that was even more privileged than, you know, than the background that I had come from,
[13:02]where, you know, they were going, oh, well, you know, my parents,
[13:05]my job is to be a student, must be nice, you know, or, you know, or, you know, buying $100
[13:13]bottles of wine and a dinner and this kind of thing.
[13:16]And it's, you know, it's delightful to be around, of course.
[13:19]But it really was different from anything that I'd ever experienced.
[13:24]You know, and then at the same time, you know, there were kids in my class who were coming out
[13:28]with huge financial aid packages, student loans, you know, just this place where,
[13:34]I think, especially growing up in kind of 90s middle-class, middle-class, middle America,
[13:40]especially I had thought, you know, well, we live in a meritocracy, you know, and it's
[13:46]I really, really believed that to the point where I hadn't questioned it.
[13:51]And then all of a sudden, you know, you're, you know, you're surrounded by these levels of wealth,
[13:57]you know, that other 18-year-olds have access to.
[14:00]You're going, wait a minute, none of us has done anything to deserve any of this.
[14:05]Yes, you know, whether it's being, you know, born with the privilege to get there or the
[14:10]intelligence to get there or the combination or the work ethic to get there.
[14:15]But again, see, even now I'm going, oh, the work ethic to get there is the just work ethic
[14:20]in that you too, an IAV, whereas really it's systems.
[14:24]So I think, yeah, I think the IAVs have always interested me as institutions,
[14:29]as this kind of byword for privilege, but also this byword for, oh, you can get there if you work
[14:36]really hard. And it takes that certainly, but in most cases, if you're not
[14:42]precedentite from the book. But it also takes a lot of luck.
[14:47]And I think that's the kind of X factor. And I think you must get this with Harvard.
[14:53]I mean, especially because, you know, I live in France, I went to Brown, but people
[14:58]kind of know what it is, but they don't really, whereas Harvard all over the world, you know,
[15:02]is, you know, is kind of owning it after graduation is a strange thing.
[15:08]Because after graduation, I was in New York and people go, oh, you went to Brown,
[15:11]well, why are you doing this job? Because it's a job because it's work.
[15:16]Yeah. So the health insurance, you know, but the, you know, you go, oh, well, I just remember
[15:21]being really uncomfortable with people's judgments of that, you know, I'm going, oh, well,
[15:27]you must be so smart. And you're like, well, no, it's, it's, it's luck in it. And just this,
[15:33]which is probably a very middle class trait to, you know, again, the precedentite in the book is
[15:39]not somebody who's going, oh, I went to, you know, I went to Yale, but I'm not that smart.
[15:45]I'm sure she's not my son who's 12 will sometimes like, like, you know, he now knows
[15:51]what Harvard is because he sees it on TV and in shows and stuff like that. And he's like,
[15:55]just say to me all the time, like, mom, I can't believe you were smart enough to go to
[16:01]Ouch. As I was, but third of all, you know, you do need to understand. And I think when you,
[16:09]I think one of the great benefits actually of my experience there was being able to see
[16:13]a lot of the underlying machinations in the system of how that world works in a way that you never
[16:18]could have explained to me before I got there because you start to see, you know, you see how
[16:25]intergenerating, you know, inherited privilege and generational privilege, how it manifests itself
[16:29]among your peers and among friends. And there are lots of ways to take advantage of that. My
[16:33]thing was always like with boys. Like, you never wanted to tell boys after college that you went to
[16:36]Harvard because you didn't want them to think you're too smart. So I went to college in Boston.
[16:40]I was talking a little while to own that properly, but now I'm so, I'm so far out, nobody cares
[16:46]where I went to college anymore. It's like, I'm very far away, I'm very aged. So you, you mentioned
[16:53]you live in Paris. What brought you there? Tell me about your, like, fabulous ex pet life where
[16:57]you're like, we're stripes and eat baguettes and wear those like, like, Emily in Paris. I bet,
[17:03]you know, are you just walking around in super high heels all day long? Tell me.
[17:08]I have not worn heels since the pandemic. I love it. I love that for you. I love it.
[17:13]But yeah, I, so I studied abroad in Paris. And then I did my masters there because I realized
[17:20]when I was studying abroad that, well, our parents and our, you know, student loans were paying
[17:26]40 grand a year, whatever it was at the time. The French students who were being exchanged
[17:32]were paying about 300 intuition, which included health insurance. So as soon as I had the chance
[17:38]after college, I worked in New York for a while, then I decided to go do my masters in
[17:44]France for, you know, again, like 300 bucks a year, health insurance included. And then I,
[17:50]yeah, I kind of caught up in that, in that system and in the academia of it all again,
[17:56]I ended up doing my PhD. I did that in London because my written French isn't strong enough to do,
[18:02]you know, a doctorate in and after that, but I published my first book with just pan during
[18:11]my doctorate and realized that that was the area I wanted my life to go, you know, but I couldn't,
[18:17]I couldn't stop the, I couldn't, couldn't give up the doctorate. I had to finish it. I, you know,
[18:23]I already had some policy. So I finished the doctorate ends and was studies and
[18:29]but then I thought, well, if I'm just going to write, I could be living anywhere and I love London,
[18:34]but in terms of quality of life, in terms of, you know, what feels like my city, you know, Paris was
[18:41]where I wanted to be. So I still had a lot of friends there, moved back to France. It's been,
[18:47]you know, since 2018 is when I moved back. So yeah, it's been wonderful. It is a great country
[18:54]to the men. I mean, they're the glamorous aspects. It's very funny. I was teaching a writing class
[19:00]this semester and of exchange students from the United States. And a lot of them in their early
[19:07]essays were writing about Emily in Paris and kind of their experience. And I was like, okay,
[19:12]just wait, you know, see, see what you think? Because, you know, the rats on the subway are not
[19:19]necessarily a featured in that show. Those are cutscenes. Bloopers. But no, it's, it's a wonderful
[19:30]place to to live to to work to write, of course. I love it. It's on my list. So I'm in Scotland now,
[19:37]and I have been an expert, similar experience, studied abroad in the UK, went back for my
[19:41]masters, moved back to live in 2008. And something that's been interesting for me is writing
[19:48]about America and Americans and in my American voice that exists in my head. But from abroad,
[19:55]I mean, have you had that experience kind of writing? Your book is very much set in
[20:00]the New Haven in New York 2005, 2006.
[20:03]Do you think that you have a different perspective
[20:04]of that sitting in Paris working on this
[20:06]versus if you were living full-time in the US?
[20:10]It's really hard to say, you know,
[20:13]it's hard to imagine, you know,
[20:14]alternate world, alternate, universal, but probably,
[20:18]it's tricky because of course I've also gotten older
[20:22]and we've all come through, you know, the late 2010s,
[20:25]we go, I'll live through a pandemic since then.
[20:28]So, you know, when I was writing this
[20:30]and trying to get back into the mindset of college,
[20:34]you know, that I had had in college, you know,
[20:37]of, you know, which I loved college,
[20:40]despite everything I've said here,
[20:42]it was a really wonderful time,
[20:44]it was incredible experiences.
[20:46]It's afterwards that, again, the structures
[20:50]that allowed me to be there, that allowed my friends
[20:54]to be there, that allowed the people I knew to be there
[20:56]kind of became a lot more evident.
[20:59]So, I really think it's time more than distance,
[21:04]but in some ways of also, I mean,
[21:08]living in a country with a fairly progressive government,
[21:12]you know, Macron is not progressive in the European sense,
[21:16]but for American, you know,
[21:18]it's the least standard of exactly,
[21:20]he's off the charts.
[21:23]Has especially in contrast with kind of American government,
[21:28]of, you know, a few years ago,
[21:30]that to see very different, like, pandemic responses,
[21:33]very different, kind of structural things that really
[21:36]ended up affecting, like, my daily life,
[21:39]certainly in the life of, I think a lot of people in France.
[21:42]So, you know, so there is something to be said of,
[21:47]you know, for that kind of simultaneous alternate universe.
[21:52]Where you do get that distance,
[21:55]but in terms of, yeah, in terms of the distance,
[22:00]I don't know, I think there certainly is something to be said
[22:03]for, you know, for living under different institutions
[22:06]and trying to understand the way that they function.
[22:10]Oh, yeah, I can't do a perspective, doesn't it?
[22:12]You know, you kind of see the assumptions
[22:15]of that things are all like this everywhere,
[22:17]and then you go somewhere else,
[22:18]you're like, oh, maybe things can be different somewhere else.
[22:21]And what are the reasons why things are the way they are?
[22:24]I just, I think it's really fascinating.
[22:26]Even the culture at those like top tier universities
[22:30]in France, in the UK and in the US,
[22:32]they're very different.
[22:33]They're very, very different in positive and negative ways.
[22:36]So, you know, in France, you know, the tuition is so much lower,
[22:41]as I've said, you know, and there aren't these
[22:45]X factors in admission like extracurriculars
[22:48]and, you know, things that like, you know,
[22:50]if you're working a job in high school,
[22:51]it can be so much more difficult to,
[22:53]because you're not also a theater star
[22:55]or, you know, a worry, Gilmore, you know, newspaper reporter,
[23:00]deep dive there, but, you know,
[23:02]that's those two.
[23:03]That's what podcasts will be to record.
[23:04]Rachel, if you're a dumb girls fan, we could go,
[23:07]we could go, we could go, we could have a whole rabbit hole.
[23:11]Please, I'm in, but you know,
[23:13]but without those X factors, you know,
[23:15]and they say, oh, it's completely a meritocracy.
[23:18]You know, and then you talk to people
[23:19]who've been through this system and they go,
[23:20]even then, it's not really,
[23:22]because the more elite high schools,
[23:24]the more exclusive high school speed into these systems,
[23:28]you know, there are, you know, coded ways of writing
[23:31]that, you know, show your socioeconomic background
[23:35]and things like that.
[23:36]So, you know, it's, it's, I think as a kind of
[23:39]an progressive American, it's so easy for me to be like,
[23:42]oh, France is amazing.
[23:44]And France is going, we're better,
[23:46]but we still have problems.
[23:48]Yeah, it's so fascinating.
[23:50]Now, tell me what you're working on now.
[23:52]Give us a sneak.
[23:53]I'm on two projects at the moment.
[23:55]First time I've done kind of a simultaneous pairing
[23:58]with first is a nonfiction project
[24:01]about this kind of medical mystery of tour
[24:05]I was on for the past decade
[24:07]and figuring out some strange symptoms in the UK,
[24:12]the US and France across the three systems.
[24:16]And that can be very heavy to write.
[24:19]So I need to kind of dip in and out.
[24:20]At the same time, I'm working on a project,
[24:23]another one set in France, like my first novel,
[24:26]but this one is about the French resistance
[24:30]and generational trauma,
[24:31]but set in, again, the early 2000s,
[24:36]which is apparently I just want to regress to,
[24:40]love teens.
[24:41]It was a simpler time.
[24:42]It was a simpler time.
[24:43]It was so funny to me now.
[24:46]Like, yeah, my students having this like a millennial,
[24:48]you know, envy and I'm like, it was not that great.
[24:51]You guys was interesting, but we had our issues.
[24:55]I'm like, don't you aren't you all wearing the same clothes?
[24:57]Now can't you see what this was all about?
[25:00]Those chokers were very uncomfortable.
[25:02]Oh my God.
[25:03]More low rise jeans for the first time in about 20 years.
[25:06]It was like, these are terrible.
[25:07]Oh my God.
[25:08]It's so great to catch up with you.
[25:10]Let's finish this off with our classic question.
[25:13]I know you've already done this.
[25:15]And you've already given your writerly advice.
[25:17]So what new writerly advice do you have for the listeners today?
[25:21]Oh gosh.
[25:23]It could be old.
[25:23]You could repeat the same thing.
[25:25]It's like, do you remember what I said?
[25:28]I don't want to put it for them.
[25:29]Just any advice.
[25:31]If it's the same thing, you said,
[25:32]you're like, I don't want to put it for them.
[25:35]Just any advice.
[25:37]If it's the same thing you said last time,
[25:39]then we're just going to say, it's that good
[25:41]that it's really bears repeating.
[25:44]Well, it's going to take a really passionate listener
[25:46]to a comparison, but I know all of the mom's audience
[25:52]is fashionists, which is great.
[25:54]I think the biggest thing that I would say
[25:57]is just to dive into reading and writing
[26:00]the kind of stuff that you want to read and write
[26:03]as much as you possibly can.
[26:05]Read so widely within your genre, outside of your genre,
[26:11]find the things that you love,
[26:12]try reading things that you would never
[26:15]think that you'd like.
[26:17]A dip in and out of different authors
[26:19]go read everything one author has ever written.
[26:22]Read, go into the acknowledgements, read everything.
[26:25]She, all the others, she recommends.
[26:28]Keep doing that and play around.
[26:30]I think a lot of people don't necessarily
[26:32]know what they want to do in terms of genre
[26:35]in terms of story until you write a lot.
[26:38]You play a lot and you throw a lot out.
[26:42]So that's my advice.
[26:44]I love getting here as my hand.
[26:45]Yeah, I love it.
[26:46]Beautiful.
[26:47]Well, Rachel, the Fortune seller is out now.
[26:49]Everybody needs to go and read it.
[26:51]Rachel, thank you again for being on mom's
[26:53]Don't Have Time to Read books.
[26:55]Thank you so much for having me.
[26:58]Thanks for listening to this episode of mom's
[27:00]Don't Have Time to Read books.
[27:01]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens
[27:04]and at mom's Don't Have Time to Read books.
[27:07]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com
[27:09]and sign up for my virtual book club
[27:11]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[27:13]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan.
[27:15]In fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[27:17]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[27:19]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.