Iheoma Nwachukwu, JAPA AND OTHER STORIES
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[0:45]Ihihoma Nuwachu Kuo is the author of Japah and other stories.
[0:51]Ihihoma grew up in Legos, Nigeria.
[0:54]After working as a Chinese herbal medicine salesman for a few years while writing, he
[0:59]wanted fellowships to come to the U.S. for graduate school.
[1:02]His writing has appeared in Italy's Internacio Nal, Electric Literature, the Southern
[1:07]Review, the Iowa Review, and other venues.
[1:10]His fiction has earned a push guard prize, special mention, and a best American short stories
[1:15]notable.
[1:16]Ihihoma is working on a novel and a short story collection.
[1:19]He is an assistant professor at Eastern University.
[1:22]Welcome Ihihoma.
[1:23]I'm delighted to have you on Totally Book to talk about Japah and other stories.
[1:28]Did I print out that right?
[1:29]Japah?
[1:29]Japah.
[1:30]Ihihoma.
[1:31]It's Japah.
[1:32]What tell me?
[1:33]What did I do wrong?
[1:34]So it's the purer in your body language, where it's from the word Japah.
[1:41]It's pronounced Japah, not Pah, but it's like a Pah sound, like a KW always, but it's
[1:50]like a...
[1:51]Sorry.
[1:52]That's fine.
[1:53]Well, congratulations, whatever it's called, however it's pronounced.
[1:57]I can read it, and that's the most important thing.
[1:59]It almost doesn't matter.
[2:00]That's the good thing you're reading.
[2:02]You like make up how everything sounds in your head anyway.
[2:04]You'll never...
[2:05]We'll never know.
[2:06]Japah.
[2:07]Okay, so congratulations on this short story collection that has gotten so much attention.
[2:12]Oh my gosh.
[2:13]Were you even prepared for this and just take us...
[2:16]Okay.
[2:17]Were you even prepared for all of the attention to this book has gotten?
[2:20]No.
[2:21]When I put the collection together, I was living in Mississippi and saw about the living
[2:25]in Mississippi to come to Pennsylvania.
[2:28]And then I answered the book for the summer of the corner and started coming to Pennsylvania.
[2:34]And the day that I got an email, since in 2020, the day I got an email saying, you won,
[2:40]I was...
[2:41]So I mean, I mean, my basement right now, so I was my basement, I was writing, I looked
[2:46]over the notification of my phone and said, you know, I'm like, okay, you're scared.
[2:52]Come in again and then, but I went up and my wife was in the kitchen.
[2:56]I was like, you know, look, the swimmer said, I want this competition.
[2:59]It's probably scam.
[3:01]You know, we get all these cans, but then I think I got a follow-up email from Larry Oslong
[3:08]who's the editor of the FOC and that's when I was like, okay, this is for real.
[3:14]And of course, fast forward to, you know, answered, I answered my book for some awards, not
[3:20]a lot.
[3:21]And I didn't hear.
[3:22]So basically, my thing is, I don't check to see like, oh, like, you know, go online
[3:27]to see how they announced and it's been right.
[3:30]So I really don't like doing that because of that suspicion could wreck you.
[3:35]And so what I did was, you know, I end up checking for one of the things that I answered
[3:41]and found out they had announced, like, I think the real, like maybe a month ago, I'm
[3:47]like, oh my God.
[3:50]So I was like, yeah, it looks like it's not going to happen.
[3:54]Then one day, I think, when this was, this was probably within February of March, when
[4:00]the long list was announced, I've got an email saying, Amber Gold and blah, blah.
[4:06]And I was like, oh my God, this is, it's impossible.
[4:09]And for me, it's a very, the fact that again, it's potential for me is monumental because
[4:17]we tried, and when I say we, I mean me and Eugene Press, we tried to get, you know,
[4:24]a boss going, you know, how the industry is, or get reviewers to look at the book, and
[4:31]we weren't quite successful with that.
[4:33]So, and what I felt was that, you know, if you have a boss going at least, you know,
[4:37]when you have judges looking at books, the amount of cards of your books, you know, because
[4:42]of the balls that you simulated, you know, prior to them, you know, jargon, the composition.
[4:47]And so we didn't have any of that going forward.
[4:50]And so this has been like a shock, right?
[4:54]Yes.
[4:55]I had no idea it was going to happen, but I made them very, very happy for you here.
[5:00]So you wrote this collection of short stories, loosely based or inspired by your experience
[5:07]moving from Nigeria to the States and having it, right, this is what I've read.
[5:11]But now why don't you tell me that the real truth?
[5:13]Tell me about the back story.
[5:14]Tell me about the stories themselves and how they came into existence.
[5:19]Okay.
[5:20]So when I thought of a linked collection, I was thinking of, I don't know if you're a familiar
[5:29]with Arky and Orion, it was an Indian fiction writer, very successful in your fiction
[5:35]writer.
[5:36]I have this book, one of these books was a collection of Shasteries titled Ma Goudy Days,
[5:41]the Ma Goudy is a fictional Indian town, right?
[5:46]And so when, so basically for me, the realization of that is the theory of San Agapatown,
[5:53]which is like a fictional place in Nigeria, right?
[5:57]So basically the whole collection was, you know, trying to do a linked collection was
[6:02]trying to do an Arky and Orion, right?
[6:06]But the inspiration for these stories, of course, was, you know, my experience in the
[6:11]U.S., you know, 2016, 2017, 2020.
[6:14]And so that was like the driving force of trying to pull the collection together.
[6:19]I'm a very stubborn person.
[6:20]So my prior collections did not have, they were not thematically linked.
[6:25]I am the sort of person who I just push against that, but this time around, something
[6:30]that's me, it's time, you know, and so I responded to that voice and that's the way
[6:36]I work.
[6:37]I could have ten people saying, you got to do this, right?
[6:40]You have good legs.
[6:41]I will not do it.
[6:42]Until I hear the voice, I say, okay, now it's time to do it.
[6:46]And so when I put the collection together, the voice is saying, it is time to do that
[6:50]theme collection.
[6:51]So I decided, all right, I'm going to put it together.
[6:54]And so I started to write the stories and the first story, the first story in the collection
[6:59]is actually the first story I wrote, you know, well, no, no, the first story that I wrote
[7:05]for the collection, like, wow, my first short story that I wrote was not good and I was
[7:13]nine years old.
[7:14]But anyway.
[7:15]Yeah.
[7:16]So it was the first story that I actually was for the collection and of course, you know,
[7:20]how when you write the stories, you then have to arrange them, right, I did have to move
[7:26]some things around, but that first, it wasn't first one, you know, that I was, you
[7:32]know, that I wrote for, for the collection.
[7:34]So after that was done, you know, I wrote the stories, you know, I had, I had an agent
[7:40]who was prior to this time to try to spell my collection and what he did was, you know, I
[7:47]had to either publish in the IOR review, the Saturn review, and so he wanted to play off
[7:53]and so have all the stories in the collection and then try to spell them, they didn't
[7:58]work.
[7:59]Right.
[8:00]And so I put away the agent and I was like, again, I'm going to do this myself.
[8:06]That's what I put together, the collection, the stories and then had all of the other stories
[8:11]that I felt were dramatically linked towards trying to do.
[8:14]I put those stories, the titles on the wall, right, just wrote them out, you know, on
[8:19]the piece of paper put down the wall, and for three months I would walk past the wall,
[8:23]look at them and then try to move them around.
[8:27]And so that's how basically the order of the stories came about was that that was another
[8:32]another entire process on its own.
[8:35]Of me just walking past this list of titles in my study in Mississippi, just walking
[8:41]paths back and forth, back and forth of like a three month period and just going, yeah,
[8:46]you don't belong.
[8:47]I'm sorry.
[8:49]You know, we're really hard to take out of the collection because I love them.
[8:53]They have been published at prestigious journals, but they did not belong.
[8:57]As that was one of the hardest decisions to make, it was like, you know, playing out stories
[9:03]that went gorgeous, they were just praying to an engine really, did not belong in the
[9:09]collection.
[9:10]And so that's how I put the collection together was basically that's not the process.
[9:13]Somebody said, have you published in the IOR view?
[9:16]No, no.
[9:17]The southern review of on the chairs, all of the mid the collection, right?
[9:23]And in the adult, they had not been published yet, but we're sitting on my computer, but
[9:28]I knew the word, the great stories, I knew the belong in the collection, so those made
[9:32]the collection.
[9:33]I love the idea that there's this wall in Mississippi of short stories pinned and the
[9:38]image of you just like a man and his wall of stories, moving them around fast forwarding
[9:45]over time.
[9:46]Even that is just such a cool image, it should be like a picture book for kids, like how
[9:51]we make stories or something, anyway, whatever, never mind.
[9:54]So tell me about your own life experience.
[9:58]And why did you come to, like, what?
[10:00]What is your story?
[10:00]I know, give me your story.
[10:02]Geographically timing all of that.
[10:06]All right, I have a frosty green body chemistry.
[10:09]Okay, my intention of understanding,
[10:12]of course, the intention of my parents
[10:15]was that I was going to be a medical doctor.
[10:20]Right, because a lot of times when I do your parents
[10:22]give you like 54 choices,
[10:24]if parents have a bright kid,
[10:26]they give you like, you know,
[10:27]but three or four choices,
[10:28]you're either a doctor, a medical doctor, a lawyer,
[10:32]an engineer.
[10:34]That was, I mean, in my experience,
[10:36]there was nobody that...
[10:38]This is not so different from Jewish parents.
[10:40]I'll have you know, very similar,
[10:42]doctor's lawyer, you know, the whole,
[10:44]anyway, keep going.
[10:46]Yes, so in fact, growing up, my nickname was doctor.
[10:50]Yeah, you know, yeah, you know,
[10:52]10 years old, 11 years old,
[10:53]I was a kid who, you know,
[10:54]like, she's going to be a doctor,
[10:56]is for your bride.
[10:57]So that's going to happen.
[10:59]But I also love reading.
[11:00]I love, I love reading.
[11:02]I love poetry.
[11:03]I read poetry a lot.
[11:05]In fact, I wrote poems with a writing fiction.
[11:08]So poetry was a part of my life for a long time.
[11:11]I read a lot of books.
[11:12]In fact, I was telling someone the other day,
[11:15]when I was like,
[11:16]feeling like you were a high school six years,
[11:18]you know, we have six years of primary school,
[11:21]and six years of secondary school.
[11:23]So I was in my second year of secondary school,
[11:25]and I was fighting my best friend in their library,
[11:28]about a book,
[11:29]because I didn't know we were reading the same book,
[11:32]and I didn't know what we found out.
[11:34]We were in the same book,
[11:35]set a fight about the book and a library,
[11:37]and they kicked us out on the library.
[11:40]But usually what I would do was,
[11:41]I would, when I found a book,
[11:43]because I loved it so much,
[11:45]the book was titled The Adventures of Suva.
[11:47]When I would find the book,
[11:49]after I was done, I would hide it.
[11:51]I would not put it back on the shelf.
[11:53]I would put it underneath the shelf.
[11:56]So like social sciences, I would go for that section,
[11:59]and put it on the book on the new shelf.
[12:02]But of course, the next thing
[12:03]when I came back, it wasn't there.
[12:05]It's not exactly.
[12:06]We put it back where it was supposed to be.
[12:08]Right.
[12:10]So my, so I went on, you know,
[12:13]to the sciences.
[12:15]Usually, but the reason I did the sciences
[12:18]in secondary school was because all my friends
[12:21]were in the sciences.
[12:22]And it was a cool place to be.
[12:24]However, in my third year of secondary school,
[12:27]we're taking aptitude test,
[12:28]because we do take aptitude test in Nigeria.
[12:30]And this has determined whether, for your last three years
[12:34]of, you know, secondary school,
[12:36]whether you're gonna be in the sciences,
[12:38]what we call the commercials, or you're gonna be in the arts.
[12:41]So I scored highest for arts seconds for fines,
[12:45]and, you know, less with commercials.
[12:48]I was supposed to go to the arts,
[12:50]for my friends wearing in the sciences.
[12:51]I was like, okay, I love my friends.
[12:53]I want to hang out with my friends.
[12:55]So I went on to do the science.
[12:56]But I'm also because I was expected to be a doctor.
[13:00]So went on to college, you know,
[13:02]did a biochemist, you know,
[13:06]got into the biochemist,
[13:07]to finish and, you know, that's not what I wanted to do.
[13:10]I couldn't, I think God made it
[13:13]that I couldn't find a job,
[13:14]because I guess my destiny was to be a writer.
[13:18]And so if I had a job,
[13:20]after I left college, I would not,
[13:23]I only thought I would have ended up writing fiction.
[13:25]So I guess the second steps it had to be right
[13:29]for me to see that fiction was the only way out.
[13:33]It's probably right, because...
[13:35]I love that fiction has backup plans.
[13:38]But it wasn't even a backup plan.
[13:42]It was like, I'm joking, I'm joking.
[13:43]But yeah, it was like, I have this nothing else,
[13:47]because I was having my father wrong.
[13:49]He had my dad had a sabaku say, you know,
[13:52]it was his building, so like, you know,
[13:54]he had an office downstairs,
[13:56]and then I was running that while I started to go out.
[13:59]What my next move was,
[14:01]so I was writing fiction.
[14:03]But so when I write a fiction,
[14:05]it wasn't because the goal was to get into each other.
[14:09]Oh, the goal was a good one, MFA.
[14:11]It was, I can do this.
[14:13]I have all of the stories, I don't want to tell them.
[14:16]I was writing them, and I was a Nigerian journal,
[14:19]but then that was called, oh, I think it's called.
[14:24]No one's a theory was, I forget what them was,
[14:27]but I'll get back to it later.
[14:28]But this journal was, you know,
[14:31]they were asking for submissions.
[14:33]And I would write a story every week and send them a story.
[14:36]But I, you know, and then finally they took one story.
[14:39]It ended up not being published,
[14:42]even after we had signed, you know,
[14:44]and then much later, I got a story into a journal.
[14:50]And then the writer to my mother did she,
[14:52]I don't know if she's coming there, but she runs
[14:57]a fiction workshop in Nigeria every year.
[15:00]I don't know if it's still running.
[15:03]But so this was probably, you think, I'd say 2000
[15:08]and six or seven that I attended the workshop,
[15:12]I think it's part of 2007.
[15:14]So I attended the workshop, you know,
[15:17]sent an entry, I was accepted.
[15:20]And then I met someone at the workshop
[15:21]of writer, like Karen Young writes a call
[15:23]being a bank away in Nigeria.
[15:25]So when Anna, so he loved my work and he said,
[15:28]look, when she just standing more of his theories,
[15:32]you know, and I was like, sure.
[15:35]So I started to spend in stories.
[15:37]And he liked one of those stories.
[15:39]And I met him the next year in Lagos.
[15:43]Probably a couple of years that I met him in Lagos.
[15:45]And he said, boy, I'm gonna set up a fellowship, you know.
[15:49]So he was the director of the Chinua Chibi Center
[15:52]for African Writers in Bard College in New York, right?
[15:57]And I didn't know that, no one knew that,
[15:59]because he didn't advertise that.
[16:01]Because if you did, that workshop,
[16:03]a lot of people would just come to him
[16:05]and try to look at him in order to get famous for him.
[16:10]So he didn't tell him, but I didn't know.
[16:13]But I just did like that he lacked my work.
[16:15]So I hung around in just half a time to talk to you.
[16:18]So basically what happened was I got a fellowship
[16:20]and in 2010, and I went to Ghana.
[16:24]And I lived in hotel for four months,
[16:25]so I didn't show up there is, you know.
[16:28]But then I got paid $1,000 tax-free
[16:31]and then lived in hotel, the paid accommodation,
[16:35]and then fed me for four months.
[16:38]And at the end of that,
[16:39]being a banker comes to me and says,
[16:42]you know, there are actually schools in America
[16:46]that have, you know, so he's talking about MSA programs,
[16:49]which I had no idea what MSA was.
[16:53]He says that the schools in America that, you know,
[16:56]they can pay for you to come.
[16:58]You know, I just come and write stories that, you know,
[17:01]you know, take classes at the end of the day,
[17:04]you get an MSA, you know, like really?
[17:08]We're gonna make it possible for you to apply.
[17:10]That's basically what they did was all the application fees
[17:14]for the seven MSA programs applied,
[17:16]so they paid for that.
[17:18]And then they paid my ticket, you know,
[17:20]from Nigeria to the U.S.
[17:22]So that's how I came to the U.S. in 2011,
[17:25]and I ended up at the mission center for writers
[17:28]in Austin, Texas.
[17:30]Shout out to Texas, I still love.
[17:32]Austin is a beautiful place.
[17:34]Miss, I miss that city.
[17:37]So I said, so that's how basically I came to the U.S.
[17:39]so that came to the MSA.
[17:41]And so after the MSA, I ended up doing the PhD,
[17:46]and after the PhD, and I got a job market,
[17:49]and, you know, voila, here I am.
[17:52]Oh my gosh.
[17:54]Wow.
[17:54]So then how do you make time to do all the different things?
[17:59]Like, when do you, when are you writing?
[18:02]When are you thinking of things?
[18:04]How, when are you editing?
[18:05]Like, when are you, how are you organizing your time?
[18:08]That's a good question.
[18:10]I have three keys now.
[18:11]Oh, well, how old are they?
[18:13]They are fixed nine, oh, no, 12 nine,
[18:18]he just went 12, right?
[18:20]So in the beginning, say back in 2011,
[18:23]when I was, you know, for a brief period,
[18:25]I was alone, right?
[18:27]I didn't have, I didn't have a TV.
[18:29]And so I could write all day.
[18:31]The mission center is a very competitive program.
[18:33]So, you know, you had to be doing your A game and all that.
[18:38]So I was constantly writing.
[18:40]Then I didn't really have a struggle with time,
[18:43]with finding time to write.
[18:45]However, as a kid that it's a calm,
[18:48]I had to shift that time and adapts my writing time around them.
[18:54]Right?
[18:54]So they, I'll say back in Tallahassee, right?
[19:00]I would write, I said it to write,
[19:03]I'll come back from a Ph.D program theme
[19:06]and write from like, they 10 p.m.
[19:09]So, it's about 12, right?
[19:12]After a while, I had to move to 3 a.m.
[19:15]So I said it to write at 3 a.m.
[19:18]That's insane.
[19:19]But here's what I told myself.
[19:21]I said, look, when I first got to Tallahassee,
[19:25]to do my Ph.D.
[19:26]I said to myself, look,
[19:28]the reason you're here is because, you know,
[19:31]they love your writing.
[19:32]That's how you go into the program.
[19:35]That's gotta come first.
[19:36]So I had to, for me, I had to,
[19:38]in my hierarchy, I was like, okay,
[19:41]it's what's going on here.
[19:42]The writing comes first, right?
[19:45]Secondly, you know, you have to,
[19:49]you also take in classes.
[19:50]If you feel those classes, you do not graduate.
[19:53]So those classes come second.
[19:55]And then, you know, the teaching comes third
[19:58]because, you know,
[20:00]You're gonna teach, right, and you're gonna do your best.
[20:03]But you need to be honest with yourself.
[20:05]The right thing is who you are.
[20:07]If I don't write, I'm not me.
[20:09]So the right thing is very important
[20:10]because it defines who I am as a person in the world.
[20:15]If I see a right, I probably saw a sick
[20:17]and I would not be able to take class
[20:21]if I didn't teach any of my students.
[20:23]So it wasn't teaching wasn't left
[20:24]because it was something that paid the least attention to.
[20:29]That's because everything else
[20:32]was feeding into who I was as a person.
[20:36]I was just, I was being pragmatic, right?
[20:39]If without the class that I was taking,
[20:43]if I failed, then that was what I was gonna graduate.
[20:46]No matter how well I was doing the teaching,
[20:48]I would not be able to graduate from the program, right?
[20:51]And so that's, so it was just a pragmatic list
[20:54]because I feel this was how I was going to be able
[20:58]to succeed during the PhD.
[21:01]But then I also told myself that this goal
[21:05]has a great library.
[21:06]And so you need to take advantage of that library.
[21:09]So I used to go to the library to write
[21:12]sometimes in between classes I would go there.
[21:16]I would go there on a Saturday,
[21:18]go use the library and write.
[21:20]Especially when I was working in a novel,
[21:22]it would be like, you know, like, okay,
[21:24]this like you have one hour and go there.
[21:26]And I always use the same computer on the same side
[21:30]of the library.
[21:30]So I'll go there with my favorite computer.
[21:32]If someone was using the computer, I would not work.
[21:35]I would just walk around and come back
[21:37]and use that computer.
[21:39]So that's, so those lots of time when I could work at school.
[21:45]And then 3am, you know, I wake up 3am
[21:48]and then I write to like six in an M ready.
[21:51]I wasn't getting it lastly back in the days.
[21:53]But today, basically my thing is I wake up at five
[21:58]because I teach, so I wake up at five,
[22:01]I write from hour, then, you know, exercise,
[22:07]then I'm off to work.
[22:09]And I prepared, but I do the preparation for class
[22:12]the night before.
[22:15]Right.
[22:16]And my thinking is, say something happens,
[22:20]you're at a power.
[22:22]I don't want to go to work for this excuse
[22:23]because I say, well, I couldn't prepare for some power
[22:27]in the morning.
[22:28]Right.
[22:28]Now, I can give myself a excuse about my work.
[22:31]But yeah, I couldn't write because, you know,
[22:34]I was out of it.
[22:34]But if I'm employed somewhere, I can't go there
[22:37]and tell them, right.
[22:39]And so that's the reason I work.
[22:41]I prepare for my classes the night before.
[22:44]And then the morning else, I do the writing
[22:47]and the preparation for that day go out the door.
[22:51]So the thinking, you know, and I like to say,
[22:55]I don't like to say, thinking, I like to say dreaming.
[22:57]The dreaming, the dreaming is when I'm brushing my teeth.
[23:02]When I'm driving, if I'm, say, doing dishes
[23:06]or just, you know, whatever the activities
[23:08]that I'm doing in the bathroom,
[23:10]those like if I'm taking a shower,
[23:12]those are just, those are moments of magic.
[23:15]But that's when, you know, when you're working
[23:18]and so you're carrying that through with you everywhere,
[23:21]right.
[23:22]And so like when it's inside of you
[23:24]and you're fading, you're brushing your teeth,
[23:26]things happen.
[23:27]And then shift around, right.
[23:29]But also dreaming that actual dreaming was sleeping
[23:34]in a stand back, stand back called it the committee of sleep
[23:39]that helps you with, you know,
[23:42]character setting while you're sleeping,
[23:44]they're like the happy new stuff things out.
[23:46]That does help and that, that works sometimes.
[23:48]And so my thing is if I wake up at 5 a.m.
[23:51]I run to the computer where I'm like in this
[23:54]almost non-contortable mental state
[23:57]and then look at the manuscript and things shift around
[24:00]and manuscript when you do that.
[24:04]In fact, for a story, one of the stories in my collection
[24:07]of Angarilla, which I wrote while I was in the village,
[24:11]that's where I have been in Tallahassee.
[24:13]So during my lives in Tallahassee,
[24:16]that story, that was the section of it
[24:18]that they ended in part of the story
[24:20]that I struggled with a lot.
[24:23]And my age ends at a time, they did my homework.
[24:25]He would say to me, I'll send him, you know,
[24:27]I was like, the story's done.
[24:28]I sent him to him and like this ending doesn't work.
[24:32]You know, you have to rewrite the ending.
[24:34]And I said, okay, we'll see how she speaks.
[24:36]So what I'm going to do is,
[24:38]because she had what I used to do is
[24:39]when I would wake up at 3 a.m.,
[24:41]I would wash my face, then just relax and then go back
[24:45]to the work.
[24:47]And I said, this time around I will not wash that face.
[24:50]I will not, you know, prepare to, like, you know,
[24:54]go into the work.
[24:55]I would just launch into the manuscript.
[24:57]And so I woke up that night and opened up the manuscript
[25:01]immediately, and I tell you those like magic.
[25:05]It was like someone telling me what to do.
[25:06]It was like, okay, I like this.
[25:09]And I just, I'll just go in my paper,
[25:11]and then and then and then and then.
[25:13]So like the ending of that story was basically,
[25:16]so that's how we came, you know.
[25:18]Now, it doesn't always happen like that,
[25:20]but I think it's the best thing to write in.
[25:24]That's where you're sort of like in a dream estate.
[25:28]Right.
[25:29]So all of these other moments for your driving,
[25:32]you feel like in a sort of past life dream estate,
[25:35]you're in a bathroom, you know, right.
[25:38]So those moments put together the moments
[25:41]which use, you know, the work.
[25:44]And so I usually tell my students that the writing is not done
[25:48]where I'll get behind the computer.
[25:50]It's done while you're walking around.
[25:52]It's done while you're doing all these other things,
[25:55]you know, something comes to you about a character.
[25:58]You're like, oh, that's interesting.
[26:00]And then you file that away.
[26:01]And then something else, but maybe while you're talking
[26:03]to your friend, if you're flash of color,
[26:05]and that reminds you about about,
[26:07]reminds you about the character, you know,
[26:10]and then you're like, okay,
[26:11]that's interesting for us now,
[26:12]for that, you know, away again.
[26:14]And then when you go to bed, everything comes together
[26:17]and it comes with heat.
[26:18]And then you wake up and you have that,
[26:22]and then you expand that, you travel it.
[26:24]And that's why you get a lot to write.
[26:27]And I don't spend a lot of time, you know,
[26:29]I'm not going to spend three hours sitting there
[26:31]because, you know, well, first off, I have to get out.
[26:34]But like after a while, you run out of the magic juice.
[26:38]And then you're like, okay, I've got nothing
[26:42]to give this manuscript.
[26:44]This little point is sitting there.
[26:45]Just, and if you're not right, that's a point
[26:48]where when I run out, I know I'm going to cut out later.
[26:51]I'm just wasting my time.
[26:53]Okay. Right.
[26:54]Yeah.
[26:55]Amazing.
[26:56]Well, this has been fascinating.
[26:57]Also, we both have dimples.
[26:59]And I think that only nice people have dimples.
[27:02]This is my thing, right?
[27:03]It's like a tell.
[27:05]It's like the universe gives dimples
[27:07]of people who you can just look at and say, oh, look,
[27:10]they're like a nice person.
[27:12]So it's a shortcut.
[27:13]So anyway, whenever I meet someone with dimples,
[27:15]I feel like immediate connection.
[27:17]So anyway, congratulations on your both.
[27:19]Thank you.
[27:20]Appreciate you all the best.
[27:21]And thanks for sharing your story.
[27:24]So thank you.
[27:25]Thank you.
[27:26]In my pleasure.
[27:27]All right, take care.
[27:28]Bye bye.
[27:28]It's you.
[27:29]Bye bye.
[27:30]Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi.
[27:32]Formerly, Momstone, I have time to read books.
[27:35]If you loved the show, tell a friend.
[27:37]Leave a review.
[27:38]Follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens.
[27:41]And spread the word.
[27:42]Thanks so much.
[27:43]Oh, and bye the books.