Read with Jenna Book Club Picks Panel at the Miami Book Fair: Emma Knight, Ariel Sullivan, and Jessica Soffer

[1:34]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to totally booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibby media dot com, and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. This was a special panel I did at the Miami Book Fair centered around Jenna Bushecker's love of books. So thank you, Jenna, for sharing all of this with us. There are two Jenna's book club picks and a book that Jenna published herself. So the conversation was about so many things, including their love of Jenna, but mostly about craft, what makes them tick, the themes they had in common, and so much else. And it was so fun to interview all of them in front of a live audience at the Miami Book Fair, and our conversation was so great. I just had to release it here. So here are bios of the three panelists. Emma Knight is the author of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, which was her debut novel and was a read with Jenna Pick, a Giller Prize finalist, a New York Times bestseller, and an instant number one Canadian bestseller. She is a cofounder of Greenhouse, an award winning Canadian beverage company, and has coauthored two nationally bestselling cookbooks, The Greenhouse Cookbook and How to Eat with One Hand. Her essays have appeared in a number of Canadian and international publications. Emma lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters. Ariel Sullivan is the author of Conform and Beneath. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, two sons, and their two French bulldogs. Growing up a military brat, Ariel moved every two years as a perpetual new kid. Ariel often observed from the outskirts where a deep love of reading was born. When she isn't writing, Ariel loves to read everything from poetry to psychology, bake with her sons, listen to live music, and travel. Her books are published by Thousand Voices, which is Jenna's new publishing company. Jessica Soffer is the author of This Is A Love Story. She has already been on this podcast about this book, by the way. She is a read with Jenna pick and an instant New York Times bestseller and also author of tomorrow there will be apricots. She grew up in New York City, attended Connecticut College, and earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Real Simple, Sever, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and NPR's Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing to small groups and in the corporate space and lives in Sag Harbor, New York with her family. Okay. Does everybody know who everybody is now? We're good? Everybody? Okay. Alright. So one other thing that they all have in common is that Jenna Buschtager is obsessed with them. They are either for book club picks or, like, Ariel, the first thousand voices

[4:49]Ariel Sullivan: published book, which is Jenna's new publishing company. So congrats on all of that success. Why don't you share what your books are about? Ariel Gilberts, Donascart, Castro.

[4:59]Emma Knight: L'Of Conform is a dystopian romance novel that takes place, quotes the World War, where your worth is now in your genes. And so in this society, you're split up into three groups, You're either a major defect, a minor defect, or an elite. And if you follow Emily, it's a minor defect, and she enters appropriation contract. And she finds herself stuck between two sides of the rebellion but also between two men on very different sides as well.

[5:25]Ariel Sullivan: So the life cycle of the common octopus is about an 18 year old late bloomer from Toronto called Penelope Winters. She goes by Penn, and she knows that her divorced parents are keeping something from her. She follows in her father's footsteps, goes to the University of Edinburgh for her undergrad degree, and tracks down an estranged friend of his, who is now a really well known mystery writer called Lord Lennox. He invites her to his centuries old estate on the East Coast Of Scotland, and there she falls in love with his family. They're enveloping, they're warm, they're British, they're wonderful, they're they'll do everything for her to make her feel welcome except answer her direct questions. And as she continues pulling at the thread of her family secret, she unravels more than she bargained for.

[6:19]Jessica Soffer: I don't really remember what my voice It's been a while since I've done that, and it cannot last ten years. So it feels not terribly fresh. But this is a love story. It tells the story of a 50 romance between Abe and Jane. Abe is an artist, and Jane is a writer. It also includes the perspective of Central Park, their son named Nax, who has a really complicated relationship of love, and also a woman named Alice, who is a young writing student and tries to get in the middle of their relationship. And what is happening during that Jane is dying and Abe's telling the story of their love from start until finish.

[6:58]Ariel Sullivan: So all of your books talk about relationships and love and sometimes falling for somebody who's not reciprocated or maybe not the right person or maybe they're torn between other people. What do you do? Talk a little bit about the art of emphraying lust and love and all of that. You go. Oh, that's me. Okay. So I was gonna say that one of the most fun things about writing a relationship is just how difficult it is for two human beings who love each other to communicate honestly. Grateful for this fact because without it, I don't think literature exists. Specifically English literature. I think there's a grand Anglo Saxon tradition of not being able to say what you feel. And so there's a certain amount of repression in my characters. The main character is trying really hard to understand who she comes from and what she comes from and what the kind of undercurrents in her relationship with her parents and with their relationship with each other is, so that she can so that she can become herself instead of accidentally becoming you know, instead of following along the tracks that have already been blamed for her essentially. And she's a little bit afraid of romantic love. I think part of watching her parents' marriage implode when she was a young teenager and seeing that they're still pretty unhappy even many years later has led her to fear that the love that she reads about in nineteenth century novels doesn't exist in real life. And she's pretty stuck on that belief until she meets Sasha Lennox, the son of the author that she tried to stand in Scotland. And I I think the in the case of this book, she's more in her mind than in her body, and it takes real attraction, real lust, the kind of communication that happens first with words and then without in order for her to kind of give in to something very natural. And then as a result of that, to

[9:03]Emma Knight: look at love in a different way and perhaps believe in it. Mine takes place, like I said, in a society where your worth is in your jeet's and they have effectively joined the family unit. So at four years old, your offspring goes to the academy so love in any facet has been destroyed and so the characters are all searching for it in ways that they don't even understand because they haven't been allowed to feel. And so the main character in this is not only desperate to understand the society she's in, she's also desperate to understand what it means to be seen and be loved at all. And it to me was very interesting because I wrote this during COVID when we were all very separated, but we were all trying to find ways to like cling to humanity and it kind of gave birth to this idea that if you took all that away, what lengths would you go to? And it like explores much more than just the romantic love. There's the maternal love is a big one in this because mothers are forced to say bye to their offspring and then reenter into a procreation agreement again, me. So there's a lot of, like, maternal love. There's a lot of quieted love, forbidden love, but it's all different facets and I wanted to explore it because like you said, we're not very good at saying what we feel

[10:13]Jessica Soffer: even when it is allowed. So what would you say? What was it? I love both of them. In my book, love is really told in a script nostalgic format. So Abe, who's kind of central character of the book tells the story his relationship with Jane and the time that they meet when they're quite young till the moment that she dies. And it's told very much in the retrospective and him kind of chronicling everything that happened from start till finish. And so what happens is kind of less of the friction that happens in the day to day and more of the friction of what happens when you're losing someone. And so I think a lot of the kind of response that we feel like the the biological response we feel as readers has to do with their love dissolving naturally than the love be kind of at the beginning and and fraud in the ways that they are. But in my book, love is also very much in relation to a place. So Central Park has its own voice and I think so often in our lives, fall in love with a place kind of never get over that place. For me, that place is Central Park. And so Central Park deserves its own sections I felt and has them. And also very much about the love of the child, which can also be complicated and difficult. And in this circumstance certainly is. Janie suffers from postpartum depression, she and her son kind of never come back from that and they never align. And so it's about the love of the child, the complicated love sometimes the child and then the love that this young woman Alice feels towards A which is unrequited, naive and innocent in the way that some loves, I would say undergraduate writing students, I have particular knowledge of this feel towards their professors can be. And so it's there's sort of many different callings of love, many different facets of love, and many different interpretations of love told in this one book, which is why this is a love story.

[11:56]Ariel Sullivan: Aetna, is there a love story in each of your lives that either influenced the book or that is something that you keep toying with and wanna write your way through? I can jump in. I actually haven't yet mentioned what's the central love story in the life cycle at the common office, which is that between Penn and her best friend of Alice. So there is a kind of coming of age, you know, lust slash love story with Sasha, but I would say that the real love story is one of friendship. And these two friends, the relationship between them is inspired by my relationship with my best friend. She does not bear a huge resemblance to Alice, her her track record is different from Alice's. So she would probably want me to tell you, but I don't think I would have been able to write that kind of relationship had I not been lucky enough to have a best friend like that. One who knows that a friendship that can last a whole lifetime has to allow and in fact, you know, hope for both participants to change and grow. I think so they're they're best friends from childhood who move overseas to go to university together, and the narrative takes place over their first year at the University of Edinburgh. And during that time, they both make several bad decisions, and they have to stand by and watch one another mess up. But they both recognize how necessary that is. And that as much as you want to intervene, you know, it's it's really your job as a best friend to provide a safe landing place for the friend to come back to after they've made poor decisions, not necessarily to prevent mess them.

[13:37]Emma Knight: Mine has to do with a couple of stories in my life. I think one is this whole book is born out of the idea that moving over two years, I deal in my life every hello how to goodbye. So I was very accustomed to knowing things came to an end. And within this society, you watch the people like still try to love while they know that the relationships and the child's being taken away. And so there's this constant longing for it to stay and it doesn't, and that really affects the main character. And then the other part that I really wanted to focus on is I did write this from a place of postpartum depression. And so I said that this is kind of the ladder I got myself to get out of that dark place. I also went to traditional therapy and highly recommended and said, You sure don't chest that book, Anna Leeds. So I wanted to really focus on that. So there's a lot of the mother child bug and you see different avenues of some women kind of putting distance between that and the offspring knowing that it's gonna end and then the others who cling to him desperately because they can't stand the idea that it was gonna end and then you watch as they follow this child even they can only see them once a day or once a year they follow and they're like what they're willing to do to themselves to make sure that that child stays okay. So that was another big part of the love storyboarding.

[14:48]Jessica Soffer: So I actually didn't come to this realization until literally the moment that I was on the Today Show with Jenna to go back to the Jenna theme of this panel. But in my novel, Abe is a is an artist is a writer and Jane is an artist and in my life and my mother isn't a writer and my father is an artist and my mother took care of my father as my father ails and passed away. In the book, it is the reverse. And so I guess, now I know so much of this book is really a reflection of that away. I think Peon and Shoup the beauty of our relationship at its ending point. I remember saying to my mother, like, pretty late in the game, it must be such a sad moment for you. And she said, actually, it's the most tender. And it really sort of changed my perspective about the way that, you know, love works and that in the kind of most intimate, sensual, seductive, exciting times, it can actually meet exciting, but also also sometimes tragic. And then at the end when it is actually quite tragic and actually be the most beautiful. So I think that is where it hangs from. I feel like all your books touch on beauty in very different ways.

[16:00]Ariel Sullivan: There's the beauty in the art that is not allowed in this new wilderness world that you've created, which is really brilliant and unique and also very terrifying. Right? There's a lot that makes me feel so glad to be on Earth right now, except for this book. So thank you for that. Or be worse. It could be worse. Yes. Exactly. The beauty of Central Park, the beauty of their relationship together, the beauty of this house, Edinburgh, oh my gosh. I really wanna go on a vacation there, hang out, and the beauty of Marva's clothes that she does. There's just so much tactile, physical beauty and an ode to beauty and all of that. And talk a little bit about that and how something beautiful inspires you. I was reading a friend's novel recently, yet to be published, but and a line that she she had a character who was a painter, and she had a line in there that I absolutely love. She said, in order to be a painter, you have to be in love with the world. Mhmm. And I thought I said to my grand Harriet, do you think that's also true of a novelist? Because I think in order to observe and then, you know, lovingly depict the world, you have to be very aware of beauty and interested in finding it wherever you can. The city of Edinburgh is spectacularly beautiful. I was lucky enough to live there for three years. And I don't think sort of like what you said about like, I I don't think I knew how much it was still alive inside of me until I started writing this book. It started with the characters, but Atabra just kind of showed up as the only possible place that this action could unfold in. And I think it is sort of a character and the beauty of its skies, the beauty of the history, like just how dense it is with spirits, you know, this ancient place was yeah. I I guess it forces you to appreciate when you're trying to capture something ephemeral in just words, it really forces you to try and look at it from every angle and then identify what about it is beautiful too, and I loved doing that. I always wanted to put art into the book. I've loved art from very young age,

[18:12]Emma Knight: and I think there's nothing more human and more courageous than artists, whether the medium is a song or a canvas or a book where they take something that could have hurt them or broke them or even fill them with joy and they transmute it into a way that we can all step into their mind and see it and feel seen. And so that was really important to me to bring into this novel and in this world they're destroying all the art and they're destroying the thing that makes you human and I thought how could you really get somebody in the totalitarian government to see that there was more and like all the things that she keeps trying to hide to fit in and conform have a home or had a home before they destroyed it. And so it's all told through art and so each art piece is also a narrative to one of the characters, there's Easter eggs in them but I really wanted to highlight the art that you've seen people do for centuries and we're all still telling stories and painting and still trying to connect with everybody. I think it's like till as old as time it should be honored and nurtured and I thought the worst thing in the world could be if you got rid of art because then what's the point of living?

[19:15]Jessica Soffer: And books and books. Said books too. In the art. Sara, I agree. I think if you have to love life, you're gonna write or paint or whatever it is. So I can play in with books in the art with you. Yeah. I mean, I think in certain ways, it's like the art is sort of the only thing we don't need for that For us, it feels like the only thing that we absolutely do need. And for some of us, think that's how we feel some of the time, on the good days maybe. But I think I think a lot about this thing that Mary Oliver talks about, which is attention as a form of prayer. And I think that's so much what it feels like. I feel it in my whole life. I've observed the world's kind of obsessively and either taken notes or taken mental notes. And so when I started writing the Central Park sections, they came out like a shot. I mean they came out so so quickly and they felt so natural and they felt like explosive and I think that's what we all work towards. That's all what we all want as writers that moment when the rain sort of comes as dictation. You're just kind of taping it down and you feel like a vessel for something. Doesn't always happen like that but when it does that feels like BART with a capital a and is really sort of why we're doing it. But I wrote those sections very very quickly and I wrote them during COVID which was a time when I couldn't really imagine what the future of Central Park was going to be and yet I did imagine that it was never going to come back from ruins. That was what it was in my head and so I wrote those sections as kind of testimony or witness to what Central Park once who happens and I hope to be again and sort of is think 90% of the way.

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[23:17]Ariel Sullivan: Talk a little bit about the origin stories of these. I know what I've read about yours, Ariel, that you were to playdate with Jenna and her son and you showed her the book and now here you are. Very often.

[23:30]Emma Knight: So for noticed how she's also a character in my book, not named after her son, thought they have to caveat. But every single time I mentioned it, no one will ever believe you. No. It's from I mean, embarrassing as it is, it's from Megamind. I don't know if you've seen that with your kids. But the bad guy's name is Hal, and when I was watching it, some characters don't if you guys have this. They have a name immediately, and then some characters, you just can't get it right. And Hal's character, could not get right. And I tried out a bunch of different names. And then the bad guy came on the screen and his name was Hal. I like, that's a week's to the name. I'm gonna put up with him. And it worked. And then two weeks later, George Donovan Carnes said, I had a new best friend. His name is Hal and George is my youngest son. I was like, well, that's great. And got off the class roster to find out who was Hal was and there was no Hal on the roster. It was for Henry's because her son's actual birthing was Henry. And so I was like, maybe it's a neighborly friend but it was so just for his for his song at the time that I was on the right path writing this and it was gonna become something that I took it as a sign that this was the right name and the right path. Then eighteen months later, Georgia Howell are still very close friends. Jim invited me over to a play date that I just like to. And so I sent her a text and my New Year's resolution that year was to tell people I've been writing these books because I hadn't said it to really anybody outside of like my husband and a friend. And so I was like, was caught upright. I didn't expect anything of it because she's Jenna Bush Hager and it'd be this was a genre she'd be interested in. I got to the play date, she asked what I was writing. I told her all about it and she's like, Well, send it to me. And I was like, Oh, I just got rejected by the eighth. I don't think you want it. She's like, no, send it to me. So she I sent it to her and two weeks later, was like, I have a plan if you're down. And but it's all things to our sons and my son is the same one I had close private impression with. So I feel like he's been my guy in lights. He was nothing. Wonder who we should have a play date with next.

[25:18]Zibby Owens: And how about you? I know you mentioned this during COVID and everything, but where did this come from? Why follow if there would be ever cuts this yeah. It's been a long road. So

[25:27]Jessica Soffer: I wrote Tomorrow There Ruby Acropods that came out in 2013 and then I wrote another another novel that lives in a drawer now. And then I started working on this. I really thought it was just gonna be a novella. I thought it was gonna be very niche and very small sections and it was Abe retelling the story. Was really changing up with Jane from start until finish. And I pushed it really hard for years for for probably five years. I worked and worked and worked this book. And eventually, started to a friend who is also a writer who a lot this is an interesting point because we are among people who read about Liz Moore, her book out the woods. And she said this feels like just part of the love story. And immediately I started thinking about the ways in which no love story is insular, no love story lives inside of backing and so how to kind of expand that. So I thought about the direct impacts on that relationship that there were in that forces that relationship with their son, their relationship with this woman Alice. And so on within three months, I tripled the length of the book. And then I decided I parted waste my agent a few years before, which is probably why things were taking so long. Sort of had no one to answer to. I was teaching full time graduates and undergraduates. And so I said, I'm going to send it to one agent. She had been my dream agent for years. And I thought if she doesn't take it on, I might have to rethink this whole Brighton thing. And she did and very quickly we sold it very quickly and through the rest I guess is history. But I think it is the thing if any of your writers about having support and how that changes the trajectory and it changes the way that you write, the way that you think about yourself as a writer and a human being. So you are a writer of the support. You need it.

[27:12]Ariel Sullivan: Motherhood and COVID play a role for me too. So our first daughter was one, and COVID meant that we were all at home, and our home at the time had very few doors. And my husband and I, as Kespie mentioned, as Zibby mentioned, we have a beverage company. So, you know, if any of you here are entrepreneurs, you know that it is full time plus. And COVID, of course, hit food businesses really hard. We had to close half of our stores. So I was sitting in the living room working constantly, and my daughter was staring at me being tired. I'm like, mommy, what are you doing? My son working, she's saying, you're not working. You're just banging on your laptop. Anyway, so as she as her language developed and I got to really know who she was as a person, I began to understand that I was modeling for her. And because of lockdown, like, very directly of what it looked like to work and to, you know, what a career was. And then she started getting older and more and she she was a very early talker. She would ask me, what kind of work should I do when I get older? And I took a while to answer that question. I didn't wanna just say the first thing that came into my head. And after thinking about it for some time, I said, you should do something that you will always want to get better at and something that makes you feel like yourself. And as those words came out of my mouth, I realized that, you know, running the marketing department of a wonderful beverage startup was not that for me. I had studied journalism. I had always written I had always written on this side. You know, I've written articles, essays, cookbooks, but fiction was the thing I most wanted to do, and I had always been just too afraid to show it to anybody. And it seemed too intimate somehow, too scary. But here I was with this little person, and I was actually pregnant with her sister. So the characters from this novel started coming to me that summer, and I started taking a little bit more seriously, you know, write down their voices as I've always done, but this time with a mind to kind of, know, understanding who are they, what's having won, what if is this something more? And then when my second daughter was born, I had some post part of complications that were quite scary. And so I was in the hospital without her for several days in a kind of COVID isolation, alarmed door type war, and it was very crazy. And I was up every three hours pumping breast milk because she wasn't allowed to be there with me. And I was going a little bit nuts, but I was also thinking about how throughout history so very many women and even now don't survive this. And, like, who am I not to use my voice when I you know, if I get through this, like, why would I be too afraid to write it's just a novel. And so at the end of all of that, I had a kind of you mentioned repulsion, I think. It was it became it went from nice to have to absolutely mission critical or else. And that's when I realized, okay, this is a novel, and I'm going to give it the time it needs. And then what was it like finding out that you were a read with Jenna Fick? That must have been a great day.

[30:22]Jessica Soffer: Details, Clase. These are I found out my agent and my editor who are some people that I love so dearly called me on Valentine's Day of 2024. And I thought it was bad news because I don't know. I just thought it was bad news. That's what people like me think. So they called and they they told me the news. And to be honest, it's not something that I had thought too terribly much about. Like I wasn't really aware of the impact despite being in the world for a long time and having friends who had been book club picks themselves. I didn't really know the merits of it. I didn't know what it would do for my career or what it would do within the industry. The way it sort of shifted the way that my publisher handles my book and it is immense. It's sort of a baseline for what they expected the book and it's just a gift. Mean it's a gift. There isn't really anything else that I know of. I would say even more than more than anything else that kind of puts you at a certain place to to work from. And then it either goes up from there or answer me is down from there, guess. But, yeah, once I knew what that was about and it changed, it really changed. It's

[31:28]Ariel Sullivan: been the best. Yeah. It completely changed everything for me too. When the email came through, I was working through line edits. And I don't know how you guys feel about line edits, but I do not feel good about them. I love, like, early editorial notes. When someone's in your sentences, it's like, what are you doing in my brain? It's like this very uncomfortable thing. And so I was, like, gritting my teeth and making my way through the line edits. And then, you know, of course, I was very happy to answer a ping from my inbox in that moment. But it was through somebody at my publisher's office who I'd never communicated with before because she was in charge of the whole marketing department, and I just immediately assumed it was with a wrong Emma. Because when you have a name like Emma, you get a lot of emails that are not for you. And so I kinda scanned it. You know when you're working and you're not supposed to be multitasking, so it was like quick scan back to the manuscript. Manuscript. It It was was like, like, obviously not for me. Lucky her. Well done. Like, I received so many other offers. Covers. Congratulations. It's a book. Like, I get so many emails further, and that's is the context. Anyway, so I kinda scanned it. It was like happy for her. Went back to my work. And then as I was working, I was like, wait a minute. Did I not see, like, in all caps the life cycle of the common Oculus? I doubt that's another Anna Hip also. And so I went back back to it and realized that it was real and that it was coming from somebody else because my nether was away that day. And it was absolutely shocking and so exciting. And, yes, it abs it transformed it absolutely transformed the way the book hit man in the world. What are you working on now? You mentioned already that you will write these books, not just a book. So what's to happen?

[33:07]Emma Knight: Mine is a nine book trilogy of trilogies. So the second one is the prequel, which I fought tooth and nail over and we even sing Jenna's praises because she read the manuscript of the prequel and said I know it's not traditional but I believe in you so go for it. And so my prequel comes out in March and it's called Beneath and I am on a deadline for the follow-up to conform that's due on December 1. And that will come out next October as long as I don't, you know, dying linens because I'd always use some brace. But yes, I'm working on those and then I'll go right into the next one. Oh,

[33:45]Jessica Soffer: you think? I also we we share a deadline which is December 1, which gives us like how many hours? Not enough. So yes, I were him another novel. This one is about four women who live in the same town. They're four mothers and there's a kind of scandal that rocks one of them very directly when the rest of them indirectly that has to do with an OBGYN at the office. So that one Theoretically will come out summer of twenty twenty seven, which is crazy that it's due as as it is and then we have to wait a million years. But that's how it works. I'm gonna

[34:24]Ariel Sullivan: brag that mine is not due till April 1. You were you were rookie. And that sounded really intense as well just now. So I am working on something completely different. It's also a novel, and it is also contemporary. And it is about two sisters who are incredibly different from one another but very close. And they I guess I can tell you yes. The the novel begins with the suicide of one sister-in-law and the other one who is in an adulterous marriage and who absolutely adores her children and has been willing to stay the course for their sake has to begin to question whether she's really living her life. What? Will you learn how to be? So what advice would you all give to any authors in the room who are maybe doubting themselves or somebody who has a creative pursuit of any kind who is just thinking why they maybe should maybe I should give up, like, motivate us a little bit here. At the end of the day, we need some let's all get uplifting. Your job. Go ahead. Let's start with Jessica. I I think I think I mean, there's the

[35:37]Jessica Soffer: minutiae that the advice minutiae advice but then there's the big one which I think is really just like find one person who believes in you and your work and that might be somebody within your family it might be somebody in the industry it doesn't really matter you just have to know that what you're doing is not insane and that your life's work was not crazy and you will feel less lonely and then you will feel galvanized and you will be able to go on and I think I I think it's just really critical and I from my experience for those years that I was working on the novel that now lives in a drawer, was working really by myself. I wasn't showing it to anybody. I didn't have an agent. And it was really lonely, and I really just kind of kept circling. Like, I was chasing my own tail. So I lost a lot of time and I lost a lot of confidence in myself as an author. So finding people are fine for person.

[36:28]Emma Knight: I would say to give yourself permission to fail because much like Emma touched on I had given myself a reason why I couldn't do this. And that inner voice was so loud that every time I sat down, I would close the computer and I wouldn't finish whatever I started. And then I read this quote that when I say it, I think it comes across almost as discouraging, but for me it was liberating and it said every great story has already been told. And it's true. The thing is we're all still telling. And so for that it kinda like I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. I just had to make sure that my wheel rolled. And all of a sudden it was so easy to write because there was no one telling me I couldn't because yeah, love stories have been told, dystopian's been told. I wasn't gonna create something new, but no one had ever said it the way I wanted to say it. And so once I do that, it worked. And so remind yourself that you're actually the power behind whatever you're doing because no one has lived your life and can tell the story that you can.

[37:22]Ariel Sullivan: Love that. That's your very inspiring answers. I would say as much as possible, separate your inner editor from the process of writing. So I like to do first drafts by hand, the main reason for that is that I can't backspace. Because if I'm typing, backspace half laser attendance, and I'm constantly questioning whether it's good enough. Whereas if I'm writing by hand, I can write pages upon pages upon pages of potential garbage, but potential gold. And later, decide. You can't decide as you're doing it. As you're doing it, the rhythm, it matters more. And trying to get at the troop as it comes to you matters more. And so with the first draft of this one, I just set myself the task of getting to end. It was I don't care if I publish a novel. I just care that I write one. It'll probably sit in a drawer for forever because that's what usually happens. Right? And that's okay because if if it takes you this one to get to the next one, that is more likely to succeed than fine. So, yeah, just writing through to the end. Of course, it's not possible to not edit once as you're doing that, but insofar as you can, separating the right and then the editors will your inner editors will have a great job later. And then I guess the other one is just that some a lot of it is grit, but part of it is patience. Like the grit is showing up at your desk every day or however often you have the opportunity to, and it doesn't have to be every day. You can definitely do it from anywhere and any town. But the grit of I'm gonna keep doing this sometimes has to meet the patience of I'm bumping my head up against the wall, and I don't know how I'm gonna get out of this corner. And those days, you know, it's just like eyes open, out for a walk, eventually reading, you know, and something something will come if you're patient. Doesn't it take forever to write things by hand? Does that matter? Not if you're really like as messy, which is part of my strategy because I can't go back and reread it and revise in the moment if I want to. Can you ever not be growing in writing and worry about brilliance lost? I no. That doesn't happen. My but what does sometimes happen is that I'm so horrified by if I'm, like, really in the flow, sometimes I'll, like, misspell extremely obvious words. I'm like, are you okay?

[39:38]Emma Knight: I do that. How do you still lie? I tie like, I tie her, but I turn off all the autocorrect because I feel like the lines and stuff like that mess with me, so that's my idea of bragging that. I sent my birch draft of conform, and my great decided that asses and assess. We need to switch. So throughout the entire manuscript that I sent two people to Jen, this one word, and then I found my word in this manuscript too and it was layman and woman which I know the difference of. But right, I was writing a flow with nothing on it. Didn't know. I just felt a sorry, Brett. What was it rereading that? Well, it's not high but it's a good one that keeps me up at night is that. 100%.

[40:16]Ariel Sullivan: For me, for some, I didn't even know that raccoons made an appearance in this. I'm for trauma. There are a lot of raccoons. So, like, okay. Fine. Of course, they did. I misspelled it three separate times. And it wasn't until, like, a very, very so I should not bash line editing or, you know, it wasn't until the last round that it was like, you consistently

[40:33]Jessica Soffer: miss out on sport. Now that think that I find really unnerving her about this experience, Microsoft Words needs smarter than you. And there's some AI that's constantly trying to tell me that my sentences are horrible.

[40:46]Emma Knight: Of course. Yeah. Do have agents? Yeah. Oh. So I type in pages, which is really old school that drives my editor nuts because I sent her up agents. She's like, will you please put it in Microsoft Word? And I'm like, help. Because it tells there we are, but I didn't lose my commas and then my feminism.

[41:00]Ariel Sullivan: Is that even more subjective than column placement? Like, good. There's there's anyway, it's fine. It's intimate. It's it's intimate. It's trivia.

[41:08]Emma Knight: So I get into like, we're right. We're because we're right.

[41:13]Ariel Sullivan: Thank you all so much for coming.

[41:16]Zibby Owens: Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Sibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.