← The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
The Evolution of a Novel: Learning to Let Go
00:34:31
Author Interview Kath Jonathan
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- [00:00]
Bianca Murray
Would you like to do some good in the world while also standing in line to win amazing literary prizes? Of course you would. I'm hosting a fundraiser for a cause that's close to my heart Literacy in South Africa. There are a host of amazing literary prizes up for grabs if you donate to this wonderful cause. They include two books with hook slots where you'll join us on the show, as well as developmental edits, coaching packages, manuscript critiques and so much more being offered by industry experts Lydia Hilger, Rebecca Faith Heyman, Trevor Brooks, Nicole Mayer, Christina Boyd, Hannah Arnayer, Lisa Rivers, Elizabeth Held, Karen Geiger and Alexandra Kakken. To learn more about the cause as well as the prizes and our brilliant and generous sponsors, head to Biancamarae.com and look for the fundraiser tab. Entries close at 8am Eastern Time on 10 April, after which the lucky winners will be announced. It's Beta Reader Match up time again, where you can be matched up with those writing in the same genre and or time zone so they can critique your work as you critique theirs. Your manuscript doesn't have to be complete to sign up for this 3,000 word evaluation. This particular matchup will be open to registrations from now until the 4th of May, with the matchup emails going out on the 5th of May because my new novel, A Most Puzzling Murder, pubs in early June and will be keeping me very busy. This will be the last matchup until the Please spread the word even if you aren't signing up this time. The more writers we have registered, the better the matchups will be, which means you'll be paying it forward to your fellow authors and hopefully they'll do the same when the time comes for you to register. For more information, head to Biancamurrae.com and go to the Beta Reader Matchup page. Hi there and welcome to our show.
- [02:00]
Carly Waters
The Shit no one tells you About Writing. I'm Bianca Murray and I'm joined by Carly Waters and CeCe Lera from P.S. literary Agency. Today's guest is a poetry, short story and novel writer. Her work has been shortlisted for the Marina Nemat Award, a finalist for the Janice Colbert Poetry Award, and long listed for the Puritans Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Fiction. She holds a Certificate in Creative Writing and an MA in English Literature, both from the University of Toronto, Toronto. She resides in Toronto as well and it's my pleasure to welcome Kath Jonathan. Kath, welcome to the show.
- [02:42]
Kath Jonathan
So lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
- [02:45]
Carly Waters
So this is a very special interview for me, so I'M just going to give our listeners some context. Kath was one of the very first people that I met in Toronto after I moved here in 2012. I had no friends then. I knew nobody in Canada. I had more animals. We arrived with more animals than suitcases. And I did decided the best way to make friends was to sign up for creative writing classes. And I think I met Kath in, I think my second or third creative writing class. And that was in early 2013. And we have been part of each other's writing group. We've read each other's work for all this time. It is now 12 years. Kath, how did that happen?
- [03:31]
Kath Jonathan
Phenomenal.
- [03:32]
Carly Waters
Yeah, it just, it feels insane to me that it's 12 years later and here I am holding in my hand, for those of you watching on YouTube, cats book. And it just like, it feels like an incredibly special moment for me. So, I mean, this is all about me. Cat. Forget you how special it is for you. Right, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the flat copy and then Kath and I are going to have a long chat about it. So the book is called the Resistance Painter. Lovely cover. And we're going to link to it on our bookshop.org affiliate page. Okay, Kat, I'm going to ask you to read your own blurb at the back, please.
- [04:08]
Kath Jonathan
Warsaw, 1939. Irena Marionowska's dreams of attending art school in Paris are crushed when the Nazis invade Poland. Instead, she joins the Home army and together with her resistance cell, risks her life guiding people to safety through the sewers of Warsaw. In 1941, after a harrowing mission, she returns home to learn that her sister Lotka has been abducted by the Gestapo. Determined to find her, arena is willing to risk everything. Toronto, 2011. Jo Bloom lives in Toronto with her beloved grandmother. Allotted painter and a decorated war hero, Jo has a budding career creating sculptures for grave sites based on the life stories of her dying clients. Her recorded interviews with Stefan, her new Polish client unveil an heroic wartime past eerily similar to her grandmother Irena's. But Jo's quest to uncover the truth about Stefan and her grandmother opens an explosive Pandora's box with shockwaves that threaten everything she's ever known about her family.
- [05:23]
Carly Waters
Amazing. Thank you so much for that. Okay, so I want to take you through the entire backstory because we are all writers here, and so context and backstory and all of that is so important. So picture it. Sicily, 1942. A writing class. We actually did stage writing. So I want you to know that Kath and I met in a class for writing plays. And some of you might be like, what the heck were you both doing? Learning how to write plays. But I really challenge you as a writer to not if you're writing novels, don't just study novel writing, study poetry, study writing for the stage, study writing, script writing, because all of these different forms will make you a much better writer. And this was one of my favorite courses that I did at U of t with Glenda McFarlane. I don't know if she still runs the course, but it was absolutely incredible. So here we were in this course and we finished the course. It was great. We, we got to write a one act play and they put it on, they got activ us to not really act it out, but to sort of just do a reading for us where our friends and family were. Of course I knew no one, so I didn't really have friends and family there, but it was so much fun. And after that, our good friend Lisa, who was in the exact same class, said to us, why don't we start a writing group? And so we did, and there were four of us and we started off and I actually this morning went through my emails and I found the email From Kathy on 29th November 2013 in which Kath said, I have starting something. I think it's a short story. It's called the Grave Sculptor. And up until then, Kath, you had been working on snippets from a memoir, is that right?
- [07:03]
Kath Jonathan
That's right. And my memoir was a memoir of my childhood in South Africa and not unrelated, as these things go. So I love what you said about taking different courses in different genres that make you a rich, deep novel writer. And so for me, I had spent most of my time writing poetry and studying poetry, and I found that to be an absolutely rich vein for being able to write very concisely but also lyrically when it came to novel writing. And the same with the course that you're talking about, which was a memoir writing course in which we were taught to write scenes with all the drama and dialogue that every scene, whether it's cinematic or playwriting or even narrative poetry requires. And so none of that work was in any way separate from, should I say, or in fact different from the work that was required for me to write a novel. But of course it came as a shock and surprise when I did because I thought it was writing a short story.
- [08:24]
Carly Waters
Yeah, that was the funniest part so Kath gives us this work and she's like, this is a short story. And we're all reading it and we go, this is in incredible. It's blowing our minds. But we hate to tell you, this is not a short story. And I think the first submission she gave us was like 12 pages. And then she sent it a few months later, and I think it got to 28 pages. And we were like, kat, this is a novel. And Kath said, oh, I don't write novels. You know, that's not what I do. And we were like, just think of each, you know, just think of each chapter as a short story. You can do it a short story story at a time. And that's how she started working on it. And just before we get into that process, you know, I also want to say what a gift it was to meet you across the world from South Africa. You know, you and I had such different experiences in South Africa. I grew up as one of the people who benefited from apartheid, who completely benefited from the oppression of others. And your family spirit experience was entirely different. Can we just chat about that for a moment?
- [09:31]
Kath Jonathan
Absolutely. And, you know, to contextualize it, in the era of South African apartheid, I also was more privileged than darker skinned people because that's what apartheid was, was the very clever, cleverly crafted gradation of color. And, you know, there were small things. There were things like my brother, sister and I not being able to go on the swings at the park, not being able to sit at a bench. There was a wonderful zoo in a place called the Queen's park, where I lived on the Indian Ocean, and only white kids were allowed to go on the little train. And of course, we asked our parents about this, but, you know, there was no answer. How do you tell a child, well, you just have the wrong skin color. But more than that, Bianca, there was violence. My dad was a doctor and routinely treated people who had been tortured and who also. And by the way, this is something I'm hoping to write about now after the Resistance Painter, but he had a surgery, which is what his medical office was called, that was used by resistance fighters as a way to secretly meet. So I grew up with a lot of fear. There was underlying violence. And I'm going to guess that you had those underlying fears as well, because that's part of what growing up in a repressive, oppressive culture that seeks to divide people does. And certainly when I came to write Resistance Painter, those experiences bled into the novel, and it wasn't conscious. I mean, in the way that, you know, when you write, you're not necessarily consciously making links to your own past. In fact, I was convinced I wasn't writing about myself. I was writing about Poland. I'm not Polish. I've never, you know, didn't grow up in the Second World War. But my South African experiences informed this novel tremendously.
- [11:42]
Carly Waters
Yeah. And you know what the scary thing is? History just keeps repeating itself because, I mean, I've read this novel so many times in so many iterations, but reading it again now in this iteration is just terrifying to see the parallels of what is happening in the world, what is happening in the US what is happening in Ukraine as, as we look at all of these things. And this is why historical fiction is so important, because the past is never left in the past. We see these, you know, these waves, these shockwaves that just extend span through time and we keep putting up these monuments that say, never again, never again, but until the next time. And this, I think so many people reading this novel, it's going to resonate not just in the past, but what we're currently seeing today.
- [12:30]
Kath Jonathan
Absolutely. And you know, I, again, this is going to sound a little bit weird or naive. I was quite resistant to be called an historical fiction writer. And now I come to see historical fiction as not just fiction about wars or about conflict, but about history. And that means, you know, not just military history or political history, but social history too. So I think about a wonderful novel like Margaret Derosier's Eight Strings, which takes place in 18th century. I'm sorry, 19th century Italy, about a young woman escaping a marriage and a young woman who happens to be queer. That's historical fiction also. And so, yes, historical fiction has this way of illuminating the past in such a way that it really. I'm going to use the word bleeds a lot for reasons that I'm not clear about, but. But it actually bleeds into the present. And when it comes to wars, you're absolutely right, Bianca. I mean, there's. There are no wars that don't resonate today. And the Second World War in particular was a world war. And when it comes to the pacts, sometimes secret, sometimes just being revealed now that the Allies made with Russia, about being able to take over Poland, being able to take over parts of what we call Eastern Europe, those things are having repercussions and consequences today and maybe they will far into the future, because these things don't seem to end on any kind of clean note. But I also like what you said about you know what struck me? And if you were to ask me what the hardest part about writing this novel was, I'd have to say it was writing about war. And all of that entails the horror. Let's not forget war is about killing. Killing sometimes friends, seeing loved ones die, but also the act of killing someone else. It's a horrifying experience for human beings. It should be a horrifying experience for any human being. And so to be writing about that while Gaza was happening, while the kidnappings in Israel were happening, while terrible things were happening in Sudan and still are, and while the whole politics and the proxy wars of Ukraine and Russia were happening, all of these things, it made writing about Irena And Joe and Mr. Godlevsky and Latke. It made it hard. I shouldn't say hard so much. It made it sad. There was a deep sadness in me because this wasn't, you know, a story that I was creating for entertainment anymore, if that makes sense.
- [15:52]
Carly Waters
Yeah, yeah. And I just think of, you know, the time in which you were writing this book, how much was unfolding, but how much has unfolded since, since you finished writing the book and now is still unfolding as people come to read the book and will be in conversation with the book, which is never something that happens in isolation because you read a book in a context of an era of what's happening around you, you know, and for me, that's going to be super, super fascinating as well. Before we dive into the writing and the revisions, something I also want to touch on, Kath, and I know you'll be like, why do we have to talk about this? But it is important because so many of our listeners set these goals for themselves and they say, if I'm not published by 40, if I'm not published by 50, I should just give up. What's the point? And you're publishing now. You're debuting in your 70s. You've turned 70. And for me, this is incredible because it is so inspirational because it's saying to people out there, you don't have to be published by 50 to be a writer. You can do it later. But besides that, you had so many concussions and you were dealing with the treatment of that while you were also trying to revise. So can we speak a bit about overcoming all of these obstacles to tell a story that was so important to you, one that you felt so passionately about, that despite doctors saying to you, kat, you can't work on a screen, you can't look at digital devices, you can't be typing on your laptop, you still came back to the page because it was so integral for you.
- [17:30]
Kath Jonathan
Yeah, well, you know, shockingly, Yeah. I am 70, and I have to say, though, that I've been writing for pretty much my whole life as a teacher of writing, academic writing. So different, definitely different from writing fiction. But I've been involved in the writing world my whole life. Even when I didn't know that I was writing. You know, I was keeping lists, I was keeping journals. I've kept a journal since I was 17. And so that immersion in writing and that immersion in reading, in reading books and reading literature, is part of that writing journey. So when I came to be at this age. And by the way, that short story that Bianca talks about that I didn't know was a novel was more than 10 years ago. It was published by Penguin Random House in a chapbook at U of t in 2014. And I thought that would be it, really. But being 70, it isn't an end point. It's a continuation of many years of getting to this point. And inshallah, God willing, there'll be many years to come as far as the concussion goes. Yeah, you know, I'm a canoeist. I'm a paddler. My partner Mark is a really keen outdoors person and, you know, secret, don't tell him this, but I am not like, I'm a city girl. And so I got hit in the head by the stern of a canoe on top of the car. And then as often happens, and this is for anybody who's ever had a concussion or maybe even experiencing a concussion at the moment, you don't have to have a head hit to get a concussion. You can just have your head shaken and your brain hits against your skull. It can have really serious repercussions. It is a brain injury. And for me, that took the effect of symptoms, like having my vision blurred, like having getting headaches, but even my memory, losing memory. So there were a lot of serious things. The Canadian medical system is extraordinary. But it took me a very long time to get the help I needed. And when I did, I got brilliant help that pretty much cured me. And so there are cures for concussion, especially if you had multiple concussions like I did. There are very knowledgeable people here who do advanced research in this area. So I'm going to share something more with your listeners, because I also had cancer just last year. Yeah, that was a shock. Like, the concussion seemed like, I'll get over this. The cancer was a shock. I had surgery. It was Incredibly successful. Again, the Canadian medical system was extraordinary. I was followed. I'm still being followed for two years and right now I'm really healthy. The cancer was found. It was removed surgically. I needed no chemo or radiation. But getting back to the writing, here I was last January, February 2024, waiting for surgery while I was doing my final draft with my brilliant editor Lori Grassi at Simon and Schuster. So I was close to the end, you know, and hey, it metaphorically right close to the end. And that helped me so much. The writing helped me so much. And this might sound absolutely looney Tunes, but as is the case with all novels, when you get to the end, it gets harder in terms of what the characters are enduring, you making things harder for them before all the big reveals come right at the end. And so I was writing about my character Irena in Ravensbruck, concentration camp for women and Bianca. Maybe I'm skipping ahead too much here, but part of my process of writing was avoidance.
- [21:41]
CeCe Lera
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- [23:32]
Kath Jonathan
You know, I look back on that now, and I think, why? I'm not sure if I have an answer to it. I think it was fear. Fear of going to those dark places. And so I had avoided writing about Ravenswood by putting my character in there. And my then editor, Sarah St. Pierre, said, no, you got to go there. You got to put her in there. And I brilliantly and very cleverly and very ornately wrote all kinds of ways around it. Like, I made her have a. An interview that was recorded, and that was, you know, there was a testimony. So everything except putting her there. And then when it came time where I couldn't avoid it, and here I am waiting for my cancer surgery, and my editor Lori Grassi says to me, cath, you don't have to write about Ravensbrook. You just have to write about your characters in Ravensbruck and their experiences, you know, and when. I think every kind of novelist does research. So I had done tremendous amount of research about Ravensbruck concentration camp. It was a horrifying place that had been started even years before the onset of war for women that the Nazis deemed criminal. They might have been lesbian, they might have been what they called prostitutes, but it was a place for women specifically. And, yeah, so I wanted to avoid it, and I knew so much about it. But Laurie saying, you don't have to write about this place. You have to write about your character's experience there, who their contacts are, you know, who are they meeting there? What are we seeing through their eyes? And that limitation made the experience so much easier for me. And in a strange way, it also made me going through my cancer journey a little bit easier when it came to actually writing that part. I don't know what you thought about that part in the novel, but it was actually easy. It was actually easy. And part of it was this word which I have difficulty with. Surrender. And surrendering, to me means making yourself vulnerable, being willing to open instead of closing. So you know, coming back to the cancer journey again, I could have shut down. I could have said, I can't write. I'm going to have to put this aside. But something in me opened. It had to do with trust. I trusted the system. I trusted my surgeons, the nurses, and I trusted my editor. And so that experience of writing while I was going through this hair raising, you know, physical thing turned out to be really good. Good in a way where I can say I grew.
- [26:33]
Carly Waters
Yeah. And I almost feel like that scene was waiting for you to be in a place in your life. It was sitting there and knew you were going to come to it. It knew that you could circle it like crazy and be like, I'm not looking at you, I'm not looking at you. But it was. I don't know, I sometimes feel that certain scenes wait for us to be a certain person or experience something, to be able to write that. And. And perhaps that was, you know, the case. The case for you. But certainly your whole journey to publication, all of it, has just been extraordinary. And I am just in awe of your talent because your talent is exceptional, but also your. Your tenacity and how you just kept coming back to this because, you know, I want to get to the part now that. That we were. I thought we were going to focus on the interview, which is the writing and the rewriting. And we can discuss it a bit now because going back when I opened up that file from so long ago, I forgot about Tuya and Brian. There were characters, Jo's best friends. Jo was a much bigger character in the story. She's in the modern day story. And then it's Irena in the past. And I remember Lisa and I saying to you, we were kind, quite gently, we were trying to say, you know, Jo's great. We like Jo, but we really invested in Irena and we really invested in that story. And you're channeling her so well. And we were like, can you focus a bit more on that story? And you were so resistant. I remember you started bringing in all kinds of characters. I loved. Who was the one character you brought in?
- [28:15]
Kath Jonathan
I've forgotten his name, but yeah, he. He was an accountant.
- [28:20]
Carly Waters
Yeah.
- [28:21]
Kath Jonathan
He had this huge backstory, you know.
- [28:23]
Carly Waters
Yeah.
- [28:24]
Kath Jonathan
He was married to a pharmacist. He was, yeah. Anyway, all of that got taken out.
- [28:29]
Carly Waters
Yes. And so I look at all of that and I go, okay, you were so resistant to that. But then in this new version, you bring in all new characters who we didn't see before, who are incredible. Mr. Godlevsk how do you pronounce it? Godlevsky.
- [28:46]
Kath Jonathan
Godlevsky.
- [28:47]
Carly Waters
He's just amazing. I don't want to give too much away on the other ones. So, you know, I want to get a bit into this process of when we begin writing fiction, be honest, we are making shit up. It doesn't matter that this is a historical context. I mean, you know, the characters are based maybe loosely on other people and other experiences. And for those of you who are interested, please go to Kat Jonathan's website. There's a lot there that she explains, what personal connection she has to the story, what made her write the story. And it is fascinating. It's just not something we're discussing today. But, you know, there's something again to be said about the letting go, because you have to let go of things to be able to free up, to open yourself to other things. And it happens in increments because I feel like you would concede, give up something and then try and snatch it back again. And yet we get to this point, however many years later, and it is a vastly different book. Yeah, it's beating heart is still there, but it is such a different book. So can you just speak a bit about the psychology of that, that the emotions that go along with that and what best served you to. To be able to let go so that you could add things, to really make this the story it needed to be.
- [30:05]
Kath Jonathan
Yeah, well, you're making me laugh because now I, for the first time, I'm starting to understand that the Resistance painter might actually be me, you know? Yeah, I. I do hold on to things. I do have trouble letting go. But here was how my journey with publication went. I was offered a tentative contract based on the question of was I willing to work with these publishers, these editors to revise the story. And, you know, I was 68 at the time. And here I was, there was this, you know, big publisher wanting to work with me on condition. On condition that I revise the story. And it didn't take me too long to say, what the hell do I think? Like this is. Here is an opportunity to rework something. But also, I'm 68, you know, did I get 100 other authors? No. So what did I have to lose? And I think. And maybe this also has to do with being older. Okay. Because I think one of the things that happens when you're older is you become more of a risk taker. I think, you know, the, the narrative, the common narrative is the opposite. But I do think that psychologically and emotionally you become more willing to take risks. You just don't have as much time to be alive. So what do you got to lose, right? So what they asked me to do, the editors. And I had two editors, a junior and a senior editor. And it was the junior editor, Karen, who had fished me out of the pile. And they wanted me to start the whole novel five years earlier. And what that meant is all the characters were five years younger. Not easy to do, you know, going to 15 from 20. And so I labored to get the age right, and then it was too young, and then I had to go back and raise the age a little bit. And they came to me. And this is, I think, something that I really want to share with other writers, because the whole idea of having your work changed, altered, touched by other people, edited, can be so, you know, you just want to feel like you want to slap someone's hand and go get out of the way of my work. But they came to me with a very strong idea of who I was and who my writing was that I resisted. And they had an idea of where this novel was in the canon of their work. And they were comparing me to other writers that they were familiar with. And I didn't know these other people so well, so I just kind of went along. And in that process, something magical happened, because, as you say, I let go of Jo, of this essential second part of my novel, which, let's face it, was the contemporary part, that was more about me. At least that's what I thought. And in the process of rewriting, I created all these other characters. I created this whole other world. But more important, they changed as editors. They grew to see who I was as a writer. They came to appreciate my strengths, my weaknesses in a different way. And so that idea of who I was and where I belonged in their canon of authors changed as I was writing. And they gave. I think they got to see me as, you know, as a unique voice, as all writers are, you know, still placed within a category, but not restricted. And that was magic for me. Once we reached that point where there was this mutual respect, everything just opened up in me. I had written some snarky puppy letters, emails that I regretted later. I tried to be polite, and I think I was polite, but looking back on them now, I realized that was all part of that, don't touch my stuff. And so I will say, you have nothing to lose. Try it. If it doesn't work, if you feel like you're giving up too much, you have the option of Saying no. And I did say no about some things. But, you know, Bianca, about Joe, the funny thing was I lost my junior editor. I lost my senior editor who moved to another place and I got a third editor. And all of this was like, I am going to chain myself to this final editor because I did not want to lose her. And Lori Grassi and I clicked from the get go when we both completely fumbled our first zoom interview. She was brilliant. And in the process of working with her, Jo came alive. Jo came back into the story. And so this novel pivots. All its mystery and reveals are located in the Jo part of the story. And so I didn't lose Jo. I did not have to give her up. That part that I felt was me. And then of course, you know, once the novel was finished, I realized that, well, Irena is also me. You know, Irena is also my writing. Even though she's based on my mother in law's extraordinary life as a resistance fighter in Poland. She's not my mother in law. It's not biography. She's a character I made.
- [36:06]
Carly Waters
Yeah, I love all of that. I adore all of that. It's just giving into the process and it's trusting the process. It's finding that connection with the right editor that's so important. And like you say, being respected and being heard. Because I think so often, you know, as authors we viewed, we're viewed as products, not just our books. You know, it's like, where does this book go on the shelf? You're a historical fiction writer, therefore, you know, this is how we marketing you.
- [36:34]
Kath Jonathan
Boom.
- [36:35]
Carly Waters
We're putting you into this slot. And I think that's perhaps one of the reasons why I've so resisted and pushed back against that because I do not like being defined and I don't like being constrained. And I love that you were asserting yourself in that way as well. Yeah. This your whole process, Kath, has just been incredible for our listeners. Our time is up. It has flown by. We've touched on so little. Like I say, please, Kath, what is your website so everybody knows how to find it?
- [37:04]
Kath Jonathan
It's www. Kathjohnathanauthor.com.
- [37:08]
Carly Waters
Okay, go there and you can read more about the. The whole experience. She's got photographs up there. It's extremely, extremely fascinating. But please get the book. I'm holding it up here for those of you on YouTube. It's just. It is fantastic. One of my favorite, favorite books of the year, Kath, we wish you so much success with this.
- [37:27]
Kath Jonathan
Thank you. So much. I, I love this interview. It's given me such a chance to talk about the experience and, and hopefully some of the things I talked about will help other writers. And if anybody wants to get in touch with me about concussions or my cancer experience or my writing or publishing or agenting, I'll be happy to communicate about that. Thank you, Bianca.
- [37:52]
Carly Waters
Kat is also on socials, she's on Instagram. We're going to tag her on that, so follow her and you can reach out to her there. Thanks so much, Kat.
- [37:59]
Kath Jonathan
Beautiful. Thank you.
- [38:01]
Carly Waters
And that's it for today's episode. I hope you'll join us for next week's show. In the meantime, keep at it. Remember, it just takes one. Yes.
- [38:14]
Bianca Murray
Would you like to do some good in the world while also standing in line to win amazing literary prizes? Of course you would. I'm hosting a fundraiser for a cause that's close to my heart Literacy in South Africa. There are a host of amazing literary prizes up for grabs if you donate to this wonderful cause. They include two books with hook slots where you'll join us on the show, as well as developmental edits, coaching packages, manuscript critiques, and so much more being offered by industry experts Lydia Hilger, Rebecca, Faith Heyman, Trevor Brooks, Nicole Mayer, Christina Boyd, Hannah Arnayer, Lisa Rivers, Elizabeth Held, Karen Geiger and Alexandra Kakin. To learn more about the cause as well as the prizes and our brilliant and generous sponsors, head to Biancamarae.com and look for the fundraiser tab. Entries close at 8am Eastern Time on 10 April, after which the lucky winners will be announced. It's Beta Reader match up time again, where you can be matched up with those writing in the same genre and or time zone so they can critique your work as you critique theirs. Your manuscript doesn't have to be complete to sign up for this 3,000 word evaluation. This particular matchup will be open to registrations from now until the 4th of May, with the matchup emails going out on the 5th of May because my new novel, A Most Puzzling Murder, pubs in early June and will be keeping me very busy. This will be the last matchup until the fall. Please spread the word even if you aren't signing up this time. The more writers we have registered, the better the matchups will be, which means you'll be paying it forward to your fellow author authors and hopefully they'll do the same when the time comes for you to register. For more information, head to Biancamurray.com and go to the Beta Reader Matchup page.