← Totally Booked with Zibby
Totally Booked with Zibby
Read with Jenna Book Club Picks Panel at the Miami Book Fair: Emma Knight, Ariel Sullivan, and Jessica Soffer
00:37:33
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- [00:00]
Arielle Sullivan
Ready to order?
- [00:01]
Jessica Safer
Yes.
- [00:02]
Emma Knight
We're earning unlimited 3% cash back on.
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Zibby Owens
Dining and entertainment with a Capital One Saver Card.
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Emma Knight
So let's just get one of everything.
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Zibby Owens
Everything. Fire everything. The Capital One Saver card is at table 27 and they're earning unlimited 3% cash back.
- [00:15]
Arielle Sullivan
Yes, Chef.
- [00:16]
Zibby Owens
This is so nice. Had a feeling you'd want 3% cash back on dessert.
- [00:20]
Jessica Safer
Ooh, tiramisu.
- [00:22]
Zibby Owens
Earn unlimited 3% cash back on dining and entertainment with the Capital One Saver Card. Capital One what's in your wallet?
- [00:28]
Emma Knight
Terms apply.
- [00:29]
Arielle Sullivan
See capitalone.com for details. Saving Abigail is the true story of the global fight to rescue a three year old child stolen this holiday season. Give a gift like no other. Give a real life miracle you can hold in your hands by Saving Abigail. The unforgettable story you won't want to put down. Ever find yourself bored or trying to kill time? We have finally found a solution for you. Royal Match.
- [00:53]
Zibby Owens
Don't believe me?
- [00:54]
Arielle Sullivan
Let's hear what people say. Royal Match is such a fun puzzle game. There are over 10 and levels. Also a bunch of mini games which.
- [01:01]
Zibby Owens
Makes it super exciting.
- [01:02]
Arielle Sullivan
My favorite part, it doesn't need wi fi. I play on my commute, on flights, even while waiting in line.
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Zibby Owens
And honestly, no ads. Not a single one. That's why I'm so into it.
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Arielle Sullivan
So there you have it. A relaxing, challenging, totally ad free game.
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Emma Knight
That goes wherever you go.
- [01:18]
Arielle Sullivan
Download Royal Match and see why everyone loves it.
- [01:26]
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 zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram IBBEowens. This was a special panel I did at the Miami Book Fair centered around Jenna Boshager's love of books.
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Emma Knight
So.
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Zibby Owens
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 co founder of Greenhouse, an award winning Canadian beverage company and has co authored two nationally best selling 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. Arielle 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 Safer 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 Wal 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?
- [04:22]
Emma Knight
We're good.
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Arielle Sullivan
We're buddy. Okay.
- [04:27]
Emma Knight
All right.
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Jessica Safer
So one other thing that they all.
- [04:29]
Zibby Owens
Have in common is that Jenna Bushtager is success with them. They are either for book club picks or like Ariel, the first Thousand Voices.
- [04:40]
Jessica Safer
Published book, which is Jenna's new publishing company.
- [04:43]
Zibby Owens
So congrats on all of that success.
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Arielle Sullivan
Why don't you share what your books.
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Zibby Owens
Are about, Ariel Gil, first I want to start Castrel.
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Arielle Sullivan
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 ifal. Emeline gets a minor defect and she enters appropriation contract and she finds herself stuck between two sides of the brewing rebellion, but also between two men on very different sides as well.
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Emma Knight
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 and tracks down an estranged friend of his who is now a really well known domestic 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'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.
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Jessica Safer
I don't really remember what families. It's been a while since I've done an event. It cannot last February, so it feels not terribly fresh. But this is A Love Story tells the story of a 50 year romance between Ave and Jane. Abe is an artist and Jane is a writer. It also includes the perspective of Central park, their son named Knox, 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 my bullshit that Jane is dying and Ave is telling the story of their love from start until finish.
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Zibby Owens
So all of your books talk about relationships and love and sometimes calling 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 writing, lust and love, all of that.
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Emma Knight
You go, ok, 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. I am grateful for this fact because without it I don't think literature will exist, 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 undercurrent 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 labeled 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 19th century novels doesn't exist in the real life. And she's pretty stuck on that belief until she meets Sasha Lennox, the son of the author that she tried Stam in Scotland. And 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, start to look at love in a different way and perhaps believe in it.
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Arielle Sullivan
Mine takes place, like I said, in society where your earth is in your jeets and they have effectively destroyed 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 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 book. There's the maternal love is a big one in this because mothers are forced to say bye to their offspring and then re enter into a procreation agreement. Again me. So there's a lot of like maternal love, there's a lot of quieted love for been in 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 even when it is allowed. So what would you say?
- [10:06]
Jessica Safer
Wasn't I love both of them? In my book, love is really told in a sort of nostalgic format. So Abe, who's kind of the central character of the book, tells the story, his relationship with Jane and the time that they meet when they're quite young, until the moment that she Dies. And it's told very much in the retrospective and him kind of chronicling everything that happened from start until finish. And so what happens is kind of less of the friction that happens in the day to day of 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 biological response we feel as re ears has to do with their love dissolving naturally, then the love be kind of at the beginning and fraught 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 Abe, which is unrequited, naive and innocent in the way that some loves. I would say undergraduate writing students, I have particular knowledge of this 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.
- [11:46]
Zibby Owens
Is a love story. Is there a love story each of your lives that either influenced the book or that is something that you keep toying with and want to write your way through.
- [11:56]
Emma Knight
I can jump in. I actually haven't yet mentioned who's the an essential love story in the life cycle of the common office, which is that between Pen and her best friend of Alice. So there is a kind of coming of age, you know, lust 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 and her track record is differing from us. 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 lying 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 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 court decisions, not necessarily to prevent them.
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Arielle Sullivan
Mine has to do with a couple love stories in my life. I think one is this whole book is born out of the idea that moving every two years I knew in my life every hello, how do you Goodbye. So I was very accustomed to knowing things came to an end. And within this society you watch deep people like still try to love while they know that the relationships didn't end, the child's need taken away and so there's this constant longing for it to stay and it 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 latter. I got myself to get out that dark place. I also went to traditional therapy and highly recommended and said you share don't just that book Anonymous. So I wanted to really focus on that. So there's a lot of the mother child bug and you see different like avenues of some women kind of putting distance between that and the onspring knowing that it's going to end and then the others who cling to him desperately because they can't stand the idea that it was going to end and then you watch it. They follow this child even they can only see them once a day or once a year. They follow and they like what they're willing to do to themselves to make sure that that child stays okay. So that was another big part of love storyboarding.
- [14:39]
Jessica Safer
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 ailed and passed away. In the book it is the reverbs. And so I guess now I Know, so much of this book is really a reflection of that, a way to kind of, I think, pay on and to the beauty of a 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 love works and that in the kind of most intimate, sensual, seductive, exciting times that can actually meet exciting, but 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 came from.
- [15:47]
Emma Knight
I feel like all your books touch.
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Zibby Owens
On beauty in very different ways. 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.
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Jessica Safer
So glad to be on earth right.
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Zibby Owens
Now, except for this book.
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Emma Knight
So thank you for that. It could be worse.
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Zibby Owens
It could be worse as Exactly. The beauty of Central park, the beauty of their relationship together, the beauty of this house.
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Jessica Safer
Edinburgh. Oh, my gosh, I really want, like.
- [16:17]
Zibby Owens
Go on a vacation there, hang out.
- [16:20]
Jessica Safer
And the beauty of Marva's clothes that she does.
- [16:23]
Zibby Owens
There's just so much tactile, physical beauty and an ode to beauty and all of that. And talk a little bit about that.
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Jessica Safer
And how something beautiful inspires you.
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Emma Knight
I was reading a friend's novel recently, yet to be published, that end up 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. 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 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 Atterborough 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 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 identify what about it is beautiful, too. And I loved doing that.
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Arielle Sullivan
I always wanted to put art into the book. I've loved art from varying age. And I think there's nothing more human and more courageous than artists, whether the medium is a song or canvas or 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 just struggling, 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 12 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, you know, centuries. And we're all still telling stories and painting and still trying to connect with everybody. So I think it's like tale 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? And books. And you said book, too.
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Zibby Owens
I agree. I think if you have to love.
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Arielle Sullivan
Life, you're going to write what page or whatever it is. So I can put box in the art with it.
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Jessica Safer
Yeah. I mean, I think in certain ways, it's like the art is sort of the only thing you don't need. For us, it feels like the only thing that we absolutely do need. And for some of us, I think that's how we build some of the time, on 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.
- [19:37]
Arielle Sullivan
I feel it.
- [19:38]
Jessica Safer
In my whole life, I've observed the world 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 writing sort of comes as dictation, you're just kind of taping it down and you feel like a vessel or something. Doesn't always happen like that, but when it does, that feels like Burt with a capital A and is really sort of why we're doing it. But I. 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.
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Arielle Sullivan
Central park was going to be.
- [20:21]
Jessica Safer
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 was and I hope to be again and sort of is thinking 90% of the way. It didn't start out of the T.
- [20:39]
Zibby Owens
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- [24:24]
Arielle Sullivan
Can I earn 1.5% cash back on birds?
- [24:27]
Zibby Owens
Birds?
- [24:28]
Emma Knight
What if you sent your true love two turtle doves plus a partridge and a pear tree?
- [24:32]
Arielle Sullivan
Sure, but why would anyone want that?
- [24:35]
Zibby Owens
The song was very convincing. Earn 1.5% cash back on all your holiday purchases with the Capital One Quicksilver Card. What's in your wallet?
- [24:44]
Emma Knight
Terms apply. See capital1.com for details.
- [24:51]
Zibby Owens
Talk a little bit about the origin stories of these. I know I've read about yours, Ariel. That you were at a playdate with Jenna and her son, that you showed her the book and now here you are.
- [25:03]
Arielle Sullivan
So for notice, Tao, she's also a character in my book not named after her son. I feel like I have to caveat, but every single time I mention it.
- [25:10]
Zibby Owens
No one will ever believe you.
- [25:12]
Arielle Sullivan
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, I don't know if you guys have this, they have a name immediately. And in some characters you just can't get it right. And Hal's character I 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 was like, that's a weeks to the name. I'm gonna put it with him. And it worked. And then two weeks later, George daughter would cry and said, I had a new best friend. His name is Hal and George is my youngest son. I was like, oh, that's great. I got off the class roster to find out who was Hal was. And there was no Hal on the roster. It was four Henry's because her son's actual birth name was Henry. And so I was like, maybe it's a neighborly friend. But it was so desperate for us sawing at the time that I was on the right path writing this and it was going to become something that I took it as a sign that this was the right name and the right path. And then 18 months later, Georgia Howell are still very close friends. Jim invited me over to a playdate that I just late to. And so I sent her a text. And my New Year's resolution that year was to tell people I'd 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, yeah, I was caught up.
- [26:18]
Jessica Safer
Right.
- [26:19]
Arielle Sullivan
I didn't expect anything of it because she Jenna Bochayer and I think 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 for the eighth. I don't think you want it. She's like, yeah, send it to me. So she. I sent it to her and two weeks later she was like, I have a plan if you're down. And it's all thanks 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 light. He was nothing.
- [26:48]
Zibby Owens
Wonder who we should have a playdate with next? 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 apricots?
- [26:59]
Jessica Safer
Yeah, it's been a long road. So I wrote Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots that came out in 2013. And then I wrote another novel that lives in a drawer now. And then I started working on this.
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Arielle Sullivan
I really thought it was just going.
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Jessica Safer
To be a novella. I thought it was going to be very Diane, very slow. And it was just ABE sections and it was ABE retelling the story. It was a relationship with Jane from start until finish. And I pushed it really hard for years. For probably five years. I worked and worked and worked this book. And eventually I showed it 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 wrote God 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 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. And that forces their relationship with their son, the relationship with this woman, Alice. And so within three months, I tripled the length of the book. And then I decided I parted ways with my agent a few years before, which is probably why things were taking so long. I 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 writing thing. And she did. And very quickly. We sold it very quickly. And sort of the rest, I guess, is history. But I think it is a 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. Look, support, you meet it.
- [28:45]
Emma Knight
Motherhood. And Covid played 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 Kaspa mentioned, as if you 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 just staring at me. Pita, what, Mommy?
- [29:22]
Arielle Sullivan
What are you doing?
- [29:24]
Emma Knight
My Working. And she's saying, you're not working. You're just banging on your lap.
- [29:29]
Zibby Owens
Tough.
- [29:30]
Emma Knight
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 as 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 want to 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'd written articles, essays, cookbooks. But fiction was the thing I most wanted to do, and I had always been too afraid to show it to anybody. 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 serious, seriously, you know, write down their voices, as I've always done, but this time with a mind to kind of, you know, understanding. Who are they? What do they want? What if? Is this something more? And then when my second daughter was born, I had some postpartum 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 comping breast note because she wasn't allowed to be there with me. And I was going a little bit nice. 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 measure compulsion. I think it was a big thing. It went from nice to have to absolutely mission critical or else. And that's when I Realized, okay, this isn't novel and I'm going to give it the time it needs.
- [31:50]
Zibby Owens
And then what was it like finding out that you were a free with genefic? That must have been a great day. Details, please.
- [31:57]
Jessica Safer
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, 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. Like the, 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, and it's just a gift. I 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 amazes down from there, I guess. But yeah, once I knew what that was about and it changed, it really changed. It's been the best.
- [33:03]
Emma Knight
It completely changed everything for me too. When the email came through, I was working through line edits. I don't know how you guys feel about line edits, but I do not feel good about it. I love like early editorial notes, but 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 edit. And then, you know, of course I was very happy to answer a ping from my inbox in that moment. But it was 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. When you have a name like Emma, you get a lot of emails that.
- [33:43]
Jessica Safer
Are not for you.
- [33:46]
Emma Knight
And so I kind of scanned it. You know, when you're working and you're not so supposed to be multitasking. So it was like quick scan back to the manuscript it was like obviously not for me. Lucky her.
- [33:56]
Arielle Sullivan
Well done.
- [33:56]
Emma Knight
Like I received so many other offers covers. Congratulations. It's a book. Like I get so many emails for other animals. It's the context. Anyway, so I kind of scanned 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 cabs the life cycle of the common Oculus? Like I doubt it's another Anna. He also. And so I read the back to it and realized that it was real and that it was coming from somebody else because my Nep was away that day and it was absolutely shocking and so exciting and yes, it absolutely transformed the way the book came out in the world.
- [34:33]
Zibby Owens
And what are you working on now? You mentioned already that you will write these books. Not just a book. So what's your.
- [34:40]
Arielle Sullivan
Mine is a nine book trilogy of trilogies. So the second one is the prequel which I fought tooth and nail over. And we can 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 1st and that will come out next October. As long as I don't, you know, dying line it because it always has some brace. But yeah, so I'm working on those and then I'll go right into the next one.
- [35:20]
Jessica Safer
I also we, we share a deadline which is December 1st, which gives us like how many hours? Not enough. So yes, I work on another novel. This one is about four women who live in the same town. They're for mothers and there's a kind of scandal that rocks one of them very directly, even the rest of them indirectly that has to do with an OBGYN. So that one theoretically will come out summer of 2027, which is crazy that it's due as soon as it is and then we have to wait a million years. But that's how it works.
- [35:57]
Emma Knight
Want to brag that Mayan is not due to label first you are.
- [36:01]
Arielle Sullivan
You're wookie.
- [36:03]
Emma Knight
And that sounded really intense until 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 in law who are incredibly different from one another but very close. And they I guess I can tell you, yes, 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 poor's for their sake, has to begin to question whether she's really living her life. What we will not be.
- [36:46]
Zibby Owens
So what advice would you all give to any authors in the room who are baby dadding 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.
- [37:01]
Arielle Sullivan
It's the end of the day. We need some. Let's all get uplifted.
- [37:04]
Jessica Safer
Your job.
- [37:05]
Zibby Owens
Go ahead, let's.
- [37:06]
Jessica Safer
Sarah Jessica I think, I mean there's the minutiae, the 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 you will feel galvanized and you will be able to go on. And I think, 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 drawers, 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.
- [38:01]
Arielle Sullivan
I would say to get yourself permission to fail. Because much like Emma touched on, I had given myself every 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 that 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 them. And so for that it kind of 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 going to Create something new. But no one had ever said it the way I wanted to say it. And so once I knew that it worked. And so I 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 where you can love that.
- [38:56]
Emma Knight
As you both. 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. And the main reason for that is that I can. I can't backspace because if I'm typing, I backspace halfway through 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 you'll 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 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 this patience, like the grit of 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 in any town. But the grit of I'm going to 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 going to get out of this corner. And those days, you know, you're just like eyes open, out for a walk, eventually reading, you know, something. Something will come if you're patient.
- [40:42]
Arielle Sullivan
Doesn't it take forever to write things by band? Does that mess?
- [40:45]
Emma Knight
Not if you're really like, it's 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 too.
- [40:53]
Jessica Safer
Can you ever not make your own in writing and worry about brilliance lost?
- [40:57]
Emma Knight
I. No, that doesn't happen. My. But what does sometimes happen is that I was 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?
- [41:11]
Arielle Sullivan
I do that. How do you still buy tiger? Okay, Tiger. 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 writing it. I sent my birch draft up conform and my Greg decided that assess and assess needed 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.
- [41:42]
Zibby Owens
Didn't know.
- [41:43]
Emma Knight
I just felt a sorry grab.
- [41:44]
Zibby Owens
Well, it wasn't me reading that.
- [41:45]
Jessica Safer
Oh it's not mine, but it's good one that keeps me up at night. Is that 100% for me.
- [41:50]
Zibby Owens
For some.
- [41:51]
Emma Knight
I didn't even know that raccoons made an appearance in this. I'm from Toronto. There are a lot of raccoons. So like okay, move on. 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 miss out or.
- [42:08]
Jessica Safer
Now the thing that I find really unnerving about this experience but Microsoft words. These smarter than you. And there's some AI st that's constantly trying tell me that my sentences are horrible. Of course.
- [42:22]
Arielle Sullivan
Pages.
- [42:23]
Jessica Safer
Yeah.
- [42:23]
Arielle Sullivan
So I type in pages which is really old school. That drives my editor nuts. Cuz I sent her a page and she's like will you please put it in Microsoft Word? And I'm like yes. It tells and it moves my commas and my fantasies.
- [42:34]
Emma Knight
There's nothing more subjective than comma placement. Like good. There's. There's anyway, it's intimate. It's intimate trivia so I can inspire.
- [42:43]
Jessica Safer
We're right.
- [42:44]
Emma Knight
Of course we're right.
- [42:46]
Zibby Owens
Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby formerly Moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review. Follow me on Instagram ibbeowens and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh and buy the books. If you love to travel capital One.
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