On Courageous Storytelling with Theasa Tuohy

Join Kathleen and Adanna as they chat with the incredible Theasa Tuohy. From her groundbreaking work as one of the early women in journalism to her remarkable journey into fiction writing, Theasa’s story is full of inspiration and adventure.

Her novels, including Flying Jenny and Five O’Clock Follies, reflect her rich life experiences, which she masterfully weaves into her fiction. In this episode, Theasa shares fascinating insights into her Paris Backstage Mysteries series and discusses her newest book, Mademoiselle Le Sleuth. This lighthearted Parisian mystery features vivid settings, intriguing characters, and even a precocious child detective, showcasing her deep love for Paris and storytelling.

Come along for an engaging discussion on the art of writing, transitioning from journalism to fiction, and the joy of crafting compelling narratives.

We’d like to hear from you. If you have topics or speakers you’d like us to interview, please email us at podcast@talkingbookpublishing.today and join the conversation in the comments on our Instagram @writerspubsnet.

Transcript

00:00:06 SPEAKER_02
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Talking Book Publishing. I'm Kathleen Kaiser, along with my co-host, Dana Moriarty. And today, we're very happy to have Theasa Tuohy with us, who is a writer. She was a journalist for many years with the Associated Press, which is a pretty hard gig to get. And she has a love of France and a love of writing about courageous women. And it's sort of It sweeps all of her books. So welcome, Theasa. Thank you. Glad to have you here. I'm happy to be here. Thank you. You have written on so many different topics, but I think, wasn't Flying Jenny your book about the early female plot pilot? Wasn't that a relative or something of yours? My

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mother. Ah. My mother was an early-day pilot. In fact, she was a member of the 99s, which was the organization created for the early-day female pilots, the women that had a pilot's

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pilot's license. By Amelia Earhart, she started the organization. At that point, there were only 99 women in the U.S. that had a pilot's license. So I have a very fictionalized, it's not a lot to do with my mother, but stories that I grew up on because my father was a friend of Paul Braniff, the guy that started Braniff Airways. So they all had, all three of them, mother and dad and Paul all had a lot of adventures flying around on those old planes that were sort of held together with bailing water. And then one of my mother's stories, an orange stick. So that's when they had a leak in a gasoline tank. Oh, my

00:02:17 SPEAKER_02
God. So you grew up with a very adventuresome set of parents that had. Yes. So how did that how do you think processing that now looking back, how did that make you a writer?

00:02:33 SPEAKER_01
Oh, gee, I don't know. Basically, I think it was not being afraid to break barriers or growing up with the idea that I could do whatever I wanted to. So I, you know, I was an early day journalist. I worked for four daily newspapers before I went to the

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before I went to the AP. So I was the first woman here and the first woman there. And so it just, you

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know, I just kind of did what I wanted to do. I wasn't particularly held back at all by my parents. So you're buying Jenny as your second

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book, right? Five o'clock was the first and five o'clock follies is kind

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and five

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is kind of about I mean, the whole book is about being a female journalist in Vietnam. Can you just talk about, like, your background

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you just

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and, you know, as a journalist and how that story kind of came to be? Because I think it's important to the origin of, like, your book writing from, you know, journalists to writing

00:03:50 SPEAKER_01
writing books. Yeah, that's pretty true. I was certainly never a war correspondent, but I was a woman in early day journalism for women. So I spent many years working on that book because I didn't know how

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on that book because I didn't know how to write fiction. I finally got

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myself into a writer's group where I finally got caught on to the difference between fiction and journalism.

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Before that, I had tried writing plays, and there's just a big, big difference between all of them. I mean, among all of them, the playwriting is very different, the journalism is very different, and the fiction writing. I had a real tough time trying to figure out how to get the rhythm, let's say it that way, of writing fiction. And now I love it. I mean, it's such a freedom because you can just wander off and do whatever the heck you want to. Yeah, that's not

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not possible with journalism. You're supposed to try and stay to the

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facts. Exactly. No, truly. And I mean, I was a real grounded journalist. I mean, I was, you know, in fact, I was just telling some friends the other day, one of the things I remember about one of my early writers group was one of the guys that was an ex-cop that was writing detective

00:05:46 SPEAKER_01
fiction. And it was with Follies, Five O'Clock Follies. The fiction there involved the woman that went to Vietnam on her own, which, much to my complete surprise, that's the way the early women covered Vietnam. The newspapers wouldn't send them. The AP wouldn't send them. The AP sent one woman over, but it was to do a, you know, a sort of social look at some of the generals or something. And the first time they actually sent someone to the AP Bureau, I think was in 1972 or something like that. So

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anyway, this guy, when I was trying to contrast the female war correspondent with her

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mother, who was an early day doctor, which was a lot of, I did the research on that, or I do a lot of background on everything and research on a lot of stuff. The only medical school that her mother could get into was Stanford. Harvard wouldn't even take her, even though she came from a family of Harvard doctors. Anyway, in this writer's

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group, this guy said, I was doing all this stuff about the background on the mother trying to give her motivation and what drove her to be a, you know, a war correspondent. And he finally, Robert Knightley was his name, and he finally said, sounds like a mother dump to

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to me. I had just put in too much background on that mother trying to find my direction of giving motivation to characters.

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But sometimes in your early drafts, that's what you have to do. You've got to put it all out there and then start just... Because somewhere in, say, the two or three pages, there's a few gems that pull in and it says it all.

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few gems

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But if you don't, there's one gal, I was in a writing group about 15 years ago, and her thing was spew. Just put everything out there, tell everything about it, because then you're going to go back. And you cut it up, because some of those are really great ideas, and most of it, you just

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don't, there's

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it, because

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you cut

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trash. And especially when it's in a background on secondary characters, you only need a few little lines. But to find those lines, you've got to write through a whole lot of stuff.

00:08:36 SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you understand characters. I mean, to be able to do that, you know, they say if you're stuck on a character and you don't know who they are or what they're going to do is like, put them in peril and and work their way out and they'll reveal themselves to you. So, I mean, you know, like you even on secondary characters, I mean, they're still important. They push the story forward. Absolutely.

00:09:03 SPEAKER_00
But Five O'Clock Follies won awards, right? That was that won some awards. So for a first book, you must have figured out. Where to edit

00:09:15 SPEAKER_01
back, at least. Yeah, no, no, finally. Yeah, I finally. But I think I'd written like seven drafts of it before I even got into the writers group and. It.

00:09:31 SPEAKER_01
It just, you know, it was just a difficult learning experience for me, but I kept at it for quite a long time. I was writing it when, you know, I was, well, I worked full-time, I was working full-time through most of these books, you know, but... Yeah, I just, it was a difficult, difficult task for

00:09:57 SPEAKER_01
for me, a difficult learning experience. I remember one character, my main character in Five O'Clock Follies, I had the point of view from one person sitting in this downtown bar in Saigon, and And the teacher I had at that time said, this point of view has to totally be changed. So I had to go back and write the entire chapter, because there's a lot of stuff in that chapter I needed to get in. And I went back. I just thought that was the most bizarre thing I'd ever heard. But I thought, what the heck? You know, I can write easy enough. I'm an editor easy enough. So I went back and rewrote that chapter from the other character's point of view. And I was just gobsmacked when I saw what happened. It was what an incredible difference it was. So, that's the kind of thing I'm saying about learning how to, going from journalism, learning how to write fiction, and comprehending that by simply changing the entire chapter, the point of view of the entire chapter, just made an incredible difference. So it's, it's been a fun learning experience as far as I'm concerned all along. And I feel like now that I just have an instinct for it. So, you know, when I'm just typing along and making stuff up, something will come up and I'll think that would be good to go back to later. That's a good, you know, So that's kind of how my fiction develops now, is that without too much of a story in mind, I just put the characters in there and see what they do and notice as I'm writing and making it up that there's a thread there that I can go pull later.

00:12:22 SPEAKER_02
Well, let's talk about the new series that you are doing. You just had the, actually, it was last week. of the second book in your Paris backstage mysteries, or murders, excuse me. And it's such, to me, a fun story about this woman with her little precocious four-year-old and her sister, the actress, that comes to Paris. How did you come up with that cast of characters? Well,

00:12:59 SPEAKER_01
Not much a trick to that. Those people are all the people in the book, except the actress or friends of mine. The four year old. Yes. Well, she just got her master's degree in London just two weeks ago, so. It was a long time coming, as someone might say, but. Yeah, they were. The incident that starts the

00:13:30 SPEAKER_01
the first book actually happened. And I saw it happen, of this mysterious woman standing on a curbstone at Châtelet in Paris. And I was in a speeding taxi with these two main

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a speeding taxi with

00:13:49 SPEAKER_01
characters, with the mother and the four and a half year old, they were on their way to a train trip to Prague on a

00:14:01 SPEAKER_01
vacation to Prague, actually, or maybe she was going for a story assignment. She was a journalist or is a writer now. But in any event, I saw this woman and we were speeding along in this taxi. And when we got up the top of the hill to the Gardelest, The woman was there. And I still, you

00:14:30 SPEAKER_01
know, I'm still mystified by that. The other character, Mary Byrne, who is also a friend of mine who lives in, an Irish woman that lives in France, she was just coming up out of the metro as our taxi pulled up because that was the deal we'd set up, that I was gonna stay in Vicki and Miranda's apartment and Mary was gonna visit with me. And I said to

00:14:58 SPEAKER_01
Mary, I can't believe this. I saw this woman down in Châtelet, we've been in a speeding taxi, and here she is arguing with a taxi driver up here at Gare de l'Est. And Mary said, well, that sounds like the beginning of a mystery to me.

00:15:24 SPEAKER_01
Vicki Miranda went ahead with their bags, and I was meeting Mary there at the Metro, and when we caught up with Vicki and Miranda, I said to Vicki, did you see that woman? She said, yes. Anyway, in my writers group, I think probably while I was working on Flying Jenny, maybe, or even the first one, I don't remember, one of the guys in the writers group said, you know, that sounds like a good story. So anyway, I had it in the back of my mind for many, many years.

00:15:59 SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I just think also, you know, with with the popularity of Emily in Paris and everything, and they shoot so much over there, you know, scenes and everything. It really makes people it's a whole like I think I think before we started recording, I mentioned it's like brought a whole nother generation into loving Paris. But I really like the way that you have these characters go on They're like investigating and they're searching and they're wandering through these incredible, the cemeteries where they're looking for Sarah Bernhardt's grave, where they're, you know. all of those different kinds of places that you have them wandering around and looking at things, and the restaurant where she likes to sit and look out the window, and just the whole feeling of being there. You really, your love of France and your love of Paris comes through in the

00:17:00 SPEAKER_01
writing. Yeah, well, see, as I said, my friend Vicki lived there for a long time, and we used to have a birthday party. We both had birthdays in February. So we used to have a birthday party every February. So I went there every February for the party, and we had friends coming from London and friends coming from all over the US, especially because airfares were cheap in February. So we had lots of people, and the same people came back year after year for that birthday party. So that's how I got to know the sort of ordinary part, not a lot. I never did tourist stuff in Paris, so I just did sort of ordinary things. And then when I finally took my friend Al's advice from the writers

00:17:57 SPEAKER_01
Al's advice from the writers group to work on that as a mystery, then started going to some of the places and I actually would go stay, I went and stayed in a hotel room for two weeks on that Châtelet Square and walking around that Sarah Bernhardt Cafe. It just all felt like kismet. It all felt like it was meant to be because on top of everything else, the street corner was called Victoria. So I would, after Vicki had moved back to the U.S., I would go on my own and stay at that Chatelet Square in a hotel there and just walk around and look at things in the neighborhood. And that's how I, you know, it wasn't far from Hotel DeVille and places that are static. But the apartment,

00:19:02 SPEAKER_01
apartment, The two apartments in Paris, where Vicki and Miranda lived, and the other one where John and his boyfriend lived, were both real apartments. In fact, at one point, when I first started thinking about this book, I went over to John's house. He's moved since, but I went over to his apartment and said, would you object if I used your apartment as a setting for a book? And he just laughed, and then later, He wears half caftans in the story. And a mutual friend of ours, when the first book, wrote me a letter and said, wrote me an email and said, does John wear caftans? I said, of course not. I just, I just make that up. But I asked him if it was all right. And he said, sure, whatever you want to do. He loves the books and thinks they're funny.

00:20:05 SPEAKER_02
Well, your books did really well last week. You went right up in the Kindle bestseller list, cracked the top 100, which is really, really good. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, it really was. It's fun. It's exciting to watch it happen. Adana and I, we were actually having our weekly meeting and suddenly Adana goes, oh, look, she's gone up to number 71. I think I actually

00:20:30 SPEAKER_00
I actually went, oh, my God. And Kathleen went, what? And I went, she's 88. Yeah, we were just like watching

00:20:37 SPEAKER_02
were just like watching it. It was a lot of fun and it lasted for 5 days. So it was fabulous of what was going on and. The other books picked up a little bit. It's part of the marketing that you're not aware of if you're not having someone who does things like what we do and help you with. But the story, to me, made it so much more fun because your characters and just that little precocious four-year-old detective, I loved her. I just loved her. It was like I was kind of an outspoken child. You never would have guessed. And I could see if I had had those kind of opportunities, I probably would have been doing the same thing. I related to Miranda better than I did to any of them, I think. I think a lot of people did from the first

00:21:32 SPEAKER_01
a lot of people did from the first book. I haven't gotten any word of mouth from the

00:21:40 SPEAKER_02
second. Well, it's just a week.

00:21:45 SPEAKER_01
But a lot of people thought, you know. One reviewer, and I don't know who it was, you know, a lot of reviewers are your friends on Amazon or whatever. But one, I don't know who she was, said the kid was a brat and she hated her. She was the only one. Everybody else seemed to absolutely say, that's just like a kid, you know. And Miranda was pretty feisty with me. Let me tell you. Some people just don't share. She's a 25-year-old now. Or 23 or whatever. I don't

00:22:22 SPEAKER_01
know. I haven't seen her in a couple of years. So tell us something. With your whole

00:22:28 SPEAKER_02
your whole span of your writing career, and now that you've gone off and you really have fun, and that is probably the most important part of writing is having fun writing. Yes. What advice? It took you a while to change. I know when I first tried to start writing novels, I had been writing marketing comedy and nonfiction. It was like a whole other mindset. It took quite a while to retrain your brain. Right. What advice would you give people that maybe have maybe been marketers just writing marketing company and press releases, but they have an idea for a novel? What would you suggest was the most helpful couple of things they could do?

00:23:18 SPEAKER_01
they could do? You know, I don't know. I mean, it kind of ultimately just happened. It didn't just happen. I went to writers groups and everything for a long time trying to understand the difference. And what I

00:23:39 SPEAKER_01
I do now is not what I hear an awful lot of other writers say. I just totally make stuff up. And that comes from the

00:23:52 SPEAKER_01
from the fact, you know, of knowing these knowing these characters quite a number of years ago, but I mean, I knew these people, and so I don't know. I mean, yeah, John didn't wear caftans, but he's a steady in the book. He's the steady

00:24:16 SPEAKER_01
steady one. He's the one that always holds them all together and stays calm, and that's what he is, and Miranda was vivacious little kid, and Vicki was a serious journalist. So, you know, I mean, most people don't write about their friends. You're told not to, and certainly not to use their names. I gave them different last names, but, you know.

00:24:52 SPEAKER_01
So it's not advice that most people would give to just sit down. And as I said, I mean, I told you exactly how the thing started. I wrote that whole book trying to figure out how that woman got up to the Gard-A-List. That's why the book's called The Woman at the Gard-A-List. I mean, it was like How did she get there? And I still don't know. I finally, you know, in writing the book, I finally found a very definite reason why she

00:25:25 SPEAKER_01
why she was up there. And but that was the fun of the whole thing was just sort of, you know, sitting down and thinking, well, what would they do next? You know, I mean, I think that is the

00:25:38 SPEAKER_00
beauty of fiction writing, though. I mean, you can take the things that you know and, you know, expand them or make them more ridiculous or make them more serious or whatever it is. But I think, I mean, you know, there there are lots of writers throughout time that have have done similar things where they like Bukowski would go sit in the bar and listen to people talk and steal their stations. I mean, he literally did that. He would go in the middle of the day and sit in a bar and drink and listen to people talk. and then take those conversations and build a book around

00:26:16 SPEAKER_01
a book

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it. So, you know, I mean, I think that there, as writers, we all get ideas from different places and, you know, that's what we try to do here is like, there's no wrong way. Like, I don't think it's the wrong way to get your

00:26:34 SPEAKER_01
wrong way to get your story. Yeah, well, it's the way I do it. And I don't know if that's, if it would work for most people. I mean, partly, I guess I had a lot of fun experiences in Paris, and that helped a lot. My friend Mary Byrne, who's the Mary in the series, the Irish woman, she's a writer, and she just dotes on, you know, listening to people and following conversations and and writing about interesting or sort of more than interesting, just really knocked down characters in France, you

00:27:15 SPEAKER_01
sort of more than

00:27:21 SPEAKER_01
down characters

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know, that the ordinary person wouldn't know much about. So, I don't know. I wouldn't be one to give advice to anybody.

00:27:35 SPEAKER_01
one to give advice to anybody. I think I've had a kind of a checkered career. I think everybody's had a checkered

00:27:44 SPEAKER_02
had a checkered career. Maybe so. Interesting people have had done a variety of things. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're a researcher or

00:27:53 SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Unless

00:27:54 SPEAKER_02
a researcher or something, you're out there doing interesting

00:27:59 SPEAKER_01
things. Yeah. No, I went to Saigon after I'd finished after I'd finished basically the five o'clock follies just to check on to make sure I sort of had gotten a lot of details right that I'd gotten all from Mr. Google, you know. Sure enough, I found all kinds of just little odd quirks, like women wearing long, long sleeve white gloves on the back of a motorcycle with a couple of kids, a couple of their husband and a couple of, you know, four or five people on those, those motor scooters in Saigon and things like that, that I would have never been able to pick up, you know, doing research about artillery. No, I did a

00:28:52 SPEAKER_01
lot of research for all of them. For Flying Jenny, I had to sit down and figure out how much fuel a flying Jenny would need to fly from someplace in Kansas to someplace in Oklahoma. So that's the research that's not too much fun, but the other research is watching the people. I have a question, which I think

00:29:17 SPEAKER_00
takes us sort of back to the beginning of this conversation, but we've talked about it a lot. And I would like to know, like, what you feel the real difference is. I mean, obviously, we all can read the difference. in writing, what is the real difference in switching from, you know, being a journalist and having to to work like that to switching into writing novels, whether you're using real people or not, which my guess is some of that is your journalist self pulling what you know into fiction. But I'm just curious if there is if there's something like one really concrete thing that you've had to retrain in this process?

00:30:07 SPEAKER_01
process? Well, I don't quite know how to answer that question. Because as I said, I, I had a difficult time switching over. And I, I don't

00:30:22 SPEAKER_01
know, this is answered the question at all. But One of the things that I always find in my writers groups is that all

00:30:34 SPEAKER_01
all of the people in various writer groups have felt that I was the best line editor. And also, if I would go to a group and show up with a manuscript and people would say, well, this is unclear or this is a problem, or whatever, in their

00:30:59 SPEAKER_01
understanding of what I'd written, they'd all comment on the fact that I immediately came back with it

00:31:10 SPEAKER_01
it corrected. So I think that's the only thing that I can say is that I brought the conciseness and tightness from journalism into fiction, but I don't. I don't really feel like that answers your question. I

00:31:31 SPEAKER_00
mean, it kind of does, because I think that, you know, one of the really big differences between writing for newspapers or, you know, as a journalist in general, is that you're used to being edited. Like you're used to that feedback. And I think that that makes it a different journey than somebody who comes in and has never been edited and has to like, you know, we're, we get really attached to

00:31:58 SPEAKER_01
and has

00:32:02 SPEAKER_00
words or we get really attached to paragraphs and journalism, especially years of it makes you like, okay, scratch that whole paragraph. You can just draw a pen through it and move on. Where people who don't have that experience have a, you know, a real deep, like, But I put my entire heart and soul into

00:32:26 SPEAKER_01
that. Yeah, yeah, that's that's absolutely I think that's right on that. You don't you don't have

00:32:35 SPEAKER_01
any, you just don't have that kind of feeling about the wonderfulness of your coffee.

00:32:44 SPEAKER_02
They're magical words. Yeah, it's easier

00:32:46 SPEAKER_00
it's easier to, you know, kill your darlings, I guess. And, you know, I spent years being edited by someone else who was like, this is never going to make it like I'm going to I'm going to cut it or they rewrite it for you or

00:32:50 SPEAKER_02
guess. And,

00:32:56 SPEAKER_00
to make it like I'm going to I'm going to cut it or they

00:33:01 SPEAKER_01
it for you or whatever. It's well and also being an editor, too. I can remember an experience I had at the Detroit Free Press a long time ago. Some hotshot writer who hadn't been there too long and had written some big long-winded piece and it was given to me to

00:33:20 SPEAKER_01
it was given to me to edit. And he kind of threw a fit beforehand, you know? And I edited it for me because I am

00:33:28 SPEAKER_01
I am all, you know, at that same time, I was very conscious of trying to keep the writer in the article as much as he wanted to be in there if it was a feature piece or something like that. And he came to me later and said, wow, I couldn't even tell where you cut it, because it needed to be cut. And I couldn't tell where you'd cut it. So that's an experience I brought from journalism of being also a good editor, because many of my jobs were editing as well as reporting.

00:34:10 SPEAKER_02
That's also, it sounds like with that case, you kept his voice. Yes. So that he couldn't even tell where you had done things. And I think that's one thing a lot of people, especially newer writers, I've found in some of the writing groups I used to be in, I think there's an insecurity, but also they have something they're trying to say, and I don't think they understand how editing can actually expand it and make it more concise and easier for everybody else. Because sometimes what you have in your head doesn't really translate to the page.

00:34:52 SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, I guess. I, you know. Well, you

00:34:55 SPEAKER_02
probably, you're so good at it, you can, but you thinking you're putting up the page. But I find a lot of newer writers have this whole thing in their head. And I said, but that isn't on the

00:34:56 SPEAKER_01
so good

00:35:08 SPEAKER_02
the page. When they talk it out, it's like, it's not

00:35:11 SPEAKER_01
not on the

00:35:12 SPEAKER_02
page. Right, right. You're not going to be there to narrate what they're

00:35:17 SPEAKER_01
reading. Right. Right. No, it is. Yeah. I do remember a woman that came into our writers group. This was one of our writers groups several years ago. I thought she was

00:35:30 SPEAKER_01
she was like a really good writer and pretty imaginative. But, you know, the story had some problems and various things we all pointed out to her and she would never come back. I mean, she was so offended. So we were all just kind of, you know, and and it was that's really true. I mean, she was just totally offended at the suggestions we made. But then it's a public just like that. Some people are just like

00:36:04 SPEAKER_00
Some people are just like that. I mean, like, you know, they're they they seek out what they're really looking for is validation, I think. Yes, yes. Yeah.

00:36:14 SPEAKER_02
I think. Yes, yes. Yeah.

00:36:17 SPEAKER_00
They don't really want to be better writers. They want to take that piece and have someone

00:36:17 SPEAKER_02
don't really

00:36:22 SPEAKER_00
say, this you should take to a publishing house. That's what they're.

00:36:27 SPEAKER_02
Yeah, they want to pat on the head. Those people are a little, you know, you've got to give that up, especially if you're, because I think writers groups are really important. The last group I was in, I was in for almost two years, and that was me and five guys, which was, and since I was writing a book all about women, it was very interesting to have five male points of view coming at me. And a lot of it I took, I could see what they were saying. Another thing is like, women don't think like that. Right. You know, we would have a few testy little debates, you know, afterwards, after the meeting, but it was, it was like, but to me, it was like, men, you know, men are 20% of the market, but it's still, you want everybody to understand what you're writing. Of course. Yeah, you want them all to appreciate it. It may not be their kind of book and that that's the thing with fiction. There's so many types of fiction you can draw from so many different. I don't like horror fiction and stuff like that. That's not me. And I'm not into romance, though I found out I read vampire romance, which completely blew my mind. I had no idea. But Goodreads told me, oh, the last few books you read, vampire fiction. It's like, romance. I was like, what? But, you know, that kind of there's so many different little sub genres out there. And some people just never pick up something in that in what you may be writing about. And that's got you've got to take that into consideration. But if everybody in your group is pointing out little things, you should listen. That's why you're at the

00:38:11 SPEAKER_01
at the group. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I mean, I well, for me, the most writers group is totally important because for me, it's a deadline. Yeah, I have to have pages, you know, to the last minute. I mean, that may be the that I'm still totally a journalist rather than a fiction writer, because it's like, I have to come up with pages to read to the group. So that's the best part for me is the deadline as well, of course, of people saying, I don't know what you mean there. Or what does this mean? Or Do you realize that you brought this up before? But, you know, I mean, all kinds of things they have to say, but the deadline is fabulous. I think the ASA answered your

00:38:57 SPEAKER_00
ASA answered your question, Kathleen, that you answered a bit ago, which was what is your advice to new writers? And it is to find a writing group. Well, but I do. I mean, you know, that was the writing group came out of that question is not quite an answer, but I think that it is the answer to that, because having a writing group and I can attest to this, it makes you a better writer because you get different perspectives and you can workshop stuff and, you know, you can work ideas in or or go, oh, I didn't realize I wasn't that clear, like all of those things. over time that just shapes you into a better writer than trying to muddle through it yourself, where you just are kind of hoping and praying that you didn't lose the story somewhere, that you're still on track, or, you know, you didn't meander away from your, from

00:39:56 SPEAKER_01
your cause. Well, the expression there that you're looking for is that everyone needs an editor.

00:40:04 SPEAKER_00
Well, that too. I mean, I agree with that, but I think a writing group offers something else that is more than just editing because it is also a place for, you know, genuine excitement for your story and also genuine, like, nah, I don't think you have it. And, and that's more than just having, you know, edits done. It's, it's genuine feedback from people who, you know, care about you because you're in that group. I mean, you know, it's, it's there for the betterment of everybody and they want the same kind of feedback, even if it's hard sometimes. And that hard feedback is really the stuff that makes you a better writer. You know, we can all get, that was wonderful from our friends and family, the Pats on the back wrote this, this is so amazing, but, but getting the real, You know, like, I like the idea for the story, but the writing's not there. Or if you like, if you wrote it from this perspective instead of this perspective, like, you know. Just just opens you up to to more creativity and and more refinement, and then you can take it to an editor and really get it, you know, to that point where you're like, this is this is the best it can be.

00:41:27 SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think so, too. And like what what you said, it was that one person that said, change the point of view. Yeah. Oh, well, yeah. Yeah. That and that and it's something like that that can just spark something and you see this. Well, when you change the point of view, you're seeing the story from a different point of view. But for you as the writer to see the story that way is also very invaluable. And she was that was a wonderful edit comment for them to make to

00:42:00 SPEAKER_01
to you. Yeah. Oh, yeah. God. I mean, I was totally resistant, but I thought, oh, well, what the heck, you know? And after I'd written it, I was like, oh my heaven, that is just incredible. What a difference. Yeah. Yeah, those things happen.

00:42:20 SPEAKER_02
Well, we want to tell everyone that Mademoiselle LeSleuth, it has a fabulous cover with this young girl in a red rain jacket coat, is going to be a 99 cents through the 25th of November. So if you want to read it, Kirk has called it a worthy escape read, and it's light and breezy. So we'd really appreciate it. And I want to thank the Ace of Tunes. Through the holidays. Oh, through the holidays.

00:42:47 SPEAKER_00
Oh, through the holidays.

00:42:48 SPEAKER_02
the holidays. Yeah, through the holidays, sorry, through the holidays, this will come out after the 25th of November

00:42:53 SPEAKER_00
this will come out after the 25th of November anyway. But through the holidays, so looking for something easy and light to read while you. Deal with your family or whatever, but that's the ebook, right? Yeah, that's the ebook.

00:43:09 SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that's the ebook. Yeah. Yeah. If you're going on a plane or something, it'd be easy to take your tablet and read it.

00:43:09 SPEAKER_00
that's the ebook.

00:43:17 SPEAKER_02
and go from there. So anyway, well, we want to thank you for coming today and talking with us. And I really admire all of your experience. And, you know, you came from a very interesting family, a strong group, a strong mother there, which is always important and adventuresome, I think really helps women keep moving forward and especially someone who went out and became a flyer that's just that's really really special really really special

00:43:47 SPEAKER_01
really special really really special yeah well i want to thank you guys too you've been such a help with the dealing with the amazon which i have no idea how to do any of this getting attention so you've been a help that's what we're here for

00:44:03 SPEAKER_02
that's what we're here for Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So, anyway, so, as we said, it'll be through the holidays 99 cents. It's Mademoiselle Lesleuthes, and it's The Ace Atouille. And it is also the latest in the Paris backstage murders. And that is a really fun part of this story, by the way, the murders and the way they happen. I didn't want to get into that too much and ruin the story for anyone. But I think you'll enjoy it. And you'll have this most annoying, adorable little four-year-old to deal with at perfect times in the story. OK. Thank you very much for joining us today.