Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Mary Robinette Kowal who is the author of The Spare Man. She is here to talk to us all about what to do when your book marketing plan goes awry, which I think is a wonderful topic for any and all people out there in the world - not even just writers. What to do when shit goes bad. It's just a good topic. We're also gonna talk about real life inspiration in science fiction, writing diversity - specifically disability. So we'll just start with Mary Robinette telling us a little bit about yourself, and then also, of course, your book, The Spare Man.
Mary: Awesome, I'm really happy to be here, Mindy. I'm a science fiction and fantasy author. I was also a professional puppeteer for about 20 years, and I'm an audiobook narrator. So that's kind of the birds-eye view of what I do, and then The Spare Man is my most recent novel. It's my 10th, which is very exciting, and it's basically an homage to The Thin Man films. It's The Thin Man in space. It's a happily married couple on an interplanetary cruise ship going between the Moon and Mars and there's murder, and they have to solve the murder with their small dog.
Mindy: Of course, small dogs are an absolute must-have when solving murders.
Mary: Absolutely, and cocktails. There's no shortage of cocktails.
Mindy: Excellent. Excellent. So I wanna touch on being an audiobook narrator for a second. A lot of my listeners are indie authors and they're always looking for talent. So talk to me a little bit about how you got into being an audiobook narrator, and then what that's like.
Mary: Sure. In college, I majored in Art Education with a minor in theater and speech and took radio as part of that and sort of fell in love with that. And then used it, the voice acting stuff, with the puppetry and then started doing audio books. Actually, I auditioned. It turns out that you can just send in a reel. Publishers will hire you. So when I started, there wasn't really a route for indie authors to do audiobooks. It was all through the big publishers. Now when I'm recording for indies, it's nice 'cause there's a little bit more hands-on from the author. A lot of times I never get to talk to the author at all when I'm recording for one of the big houses. It's like puppetry without the pain. I'm in my booth right now, so I have a fancy mic.
Mindy: Oh, you sound amazing. I was gonna say that.
Mary: Thank you. Thank you.
Mindy: Your audio is fantastic. But I do think the audio book narration is so interesting in that so many people think they can do it, and they don't understand that this is a trained skill. This is an art. I love my friends, of course, if any of my friends are listening, I love you. But so many of my friends have said I would like to get into audiobook narration because I read to my kids at night and I'm pretty good at it. And I'm like, I'm so glad you read your kids. That's wonderful, and you should keep doing that. That doesn't mean you can do this for a living. These are trained voice actors.
Mary: This is 100% accurate. The other piece of it, and people don't think about this part, is that for the most part, narrators don't get to pick the work that we do. We have to pay a bill, so we will record whatever is given to us. So if you wanna check to see whether or not this is a thing that sounds appealing, what I recommend to people is that they get a book in a genre that they don't read, and they don't get a good example of that book, and then you read it aloud. And any time you make a mistake, you have to go back to the beginning of the sentence. That means stumbling on a word - saying the wrong word. We do this all the time. Grab a word from a line below or you'll swap something out without even realizing that you've done it. You'll say huge instead of big and when you're reading to your kid, that's fine, but it has to be word perfect because it is the author's words, not yours.
Mindy: There is a huge skill set. As someone who is a writer, it puts my back up a little bit whenever anyone I'm talking to asks me what I do, and I say that I'm a writer. And they say, "Oh, I've always wanted to write," or "I think I could write a book." And I'm like, "Well, then do it." You know?
Mary: Yeah.
Mindy: I've become attuned to as a creative person moving through the world, and I think everyone is creative. Don't get me wrong. I'm not being a snob on that count. The hours and the practice and the skill and the amount of toil that goes into being able to make a living at it is not a whim. It is not a "Oh, I think I could." It is, "Oh, I'm going to break myself to make this happen."
Mary: Yeah, absolutely. With all of the arts, is that someone has done it as an amateur and thinks, "Oh, oh, I can do this. This isn't hard." And they don't think about all of the hidden effort. The stuff that happens before the final product.
Mindy: Absolutely, the overnight success that took the author 15 years.
Mary: Right.
Mindy: Yeah.
Mary: Yes.
Mindy: We're speaking of time and speaking of investment and speaking of all the easy ways to trip and fall while you're going along your publishing journey. Talk to me about book marketing and what to do if you have a plan in place, if you need to build a plan, or if your plan just completely has the rug ripped out from underneath it.
Mary: There's a couple of different things to think about when you are thinking about marketing your book. The first thing is you need to define your parameters. Like how much money can you afford to spend on it? How much time can you afford to spend on it? What sort of resources do you have at your disposal? And not everybody has the same things. I'm 10 books in, and I'm a traditionally published author. And I've been in the industry for a while. So that means that I have a lot of fancy author friends that I can call on to help. I also have two assistants. They're both part-time, but that means that I have the ability to delegate things to people. When I was starting out, I did not have those things. My second novel, this is from Tor, so from one of the big six, the book came out and the first line was missing.
Mindy: Oh! Oh my God.
Mary: Just gone. And then there was another page deeper in where none of the corrections had been applied. I think it was actually a paragraph missing, which was like the paragraph in which I explained a French term that then I proceed to use through the rest of the book. So at that point, I didn't have assistants. I didn't have the reach that I have now. So the training that I always have is, if you can't fix it, feature it. And so I could not fix the first line being missing. So I set up a quiz on my website - famous novels, guess them by their second line. I had temporary tattoos. I broadcasted as much as I could. One of the important lessons, I think, is that what gets people excited is a story. So in some ways that line going missing was actually helpful because it gave me a story that I could tell. Why should you publicize this book? Because this book had this bad thing happen to it. With The Spare Man, I don't like having a story to tell, but what has gone awry with mine is that you always dive people to do preorders. Preorders. Pre-orders. There's a bunch of good reasons for that. Preorders helps anyone decide how many copies of the book to print. The number of copies of the book is printed, that helps the bookstore go, Oh, they have a lot of confidence in this.
Mindy: Yeah.
Mary: 'Cause they'll look at the print run. So there's a bunch of different reasons to drive pre-orders besides just knowing that people want the book. The Spare Man was originally supposed to come out on July 19, and we had to push the release date for reasons. When the date got pushed, that pre-order page, they didn't change the date on it. What they did was they put up a new pre-order page. So people were still able to pre-order on that old page. The existing pre-orders were all there. And on July 19th, all of those pre-orders were just canceled.
Mindy: Oh my God. So you lost them. All of them.
Mary: Yeah, it is a nightmare. And then also for reasons... I always wanna be careful when I'm talking about this because it's easy to get mad at someone, but this is a thing that happened. But one of the other pieces that happened was that my publisher has the right to sell the book in the US in English language. Not in the UK. They sold those rights in the UK and Australia, but the Kindle page went up in the UK and Australian markets. So people pre-ordered the book and all of those preorders got canceled, but as a result of that, I have to make up ground. I don't like having a story to tell, but it gives me a story to tell.
So when you're writing a press release, they wanna know why they should care. It's the same thing as when you're writing anything else. Why should we care about this? Why is this particular book important? When you don't have a story to tell of something going wrong, then you have to think about why your piece is important. What is the story, the larger story, about your novel that makes it important? I see a lot of people, you know, their press release looks like their catalog copy. A newspaper, some days they just need to fill a column inch, and if they get a good press release in that's well written, they'll just run it as it is. Back when I was doing puppetry, we would always write our press releases as if it was a news article about the fact that this company was coming to town. Frequently newspapers would run it as it was. So one of the things you can do as an author is craft those press releases so that there's a story to tell. It's like, "Why is this author special? Why is it special that this book is coming out? How does this book connect to the community that this press release is going to?" There are ways to shape a narrative.
Mindy: First of all, I think it's so clever, what your approach to missing the first line of your book. I don't think I could have handled that any better. You're right about a story mattering. So, my book Be Not Far From Me was supposed to come out in the fall of 2018. And it was written, and it was edited. And it was ready to go. I had done the edits. I think it was ready to go into copy editing, and I pitched them the idea for my book Heroine, which is about the opioid epidemic. And this was before Trump got the nomination, and the opioid epidemic was the only thing in the news. And my publisher was like, "We're going to stop the presses on Be Not Far From Me. We're going to do a speed release on Heroine." Because of the way that my releases were staggered, that meant that Be Not Far From Me got pushed back to a 2020 release. So that book, first of all, I got the idea when I was on an ill-fated hike with an ex, and the whole experience of deciding to write this book kind of came about as me being on this hike with this person that I had been in a relationship with for over a decade. And this hike was when I realized that this relationship was not going to make it. And so it was like, it is a break-up book, but then it got pushed back almost two years. And then it released in March of 2020.
Mary: Oh, I'm so sorry. I had a book come out in July of 2020.
Mindy: Yep. All of us in that window. Oh my God. I was on tour with three other authors, and it was the week of March 18th. We were flying across the country. We were doing the big book tour. And at our first one, there was the amount of people you would expect. At the second one, there was about half. At the third one, there were three in there wearing masks, and at the fourth one, they just basically had a sign on the door that said, "Come in. Sign stock one at a time, and then go home." We got the tour in, but it was miserable. And then it's like, I got home and literally we went on shut down like two days after I got home. You know what the experience was in releasing in a pandemic. People ask me about which book is your favorite, and I don't really have an answer to that. But I'll be like, I'll tell you which book of mine has gotten beaten around the most. Have a story, and this is the first of all, the inciting moment for the story is when I realized that my relationship of 12 years wasn't going to make it. Then it got pushed back two years, and then it came out in the pandemic. And you're right. Just telling that story about that book, I don't have to say anything about the book. I don't have to say what the book is about or anything like that. There's a story about the book becoming a book, and it interests people.
Mary: My book, Ghost Talkers, for reasons... It was supposed to - it came out in August 2016. August 2016, and then they sent me on tour... November. My first tour day was Election Day of 2016.
Mindy: Oh God.
Mary: Weirdly, the book did not sell well.
Mindy: No, I'm sure it didn't.
Mary: Yeah, being in July, we had the is tour gonna happen/is tour not gonna happen. Let's just go ahead and call it and let's set up virtual event. People were lonely. They wanted connection. They wanted a sense of immediacy. They wanted a sense of something ephemeral, because everything that we were doing was in the tiny little screens. I created the astronaut training center, which was Zoom. Set up a bunch of breakout rooms. Had tour guides. And the set up was that you had arrived at the astronaut training center to apply to be an astronaut. And in each room there was an actor who would do a skit and interact with you, and you got to do the astronaut training trials. We did huge pre-orders for that. We linked it to the pre-orders, and so for a virtual event, the pre-orders on that were really, really good. What I have found since is that it's again about what is the story that we're gonna tell? Yes, these two people are in conversation. Picking a topic before we go in, so that I don't wind up having the same conversation, but just with a different conversation partner every single time.
Mindy: Yep, absolutely. And that's what it's like, especially during the pandemic, when we were doing all those Zooms. It was like, I have rote answers and I try to say something different, a little different, each time just so that there's a distinction between this interview and the next one. You do get the same questions over and over, and I try to keep my answers from being rote, but that can be really hard. So you're right. Distinguishing your virtual event from the next virtual event during Covid was a huge challenge. It sounds like you found a way around that.
Mary: I was also in a weird spot because I was early enough in the pandemic that people were not yet experiencing Zoom fatigue, and late enough that I had some tricks. I had already learned some things about how to handle that because of the stuff that I was doing with SFWA for The Nebula Awards conference. Now, I'm in also an interesting place because people are not sure how to handle book tours now. They aren't sure if they should send people out. Well, sending people out doesn't work. Zoom doesn't work. I'm like...
Mindy: Nothing works.
Mary: Actually, first thing we did was we made a list of people that I know that are good conversational partners that have an audience that is likely to overlap with mine. Thinking outside the box. So instead of just looking at authors, I started looking at people from different areas. So when I am in San Francisco, I'm doing an event with Adam Savage. First of all, hurrah that I can ask Adam, but second, he's not a science fiction author. I'm talking to someone else who's an actor, and we're gonna do a small skit. What are the other avenues? It's very tempting to reach for exactly the same thing every time. It's the reason that everybody was doing book trailers, because one or two book trailers were successful.
Mindy: Yep, and then everyone started doing them, and everyone had one. It's not as effective. You do have to find things that play to your skill sets, as well, and your opportunities. So, as you know, I'm currently touring. But this is something I put together myself because I was a librarian in a school for 14 years, and so I had a whole bunch of contacts just throughout the library world. And then of course, becoming a writer and utilizing those - networking, networking, networking, which I am good at. So one of my books won The Gateway Award, which is an award from Missouri. I immediately had librarians and educators and teachers and English teachers start following me on Twitter when this gets announced. And I follow them all back, and I send them DMs. And I'm like, "Hey, if you're ever interested in a school visit, let me know." I string enough of them together, and I'm like, "Alright, this is what I charge, and this is where I'm going to be. Do you have anybody else around you that would be interested?" And it just blossoms and blossoms until I'm on the road for three weeks. 'Cause I did work with teens, and because I worked in a high school for 14 years, I can get in front of teens and I can talk to them and make it work. And that is a special skill. And I know a lot of writers that don't like to public speak, let alone go in an auditorium with 800 teens. Like they would rather die. And I love it, and I have a great time with it. And I had tremendous success on this particular trip because partially... Now, I do have to say also, the staff does a wonderful job of prepping the kids. And you can always tell if the staff is enthusiastic and supportive of the author visit. I drive out to Kansas. I'm in Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas this month. And I drove out here two weeks ago with my car unsafely loaded with books. It was bad. There's no excuse for what I'm doing other than capitalism, right? And so...
Mary: Right.
Mindy: And I still have two school visits left, and I have two boxes of books and they're not even full. I have sold books hand over fist and I have re-upped my stock twice. Hand selling? This is a weird thing I've discovered about myself. I am a very good handseller. And so I know that I can do it, and I know that I'm good at it. And it's not... I mean, it's a skill that's like a cool thing to have and is super useful. It also makes me feel totally slimy all the time, but I'm good at it.
Mary: Yeah. A lot of the skills that I have come from selling puppet shows - where you have to convince people that what they really need is a puppet show. You get a toe hold in one area, and then you see how you can expand. And word of mouth is one of the very, very biggest best thing. You and I are connected because Jessi and Marie were like, "Hey Mindy."
Mindy: Absolutely, and it was perfect timing 'cause I'm on tour and extremely lonely, so...
Mary: Yeah, again, so familiar. I toured for a really long time, but when I was touring with puppet shows, it was... We were on the road for nine months at a time.
Mindy: Oh, God. I don't know if I could do it. I love what I do. And I do love elements and aspects of living out of my car and doing laundry and back hallways of hotels. There are elements of this that I really like. I think I've hit the upper levels of what I can... It's mostly my dog.
Mary: Yeah.
Mindy: I haven't seen my dog in a long time.
Mary: Yeah, should just tour with your dog. That, that answers everything.
Mindy: That has been mentioned to me multiple times. That I should just bring Gus, and I think that maybe, maybe I'm gonna put that in my back pocket for next time.
Mary: Yeah, I've been thinking about trying to tour with my cat because I'm similar. I miss Elsie when I'm gone.
Mindy: Oh my God, it's hard. I've been going for walks. There's a little, there's a little park outside my area B & B that I'm in right now in Kansas, and they just got a little walking trail, And everybody's walking with their dogs. And their dogs, they'll tug on the lead, and they're like, "No, no, we're not saying hi to everyone," and I'm like, "No, please hi. Can I pet your dog?"
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Mindy: Let's talk about writing characters with disabilities and creating a diverse cast. I know that's something that's important to you.
Mary: So there's a couple of things. There's, how do I plan ahead? So there's the character, and then there's the way the character interacts with the plot. One of the things that I started doing... I have a spreadsheet, and I plug into the spreadsheet where people are on their axes of power. And the idea of an axis of power is something that I got from a sociology book called Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And the idea is that everybody has an area in which they're powerful and an area in which they're not. Dominant and subordinate. So when I'm building the characters, I try to make sure that everybody has at least two areas where they are not dominant. I'm a 53-year-old white woman. On the gender axis, I am further towards the subordinate end. On the race axis, I'm all the way at the top of dominate end in the US. It doesn't have anything to do with the actual value. It has to do with the amount of power a person has in a given society. When I started doing this, I realized my characters were very cis straight. I think it allows me to look for and kind of balance things there. Including people in the plot. One of the important things that I've found is that I think about these axes of power, but then I just let them be characters in the story and try not to have whatever that is be a plot driver.
So for instance, on the disability front, there's an organizational structure that I use a lot to talk about fiction called the MICE quotient: Milieu, inquiry, character and event, and each of those are a major drivers. So milieu stories begin when you enter a place. They end when you exit. Inquiry, inquiry stories are stories in which your character has a question, "Why is this dead body on the floor?" and then the answer is, the Butler did it. Then you've got character. Character stories begin with angst as a character is unhappy with some aspect of self and then they try to change themselves. Internal conflict. Event, which is an external conflict, like an asteroid coming at the earth. So the problem is that if I take disability and I map disability into a milieu, someone is body-swapped into a disabled body, and they have to learn how to deal and navigate. The problem with a story like that, is that it makes the disability this exotic, other-ing thing. It creates this...
Mindy: Fetishized?
Mary: Yes, exactly. With the inquiry story, why is that person like that? As soon as you phrase it that way, you're like, Oh yeah, no, that's not a good… That's not it.
Mindy: It's not a good angle in.
Mary: No. The character story of basing it on disability, character begins being unhappy with themselves. So you're immediately doing a story in which you are placing a value judgment. They want to change that aspect of self. If you are a person with a disability and you are writing your own story, that's a very different thing than an outsider writing that story. And then with an event story, event is something disrupts the status quo, and that's like the sudden traumatic injury. It's - you're putting a value judgment on it. It's not that with an event that you're never allowed to have character injured. It's that if you want to tell a story that is about disability, you have to go into it making decisions and knowing that anything that you do is going to wind up coming with a value judgment. Because when you answer one of those things - you raise a story question at the beginning. You provide an answer at the end, and you tell the audience how they're supposed to feel about it. So that means that immediately you're putting value judgments on stuff. On the other hand, if you just let the character have a disability and interact with the plot, so that the disability affects the way they move through the story, but the story is not about the disability, you're going to have a much more rounded character. You're gonna have a much more nuanced approach to the disability. It's going to be actual inclusion instead of literally profiting from someone else's pain.
Mindy: I'd never heard of the MICE method. I think it's pretty fascinating. I, myself, have never had any real training in writing. I learned to write by reading and just modeling. So whenever people talk about some of the methods or the art of their craft, it's always interesting to me because my own approach was very, very different. I think that that could be extremely useful in so many different situations. I love what you're saying too about how you can write a person with a disability or perhaps some part of their identity that maybe is marginalized in our society and that isn't their story. I'm gay, and my whole life is about being gay.
Mary: Right.
Mindy: No. You just are gay, and your life is happening.
Mary: Yes, yes. Which is the way things actually go.
Mindy: Exactly. Yes. Oftentimes I think that writers that don't share the identity of a marginalized character can make the mistake of hitting on that too hard as part of the everyday experience of simply being a human moving through the world.
Mary: One of the things that happens frequently when someone is writing from a dominant position about someone in a subordinate or less powerful position, is that they only pay attention to the pain.
Mindy: Yep.
Mary: You know, as writers, we get attracted to pain. It's all of the yummy stuff about writing, but it is so reductionist to reduce people down to just their pain.
Mindy: Something I've been dabbling with, would like to continue to work with, is characters dealing with mental illnesses. Because those of us that already lived in that world had been managing it for some time, and then when the pandemic happened, I think suddenly almost everyone was having to deal with aspects of mental illness they'd never had to deal with before. And it was interesting to me because friends and family and people that were just like, "Oh my God, how do you live with this every day?" And I am like, "Oh, well. Let me show you."
Mary: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was not diagnosed with depression until I was 45, and in hindsight it's... I've had it my entire life. And I was 50 when I was diagnosed with ADHD, and again, in hindsight, so many things are much clearer.
Mindy: Oh yes.
Mary: But if you were writing the story of my life and you wrote it as a story of depression and ADHD, I'd be like, "That is not what my life is."
Mindy: No.
Mary: Does it affect the way I move through the world? Yeah. Is it really deeply annoying sometimes? Always yes. The reason I wasn't diagnosed until I was 45 was I didn't understand that I was depressed because I was cheerful.
Mindy: I think when it comes to a mental illness that many of us share, be it depression or anxiety, some people that have brushed up against it versus someone that is living with it consistently, there are so many wide and varied experiences of it, but you are still someone that is not only experiencing sadness constantly all the time. Now that does happen, but those are people that are unfortunately at the highest end of the suffering. I actually just went off of my medication after being medicated for 15 years and deciding that I wanted to find out where I am now, what my baseline is now. No one ever told me that you're not actually supposed to be on this medication for 15 years until a doctor was like, "Uh, we should do a blood draw because of your kidneys and liver," and I'm like, "Why?" He was like, "because of all the medication you're on," and I'm like, "Oh, no one ever said, maybe this is a bad idea." But it is interesting to come back to myself 15 years later as an unmedicated person. How do I feel? It's all very interesting. It's not always pleasant. That's for sure. Writing about mental illnesses in particular is something that, number one, is very important. And number two, I do think that you can write it if you haven't experienced it, but I also think that you have to understand that it is not the defining characteristic, just like sexual orientation, or gender, or identity, or race or any of those things.
Mary: I think I'm writing all of my characters as ADHD characters, but if I were trying to write a character who is explicitly ADHD, I wouldn't actually know how, because that's just the way my brain works all the time. So if I were trying to write someone who is not ADHD, and contrast with someone who is and have that be the story, I'm like, I have no idea what that would look like. 'Cause it's just my normal.
Mindy: That's just my normal set. I write really hard things, dark things, difficult topics, things that make people uncomfortable, and this is just the stuff that I think about. This is my normal. This is my brain. This is how it operates. It always has. I get emails from people, and it's always very kind and it's always very well-meaning. But I get emails from people and they're like, "I don't know what you've suffered, but I'm sorry for your trauma," and I'm like, "I'm fine." I always tell people I grew up on a farm. I have that lovely bucolic farm life. My parents love each other. They love me. I get along with my older sister, and I'd literally be out in the meadow making daisy chains and everybody else is like, "we made a pretty crown" and I'm like, "Yes, and these flowers have died, and this is actually a circle of death now," right? You know, I'm five and I'm like, "We've murdered these flowers, and now we have made crowns of suffering." That's just how my brain works. Nothing horrible happened to me as a child. This is just me. This is just who I am. So it's like my characters occasionally, and more often than not, are gonna share that same outlook. People ask me all the time, "How do you write this dark content? How do you sit with this for many hours a day and return to it? How is this possible?" And I'm like, I don't understand rom-com writers. I don't understand sitting there and writing the meet cute and making sure that there's a happily ever after and that things turn out okay. I don't understand doing that.
Mary: I also had like the bucolic Normal Rockwell... My family did, still does, talent shows on Christmas Eve.
Mindy: Oh yes.
Mary: Talent shows.
Mindy: I grew up that way, too.
Mary: I take a certain amount of delight in making people cry.
Mindy: I know. Me too. Me too. And I get emails from people that are upset, and they'll be like, "I can't believe like you did that. You made me very upset, and I'm mad at you." And I'm like, "That's awesome, because you had an emotion, and I made you feel it. And I'm proud. That was my job, and I did it." Last thing, let my listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your books.
Mary: So, the easiest thing is to... My entire very long name, Mary Robinette Kowal dot com. Sign up for my newsletter. And that'll tell you where I am, and there are links to my books on my website. I'm also on most of the major social media. I'm on TikTok. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Twitter... Facebook. Mary Robinette or Mary Robinette Kowal, depending on which platform it is. I'm pretty interactive most of the time. Oh, and if you follow me on Instagram, there's lots of really adorable cat content. Just gonna say, most of my Instagram is actually my cat.
Mindy: Mine too.
Mary: My TikTok is me walking in the woods giving writing advice. And then I guess the last place to look for me is writing excuses dot com, which is a podcast that we do. That is... Our tagline is 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
Mindy: I like that a lot.
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