Latest / Mythmakers / Mythmakers Season 8 Wrap Up: Top 5 Author's Tips

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Mythmakers Season 8 Wrap Up: Top 5 Author's Tips · Mythmakers

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Hello and welcome to MythMakers.
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MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
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creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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My name is Julia Golding and
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we are taking our summer break at the moment so I've compiled together some of the top
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moments from our last season of interviews with authors.
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So we have five top tips from our top
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performing episodes where there are little nuggets about how to be a writer, how to get published,
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which I'd like to share with you now.
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So first up, I'm going to start with Darren Simpson.
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Now,
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I spoke to Darren about his long road to getting published and how, in his view, the length of
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time it takes can turn out to be a gift.
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So let's talk about the actual process of writing.
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I know a few people, some of the people listening to this will be trying to write their own novels.
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Did you have a relatively smooth sailing to being published or was it many, many years of trying?
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How did it happen for you?
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Yeah, definitely wasn't a smooth sailing.
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So my first
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published book was Scavengers.
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I got a sort of crowdfunded sort of indie book before that as
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well but very small scale um but yeah before I actually got published um by a traditional
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publisher I'd say I was going for nearly a decade I think I wrote like three or four books that
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didn't make it anywhere so it was a long journey uh and and whenever I do school visits I try not
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to sort of that question comes up how long did this take you to get published and I try not to
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put young writers off or any writers off because that sounds like it sounds like a slog it sounds
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like a lot of work but at the same time it's sometimes it can be a gift to have to go through
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that struggle um because i think if for example when i wrote my first novel if that got published
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i wouldn't quite know which author i was yet i wouldn't really have my writer's voice settled
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down just yet and so for me yes it was a long slog and i definitely was very close to giving
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up at times but um i learned so much on the way uh there's nothing i would tell uh kind of writers
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who are trying to get published that everything even you know every short story every idea you
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have that doesn't work out it's never a waste it's always practice it will always feed into
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what ultimately does become your first success.
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So yeah, for me, it was definitely a long slog
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and hard at the time, but I'm glad on hindsight.
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And do you enjoy the process of working with an editor?
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I do, yeah.
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I remember when I was much more young
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and a bit more, I don't know,
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I don't want the word bit uncompromising.
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I sort of not like the idea
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of someone meddling with my stuff, you know what I mean?
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Which is a bit on hindsight,
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it's quite a young attitude, I think.
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But now, having been through it,
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especially with, I mean, it might be that I've been lucky.
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I've always had I've only I've only I mean I'm fairly new to it so I've only had two editors so
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far in my experience but they've both been editors who really get what I do and understand what I do
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and I think I so I mean it might be different if you have an editor who sees your book as being
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something else to what you imagine it being but I've been lucky that we've always kind of clicked
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in that sense so I've always enjoyed the editing experience um a lot um I've never been afraid to
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sort of say if I disagree with something or I don't understand something but I am basically so
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far in my experience my books have always been better for that kind of fresh set of experience
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died i mean i don't know how do you how do you find it has your view of that sort of thing changed
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as you've kind of gone on no no i've always really i always feel it's um it's like i'm not
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going to go back to see a series again um there's that bit it's meant in a completely different
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context but there's a bit where eustace um turns into a dragon and um he can't change himself back
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into a boy he needs Aslan to take the dragon skin off him I often feel the editor and that's got
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religious sort of application but I'm thinking about it in terms of me as a writer that actually
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sometimes I feel as though I'm stuck in my dragon skin and I need somebody to unpeel those layers
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which are getting in the way of the story should be it happens I find that I still sometimes can
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get a major edit particularly if I'm starting um the first novel in a new series for example
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but and it gets less because then you anticipate what someone's going to say and do so
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you get less edited in a way as it goes on but what makes me laugh is possibly because editors
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do have very sensitive flowers of um authors um always the letters are couched in this sort of
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you know this is really good and you know don't get defended if i tell you that it's not perfect
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you know, they don't quite put it like that, but that's the subtext is please don't throw your toys
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out the pram.
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And I always want to say, look, just tell me, tell me what you think, because I know
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that after I've had a think about what you're saying, you've often picked on things which I
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had in the back of my mind weren't quite right, but thought no one would notice.
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Actually, it's
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really helpful if you tell me.
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So I think it's great and it's a privilege.
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So these days, the
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economics of getting published are really rubbish it was much better when i started out um so a lot
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of the joys of editing are like free work on my books for me i look at it like that um yeah because
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authors don't people out there be afraid authors don't make a lot of money unless they happen to
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hit the big time with a and but that's a different league most of us are just pottering along
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piecing together uh yeah and it's funny how that um that kind of idea of right is i mean the amount
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of schools i go to and do when i do festive events or school visits um so many well not just
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younger readers a lot of adults often assume that if you're a published writer you're rich it's still
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quite a kind of common cliche in people's minds and it probably hasn't been since maybe the i
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don't know maybe as far back as the 90s that a lot of publishers did very well for themselves
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But now, you know, I sort of have a part-time job,
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which I, again, feel very privileged to sort of have half my income
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come from writing, from doing what I love.
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And that took a long time to get there.
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But yeah, a lot of people do still assume that writers generally
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must be quite wealthy because their books are in shops.
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And this doesn't apply just to books.
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Obviously, it applies to the music industry.
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It's just the way a lot of creative industries are going,
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which is sort of partially why you do have to do it,
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obviously, not just for the money, right?
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Yeah, yes.
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Yeah.
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It's always lovely to talk to Irish writers and we spoke to Pada O'Gillian earlier in the year.
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And in our conversation, we talked about the influence of Irish history on his writing and also the role of the Irish tradition of the Fae folk, the Cis, the little people of the Green Hills.
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So have a listen to what Pada has to say about that.
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So when you're talking about this sort of history based on the Book of Conquest, was that the?
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Yeah, or Book of Invasions.
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Invasions.
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Yeah, it's got different, yeah.
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Is it, when you are sort of using that as a background,
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obviously there are strong themes here of like history and colonization and class war and wealth war.
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Because I'm thinking of the enclosure movement in Scotland and England had a similar thing where basically the poor people always get shafted in all these situations.
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So in a way, there's a kind of very obvious mapping on to real history.
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but also you've got the beautiful imagination of this idea of the the magic that goes along with
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the the fae folk which gives them power so gives them the power they didn't have before so when
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you're using it how much are you thinking if at all that you're writing a sort of modern morality
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tale and how much are you just really sort of enjoying the fantasy and seeing where it takes
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you because there's always this balance between the theme an author might be exploring which can
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end up being messaging which you don't want to do no no so how did you go about it well well i did i
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didn't i didn't deliberately aim for a theme yeah but but we all have themes in us they emerge don't
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they they emerge i mean it's it's basically like if you have an apple and you drop it
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you expect it to fall.
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You don't expect it to float there.
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You expect it to fall.
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It's just, you've grown up in this world.
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This is your instinct.
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This is something that you just know to be true.
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Right?
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Now, you may be wrong about that.
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You may just not have seen the apples that float.
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But as far as you are concerned,
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for your entire life,
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if you drop an apple, it floats.
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In the same way you were saying
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with the enclosures and so on,
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it's always the poor people who get shafted.
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Right?
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Maybe you're wrong about that, but more than likely, you believe that to be completely true.
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So if you're writing a book and you wanted to have some verisimilitude, you're not going to have the poor people not getting shafted most of the time.
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You know, unless that's your story, like the poor people triumph and, you know, have a great adventure and finally save themselves from a good shafting or whatever.
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But you know what I mean?
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Like if it's just the background to the world that you're writing.
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to your mind, the poor people get shafted.
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So that's not you making a political theme.
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That's just something you believe is true of the world.
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And therefore, when you're writing the world,
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that's what's going to come out.
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It's the same for me.
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I grew up on the border with Northern Ireland.
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A person living next door to me at one point
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was arrested for being in a terrorist organization.
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we used to do all our shopping on the other side of the border.
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We would come in on a Saturday morning
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and the whole road would be covered in bottles and bricks
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from a riot of the night before.
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Everywhere I lived was covered in graffiti.
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People had very, very strong opinions.
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My father was a surgeon who operated on people
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who were sometimes whisked in under great stress
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having been attacked.
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or whatever.
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So this is going to have an influence, you know, it's going to have an
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influence.
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Not necessarily, here's me making a political point, but that's just what I grew up
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with.
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It's just what I saw, you know, and if I'd grown up somewhere else, I'd have seen something
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different and come out with something different, you know.
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So that was definitely in the background.
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also in the background
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were all of these myths and legends
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I mean they were
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they were
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told in every school
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everyone
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knew these stories in the same way as
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a lot of people in Britain grew up
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with these kind of ladybird books
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you know Rumpelstiltskin
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and so on
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and Sleeping Beauty
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and all of these you can probably still picture
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in your head the illustrations from
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some of them from when you were a kid, I'll bet, you know?
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Yeah, definitely.
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Yeah, we had those too.
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But we also had this other set, you know, of stories.
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And again, they affect you, you know?
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They're a very different way of looking at the world
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from those Lady Bird books.
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Like, you know, they have a very different mentality,
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but it influences you.
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I also had a very enjoyable conversation with Marissa Linton.
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And here we were discussing about the choice to change publishers or whether it is a choice and how as a writer these days, you have to really just go where the market will take you, where the people will publish you.
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So have a listen to us being very practical about our publishing choices.
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so um you've this is your second book as we mentioned at the beginning um so how is this
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moved to hod escape about the fact that this is an adult book so it rests nicely to have a
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different publisher with an adult book because chicken house is a younger fiction publisher
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it wasn't it wasn't deliberate um just who who will publish me which is how i do it
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Yes.
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That's my way.
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You will have the benefit of my books.
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Yeah, it wasn't like that.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I mean, I'd written these books and been turned down by just about every agent.
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And if I have a message for anyone listening who's writing fiction, keep going.
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Yeah.
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Keep going and also find your community.
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Those are my two messages, really, because it is very tough.
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I wrote, as I said, I wrote The Booker King that became The Binding Spell very much in
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isolation.
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Got turned down by everybody, but then it won this big prize.
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It won the Times Chicken House Prize.
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And part of the prize is that they published it.
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So that was done and dusted.
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Circle of Shadows then got taken on almost immediately afterwards
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because publishers had heard of my success with The Binding Spell
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long before it was published.
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So I actually had two books.
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Oh, sorry.
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It was a cat.
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That's really exciting for everybody who's watching this on YouTube
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because I was warned.
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We've been joined by a most delightful, beautiful cat.
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She's not very delightful.
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I might have to move her because, sorry, I will.
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We will do a little pause in the proceeding.
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Do pause just for a second.
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That's quite funny.
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We might have to keep the cat in because it was a very pretty cat.
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Even if, yeah.
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So we're talking about moving to,
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from writing for a YA audience,
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which is very different,
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well, not very different,
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but it has different things that you have in mind
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when you're doing that,
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to writing The Circle of Shadows for an adult audience.
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Are you thinking of this as a series,
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this particular book?
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The Circle of Shadows is a two book deal.
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Ah, so there's-
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I am writing the sequel as we speak.
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that is what I spend my time doing yeah fantastic have you got a title for it it probably won't stay
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the same though I found I have a title but I don't know if they'll yeah that um so I probably
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shouldn't yeah no don't no I'll say when you stop recording people yeah people don't realize
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how little power authors have over their own titles I've had books that have been published
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under one title in one country and then another and a completely different title both in English
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which is very confusing and you worry sometimes that people might by mistake buy both and find
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it's the same book but it's not the author's fault it's to do with the market you're in
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yeah so do you enjoy the process of working with an editor and being edited because that's one of
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the privileges of actually doing a professional route to being published as opposed to self
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publishing something or that kind of route.
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I've loved it.
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Yes.
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When you get an editorial letter, do you always feel, some people feel attacked by it and sort of,
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you know, clam up and try and defend what they're doing.
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If only you understood how
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brilliant I am, or do you actually sort of say, right, this is my opportunity to make this better?
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the editors I've worked with have been brilliant I can imagine what you're saying that it you can
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imagine a circumstance where somebody wants you to basically shred the book as you've imagined it
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and that would be yes that would be really really hard and you would have to say at what point do I
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sort of dig my heels in and say this is this is not my book this is something else I could
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And yes, I certainly could imagine that scenario happening,
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but it wasn't my experience.
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My experience with both books has been really positive
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in that I felt that both editors for The Binding Spell
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and then for Circle of Shadows wanted the best for the book,
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really cared for the book.
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And if you trust the editor and you feel they're engaged with your book
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and your world and your characters, then you can trust the process.
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and in neither case did they force me to do anything.
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There was no kind of get rid of that character.
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Oh, my God.
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It wasn't like that.
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And I think if an editor really cares about your book
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and engages with it, they can help you see things that you've missed.
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So if there are other problems, we all have problems,
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technical problems along the way.
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This bit doesn't work so well.
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how do you get these characters from here to here?
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Is this motivation quite worked out?
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Is this backstory working?
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Those kinds of things.
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If you trust the editor, they can help you find the best way up the mountain.
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That's how I see it.
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They can say, well, have you thought of this path?
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And it can be quite a shock when you get the editorial letter
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because you haven't thought about that path.
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You didn't even know that path existed.
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But if they're really engaged with it, then yeah,
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I would listen to what they say really closely if they want the best for the book
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and they really know what they're talking about.
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And I had that.
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And yeah, that was brilliant.
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And I think both my books are a lot better for that editing process.
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Yeah, I do think so.
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I do remember right at the beginning of my career back in 2004, something like that,
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I had a sort of development deal with a publisher Oxford University Press for my first set of
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fiction fantasy fiction books and I did a rewrite after a sort of big edit letter and the editor
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said to me after that when I saw that you would take an edit that's when I decided to give you a
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contract.
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So it's a really good skill to try and learn to be edited.
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It's really important
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to not feel attacked, but to think what they're trying to do is make this the best book it
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can be for a market into which it's going.
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So I never really considered myself writing
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immortal prose anyway, you know, so I'm quite happy to be told where I can be improved.
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It's really important to be able to do that.
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I also spoke with Naomi Ishiguro, who wrote a book called The Rain Shadow Orphans, inspired by Japanese culture and history.
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And we talked about whether or not it's ever plain sailing for a book and what happened during COVID for many writers.
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So was the journey to writing this a smooth plain sailing all the way or did you have many stops and starts?
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Was it actually quite a tough write?
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I don't feel like anything is ever plain sailing in writing.
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That's a trap, that question.
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Yeah, with listeners who, if you write, you'll know that it never is.
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But yeah, so I published a couple of books in the pandemic.
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And just the experience of that was, you know, I mean, there were many, many, many worse things that happened to people in the pandemic.
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I'm definitely not complaining.
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but it was it was just very discombobulating and I think just sort of being exposed to the industry
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for the first time was quite stressful so I wanted to carry on writing but I actually sort of decided
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I wasn't going to be like a career writer and trained as a secondary school teacher and was
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working as a high school teacher so I was working with teenagers for a couple years after my first
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book and that was so my agent was you know he kept he kept me on and he was like you could try
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writing a different kind of book like what have you wrote about teaching what have you wrote
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non-fiction and then he sort of said what have you wrote for for young people like what have you
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wrote with your students in mind like with a different audience and I was a bit like yeah okay
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um but then I actually thought like yeah what if I what if I did sort of do because it's not a
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children like it's not a YA it's being published as adult but it is it's with the sort of and I
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was you know I was teaching like up to like 18 year olds so um but yeah it's sort of with with
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with my students in mind was kind of how it sort of first came into being.
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And yeah, I think once I
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once I decided to write it, it was actually quite not easy.
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But it came quite quickly.
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And
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I just found myself like very excited by the whole process.
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And I had a great time writing it.
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And
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it just sort of like everything kind of seemed to come together in the world.
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sort of made sense.
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And I just had like a fan because with fantasy, you can source ideas from
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all sorts of different places and people and it's just such a fun process.
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So it was actually kind
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of wonderful once I'd started, but I think that that sort of sense of what am I going to write
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took a while.
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But I think that's sort of very common with writers because once you sort of
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write a novel, you've sort of said everything you have to say.
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You pour like years of thinking into
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it and then you have to sort of spend some time sort of living and and gathering more uh thoughts
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and observations about the world yeah so the world building um i'm correct me if i'm wrong but i was
22:13
seeing it as having a sort of japanese basis for the culture and um but it's not japan it's not our
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own world i mean obviously once you realize there are three moons um you know you're somewhere else
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which sort of frees you up from any sort of attempt to connect it um so what kind of world
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builder are you are you the sort who has loads of notebooks where you're um you know already
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creating a world and then you go ahead with the story or do you create the bit of the world that
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fits that bit of the narrative um i think it's a difficult one because i love world building just
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for fun um i think it's just a wonderful like it's it's a great activity you get stuck there
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can't you because it's so and it's something quite different from from writing a novel i think so you
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can create a sort of perfect fun world and then you think oh it's not really in service to the
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story and the characters and the themes i really want to explore because like writing a novel is
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is really about theme um so i think yeah i mean for me like i did say that the sort of land and
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the sort of politics of the land was very much that came from the themes but um yeah there's a
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whole kind of solar magic system that's kind of roughly based on i guess sort of ideas of like
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numinous energy flows through the world or kind of chi um uh and there are kind of creatures called
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sun spirits um who like i've invented but are sort of based on um just ideas that like slightly uh
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sort of japanese yokai um and like uh the animism in the shinto tradition of sort of kami being
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these sort of spirits um these gods that are sort of physically present in places um yeah
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I think with the world building
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with this book there were bits that were sort of there
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and they were the ones that were in service to
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the theme and the character
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the characters
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and then I sort of wrote the draft
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sort of getting the story
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and then I had sort of
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three friends who ended up sort of helping
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a lot, three kind of
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beta readers I guess
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one of them was just a sort of amazing literary novelist
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who read a draft and
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was sort of questioning some of the politics
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of it sort of being like okay so how does this island's economy really really function you've
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said that it kind of runs on these uh the labor of these like undocumented migrants who are in
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this sort of like almost refugee camp like how does that actually work like what like and what
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is the role of this gang the lucky crows that you have like what are the actual kind of mechanics
24:35
of injustice here like let's draw that out a bit more um uh yeah and and sort of looked at sort of
24:43
the history of the island and that kind of thing with me.
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And that sort of solidified that.
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I have
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a friend who's a professional theoretical physicist, which is always handy.
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It's great
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to have one of those on speed dial.
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So I asked him about the magic system and just being like,
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so does this, is this logical?
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Like, does this make sense in terms of like some kind of physics?
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And sometimes the answer would be yes.
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And sometimes like, no, not quite, but what if you
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did this um and that's just that was really fun just to throw around ideas and to get ideas for
25:14
like future books of like just kind of things that could happen that may never like we did a lot of
25:18
just kind of co-world building that may never actually end up in the books but uh was really
25:22
fun as an activity so that did make me think it's quite dangerous you can just world build infinitely
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um and yeah i have a friend who has an mst in japanese studies from oxford which despite me
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being half japanese i'm definitely definitely don't have that um uh so she read through the
25:37
book and just kind of gave me more advice on the cultural aspects because it does borrow quite a
25:42
lot from Japanese sort of culture and tradition so she was sort of my cultural advisor so I think
25:48
with fantasy it's great because you get to draw on the expertise of the people around you and
25:53
yeah my previous books felt very much like me on my own like this is just me whereas this has felt
25:58
like I've written it but it feels very much like a kind of team effort of me going around and
26:03
sourcing like interesting people and having interesting conversations and there's definitely
26:07
like more like research uh experiential research that has gone in has gone into building this world
26:13
definitely yeah i've got a friend who is a primary care doctor in the developing world you know so he
26:20
goes into the the kind of places that you know like yemen and somalia and you know places that
26:26
you wouldn't go on holiday at the moment um but he's very helpful because if i say um what happens
26:32
if you get bitten by a cobra?
26:34
What happens if,
26:35
what happens if you get hit by a sword?
26:37
You know, what really happens
26:38
as opposed to like fantasy,
26:39
you know, film violence?
26:41
Yeah.
26:42
What's, what kind of infections
26:43
might you have after?
26:44
You know, sort of,
26:45
and unfortunately he knows
26:47
because of the nature of where he works.
26:49
So he often gets a dedication and a thanks.
26:54
And finally, I spoke to a friend of the podcast
26:58
and good friend of mine, Malcolm Geit,
27:00
who has begun on an epic Arthurian journey in poetry.
27:07
And we talk about where the inspiration to do something
27:10
which hasn't been done since probably Tennyson
27:13
and the ambition that he has set out on to write
27:17
four cycles of Arthurian-themed poetry.
27:24
what did you feel like answering that call to stop think and then start to tell the tale again
27:33
and how did you persuade a publisher to go with you well yes indeed i mean well first of all i've
27:38
wanted to do this for years and years and years ever since my mother told me the stories when i
27:42
was little but i was in fact mentioning charles williams and those kind of high modernist lyric
27:47
cycles of Taliesin through Logres, and I was a bit daunted.
27:52
I knew I didn't want to do the big
27:54
Tennysonian blank verse thing.
27:55
I think the problem is, and my problem was form, really.
28:00
I knew I
28:00
wanted it to be poetry.
28:02
But Tennyson, A, it had already been done, and B, I think after Milton,
28:07
it's almost impossible to write a long blank verse poem without kind of blundering into kind
28:12
to ponder as sub-Miltonics.
28:14
It's just been done so well by Milton, you can't get out from under
28:18
his shadow, as Eliot observed.
28:21
So I had a problem of form.
28:22
I mean, I love David Jones, but then
28:24
again, this is very high modernist prose poetry that's kind of an absolute thicket of footnotes
28:32
everywhere in four or five languages, and I didn't want it to be recherche like that.
28:37
Eventually, I realized the answer was staring me in the face.
28:39
I'd written a long
28:43
meditation and reflection on Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a book called Mariner,
28:48
in which, of course, I just looked at how he took the common ballad form and turned it into this
28:53
really delicate instrument.
28:54
He kept its vividness and its directness and its repetitions and its
28:58
strong rhythm, but he would occasionally extend the stanza or shorten it or do various things
29:04
that heighten the effect.
29:07
And so I just thought,
29:11
I think I'll have a go in the ballad form
29:13
and make it much more accessible.
29:15
My original plan was to do a combination of prose and poetry.
29:17
I thought I'd do it as a travelogue around Great Britain
29:21
with a prose narration in the modern day,
29:23
the surface roundabout,
29:25
and then invoke each Arthurian place in poetry
29:28
and have the place,
29:29
so the matter of Britain was like literally the matter,
29:31
the physical matter of Britain.
29:33
But then I thought, that's too Trixian, postmodern, and double narrative.
29:36
I just don't...
29:37
I'm really going for a second naivete here.
29:39
I think I'm done with that.
29:41
I really think we need wonder and enchantment.
29:44
And that was the other side of it, of course,
29:46
because the word chant is inside the word enchantment.
29:50
And I think I wanted this...
29:53
I have a little note at the beginning saying,
29:54
read this aloud, and then you'll get it.
29:57
So anyway, persuading a publisher.
30:00
Now there you put your finger on something.
30:02
because, I mean, you're right.
30:05
Tennyson is the last really long treatment of this
30:07
as an epic poem in 12 books.
30:10
So we're talking 1850s and 1860s.
30:12
There is a rather extraordinary little book in between
30:15
in the 20th century by John Heath Stubbs
30:19
called Artorias,
30:20
which is in 12 books in varied metrical forms.
30:24
But they're little books.
30:25
I mean, it's one fairly slim volume.
30:28
And unfortunately, I mean, it's full of brilliant things,
30:30
but unfortunately also like T.H.
30:32
White, he can't resist being satirical or ironic.
30:38
And I just wanted no satire or irony anywhere in this.
30:42
I wanted it to be cleansed of that.
30:44
We've had more than enough of that.
30:47
So this is the first really big retelling.
30:50
So, I mean, they say publishers or anything,
30:53
you're supposed to have what they call a USP, a unique selling point.
30:56
So my unique selling point was this hasn't been done for the last 150 years.
31:01
But I had to point out that might also be the unique sinking point in that there might be a reason for that.
31:06
But I was willing to bet that the time might be right for this kind of retelling again, the sense of the need for re-enchantment, lots of things coming together.
31:16
and I thought nobody else literally nobody else is going to do this I'm you know I've spent
31:21
you know decades learning the art and craft of of metrical writing and and use of rhyme without
31:30
torturing the syntax and that kind of thing I don't know I mastered the sonnet which is obviously
31:34
a much shorter form but I thought if I don't do it nobody will and if I don't do it now
31:39
starting as the thing says on that midsummer morn when I did indeed walk out one morning
31:45
I'm not going to finish it
31:48
because you know I'm in my 60s
31:49
so it was now or never
31:51
and I decided to go for it
31:53
and unfortunately
31:54
Rabbit Room in America
31:56
got totally got what I was doing
31:57
and we're going to do it beautifully
31:58
I mean I think they sent you
32:00
an advanced reader's copy
32:01
which is paperback
32:02
but the real thing is
32:03
hardback and glorious
32:06
and then obviously
32:07
I didn't want to write a British epic
32:09
without it being published in Britain as well
32:12
so I got Rabbit Room
32:13
and Canterbury Press into conversation with each other
32:15
and then Canterbury Press jumped on board as well.
32:18
So I ended up with two publishers, you know,
32:21
taking a chance on me, as Abba would say.
32:26
Yeah, I didn't pick up any other Abba references
32:29
amongst the network of references.
32:34
But in that little...
32:35
Abba was a reference to the rhyme scheme in Memoriam,
32:39
A, B, B, A, but there you go.
32:44
I hope you enjoyed meeting all our authors during this season.
32:49
And I look forward to speaking to others when we kick off again with the new season.
32:54
If you have a favourite fantasy writer, particularly someone who is new or has been neglected, do let me know and I'll see if I can get them to come on and have a chat about their writing process and what they're working on at the moment.
33:08
Thank you so much for listening.
33:16
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33:19
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33:22
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33:27
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you