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Find Your Writing Bliss with Katharine Sands · WriterCon

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This week on the writer Con podcast, one single Piece, Well, speaking
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as an agent, my advice is very different from what a writer might the
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editor might offer. I guess i'd quickly say to remember that everything you do
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and all the communication about your writing or writing you do about your writing something
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I call pitchcraft. The speaking that you do about your writing. It's a
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message in a bottle. You don't know whose desk you're going to land on,
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whose interest you're going to peak. You have no idea what's going to
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happen, and it's a good way to approach the industry when it comes to
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the great agent hunt. Welcome to writer Con, the gathering place for writers
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to share their knowledge about writing and the writing world. Your hosts are William
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Bernhardt, best selling novelist and author of the Red Sneaker books on writing,
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and Laura Bernhardt, Award winning author of the want LNN Files book series.
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Hey they are writers, thanks for joining me and Jesse Ulrich and who is
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that beautiful brinette wearing those funky headphones in the other square? An answer to
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queries we have received, Yes, Laura Bernhardt and I are married and we
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do actually live together. But Jesse makes us broadcast from different rooms for sound
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reasons, well not sound reasons, for audio reasons. Right. So that's
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why I'm in front of all of these books, and Laura's in front of
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all those album covers and superhero figururye, Instagram and more books, because our
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entire house is full of books. As you might suspect, Jesse, was
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this an this a scheme to try and split us out? Is that what
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you're up to? No, this is just a way for me to see
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all the different rooms in your house. I've had Laura in the Donald Duck
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room, and I'm let's try to secretly find out every everything that's in your
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house. And now you can, you know, see what kind of music
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plays in Yeah, let's see it. Yeah, let's see a nice rymeric.
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I see Paul Simon's Graceland. Great album, good though, Yes,
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I am impressed. All right, So evidently, Laura, you need to
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move to a different room for every for everyone. I like that we can
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play War's Laura. Yeah, all right, let me tell you that our
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interview is just looking for my best light. I know, I know our
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interview is with a terrific agent. But before you push pause, because it
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isn't an author. Let me just tell you that this might well be one
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of the most beneficial interviews you ever hear. Quick version of my personal story,
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and of course is a long time ago. But I spent four years
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getting my first agent, despite having a completely finished manuscript which I liked and
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was eventually published and sold more than half a million copies, So I like
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to think it was okay, But that did not make it any easier to
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get an agent. It's an eternal challenge, which is why we spend so
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much time finding and bringing in top tier agents for writer Cohn and the Cruise,
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and why our interview today is with friend of the podcast and on the
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Cruise, because she's joining us. Katherine Sands one of the most successful agents
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in the biz and definitely one of the nicest. She is with the prestigious
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Sarah Jane Freeman Literary Agency. She's got a great web page there called my
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Manuscript wish List that I think is one of the best and most useful things
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I've ever read. Anybody trying to sell a book should read what Catherine is
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writing. Oh she's in the magazine too this month, isn't she Laura?
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Yes, Yeah, thought so so I'll put all those links in the show
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notes, and we will talk to Catherine Sands all about the world of agents
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and publishers. But first the news. All right, our first story,
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which involves oh, I won't even tell you upfront. There's a person named
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doctor Stephanie one, and she is seventy five, but she still turns to
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her father when she asks questions or wants someone to bounce ideas off of or
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to talk to her kids. How did he deal with racism, she wonders,
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How did he succeed against stacked odds? Well, the tricky part of
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this is that her father has been dead for more than a year, but
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she's listening to the answers delivered in her father's voice on her phone through an
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app called Hereafter AI. This is an app powered by artificial intelligence that generates
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responses based upon hours of recorded interviews with this gentleman before he died last year.
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Doctor Onny says that his voice gives her comfort, but she created the
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profile more for her children and grandchildren. I want the children to hear all
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those things in her in his voice, she said. Well, that's a
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spin on AI that I at least did not see coming. Jesse. Let's
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assume you could use AI to have a conversation with someone you loved but lost.
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Would you do it? You know, at first I was going to
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be glib about this answer, but honestly, like, for example, I
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never got to meet either of my grandfather's they both passed away before I was
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born, and honestly, I would love to hear from them. And so
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you know, now that we have the technology to record people's voices and to
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give a lot of information, I'm not I'm not against this. I don't
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know if I would personally do it, but I'm not against if someone is
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willing to like do the work to be interviewed enough to you know, sort
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of give a slice of their personality to an AI program, I'm not against
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this. I'm just I'm worried about I'm worried about where the technology for this
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could go. Like we are, we are fast approaching the UH for any
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of my sci fi fans out there, the we are Bob, we are
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legion, we are Bob sort of area of this where what is our consciousness
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and what is our personality? And what does that mean? And how to
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contain such a thing that this this leads to a lot of questions that we
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have not talked about as far as Ai goes on this podcast. Yeah,
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yeah, I mean we've got deep fakes now with people who are still living.
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Yeah, Laura, what's your take on this? I'm with Jesse in
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that my kids never really got to meet the majority of my grandparents and that
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crushes me. I wish that they had gotten to know them a little bit.
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I was trying to record my mom's father's experiences flying in the Navy in
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one of the wars before we lost him, and I only got a little
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bit of it down, not nearly enough. And you know, our boys
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are huge history fanatics and would have loved to have been able to hear that,
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hear what it was like for him. And just I'm not trying to
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be, like Jesse said, not trying to be good, not trying to
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be This is giving me kind of Harry Potter vibes. How they have the
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photos that move and speak, Yes, it just everything that it feels like.
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It's kind of a move in that direction, which I thought was just
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fantastical when I read it, but kind of cool. But the way this
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is being used to be able to save for future generations, the voice,
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the thoughts, the experiences of their family members. I wish that I could
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capture some of that and be able to share. Yeah. I think that's
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a great take. I mean a lot of the publicity on this has talked
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about you know, it's like a sayance, you're trying to contact the dead.
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They have compared it to your history. Buffs may recall that at one
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point Thomas Edison spent years trying to invent a spirit phone by which people could
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call and obviously call the bad people, and obviously that didn't work. But
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this is and I hope a parent would explain this, This isn't really talking
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to the dead. This is generated by something that happened. While it's I
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don't even have very many photographs of my grandparents to be able to share them
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and say this is who we come from. These were my grandparents, and
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as I try to share stories with them, so not even having photographs,
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I surely we could describe that. It's kind of akin to that. But
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you know, I write supernatural suspense and I would get behind a spirit phone
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too. So I'm well, and I'm wondering, and this is bringing in
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my old life into it. But I know that, you know, the
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the largest you know, the Holocaust Organization started by Steven Spielberg after the Schindler's
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List, has been working on a project where, using interviews from Holocaust survivors,
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people coming to the center could interact with them, like as a hologram.
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And I'm wondering if this is where that's you know, if that sort
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of direction is where this can be most useful. Where like I would love
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to, like, you know, go to a museum and yell at a
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hologram of Ben Franklin, Like that be fun for me. That's like right
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out, that's kind of brilliant. Fifty one. You remember the wife who
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talks to basically the ongoing serial on the walls sort of with an AI intelligence
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that allows them to interact. Bradbury was way ahead of his time. Look
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at us catching up to sci fi? All right. News story number two.
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This one involves a first time author, Saddest Thing in the World.
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She lost a major book deal with Penguin Random House after she was accused of
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trying to sabotage other authors by posting negative reviews under an alias. Perhaps I
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should make it clear that when I said this is the saddest thing in the
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world. I'm not saying I'm not excusing her behavior. I just remember how
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exciting it was when my first book was about to be published, and now
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she's going to not have the same glorious experience. This story actually broke a
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couple of weeks ago, but I held back hoping there would be some new
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developments to explain this because I mean, it didn't even make sense to me.
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But now we have a little bit more information. Let me explain the
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situation. Kate Corarine, who is the author of what was a forthcoming novel
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science fiction novel called Crown of Starlight, I was coming out until this backlash
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about the review bombing. Since then, she has been dropped by her US
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publisher and her agent. Her book could even been selected for one of those
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subscription boxes, you know, and she's been kicked out of that now because
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she was posting, allegedly posting fake negative reviews to good Reads, which is
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all of course called review bombing. She had created a bunch of anonymous accounts,
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or not anonymous, but not with her real name on it, and
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suspicion started when people, particularly writers of other books, noticed that the same
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named accounts were leaving scathing one star reviews on a bunch of books by other
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authors that weren't yet released, but We're going to be released about the same
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time as Kate Crane's book. Internet users also alleged that the vast majority of
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the targeted books were written by people of color, and then they discovered that
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those accounts that seemed to be trashing everybody else all gave Crown of Starlight of
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five star review and at that time she was basically nailed. She initially claimed
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that a friend had been behind the review bombing, and she's shared screenscots of
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screenshots of discord conversations between her and this alleged Lily, but no one was
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convinced and pointed out that the if you looked at the time stamps on the
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video, you could see that the conversations had been edited. More recently,
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she explained that her alleged friend Lily, was in fact nonexistent. She said
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she'll be reaching out to the affected authors, whatever that means, and going
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into an intensive psychiatric care and rehab facility. Quote. All I can do
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going forward is to try to live my life in a way that shows you
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there aren't empty words, rather than just saying I have no idea what that
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means. Laura, what's your take? What do you think it means?
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Or Jesse anybody? Well, Jeff, but first, you're leaving out the
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most important part of the story, which is who caught her, like and
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some. At some point in this she tried to place blame on a very
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small subsection of Star Wars fans who are really into ray and Kylo Ren fan
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fiction ray Loo's I believe they're called and like you don't listen Internet, don't
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mess with super niche IP groups like these people are dedicated and smart and have
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a lot of time on their hands and no technology. You will be caught.
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Yeah, well it was. I mean, yeah, it's a science
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filmparrection novel. And some of the other authors that she was drashing have said
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pub publicly. I haven't gotten my apology yet. Yeah, she's making public
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statements, but she hasn't said anything to me. Lara, what do you
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think it's sounding. I know, we keep saying alleged, it's sounding like
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she really did this. Enipows my mind. I can't well, I don't
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imagine I work, No, I know, I know. Let me just
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say I work so hard with aspiring writers and help with their editing. Everything
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that I do, everything that I'm pouring my own time and energy and blood
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into, is to lift aspiring authors and try to bring people up. I
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think we talked at the Women's Fiction Writers Association, when that door is open
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for you, even if you've just got it cracked and got a little bit
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of a foot in the door, try to get as many people in as
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you can. And that's absolutely what I do, and I offer support and
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advice. I just can't imagine. It crushes me to think that somebody in
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the situation where they've beenhanded what so many people are aspiring for, have to
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go out and try to tear down others to feel better about themselves. I
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guess, to try to make their book look better. It's just I can't
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wrap my brain around that. That's not how I operate. I'll try and
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be slightly sympathetic. She is young. I don't know if she's getting good
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counseling. I'm not going to turn this into a writer controversial, but I
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will say that if she had friends in the industry, if she had people
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to bounce ideas off of, this would not have happened. This seems to
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me like the behavior of someone who is a very insular and needs friends.
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What I mean, ye, all to do is do nothing? Yeah,
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yeah, exactly. And also another reminder that Goodreads is not regulated and is
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a terrible way of sort of reading and reviewing books, and people choose what
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they're going to read based on those So that's and they do that, that's
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why they were after them. Now I'm with you, Bill, You're so
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kind hearted. But at the same point, like I know you've never gone
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and left an I'll be honest, even if I read a book and I
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don't like it, I just don't review. I cannot bring myself to leave
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even a mediocre review for a mediocre book because I don't want to hurt that
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person. I know that they worked hard and maybe somebody else really did love
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it. I just I can't do it. I can't tear somebody else down,
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even if I think it's going to lift me up, which it doesn't
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by the way, Yeah, trashing someone else does not lift you up.
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So that's just that's just awful. Yeah, too bad. All right,
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Jesse, cue up the music. Let's take a brighter note and talk to
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Catherine Sands. Catherine, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you lovely to
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be here. Yeah. Thanks, Hey, even though you've been on before,
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I'm still going to ask the traditional first question because who knows. Your
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answer may have changed or I have decided you didn't like your previous answer.
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Who knows. So, first question, if you could offer writers one piece
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of advice, what would it be? One single piece? Well, speaking
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as an agent, my advice is very different from what a writer might offer,
18:23
an editor might offer. I guess i'd quickly say to remember that everything
18:29
you do have, all the communication about your writing or writing you do about
18:32
your writing something I call pitchcraft. The speaking that you do about your writing.
18:36
It's a message in a bottle. You don't know whose desk you're going
18:41
to land on, whose interest you're going to peak. You have no idea
18:45
what's going to happen. And it's a good way to approach the industry when
18:48
it comes to the great agent hunt, hm right, which you know you've
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already said it. You're an agent, which means you've got what almost everyone
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wants. So can you describe how you go about selecting the you know,
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relatively slender number of people who will become your clients. Well, it's not
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very scientific. I think of myself as a book dowser. You don't have
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an AI program for that yet, not yet. But they tell us it's
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coming. You know, we're all replaceable by AI, but not yet.
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I have what I call my dowser feeling, and it's something like the water
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witch is feeling when she goes into the desert and finds water. I can
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feel it, and if this starts happening, I know I should select the
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writer as a client. And it isn't necessarily based on merit or even talent.
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Sometimes somebody's absolutely publishable and I'm just not the right agent for any number
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of reasons. So that's how I make a choice. I get my dowser
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throb, and I know I'm the one just getting feeling. That's I would
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not have guessed that, but I love it. That's so cool. It's
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slightly different from a gut feeling. It's more of a It's more proactive in
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that if I'm doing this, it means I want to pick up that phone
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or I want to pick up that megaphone, and I want to talk about
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this writer's work. And that's not always a gut feeling as much as it
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is a feeling that yes, I'm the partner they need. Very nice,
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very cool. Well was there an author ever that you remember really surprised you,
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maybe the book or the client the author and surprised you by doing better
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than what you had expected. Well, we had a huge success last year.
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I was not the agent at the time for Jarvis Masters and a book
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called That Bird Has My Wings. The book was actually published years ago,
20:52
two thousand and nine, but it led to so many interesting things, including
20:57
Oprah selecting it for her book club. So she had read the book in
21:03
twenty fourteen, but she selected it for last year, and it became a
21:07
New York Times bestseller and led to many extraordinary things. So that was a
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big surprise. That's a nice surprise. Okay. Conversely, no, no
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for anything unless you really want to. But ye, did you have have
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you had a situation that kind of went the other way? I'll confess to
21:30
one. It's a sorry I may start crying, but a book was touted
21:37
for best seller them. We had sales to Japan, to Italy, you
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know, Spain, so many countries were going to do events for the very
21:47
mediagenic. Authors agents are allowed to say mediagenic. We're not allowed to say
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attractive. But COVID happened. And I begged the author to let us put
21:57
the pub date back, and author wouldn't hear of it, and the book
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went nowhere. And so yes, that's the opposite of that is very,
22:07
very disappointing, really deserving book. And I even did something somewhat off book
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in calling the publisher and saying, surely we can agree, this shouldn't come
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out now. But usually I love to be right, but not in this
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case. Oh no, not for well. I know that you have done
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a lot of work, and even beyond being an agent, you've been involved
22:34
with helping writers find their path, which is of course like the writer Con
22:40
mission statement you mentioned a couple of minutes ago Pitchcraft. You did a long
22:48
workshop on pitching at writer Con maybe two years ago. People are still talking
22:53
about it. That was ter Maybe we need to have that again this fall.
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Anyway, you can't do the whole three hours or whatever it is,
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but give the give our listeners a taste or a few tips for pitching.
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Oh well, thank you very much. That thrills me. Thrills me I
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often get wonderful letters saying I took your workshop and connected with another agency,
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and I think, well, that's wonderful too. I really became an evangelist
23:27
for pitchcraft because I realized at one early point and now there's much more attention
23:33
paid to the pitching stage. But when I first did my book making the
23:36
perfect pitch, there really wasn't and I came to see it's absolutely what starts
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everything in motion. So quick, quick, quick tips. I would say
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that I work with a formula called place, person pivot, which I've amnuted
23:49
from Donald Moss's formula, which is setting protagonist problem. So if you're pitching
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a memoir or FEMOA or himoa or a work of fiction, in terms of
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pitching, you want to nail those elements so that somebody could repeat back to
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you ten minutes later, the place, the person, and the pivot.
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And then for nonfiction, it's so important to answer the questions why you,
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why are you the best person to write this? And why now? What's
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in the zeitgeist? What does the reader's need from this book? So those
24:22
are some very quick tips. But if you have three hours, I'll give
24:25
you the rest, or maybe come to writer Con better yet I loved being
24:33
it writer Con. It was a terrific place, Catherine, How do you
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deal with what I would think, particularly for a person as nice as you,
24:42
the hardest part of the job, which is of course having to say
24:48
no, like when a perfectly lovely person pitches you a book that you know
24:52
is just not ready yet. How do you handle that? Hum Well,
24:59
I You've come to not really think of it as no. No doesn't necessarily
25:03
mean no. It just might mean that I'm not the choice, or it's
25:07
not the right timing, or, as you point out, often something's just
25:11
too early and might need careful oversighter development. That means that it's not ready
25:17
for what an agent does. And except for those of us who are working
25:19
editorially more and more, it's it's not meant to be no. You know,
25:26
we see good and turn down good stuff all the time all the time.
25:30
But I do, like in myself and other agents to emergency room physicians,
25:36
you know, I think you were triaging. Yeah, and you don't
25:41
think, oh my god, that's a five year old, that's somebody's mother.
25:44
You know, you don't think that you do the job if you're the
25:45
surgeon on er or Grey's anatomy. If the cop killer comes in along with
25:51
the cop you know you have to bring your A game to both. And
25:55
so it's it's something of a detachment. But I always tell people, as
26:00
do many of us, sometimes it's just subjective. Somebody else may see the
26:04
possibilities that I'm missing. That's fascinating. So well, we've talked about you
26:11
having been to writer Con, but this year you're joining us for the first
26:17
time on the writer Yes, I'm very excited about Are you looking forward to
26:22
it? Oh? Please? I practically packed and I can't. That helps
26:27
me feel better. I'm already picking out what I'm gonna take. I'm so
26:33
excited. I think you have put together so wonderful. Yeah, it's so
26:38
much fun. But it's also and it's intensely educational. I think it's packed
26:44
with information. So are you thinking about what you'll you'll be talking about?
26:48
What are you going to be sharing with us this year? Can you can
26:52
you give us a little idea of that? Well, we have sailing days
26:56
and workshop days, and some of the workshops will folk because pitching, and
27:00
some will focus on developing material. And I want to bring to it everything
27:06
I know about how to really work for publication, which is very different from
27:11
a support of writers group or anything else. So I'm looking forward to really
27:15
working very closely on the main Yeah, you bringing the business side of the
27:22
business, I think, and that can be hugely valuable to aspiring authors absolutely
27:32
well. Also, the crafting for publication is so very different, and often
27:37
a newer writer or someone working on a memo, for example, forgets what
27:41
those other eyes might see because they're looking backwards and we're looking only forwards as
27:48
forward as reader. That's a great point. Yeah, how do you respond
27:55
when people ask you should they get an agent and try to go the traditional
28:00
publishing route which could take a while if they're worried about time or just not
28:07
sure that they have it in them, like or just self published. So
28:11
someone's asking you your I kind of feel like you would prefer that they have
28:17
an agent and go the traditional route, but maybe that's not right. How
28:21
do you respond to that? Well, it's funny because my answer has really
28:26
changed over the years. What I would have said years ago, oh,
28:29
no, self publishing, run, run, And now I would never say
28:33
that because there have been so many successes and there are so many ways writers
28:37
can proactively market and publicize their own books. As an agent, I'm naturally
28:44
going to come down on the side of the of the traditional model of agent
28:48
takes a project to publisher. And yes, I often say in a class,
28:52
try that at home, you know, call up Simon and sister and
28:56
see how to get to anybody. And you won't because everything set up to
29:00
keep you from ever reaching an editor. And you know you've got robotic turnaround
29:06
waiting for you if you try that. But for people who have the means
29:11
of publicizing, possibly they have outreach a restaurant, a medical practice. Of
29:15
course, they can possibly self publish, maybe reach the four or five thousand
29:22
copies sold, which seems to be the area that the number that a publisher,
29:26
a trade publisher would want to see, and then shift over into trade
29:30
publishing, and we're going to see more of that than ever before. The
29:33
other thing I suggest is sometimes if you do have a beautiful family story that
29:38
you want to preserve, of course you should self publish. It may not
29:42
be right for the book world as a for profit business, but it should
29:48
absolutely be a book that people can see. But mostly I find myself saying
29:55
things like, try that, test, call up a trade publisher and see
29:57
what happens. If nothing does, then you want to think about what it's
30:03
involved to find a literary agent to do that for you. I I always
30:10
cringed when I asked a question because I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't escape
30:14
it. How many queries do you get? Oh? No, I cringed
30:19
hearing the question. It's it's never ending, and it's I'm not numeric.
30:27
Really, I know you can't count that high, but I mean I will.
30:33
I don't think that way. I know people who keep charts of these
30:37
things. I don't you know. It pours in the door, it's an
30:41
oceanic tide. But what I would immediately say to any writer is you have
30:47
to believe you're in that one percent that might get through. You just have
30:51
to believe it. So it doesn't matter what other people are are pitching.
30:55
And mostly it's not overwhelmingly wonderful. It's too early or hope, bliss or
31:00
right and helpless is not a word I like to use for writers, not
31:04
at all, but shorthand where right it's not a competitive Yeah, really,
31:08
really make sure that you've prepared and done your research and done everything you possibly
31:14
be can before sending that query in because I know we've heard from people it's
31:19
terrifying to me what they sometimes open up in their in box, that people
31:26
would send it like that. Well, it's not just that there's so much
31:29
available online today, you know, you don't have to do that much research
31:33
to get a sense of how a query might be winning as opposed to just
31:37
not going to happen. But we you know we I'm in an agent's group,
31:41
and we do share some of the funny ones, and you know,
31:45
but we also are respectful. You know, this is our livelihood and this
31:51
is how we often connect with new writers, and conferences are probably the ways
31:56
most of us find new clients. So we've established that you probably look at
32:04
a lot of manuscripts and some inevitably are going to be better than there isn't
32:08
chosen or not chosen. I know a lot of people listening to this podcast
32:15
or possibly you know, polishing off the manuscript and getting ready to email it
32:20
tomorrow morning. So can you describe what this What are some of the red
32:25
flags that you see most frequently that tell you, no, this one's not
32:30
ready, or this one's not for me, or anything like that, this
32:36
one's not going to be picked up by me anyway. Well, I call
32:42
the red flags querial killers, and those are the series of mistakes that writers
32:46
make when they're querial like ceial, I got it. Oh that's great,
32:52
when they set out to wu and win literary agents. And today we definitely
32:57
have a kind of alchemy between the query letter and the first page, and
33:00
we do make a lot of decisions about that all important first page. So
33:07
to say red flag, I wouldn't necessarily call it a red flag. But
33:10
sometimes things are just informational and there's no story that's starting to engage you.
33:16
You know, there are a couple of querial killers, the weather report or
33:20
the letter in the attic, or something too passive that make it all too
33:24
easy to just say, eh, I'm going to move on. Wait,
33:28
the letter in the attic. What's the letter in the attic? Well,
33:30
people waking up from a dream, or you know, there's a letter from
33:36
Grandma, that kind of thing. I mean, it's very passive story those
33:42
But I try to be careful because I never want to sound disrespective. I
33:45
couldn't. I really support all writers' quests and creativity, you know, in
33:52
wanting to aspire to publication, but as an agent in New York City,
33:58
we're moving through the very rapidly to find something commercial and potentially saleable. What
34:07
does your what does your typical work day look like? Oh, dare well,
34:13
what it really looks like? Or how I like you if you have
34:15
a typical workday, Well, I suppose, I suppose that's your prerogative.
34:20
You can decide. But I'm curious. I'm fascinated by by what your real
34:23
work day looks like. But up to you, well, i'd say,
34:28
you know, I do hear of agents who organize different days. Maybe they'll
34:34
have a reading day, maybe they'll have a contract day. My day is
34:36
much more kaleidoscopic than that. There's putting out whatever fire was left over from
34:40
the day before. Yeah, you know, I don't. You try to
34:45
work in blocks of things, but I find that impossible. I find that
34:49
it's it's very much about leaping form, leap frogging from one project to the
34:54
other, getting yourself in the space of a submission. For example, you
34:59
know, if you have a submission that's pending, that's a very particular day.
35:04
You know, researching and preparing the submission list and then getting the submission
35:07
out is one day. Another day might be just reading submissions, which you
35:14
know it again turns into something else you're doing. Interesting. My one of
35:21
my professors in college way back when, I remember her saying that she felt
35:25
like she just got up in the morning and sort of threw herself at life
35:29
and helped that she managed to get through everything she had to that day.
35:32
I have days like that. I understand exactly what she was talking about.
35:37
Well, it's you know, there are things at different stages. I mean,
35:40
you know, you you wake up and you look at email and somebody's
35:44
looking into the Romanian rights for something, and you know somebody else is pitching
35:49
you a new book, and then you have hopefully two offers pending for something.
35:52
I mean, you have so many different little moments in the day with
35:58
regard to different project chicks. Mm hmm. Catherine, do you have any
36:04
future plans that you want to talk about on this podcast? Well, future
36:08
plans are to head to UH to writer the cruise. Yes, I know
36:15
about that. That's a major highlight coming today when it's two degrees. That
36:21
sounds pretty good an ideally to seeing happy homes for the projects I have on
36:30
submission, Yes, of course, Catherine. Thanks so much for being on
36:35
the podcast. Thank you. I've enjoyed it so much. Just a few
36:45
parting words, Laura, we are getting pretty close to the registration deadline for
36:52
the Writer con Cruise. Tell us about the cruise please. The cruise is
36:58
an incredible opportunity to really immerse yourself in whatever your current writing project is.
37:06
We're on the boat. We meet in small groups. You're going to be
37:09
working on your manuscript and everyone in your small group is going to read it
37:15
for you too, so you're going to get real time feedback. You'll be
37:17
led by someone who will be happy to give you their advice as well.
37:24
You can meet with an agent if you want to. Everybody who wants to
37:29
gets the chance to meet with an agent, or with Bill, or with
37:31
me or with anybody else. We are there for you. We want to
37:36
make sure you have the best possible time you can. We could maybe even
37:40
meet in the hot tub if you want. Then you could you know,
37:45
you see me in a swimsuit or maybe that's like not a draw. I
37:50
don't know, but either way we can. It's a draw for me.
37:53
Everybody else stay in your room. Okay. Also, for fans of this
37:59
podcast, you get to see a live version of this podcast on a boat
38:01
or yeah, we're delightful. Yeah, And and let me emphasize when Laura
38:08
talks about everybody meets the agent, that's one on one assuming yes, yes,
38:14
you can talk to you, clarify that manuscripts, your thoughts for the
38:17
future, whatever you want. Then let me tell you Catherine is very start.
38:22
Shall have the answers you're looking for, all right, And let me
38:27
also mention that if you haven't joined the writer Con Facebook group, that's a
38:32
great way to get all the latest information. And please subscribe to the writer
38:38
Con newsletter. And let me just quickly differentiate between the newsletter and the magazine
38:47
that we keep talking about. The newsletter is short and comes out once a
38:52
week or so on substack. If you subscribe, even a free subscription,
38:58
you'll get the newsletter and you my posts on recent news items. But at
39:04
the much more comprehensive magazine with longer articles written by other authors and Asians and
39:09
whatnot, that requires a subscription. But just go to Suspect, find writer
39:15
Con and decide where you want to start, and that'll be fine, okay,
39:19
all right, until next time, everybody, keep writing, and remember
39:24
you cannot fail if you refuse to quit. See you next time.