Episoder
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Since releasing this episode in January, Pineapple Street, now out in the UK, has become a New York Times bestseller! Enjoy!
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Jenny Jackson’s forthcoming novel Pineapple Street is one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, but Jenny is also a Vice President and Executive Editor at Knopf, so she knows all about publishing from the other side of things too. She has an incredible list of authors, from Emily St John Mandel, to Cormac McCarthy, Helen Fielding, Katherine Heiny, who we’ve had on this podcast before. And she says that after 20 years in publishing writing has taught her to be a better editor. Finally, she says, she understands why it is that authors can be so reluctant to revise.
Jenny actually wrote another novel right before Pineapple Street that she wasn’t able to publish and the experience left her heartbroken. Luckily for us, she decided to jump straight back in and write something else.
I’m so grateful to Jenny for sharing that experience here, and also for her advice on fulfilling and subverting reader expectations, rejecting authors she’s already worked with and what it felt like to have friends in publishing pass on Pineapple Street.
Pineappe Street isn’t out in the UK until 13 April but I really recommend that you pre-order it. It really is that good. And I will rerelease this episode coming up to publication.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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If you want to write domestic fiction I cannot recommend reading Tessa Hadley, or indeed listening to her here, enough.
Tessa, who has been long-listed twice for what is now the Women’s Prize and whom the Washington Post called “one of the greatest stylists alive”, wrote four failed novels throughout her thirties and was finally published aged 46, with Accidents in the Home. She has now written eight novels and is one of the modern masters of domestic fiction, burrowing into the complex inner lives of middle aged women and the clashes between them, their feelings and the outer world.
They are books of enormous sensitviy but also, as Tessa says here, born of a lot of control and labour, and while Tessa is clear about how compelled she is to write she is also keen to dispel the idea that it is in any way easy. “I’m a slow and painful writer.. writing in a knot of constipation” she says,.
I find her story as riveting as her writing. She worked away for years on what she later realised were all the wrong sorts off things - books about big political events when really she was interested in things closer to home. I found her fascinating on how she kept going (even when someone told her nobody wanted to read stories about people in their forties) and how writing is learning to hear what you sound like in readers minds.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of six novels including Less and Less is Lost, which are both bittersweet, tragicomic road trip tales about Arthur Less, a failing and flailing mid-list novelist. But it’s not just through his fiction that Greer is familiar with mid-list despondency. He originally wrote Less when he was feeling exactly that way himself, but then, although it was rejected by 12 British publishers, felt slightly less dependent when it went on to win the Pulitzer! Last he year he published a follow-on, Less is Lost, which his agent actually advised him not to write for reasons we discuss. He did it anyway.
I love this interview. Andrew is just such a jolly yet occasionally reassuringly despairing writer, racking up dozens of drafts and being honest about the poverty early writing can involve. I loved in particular talking to him about the details of turning the originally serious Less into a comic novel, and also about finding the diamond heist. You’ll have to listen to end to find out what that means but I think it’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. Find the diamond heist!
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Monica Heisey is the author of the very funny Really Good, Actually, which just came out a week ago and became an instant Sunday times bestseller. It’s about a woman in her twenties getting divorced, which is something that Monica herself did aged 28, weirdly just after she had begun to write a different novel in which her character Kathleen had started to have marriage problems.
That book didn’t make it, which we talk about here, but Monica is actually pretty used to things not making it because she’s also a TV writer (her credits include Schitt's Creek) and comedian, worlds in which rejection at various stages really is par for the course.
Monica was so great to talk to about outlines; since doing this interview I feel enthusiastic about plotting for the first time ever! We also chat about avoiding writing until characters pop up in your head all the time, and about rom coms (yes, we talk about When Harry Met Sally in this interview), and why heartbreak might actually be easier to write about than love.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Last year, Alan Garner became the oldest person ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, at the age of 87, for his novel Treacle Walker. Alan has been writing novels and other books for more than 60 years, many of them rooted in the folklore and mythology of Cheshire where he is from. His first novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen had people calling him the new Tolkien and he received an OBE in 2001 for services to literature.
Among Alan’s books is his incredible memoir Where Shall We Run To, in which he describes his childhood. He was a very sick child and spent days, weeks, staring at the wall of his bedroom during the second world war, thinking and dreaming, and perhaps sowing the seeds of becoming an author years later, But he also describes the pain of being cast out of his community when he got into grammar school. A rejection that still seems to pain him today and which feeds into the type of writing that he does.
Alan has an unusual writing process, that often involves years of what he calls gestation, where he barely writes at all, waiting for the subconscious part of the brain to come up with the goods, and I think there’s something to learn from this - that a writer’s work really isn’t all done at the desk, and that patience isn’t just a virtue but a necessity.
I loved chatting to Alan about writing swear words on the first manuscripts he was throughly dissatisfied with, thinking T.S. Eliot’s wasteland was a load of rubbish and giving up academia to write even when he had no idea whether he’d be any good.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jenny Jackson’s forthcoming novel Pineapple Street is one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, but Jenny is also a Vice President and Executive Editor at Knopf, so she knows all about publishing from the other side of things too. She has an incredible list of authors, from Emily St John Mandel, to Cormac McCarthy, Helen Fielding, Katherine Heiny, who we’ve had on this podcast before. And she says that after 20 years in publishing writing has taught her to be a better editor. Finally, she says, she understands why it is that authors can be so reluctant to revise.
Jenny actually wrote another novel right before Pineapple Street that she wasn’t able to publish and the experience left her heartbroken. Luckily for us, she decided to jump straight back in and write something else.
I’m so grateful to Jenny for sharing that experience here, and also for her advice on fulfilling and subverting reader expectations, rejecting authors she’s already worked with and what it felt like to have friends in publishing pass on Pineapple Street.
Pineappe Street isn’t out in the UK until 13 April but I really recommend that you pre-order it. It really is that good. And I will rerelease this episode coming up to publication.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Good news for Peep Show fans! I am so delighted to have Robert Webb on the podcast today. Rob's memoir How Not To Be A Boy is one of my favourite books ever, a brilliant look at Rob's background and what I think we would now call toxic masculinity – it's the best exploration I've ever seen of how gender stereotypes serve men as badly as they serve women. Rob has also written an excellent novel, Come Again, about a woman grieving her late husband who suddenly finds herself back at university meeting him for the first time.
Rob is, of course, best known as the star of the comedy Peep Show, which he worked on with David Mitchell for 12 years, before which the duo spent years in the wilderness taking random writing jobs and being rejected all over the place, like most freelancers. Rob talks insightfully about that time, and also about how hard it is trying to write a second novel when the idea for the first came to you like a lightning bolt.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw’s book of deliciously vibrant and rebellious short stories about sex and black women navigating social pressures, won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2021, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020. What I love about Deesha’s writing journey is that she did so much other stuff before she even thought about writing. It was only really when she quit her more high-flying job and began teaching the creative processes of writing as an English teacher that Deesha began to learn those creative processes herself. She’s now 50 and her debut, that award-winning book, Church Ladies – which was initially roundly rejected by mainstream publishers – was published in the UK last year. It’s now being turned into an HBO show.
Deehsa and I talk about how her mum’s life and death affected her writing, about learning to write as an adult and about trying again and again to write the novel that she kept on not getting quite right. I so enjoyed this interview and I hope you do too.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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I am on a little break from Season 3 for Christmas this week, but I thought you might enjoy a replay of my interview with Meg Mason in July last year, in which she talks about the traumatic experience of writing her "untitled Christmas novel"!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Who deserves to be a writer? When Sarah Turner was in her early twenties she had a baby, found it challenging and, unable to find writing online to match her experience, set up a blog. A couple of years later that blog, The Unmumsy Mum, had nearly 100,000 readers and landed Sarah a book deal. Her three very funny, honest non-fiction books about parenting have all been bestsellers, as has her debut novel Stepping Up, which came out this year.
So why is Sarah on Write-Off. Well, because of that question: who deserves to be a writer? Sarah has more than 400,000 followers on Instagram and is famous to many people as an influencer, posting frequently about her three adorable sons, the daily difficulties and the magic of parenting and their house renovation in Exeter. As such she knows she’s seen by some as someone who has just been handed book deals, someone who maybe can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to write. But Sarah got the book deal because she was already writing stuff that resonated with people. And those books are really well written.
I absolutely loved dissecting this question of who deserves their place in publishing with Sarah and discussing all the self-doubt that comes with this sort of advantage. Because whatever you think of this sort of route in in the end putting a pen to paper as it were and hoping to do a good job is never easy.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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My guest this week is so well-known that his unfinished manuscripts and first drafts have been displayed at the National Library of Scotland. Sir Ian Rankin has published more than 35 books in his 36 years of writing. That includes 24 novels about the Edinburgh police detective John Rebus, which have sold over 30 million copies around the world. His latest, A Heart Full of Headstones, came out this year.
What is so interesting about Rankin’s publishing history is that he really didn’t make it straight out the gate. In fact it took him a while writing in quite difficult circumstances, including a time when he suffered panic attacks in London and a period living as an impoverished artist with his wife in France, where he was living in fear of not being published again before the Rebus series really took off.
I love talking to him about the rejections for the first Rebus novel and how he still receives rejections today (can you imagine?!), about how he turned to thrillers thinking he’d write the next big airport book, before find his way back to Rebus and, about how writers are the weird kids at school.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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My guest today is the fabulous Bonnie Garmus! Despite wanting to be a writer all her life, Bonnie’s debut Lessons in Chemistry was published when she was 64. The book, about Elizabeth Zott, a formidable 1950s chemist and reluctant cooking show host, has gone on to sell in 40 countries, has been sitting on the bestseller lists for months and is being made into a TV show.
But before this Bonnie wrote several books, the last of which was sent out to and rejected by 98 agents. Wow! We talk about her husband asking her why she was continuing to send things out amidst all that rejection, repurposing stuff from past books in new ones, and the best advice she’s ever been given – if you get stuck make something happen.
Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear you stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!
Many thanks to The Novelry for sponsoring this episode of Write-Off.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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It’s hard to express quite how much I love Liane Moriarty's writing. I have read all of her books, some of them many times, and I just think she combines such a good eye for women's interior lives and the complex issues we confront in ordinary, everyday life with a great sense of humour and unique momentum. Liane published her first novel at 38, spurred on when her sister Jaclyn, also an author, was published. Her first attempt, though – a children’s book – was, she says, rejected by everyone. I love listening to Liane talk about sibling rivalry and support and the embarrassment of that first rejection.
Before The Husband's Secret and Big Little Lies became bestsellers, Liane spent years as a mid-list author and is very honest about the little humiliations she endured before hitting the big time, like doing events where no one turned up. I love Liane’s observation that she’s always trying to get back to the simple joy of writing as a child, unencumbered by publishing needs or expectations. I hope you enjoy listening to her as much as I did.
This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.
You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele
Please do rate or review the podcast on your Apple podcast app – it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You probably know David Duchovny from decades on our screens as the FBI agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files and the TV show Californication, as well as the recent Judd Apatow film The Bubble and last year's Netflix hit The Chair, a campus comedy in which David plays himself – taking the mick out of himself.
It’s not often that Hollywood and literary fiction collide in this way but David Duchovny is in fact now a successful novelist as well as a musician and actor, with four novels under his belt and a new novella, The Reservoir, out this June.
We talk about how David originally intended his debut, Holy Cow, to be a film until it was turned down everywhere he took the idea, how he planned to be a professor and use holidays to write – his father was a magazine writer and playwright so it was a long held dream of David’s to be a writer too – and how his teenage poetry was bad, just like (he says) his early acting skills.
You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele
Please do rate or review the podcast on your Apple podcast app – it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!
This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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This interview has a special place in my heart because Joanne Harris, the prolific author known for the gorgeous Chocolat, among other things, was the first person I ever interviewed. I spoke to her for my university newspaper 20 years ago, and she was, thankfully, very nice then and remains very nice today.
I’m not sure I’ve spoken to a more adventurous novelist. Joanne fearlessly tackles whichever genre she is interested in at the time and indeed isn’t fond of the notion of genres at all actually. We talk about her excellent new thriller, A Narrow Door, and how it felt to write that compared with, for example, her 'gastromances' (not a word she’s keen on, completely understandably) such as Chocolat. We also discuss her making (and burning) a sculpture out of rejection letters, rewriting her fantasy novel Runemarks from scratch because her daughter wanted to see it published and how mistakes are all signposts on the road to success. Oh, and also the time she met Harvey Weinstein.
You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele
Please do rate or review the podcast on your Apple podcast app – it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!
This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jeffrey Archer is a bit different from many of my usual guests. He’s not at all sentimental, he’s very confident – I mean this is a former MP who went to prison for perjury after all – and in many ways that confidence seems impenetrable. But this is, I think, what makes him so interesting to listen to because even Jeffrey Archer is afflicted by self-doubt and even Jeffrey Archer has had to come up with strategies for dealing with it, even if sometimes the strategy is basically just being ferociously productive. Since his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, was rejected by 17 publishers before selling in 1976, he has sold more than 300 million copies of his books worldwide, which makes him one of the top 25 fiction authors of all time.
We talk about his incredible self-discipline when it comes to his writing routine, how lots of editors rejected his debut because none of them believed he would write a second book and how he would not have made a good prime minister!
You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele
Don’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!
The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.uk
This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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I loved talking to Abi Elphinstone, a bestselling children’s author who writes about dreamsnatchers and sky gods and wildcats. She has been called a worthy successor to C.S. Lewis by The Times, and talks regularly at schools about her writing process, with great enthusiasm even when the kids mistake her for JK Rowling. I was especially grateful to Abi for fitting me in when she was practically moments from giving birth, and I think that’s testament to how she’s always keen to chat about her work whenever she can.
We actually haven’t had an author on Write-Off before talking about rejection at the agent stage specifically but Abi is an extremely good example. She was rejected a grand total of 96 times before she got her first book deal, and she is not afraid to talk about it, once posting some of those rejections online. We talk about what she learnt from all that feedback, how her dyslexia stood her in good stead for years of hard work and mapping out stories before she starts.
You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele
Don’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!
The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.uk
This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Chris Paling, a BBC radio producer, had an auspicious start as a writer, accidentally stumbling across a very starry agent with his first attempt at writing a novel. That novel didn’t actually sell though, along with several others, and later in his career, after he had been published, Chris began to keep a diary of his musings about the industry. Not originally intended for publication, that diary is in fact now published as A Very Nice Rejection Letter, a lovely, very funny book. Chris is really good on that sort of sixth sense as to whether something is working or not, and we also talked a lot about whether writing is really a dialogue with yourself or something you are desperate for other people to hear.
You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele
Don’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!
The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.uk
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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If you don’t already know Sandra Newman, you are going to be hearing a lot about her in the next year or so. Her new book, The Men, about a world in which everyone with a Y chromosome vanishes, is out this June, and she is also currently writing a much anticipated feminist retelling of George Orwell’s 1984.
Sandra has experienced plenty of failure, notably when her publisher declined to publish the second book in her two book deal, We discuss unlikeable books, and she tells me all about the time she pulled off a remarkable publicity stunt fort her first ever play when she was a creative writing student, only for it to get savaged in the press.
You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele
Don’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!
The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.uk
This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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When The Girl on the Train came out in 2015 and went straight to number one on global bestseller lists Paula Hawkins was pitched like a debut. But in fact Paula had written several previous novels, romantic comedies, under a pseudonym, the last of which hadn’t done well at all, leaving Paula feeling seriously rejected. What I loved about talking to Paula is they even though she is now one of the most famous thriller writers alive, she remains extremely cautious and circumspect, with vivid recollections of how it felt before she was successful and before she started to really love what she was writing,
Her latest book, A Slow Fire Burning, is out now and is, I think, her best yet, a really clever mystery with a lot of subverted tropes and jokes about book writing. We talk too about not being able to give publishers what they want, the horror of bad reviews - yep, she had them - and the book that The Girl on the Train very nearly was until another author wrote it.
You can find me on Twitter at @francescasteele and Instagram at @Francesca_steele
Don’t forget that I list my guests' books at my online shop https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/francescasteele. This helps fund the podcast so please do buy there! Also do rate or review the podcast on your app - it helps more people find out about Write-Off, and also I just really like seeing the reviews!
The lovely Scott Elliott helped me produce this season. Please do consider him for all your pod needs. https://www.podcastconsultant.co.uk
This season is sponsored by the wonderful Jericho Writers https://jerichowriters.com. Listeners of the podcast can get an exclusive 15% discount on membership by going to www.jerichowriters.com/join-us and entering the code Write-Off.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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