S2E6 May 2026 Q&A with Casey Nott on Five Stages of Grace

Welcome to Kelly's Writerly Q&A, a podcast that celebrates authors and their books! I'm your host, Kelly Sgroi, writer, reader, and soccer mum.

Listen to my 29th episode where I chat to Casey Nott, contemporary fiction author who writes about women and the challenges they face in modern society.  Her second novel, Five Stages of Grace, just came out with Hawkeye Publishing, and it's an every-emotion read. 

We discuss:

• Our last chat S1E14
• The true cancer story behind Five Stages of Grace
• Book launches
• Humour on the page
• Being creatively worthy

And more!

Thank you for listening!

Music credit to Levgen Poltavskyi from Pixabay.

*If you enjoy this podcast, please like, share, follow, and consider buying a copy of the book using my Booktopia affiliate link or buy me a Ko-fi. Your support, big or small, will help cover hosting and production costs, and keep me creating and supporting authors and books!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

You're listening to Kelly's Riderly QA, a monthly podcast that features authors and their books. Kelly Scroy is your host, writer, reader, and soccer mum.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

This is season two, episode six of Kelly's Writerly QA, and I'd like to extend a warm welcome

Welcome back to Casey Nott

SPEAKER_01 0:22

to Casey Knott, a contemporary fiction author who writes about women and the challenges they face in modern society. Your second novel, Five Stages of Grace, is an emotional read that came out with Hawkeye on the 1st of May. Congratulations, how are you today?

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Thank you. I am still riding the high, I think. Um I forgot what it was like that week after a book comes out. I know you're not meant to relate, like relate having a baby to having a new book, but you sort of forget what it's like, and then you're like, oh yeah, I'm really tired and happy, but all at once. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

So send pre-packaged meals, please.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

No one's done that, weird. Not to cook my own dinner.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

No, but it is like birthing a child and ten times worse in some ways because you know, a child only takes nine months to grow, whereas I'm sure this took much longer to write. So you're definitely allowed to feel that way.

SPEAKER_02 1:29

Yes, well, I didn't have stitches this time, so that's always a bonus, but yeah, it took a lot longer than nine months.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

And it's such a beautiful story. You had a wonderful launch, and it was such a warm crowd with old friends that you had their family, new friends, and of course their wonderful writing and book community people.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

Yeah, it was amazing. I just adore how books bring all the facets of my life together, and that I just have this amazing band of supporters that will come and listen to me talk about it, which is still quite mind-blowing. It was so fun, and we laughed, we cried, we did all the things, but yeah, that was great.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

It was so good. I'm gonna talk about that a bit later, but I just want

Throwback to our chat in 2024

SPEAKER_01 2:17

to say now that we met in 2024 when your debut came out, and you were a guest on my blog when it was just a written QA, and you were also a practice subject for me to learn how to zoom record, which turned out to be such a good chat that last year I uploaded that to the podcast. So season one, episode 14, and I encourage listeners who have just discovered you to go back and check that out. It has information on the Hawkeye Prize because you were long listed with your debut and shortlisted with this book. It also talks about accountability buddies and the wonderful Holly Bronbauer, um, research, beta support, drafting and editing, and so much more. So wow, that makes me sound so wise. But yeah, if you can't get enough of me, go back and listen to that one. Definitely. So thank you for taking the time to answer some more writerly questions. And I have had the pleasure of reading Five Stages of Grace

What's Five Stages of Grace about?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

and experienced every emotion. So, for those who haven't heard of it yet, how would you describe it?

SPEAKER_02 3:33

So I would describe it across between the fault in our stars meets steel magnolias. So, um, yes, it is about a young woman who is diagnosed with cancer unexpectedly, and when she's trying to just build a life with her husband and have a baby that's not been going well. So she really gets um rerouted into this quite traumatic um six months of her life where everything around her sort of falls apart. Um, and she has to go through an evolution to really fall in love with herself again. And I think women do that a lot, that sort of reinvention all the time. And I guess I wanted to show that it's not something to necessarily be afraid of, and that we can break and remake constantly, and that's okay, and it's actually something quite beautiful. So I hope that that comes through. That yeah, it's grief is awful when you're in it, but it's not the end, and we grieve over and over in our lives. Sad things will just keep happening if we when we love people or things or anything, and it's a process that you can't really ignore. So I just hope this will make people feel less alone in their own grieving and yeah, hope, hope for their own future.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

That definitely comes through. It's an every emotion read. I laughed, cried, and I turned the last page with a full heart. So I would recommend it for readers of Sally Hepworth because you are so witty, and what readers really most need to understand is that it's not a sad story. Does that make sense? Like, would you agree?

SPEAKER_02 5:28

Absolutely. We've been saying um cancer, but make it funny, yes. Um, yeah, and I think that's how I approach everything in my life. Like, I just try and find the humour all the time. It is there if you're willing to see it, even in the darkest moments. I can remember, uh, for example, a time in lockdown where I had three small children under four at home, and one day I just lost it and laid down like on the kitchen floor, just couldn't just couldn't do it. And my kids all just went and got a blanket for me and covered me up, and you know, my husband came in and he's like, Mummy's sleeping in the kitchen, cool. And we just kind of had a bit of a laugh about um what predicament we were in, and I don't know. I just I like to laugh through my trauma.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

It's important, I think, to share

The importance of being real on the page

SPEAKER_01 6:23

the real side of life, of womanhood, of grief, whatever it might be, and that's what I love about the way you write because yeah, it's a really sad subject of you know, cancer and the battle of that, but you have this supporting cast of characters that keep everything light, and you have the main character who does manage to still make us laugh, even when she's uh undergoing the most disgusting and humiliating uh hospital procedures, shall we say? We won't talk about enemies, cancer.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

But yes, and cancer is like that, it's just changes your whole perspective overnight, and it is a very personal experience for me. I

The real cancer story behind Five Stages of Grace

SPEAKER_02 7:20

was 29 when I got diagnosed with Hodgkins, and it did just blow my life apart, not in the same way as Grace's life. I would like to go on record and say that most of this is fiction. The cancer stuff is pretty real and as it happened, but a lot of basically everything else is not real, which was deliberate. I didn't write a memoir, I didn't want it to be a memoir. I think people who write memoir are really brave, and also I find it easier to be funny and find those moments if I can make it up and if I can sort of take things that were true and then just spin them with you know my made-up characters and people, and that was a fun way to process my grief, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Yeah, that's why I write fiction as well. I think it's definitely easier to almost hide behind that.

SPEAKER_02 8:17

Yeah, I it and plus also my life, it's quite boring and my experience. I was surrounded by love and it was all very lovely, and people were kind to me, and I didn't I didn't have any outside trauma apart from the cancer, you know, just cancer, whatever. Um, so I wanted to make it a bit more interesting and you know, a pacey page turning read um in the midst of the trauma.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Yeah, you definitely added the tension, which made it a page turner, but was it harder to write

Was this novel harder to write than your first?

SPEAKER_01 8:51

this compared to your debut because of the real life story behind it?

SPEAKER_02 8:58

It was harder, not because it was real, those parts were actually far easier to write because I'd lived it, I knew it was gonna happen. So they poured out quite easily. But it was harder to write a second book because there's the pressure of the first book, and you don't want to disappoint readers that you've collected. So I was mindful to like make it good or make it better. Everything I write, I want it to be better than the thing I've written before. So, yeah, I I think there's always a pressure, creatively speaking, when you write a new thing. Yeah, but the personal stuff I think was probably the easier part for me, weirdly, and quite cathartic, even though it was hard and I was sobbing a lot of the time at the computer, but that made me feel like I was on the right track. Like if I was making myself feel awful, then maybe that would come through the page in a real visceral way for the reader.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

That's so interesting. And I've heard a famous author say something along those lines. If the writer's not crying, then the reader won't cry. I I'm probably mauling the quote, but you know, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

And I wasn't really setting out to make everybody cry, but um, it appears based on my DMs lately that that is what I have done. Yeah. Um, so that's why I like feel like I've given them the laughs as well to compensate for that. Um, fingers crossed.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Yeah. You know what summoned my emotions the most? It was the moments with the parents. There was a few moments there, and I suppose it would be different for each reader what parts really got them in the heart, but those were the ones for me.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

And I was

On motherhood

SPEAKER_02 10:50

obviously I was not a mother when I had cancer, but I was a mother when I wrote the book. So I really had a lot of empathy for Grace's mother in a way that I probably couldn't have before. Um, I will cry if I talk about that too much. But that was like probably a nice connection with my own mother. My own mother really isn't not like Susan in a lot of ways. Like I stole things she said uh pretty much verbatim to me as a child. Um, but that was about the extent of it. She wasn't overbearing like Susan was, she didn't overstep. Like, I still think Susan comes from a place of love and care for Grace, but yeah, she really misses the mark quite a bit, and they have a complicated relationship, which it's sort of you learn why as the book evolves. Yeah, that was all made up, really.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

But it's very common, I think, for people to show their love with actions rather than words, and for that to be misinterpreted. So that was another part that I really liked to see on the page because it is what goes on in families, you know, we don't communicate that well, but we're trying to show love in other ways.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

Well, she made a lot of food, so that was uh food was her love language, and a lot of people did that for me when I was ill, and we would just have so much food brought over all the time because people felt really helpless, but less so when they can drop off a chicken catch a tori, so we were very grateful for that, and then some people don't know what to do, so they do nothing, and you know, there's gotta be a happy medium, I think, somewhere in the middle. So I wanted to show those things um in her friendship circle as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Yeah. So you mentioned that you wanted it to be better than your first, and I really liked the way this one was structured. There was a couple of things that stood out to me that seemed

On structure

SPEAKER_01 13:00

very intentional. The name of the main character, the structure of the story, which ties in with the title. Am I right to say that they were intentional?

SPEAKER_02 13:12

Yes, for someone who doesn't plan a lot, I did plan. The title comes first for me always, which I know is baffling for a lot of people, especially people that find it really hard to make a title. But I thought five stages of grief, I was trying to structure it in a way that would make it easy for me to write the words, and that was about as big of a plan as I could manage to have the five stages of grief. I thought, great, I'll break it into five parts, and then I picked a name that started with G. That was about the extent of it, but then I think Grace was the obvious choice because she kind of transcends herself as well. So there were quite a lot of layers in the end to the title, which I'd love to say that I intended from the beginning, but probably I'm not that genius. So it sort of evolved and gave me a structure because I think initially I thought, oh, maybe I could write a memoir, and then I thought, nah, you're quite boring, I don't think that would work. And then it sort of spiraled. I just thought, oh, I'll write the first bit as I knew it, and then see what happens. I didn't know what the ending would be, I didn't know how important some of the side characters would be.

On side characters taking over

SPEAKER_02 14:25

I can't say who exactly because it would be a spoiler, but there was one male character who I put in as a joke for um my husband's friend who didn't get a character named after him in Forgotten, and he was upset about that, so I named one after him. And he just demanded more attention about halfway through, and I'm like, okay, I didn't know you were gonna do this, but here we go, let's roll with this.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

I love that. I love when the characters take on a life of their own. That's I think that's good writing, that's when you've really hit your stride.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Yeah, I feel comfortable when that happens. I'm like, trust these guys, just it sounds like I mean, I talk about them like they're separate people, but they really are. And I I don't know how to do it any other way. I don't know how other writers do it, but for me, I have to think about them separ as separate entities, and then they when they speak, they take over for me. The dialogue is where they shine and where the plot just goes where I didn't envisage.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

That's awesome. And I loved the double meaning with grace as the

How Casey came up with her title

SPEAKER_01 15:39

name and in the title. I didn't think of it at the time when you first mentioned it at your book launch, and you said, you know, you started with five stages of grief, and then you've looked for a a name starting with G, but Grace is definitely obvious when you think about the grace that she has to have to come out the other end without turning into a total angry, despair-filled human being, you know.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

Yeah, and she's not a perfect character either. She's not meant to be. Uh, it's not like you get cancer and you turn into this saintly woman. Uh she's certainly not like that. She gets uh really angry a lot, and also the stages of grief are not linear, so it's not like you do denial, then you do anger, and then you're sordid. You really you're back and forth, and that was a real experience for me in that some days I was just so mad I could not function on any level because I just didn't want to do it anymore. And I needed her to feel like that sometimes, I guess to shine a light on that loneliness that comes with grief. Yeah. Yeah, when you really feel like life has just abandoned you and left you this shit prize. But I mean, not no feeling exists in a vacuum and it's not forever, which is also, you know, hope. And hope is kind of a dangerous game when you're going through chemo because you're you're tentatively hoping, but you're also sort of trying to plan for the West.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Yeah, it's so realistic from my experience of seeing family members go through it and having close calls myself. And I think people will get something out of reading it if they're open to that, because you know, not everyone can be in the right place at the right time. But if they do discover it and they've just had a scare or they've had someone going through it, I think it is helpful to have those signs of grief on the page and see, like you said, how they're not linear, how all those ups and downs, they're so real. I just love that how authentic you've managed to make it.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

So

Demystifying cancer

SPEAKER_02 18:07

I had a beautiful woman message me and say she was so grateful to have read it because getting cancer is something that she was just terrified about, and I sort of demystified it for her a little bit, and she said, I mean, no one wants to get it, but she's like, you know, I know that if it happens, that I'll be okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

Like that was really nice. So special. So did you mention how you actually came up with the title and then what happened after that came to you? And how do you build the story from there?

How did you build the story after coming up with title?

SPEAKER_02 18:43

All I had was the five stages of grief. I did a bit of research on what kind of things happen in each stage. Um, so I had a fair like I'm talking an A4 page of notes at this stage. Holy Bronwau will be just like screaming, she's listening to this. And then I just started, I just off I go. I don't I did this one in scenes, not chapters. This is the first time I've done that. Um, so I can't remember how many words a scene, but some of the scenes are quite short, and that's really just because I get bored in a scene pretty easily. So I do the arrive late, leave early, and that works for me with pacing, but I don't really know what I'm doing. Like, that's not on purpose exactly. I just like right alright, we're done here, move on. What's next? And that's all I do. Like, what happens next? What's a logical progression to this? And I sort of knew what would happen to her physically, but I mean, she was still different to me, we didn't have the same experience, so I I got to play with that a little bit, which was fun. Fun feels like the wrong word when you're talking about a cancer book, but yeah, it was fun to I guess maybe even do grief better than I had done at the time, or work through things that perhaps I had neglected at the time. So it probably closed the loop on my own grief about that experience too.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

And I loved how you just reminded me that you

Arriving late and leaving a scene early

SPEAKER_01 20:24

do uh arrive late, leave early with scenes, and that's something that I love about this book because it keeps the reader turning the page and there's no unnecessary details. You're on to the next thing, you're you're in the scene, the important part quite quickly.

SPEAKER_02 20:47

I think that's really a not a mistake, but it can be a trap that new writers fall into thinking you have to tell everything, and nothing will turn me off a book quicker than if I'm on page two and I'm getting this three-paragraph info dump. I'm like, I don't need any of this yet. All I need to know is why I should care about this character and a glimpse of what is happening in their life, all that other stuff can come later, and I just I I don't want it to get bogged down in that detail that isn't that important. Even there's one character, Justin, and they're having a conversation in a cafe, and it alludes to that he's had some kind of troubled childhood, and that's it. That's all I tell the reader because all she needed to know was he didn't have a perfect childhood. That's it. That was the most important part. You can draw your own conclusions, and sometimes I think we don't give the reader any rope to you know go off and make up their own bits, and that's part of the magic of reading a book is that you you can draw your own conclusions as long as you've painted. Enough of the picture. It's really, it's more important what you're not saying than what you are saying sometimes. Another good example is dialogue where people come into a room and hello, hello, how are you? How are you? I'm good. Get rid of it. Get rid of all that. You can assume they say hello to each other. Like that's okay. You don't have to have every single piece of the conversation. And I guess that's how I keep dialogue snappy and it's how I keep it moving. Where it yeah, but that comes with practice.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

I love everything you just said. That's amazing advice. And so true. We need more books that do challenge us, they don't spell everything out, and they let us fill in the blanks. So yeah, amazing.

SPEAKER_02 22:48

Your reader is smart, they're they know what they're doing. So you can trust that you don't have to paint everything. Plus, I like the ambiguity, especially in an ending where I have people still occasionally message me about forgotten and like, oh, where are they now? And I'm like, Well, I can tell you where I think they are, but where do you think they are? And yeah, it's a bit part of the fun for me. If I'm still thinking about characters in a book after I've read it, that's a success. That is a great book.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

So true. So let's switch it up a bit and talk about humour.

On humour

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Because we are one of the wittiest writers I know. It feels like a lot of pressure. But how do you manage to make readers laugh even when your characters are suffering? Like, is this something that you consciously apply, or is it just coming out that way?

SPEAKER_02 23:41

Uh I mean, enemas seem to make people laugh, so I guess no, it is not conscious, but I think not to sound like a dick, but I think I am funny in general, and I find it very hard to turn that off, and I think maybe it's a bit of a defense mechanism in a lot of ways that's been honed over my whole life. I'm not sure that really cool, popular people end up very funny, like in you know, the girls that peak in high school, I'm not sure they're hilarious. So I did not peak in high school, which is I think a gift, really. I think you want to peak in your 40s when you're really coming into your own. So I don't try and write jokes ever, but I don't maybe, and I think it's my um sometimes just dry delivery of things that I know sarcasm is meant to be the lowest form of wit, but that's all I've got. So here we are. I don't know how I do that on the page, except well in dialogue, I guess that's sort of the character doing it on their own. And I just think sometimes what would be the most outrageous thing that they could say now. Um, and that's fun because they're not real people, like I'm not gonna offend anybody in my real life. So they I have a freedom in writing that I don't have in everyday life. So I'm not I don't know if I'm that funny, like I'm not at the schoolgate you know, having people in stitches every day, but um I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Well, I think that should be your tagline, so please adopt it. And the wittiest uh writer in fiction or contemporary fiction, it seems like to me that that is your voice on the page.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

So and I that I think you're absolutely right. I and you can't uh you can't teach it, you can't

On voice

SPEAKER_02 25:45

fake that, and I think if I was trying to write in another voice, it wouldn't work. So I guess I just write how it comes out of me, and then that is voice. That is what makes my book different to the other ones on the market in my genre, is that it just sounds like me, and my friends will attest that when they read it, they're like, Oh, yeah, she does sound like you sometimes, and of course, and they find it very hard to separate me from the story. So, yes, voice is whoever you are as a writer, and you need to lean into that. And I think the more we pull from that, the less authentic the writing will be, and then it will feel boring.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

So at your book launch, a box of tissues was required,

On Casey's funny and teary book launch

SPEAKER_01 26:35

but also we were all in stitches, so Shannon.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

I think we've had to give some credit to Shannon Kelly White, who was an extraordinary host. She was, I loved meeting her, she's amazing. She really is. So it's easy to be funny with Shannon because she is so funny. So maybe if you want to be funny, you should hang out with funny people because it's it's a bit contagious, and when we get together, we're trouble.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

My question was like, what makes a great book talk? But I also want to know the same question I asked for your humour on the page. Like, did you plan to maybe mention some of those jokes? Like, or are they also just coming out as natural casey not comments, you know?

SPEAKER_02 27:22

Oh, I think that's how they come out. We had planned, like, we planned some questions whenever I do an in an in-person event with someone, we have like a scaffold, I suppose, and inevitably go off-piste. And I try not to plan too much what I'm gonna say in advance because then it doesn't really come out authentically, I guess. So yeah, I think you need a host at an event that you have a good rapport with and someone that you know that will relax you. I hosted Holly Brunbauer's launch, and that went really well because we were such good friends, and I also knew how far I could push her with it. Like, she's like, Don't ask me any questions that aren't on the list. And I only asked one that wasn't on the list just to mess with her a little bit, but that was okay because she trusted me. So I think if you're being interviewed by a stranger, that could be really hard work, and that has happened to me when I've gone to events and been interviewed by someone that I didn't know, and we've had some interesting moments.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

You need to be able to trust yourself to speak off the cuff as well, which is a skill that not everyone possesses. So I think yeah, you're just amazing.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

Now, when I first started um touring Forgotten Around, I didn't really have many riding buddies that I could call upon to do these events with. So I would just, you know, take my books, take my banner, rock up to these little country towns, and I would just talk for an hour, like a one-woman sort of stand-up life story show. And I think I don't think I could do that now that I know that I've been around a bit because that is terrifying. And I was just naively like, okay, well, I've got to, you know, get myself out there, so this is what I'll do. So a little bit of yeah, naivety goes a long way, and yeah, okay, I am not shy, I suppose. I'm kind of an extroverted introvert, I suppose. I like my downtime, but yeah, I I was a debater at school. Does that come? Does that come across?

SPEAKER_01 29:32

Okay, that makes sense. So good. Well, I find writing

On going from journalling to finished manuscript

SPEAKER_01 29:40

to be therapeutic, and I was wondering if you agree with that statement. And if you do or don't, what advice would you give to writers who are trying to push themselves to maybe move from journaling to a final draft?

SPEAKER_02 30:01

Yeah, I mean, journaling is great, and I have done that on and off for my whole life. I see it very differently to writing fiction. Like when you're journaling, it's more of a stream of consciousness for me. It's just, you know, purge it all out with a narrative. I guess you have to have a story in mind. And there was some great advice by I think Jillian McAllister, who writes Thriller as a UK writer, and she says she comes up with her hook at the start, and then she puts it on her wall and she thinks about that hook the whole time. And I think that is really great advice, and I wish I had known it sooner because I probably wouldn't have wasted so much time on tangents that had nothing to do with the point of my story, um, and less editing at the end. So I think that's a good idea to have like your one-line elevator pitch in your mind the whole way through to just make sure you don't stray too far from the crux of your story, and in that way it's quite different to journaling, but journaling is more like a flex, I think. And then you might unearth something while you're doing that that you could take into a story, and sometimes it will be something so innocuous that gives you a seed of an idea. Like, I had a the there's a comment in the book where I compare a man to yogurt, like he's sort of you know, inoffensive, he's like yogurt, and that was a real conversation that I had with a friend at a dinner party, and I said, Oh, what's so-and-so's boyfriend like? And she just went, he's like yogurt, and the whole table just laughed, and it was really funny in the moment. And I straight away said, Well, I'm stealing that, thank you very much. Great, but so I think you just have to be listening all the time to what's going on around you. Again, listening to what people are not saying, maybe rather than what they are. People are a massive contradiction, and they're always giving you gems, so just look for those and listen. Catch public transport, listen to people talk on trams, gold, gold on there.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

Yeah, wonderful points. So I'm going to quote you now because you allowed me to take this quote from our last interview, and I've immortalized it on a bug. And yeah, I just think it's so important. The words just resonated with me, and I'm

On our creative worth

SPEAKER_01 32:32

sure will with other people about writing and how it affects us and what it means to us, and how we do need to be kind to ourselves. So the quote is we all have creative worth, and it's important to remember that.

SPEAKER_02 32:50

Very wise, I can't even remember saying it now. Yeah, true, and just because you might not have your book in a bookshop or published or even finished, that doesn't mean your writing is worthless or doesn't have value, and even if that value is only to you, that is enough.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

You write, you are a writer. That's so beautiful. And just to finish up, I'm dying to

What's next?

SPEAKER_01 33:15

know what we can expect from you next.

SPEAKER_02 33:19

It's really starting to cook. I'm very pleased. This this happened to me last time when Forgotten was released, and I started to really hit my stride riding Grace. So I've now started to become consumed by these characters, and they're quite diabolical. It's a complicated family drama, dual point of view between a husband and a wife. Um, but they have a really uh unpleasant, complicated family, and they also really don't like each other a lot. So that's being really fun to play with. And I'm only early days, but I I feel like we might be onto something. So watch this space. I do have a title, but I better not say it just in case I jinx myself.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

Okay, all right. Well, I'm very excited. I look forward to hearing more about it and hopefully getting to read an early draft. Hopefully soon.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

Hopefully, it pours out.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Yes. Thank you so much for chatting with me again. It's just been wonderful to watch you on your journey over the past couple of years, and yeah, I look forward to keeping in touch.

SPEAKER_02 34:29

Oh, thanks so much, Cal. And you were my first ever podcast, so this feels like another amazing moment to like come back together and um yeah, when I'm not so green and scared. Same, same.

SPEAKER_01 34:44

Are you feeling

Join Draft Through Winter

SPEAKER_01 34:45

ready to knuckle down and write? Draft Through Winter begins on the 1st of June, and it's my biggest writing program ever. Follow Write Till Christmas on Instagram for free daily motivation or become a member over on Kofi. That's K-O-H-I, and join the group chat, Zoom write-ins and catch-ups. Let's write together. Thank you for listening to this episode of Kelly's Writing QA. If you'd like to know more about the podcast, visit KellyScroy.com.