%20(2).jpg)
Craft Chat Chronicles
Craft Chat Chronicles
Episode 1 Unlock the Secrets to Writing a New York Times Bestselling Novel with Gilly Segal
Join us as New York Times best-selling author Gilly Segal shares lessons on crafting bestsellers. Transitioning from law to literary stardom, Gilly unfolds her remarkable journey from hidden manuscripts to her collaboration with Kimberly Jones on the acclaimed YA hit "I'm Not Dying With You Tonight." She offers invaluable insights on persistence, the magic of the right partnership, and the importance of robust critique.
Explore the nuanced dance of co-authorship, highlighting the synergistic power of diverse writing backgrounds and the importance of solid co-writing agreements. Gilly discusses the business side of writing, providing legal insights from resources like the Authors Guild, and how to navigate the publishing industry with finesse.
Discover the art of engaging young readers through meticulous research and savvy marketing techniques. Gilly recounts gathering authentic experiences from riot survivors and law enforcement experts to enrich her narratives. She emphasizes strategic marketing to leverage speaking engagements and the detailed orchestration behind bringing a story to life.
This episode is your guide to mastering literary craft with the insights of a passionate and accomplished author. Join J.D. Myall from Writer's Digest and Drexel University on 'Craft Chat Chronicles' for interviews with best-selling authors. Delve into writing, publishing, and book marketing insights that combine creative writing expertise with real-world publishing experience. Tune in for transformative literary guidance, perfect for aspiring and seasoned writers, and students alike.
#BestsellingAuthorTips, #YoungAdultFiction, #CraftingBestsellers, #PublishingIndustryInsights, #WritingStrategies, #AuthorSuccessStories, #WritingCareerTransition, #WritingCraft #NarrativeDevelopment, #BookMarketingStrategies, #CreativeWritingTechniques, #NYTimesBestsellingProcess, #AuthorInterviews, #BookPromotion, #LiteraryAgents, #RealLifeExperiences #Publishing #WritingTips #BestsellingAuthorTips, #YoungAdultFiction, #CraftingBestsellers, #PublishingIndustryInsights, #CoWritingStrategies, #AuthorSuccessStories, #WritingCareerTransition, #YAMarketTrends, #LegalTipsForAuthors, #NarrativeDevelopment, #BookMarketingStrategies #WritingWorkshops, #LiteraryCollaboration, #CreativeWritingTechniques, #FromLawyerToAuthor, #NYTimesBestsellingProcess, #AuthorInterviews, #BookPromotion, #LiteraryAgents, #RealLifeExperiences.
Commercial before HG release.
Welcome to Craft Chat Chronicles, the go-to podcast for tips on crafting best-selling fiction. Here at Craft Chat Chronicles, we bring you expert interviews, insights and tips on writing, publishing and marketing. For workshops, show notes and more information, visit jdmyhalcom.
J.D. Myall:Welcome to tonight's Craft Chat with the remarkable Gili Segel, a rising star in young adult literature. Her debut novel, I'm Not Dying With you Tonight was co-authored with Kimberly Jones. Kim is also a friend of the Craft Chat. We spoke to her recently too. Their debut novel is on the New York Times bestseller list and it earned them an NAACP Image Award nomination. So you guys have just been doing all this awesome stuff. Following that, their book why we Fly was celebrated as a Sidney Taylor notable book, and her latest venture, captain Marvel's Shadow Code, is enchanting young readers everywhere. And this one was just Gely. It's just you, by yourself on Captain Marvel, right? Yes, my first solo, my first solo. Geely is a two-time Georgia Author of the Year nominee. She brings a wealth of knowledge on writing compelling young adult stories. Tonight she'll share her publishing journey, give writing tips and co-writing tips and give you insights into crafting stories that captivate. Let's welcome Gili everyone. Yay, welcome Gili. For starters, can you tell us a little bit about your life before books?
Author Gilly Segal:So before books. I was born and raised in Florida and I actually spent some time in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania and then after college I decided I was going to go. I grew up sort of solidly middle class, lower middle class. My parents were small business owners and the vagaries kind of of their life owning a small business and paying employees and all that stuff was. I was like that's not for me. I need somebody else to deposit the paycheck in the bank every two weeks. And so I went to law school and that's actually how I ended up in Atlanta, eorgia, where I live now.
Author Gilly Segal:I went to Emory Law School and I started practicing law and I spent, you know, two or three years practicing law. I had always been a storyteller, right, I was that kid like in the back of math class flip into the back of her notebook and writing stories instead of doing my math, which I have to be really careful about when I talk to groups of high schoolers because I'm like, oh, I shouldn't tell that story, but you guys are grownups so I can say it. And so I went to law school thinking it was going to be practical and I was going to get a job at a big law firm and I did. And although I worked for a great law firm, I was like profoundly unhappy, right, the creative side of me was missing and I do contract law a lot of the time, which I like, but it's not the most exciting thing to do with your entire day and I started writing again when I had been at the law firm for a year or two and I started out writing mostly women's fiction.
Author Gilly Segal:And then I discovered young adult novels. This was kind of the early days of the YA, the most recent YA boom, so it was like the Twilight era and Cassandra Clare and John Green were all making a real mark. And I started reading young adult novels and kind of found the voice that I loved the most and the stories that I wanted to tell. And so I started writing YA novels and I had a very, several very bad trunk novels. We all have trunk novels, right, the ones that you start writing and they're terrible, but they're your practice, right. They're like you're kind of cutting your teeth and you're figuring things out. So I had a couple of those and then I started writing with Kim and things took off from there.
J.D. Myall:Tell the people who don't know how long it took you to get your debut. Like what book that was actually.
Author Gilly Segal:Oh, gosh, I I mean 10. I mean I probably written 10 by the time, somewhere between 5 and 10. I was the queen before I got. I had two or three that I had finished. But before this book with Kim, I was the queen of what I call the 30 page novel, where I would get excited by a new idea. And you know the you. You fall into it and you're like, oh, this is amazing, I'm writing and it's going great, and you write about 30 pages and then you get to the hard part. This has was before.
Author Gilly Segal:I spent a lot of time kind of educating myself about craft. So kudos to you all that you are doing that with your MFA program or your association with the Drexel community, because I really did not when I first started out, and so I'd get 30 pages in and I'd get totally lost. I wouldn't know where the plot should go, I wouldn't know how to develop the characters and I would quit. I would get seduced by the next great idea that would come along and I'd be like, oh, obviously that first idea was bad, let me move on and write in this new idea, that's the one, and I would get another 30 pages in. So I have, you know dozens of 30 page ideas that I quit on before I learned to finish, yeah, so. So I mean I have dozens of partial or trunked novels. So if you have those, don't give up, don't give up.
J.D. Myall:Looking back, what do you think?
Author Gilly Segal:you did right that helped you break in and become the novelist that you are today. Can I say find Kim, my co-author, kimberly Jones, is an extraordinary creative and a gift, and I love working with her. But really that's not a very helpful answer, right? I think the helpful answer is spend time on craft, right? The first thing I had to do, honestly, was learn to finish a novel and then get valuable critique or people who you know, gave me lots of affirmative feedback that made me feel great but wasn't helping me grow and develop as a writer. And so spending time figuring out what am I doing well and what do I need to work on and where do I find that help and information.
Author Gilly Segal:I learned that I'm a plotter. Pantsing, which is what I was doing before, does not work for me. I can't write that way, and so kind of it was my instinct to just just pants, to be like oh, I'm going to write, I'm going to write the scenes I'm excited about, and recognizing that part of the reason that I was getting lost is because that particular method of writing doesn't work for me. And that's not to say that that's the method that anybody else should use, just that you should recognize. If what you're doing isn't working, you have to kind of free yourself up to try something a little bit different.
J.D. Myall:Tell us about your publishing journey. How did you get your agent in?
Author Gilly Segal:Yeah, so I had seen I'm with Adams Literary, tracy Adams and Josh Adams, and I had seen Josh Adams at a conference. I went to an SCBWI Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators conference here in Atlanta and I saw Josh, who was one of the agent presenters, and I really loved their approach right. So they talked a lot about how they came to like stories, but also about how do you evaluate a deal, right? How do you evaluate a publishing deal? Do you want to take just the biggest dollars that are on the table? Do you want to find a publisher that's committing and writing to marketing what is it that is right for you? And I really liked their approach. And so I had, like I said, I had a couple of novels. I finished one that was I mean, let's face it, it's a little bit Cassandra Clare derivative. I had kind of an angels and demons urban fantasy novel that I finished writing and I had started subbing it to agents and I was I held back from subbing to them because A-Lit was my dream agency and I was like I'm just going to wait and see. And I got a lot of rejections and you learn from that. This isn't the one right. Something's not working with this particular story and I was glad in retrospect that I held back from them because I was like, oh, I don't want that to be the impression.
Author Gilly Segal:And then Kim and I started writing together. We had the idea for our novel, we started writing together and we actually a friend of ours was represented I used to host this thing that I called Literary Salon. At the time I was working four days a week. My Fridays were off and I would invite all of the writers that I knew to come to my house on Friday mornings and I would feed everybody breakfast and then we would sit and write and talk about books and our plots and help each other out. And one of the women who came to that was represented by Josh Adams, and so when she heard about our story and she liked it, she offered to refer us to the Adams and we were like, yes, of course, and we sent it to her and it was actually just a partial at the time we had not yet finished it and Tracy replied back and said I love this, but I have never offered representation on a partial and I think that you are doing your story a disservice, right?
Author Gilly Segal:I think you're rushing, because it felt very timely at that time and she was like I think you're doing a story a disservice. I can't offer representation based on this. And at the time I was crushed. I was like, well, there go my dreams, because you know, we're nothing if not dramatic as writers. But actually in retrospect she was really right. We were trying to fit the market instead of do the story justice. And so, fortunately, we did not quit and we finished the story and we got lots and lots of feedback which helped us make it better. And then we submitted to her again about a year later and she offered us her presentation and we took it.
J.D. Myall:Hey, that's exciting. Yeah, what do you wish you knew about publishing before your first book?
Author Gilly Segal:Oh, there's no brass ring right, getting the book deal, everything that you achieve. You're going to think that's it, I've made it now and it's not right. Like you have to do this because you love it and you believe in your stories that you want to tell and you want to share them and there's no one thing that happens. I mean, I look, I guess if you're Stephanie Meyer in Twilight, that first book was her brass ring. So there's some exceptions to what I'm saying.
Author Gilly Segal:But for most of the rest of us, you know, the New York times bestseller list didn't guarantee me another sale. I submitted a book to my publisher after that, um, that didn't sell. They didn't want it, and I was like how can this happen? But it just does right. Like it wasn't the right moment for that book, the editor wasn't the right editor for it, um, and so you know you have to love what you do enough to keep doing it, even through the difficult times, because there's no making it in this business right. There are moments of celebration and the work is fantastic, but also it can be very disheartening if you feel like there are these milestones that you should have achieved and you're not achieving. So, like, re-evaluate about what about this that you love and do what you love, as opposed to looking for the external markers of success?
J.D. Myall:Love that, but the external markers feel good. How did you get the news that you guys made the bestsellers list and how did you celebrate?
Author Gilly Segal:So we got the news, our editor actually called and I didn't answer my phone. Then I was I think I must've been on another phone call. This was it was during COVID and my day job. I still have a day job. I still work full-time as a lawyer. My day job was really crazy busy and I spent a lot of time on the phone in those first few months of COVID and I didn't answer his call. And then all of a sudden I started getting Kim's calling me repeatedly, right, Like she's calling, she's not leaving a message, she's not text messaging me, she's just calling, calling and calling, calling. And I was like, oh, I better answer that and see what happened. And she, she is the one who told me and we both cried a little on the phone and then it was COVID, so we couldn't actually celebrate like much. Later we took ourselves out to a fancy dinner, but we couldn't actually celebrate right away.
J.D. Myall:And how'd you find out about the NAACP Image Award nomination?
Author Gilly Segal:Kim actually told me about that as well. I was this was before COVID I was at my day job and my day job is very supportive of my writing. I'm tremendously, tremendously fortunate in that they I work for an advertising agency and they love being able to say, like we're so creative even our lawyer is creative and so I am celebrated at my day job, but I also don't talk about it a lot there because I'm the lawyer and it's just sort of you wear a different hat and you have a different persona, but that. So I get this text message from Kim and it was a screenshot of the nomination that NAACP does Instagram posts to announce it and she like texted me and this was Kim's lifelong dream, right, so we were both.
Author Gilly Segal:She was falling on the floor. She didn't have words. I was falling on the floor. I was like I can't believe this and I went running down the stairs at work. Like who am I going to say this? Like I can't believe this.
Author Gilly Segal:And I went running down the stairs at work. Like who am I going to say this to? I can't say this to anybody, and actually a friend of mine she remains a dear friend of mine like ran into me on the stairs and she was like are you okay? And I was like this is so braggy, but I can't help myself. And that was wonderful. It was our publisher's first ever NAACP Image Award nomination, so they went all out for us and they sent us to the awards, where we did not win, but we had a blast Like we sat near Harold Perrineau. If any of you are old enough to remember the Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet, he is forever my Mercutio and he and his wife are just the most amazingly beautiful people I've ever seen in my life and we sat near them at the ceremony and it was spectacular.
J.D. Myall:Awesome. That's really cool With co-writing. I know you're a lawyer, so did you guys do a co-writing agreement? How did that work out? We?
Author Gilly Segal:did. We did, actually, and I would highly, highly, highly recommend that anybody who is co-writing do a co-writing agreement. We didn't do it before we began, right, we did it before we decided to start submitting for publishers, because when you're writing just for the craft of it, there's no business, right, there's no business of writing. But once you decide that you are going to publish, now you have a business side. Now this is a career, and you have to put and this is another thing that I would say like, before you get into publishing, this is not just a creative art the minute that you share your art with the rest of the world, now you have a business side of the house, and that's true whether you're going with a traditional publisher, a small publisher or self-publication, and you have to worry about things like marketing, you have to worry about things like legal, you have to worry about things like royalties. So I had you know, I drafted an agreement that was it's, ours is sort of mostly balanced. The notion would be like, if we ever end up in a disagreement, this is going to be the thing that we pull out of the drawer and say if we ever disagree, here's how it's all going to break down. Kim had her manager review it right, so it's not unfair that I have the legal background and she doesn't. And we signed it and that kind of governs our relationship to this day, and you can find samples of them online.
Author Gilly Segal:Don't ever just pull a thing off. I don't care what AI says, it's not as smart as people. Don't ever just pull an agreement off. Legalzoom Please go and read it. Make sure you understand what the terms say. The Authors Guild provides legal services to lawyers at very low cost. So if you ever need a legal agreement as a creative person, as an author, go to the Authors Guild. Join the Authors Guild and get low cost legal services. They can help you with things like co-author agreements. They can also help you with things like if you end up unagented selling a book, you don't have an agent yet, or you're working with a small press, or something like that. They will also review your publishing contracts to make sure you're not trapping yourself into a bad deal.
J.D. Myall:Love that, I love that. So what do you think makes your co-writing team successful? What are the elements of a good co-writing? I love that question.
Author Gilly Segal:We lean on our strengths and lean on each other for our weaknesses, right. Like as authors, we all have things that we're wonderful at and we all have things that are growth opportunities in my corporate speak or things that are just that are tough for us, right. So, like Kim comes from a screenwriting background, which means her dialogue and her pacing are top notch I mean, they're just amazing, right. She knows how to pace a book, especially our first book has really drafted to be fast-paced. It takes place over the course of one evening, it's intended for reluctant readers, and so she brings that dialogue. She brings that snappy dialogue.
Author Gilly Segal:I come from a traditional novel background, right? So sometimes she would send me pages and I would be like this is a script, where are they, what do they say, what do they feel, what's their interiority, and she would be like, oh well, the camera is going to show. There's no camera, right? So I would sort of bring that strength of novel background, dialogue, interiority, and then I would submit pages to her and she would be like these people sound like they're 40 years old. And I would be like these people sound like they're 40 years old and I would be like, well, I am 40 years old, but she would sort of do the be like no, this is not. You know, we need to snap up this dialogue. We need to have more dialogue in the page. There's too much description and interiority. So I think a co-author duo, where you have different strengths and weaknesses so that you can lean on each other for them, is really powerful. I honestly think the most important part of being a co-authoring duo is to be really, really honest about how you're going to do it. This is that business side of things again, right?
Author Gilly Segal:So Kim and I both had, and still have, full-time jobs. That means we cannot devote 15 hours a week to writing. We write physically, side by side. That's how we write best. And so you know, we used to use those Friday mornings. We would use our weekends and it was in the early days.
Author Gilly Segal:I think there was more tension around are you able to write? I'm not able to write. You didn't do your pages this week. Well, I didn't get feedback from you, and once we sort of had that very honest conversation of like, here's what I actually have to give to this project and does that work for you? It became really seamless and we don't actually fight and argue. We always joke that we should make up some sort of beef to tell because it's so boring to be like no, we never fight. But we don't fight and it's because we're just really upfront about what we have to give to a project and we accept each other. We meet each other where we are right. At various points over the last I mean, we've been writing together for eight years now Both of us have had to be like I have to step back from this project, I can't work on this right now, and you have to honor that for your creative partner.
J.D. Myall:How did you guys like? How do you come up with the ideas or how do you decide which topics to work on as a team and which one to do individually?
Author Gilly Segal:I usually spam her with links. Links are my love language. If I start texting you links to articles. Or I had a brief affair with TikTok, which I really love, tiktok and I would send TikToks back and forth. I've weaned myself off TikTok, but I will like see something and be like look at this. And that's usually me being like do you want to write about this thing with me? So it's actually sort of been we've no, any time to. The project is going to benefit from two voices and two lived experiences is typically when we want to write together. And then our solo projects have come to us really like from totally different avenues. We have separate agents. Now Kim's moved on to another agent and so our solo projects have sort of come from our agent as opposed to from us.
J.D. Myall:Now does that make it complicated to do group work with two agents involved. How does that happen?
Author Gilly Segal:No, they play pretty well together and you want that. If you guys are at the stage where you're looking at agents, right, like if your agent doesn't play well with others, I would ask some questions about why. But it's in. They represent us, they work for us and it's in their best interests for us to be successful. And so you know they want to collaborate together and they, you know, sort of when we have a project that we're pitching, they get together and they agree upon the pitch and they agree upon who's going to send it and they sort of look at who has the relationships with the editors that we're targeting for a particular project. Those types of things.
J.D. Myall:That's cool, that's good to know you guys often write about important social issues. How do you do that in a way that's like balanced and respectful and also keeps you from ripping each other's hair out?
Author Gilly Segal:Yeah, we had a friendship first, right Before we ever I mean, we write about race relations in America, right, like that's sometimes really hard, but we had a friendship before we had a relationship before. We have literally lived through romantic breakups, our children's ups and downs, the election of 2016. We were here in my house crying on my couch together. So we started from a place of friendship and a place of mutual respect and we actually developed a code word that was like I have a difficult question to ask, right, this question comes from a place of ignorance or it comes from a place of misunderstanding, and we approached it sort of with that background of knowing how much we really cared about each other going.
Author Gilly Segal:I know that Kim would never want to do anything to hurt me, but she needs the answer, she needs this information, she needs this conversation for the book to be its best self. And so we would say the code word and that would kind of be the introduction to a brave space conversation, right, not a safe space, because growth doesn't come from staying safe, growth comes from being brave. And we would have the conversation and we always followed the passion, right, whoever was most passionate about her point was the one who won the argument, because the book was always better served by following the passion right. It was never better served by watering down and compromising and meeting in the middle right Like that was never the right creative answer.
Author Gilly Segal:So we just found our way through it. We put the relationship first. We still put the relationship first. We don't need the code word so much anymore Now. We use it to gossip, like if we have good industry gossip, we'll be like code word. Let me tell you what so-and-so did. So everyone's always like what's the code word and I'm like I can't tell you.
J.D. Myall:Cause if you hear us say it, you know what's coming next. Okay, for those that might be a little afraid about tackling topics like race relations and sensitive topics, what advice would you give them?
Author Gilly Segal:Do the work to get it to be thoughtful, to understand and learn. The very first question I would say is ask yourself why you're the right person to tell this story. So for me, with the with I'm Not Dying With you Tonight. It was an article that I saw. Like I said, links are my love language. It was about a school bus that had become trapped behind a police barricade during the unrest in Baltimore after the murder of Freddie Gray, and it was a bus of high school students. And I thought to myself so it was a predominantly Black neighborhood, although it was a mixed neighborhood, so there were white students as well, and I thought what happened to the students on that bus and how did they get home? But I also knew that, trying to tell that story by myself, I didn't have the lived experience to do it. Well, to do it justice, I can't tell the story of a Black community in Baltimore. I don't know that. I don't know I would never be able to do that culture justice. So the first thing is am I the right person to tell that story? And if you're not the right person to tell that story, it's okay to let it go right. I think sometimes we feel like, oh, this is the one, but there's no one right. We're creative people. There's always going to be another, there's always going to be an idea that we're suited for. And then, once you've decided you're the one who's going to tell the story, do the work to take it, to get it right. Right To do make sure that you have an understanding of the culture that you're talking about. Make sure that you are being plausible and thoughtful about how you're rendering it.
Author Gilly Segal:If you are writing outside of your own experience, are you getting input from people who have that experience?
Author Gilly Segal:Sometimes we call them sensitivity readers, sometimes we call them authenticity readers, but it's really no different than doing research. And if you're a thriller writer and you're writing about a murder and you talk to a doctor to see if you got the wound right, it's really no different than writing about another culture and seeing did I do this culture justice? And then be willing to take hard feedback, like whether it's before your project gets published or after your project gets published. You know, no culture, no community, no hard topic is a monolith. People have very different feelings about it and so you're going to get hard feedback. You're going to get people who hate your work and you're going to get people who tell you you did a terrible job and you have to sort of put your big kid pants on and weather that storm and accept that if you wrote the best story that you can write, that's all you can do what do you think are the essential elements of a good young adult novel?
Author Gilly Segal:Ooh, I think plot and character are really central to young adult writing. Right, different from adult novels, which can take a lot more time with description, which can take a lot more time with meandering. Right Like, at the core of a good YA novel you have it's a coming of age story. You have a young person who is navigating, most often their entry into a wider world. Right, middle grade is a lot about how do I interact with my own family and my immediate community, and YA is how do I interact with the larger world, and so you know that's a very emotional, character-driven journey. And also YA is really unabashedly about plot a lot of times, or at least the YA that I love is. And so you know you don't have a thousand pages to write a wandering philosophical tome about the meaning of man. Right Like, you can talk about the, you know the significance of man on earth, but it's got to be in the context of a rip-roaring adventure as well, because you just don't hold young people's attention without that.
J.D. Myall:Very true, very true. Can you give us some tips on creating a good villain or antagonist?
Author Gilly Segal:Villains and antagonists are the most fun. They have to be plausible, right, like, unless you're writing a Phineas and Ferb screenplay and it's Doofenshmirtz, which he's always my example If you haven't watched Phineas and Ferb, by the way, it's fantastic and you really should, because it's really really clever writing, even though you know it's intended for kids but there's a lot of grown-up stuff in there too. But Doofenshmirtz, the villain, is super cartoonish and implausible and he's fun because he is. But in a novel you have to have a plausible villain, they have to have a motive, they have to want something that seems achievable, and I think they have to have a little teeny bit of sympathetic element to them, right? You also, I think they have to have a little teeny bit of sympathetic element to them, right? You also, I think, have to think about your villain in relationship to your hero.
Author Gilly Segal:So in my Captain Marvel novel I don't know if you all are Marvel fans or not, but if you are, you will know that, like Carol Danvers, captain Marvel is the most overpowered superhero in any universe period. She is indestructible. Physiologically she's almost indestructible. She shoots lasers from her hands. She can turn into this literal comet shooting through the sky called Binary. It's really hard to harm. Yep, I love Captain Marvel too. She's the best. But it's really hard to take a chunk out of Captain Marvel.
Author Gilly Segal:So when I was working on the book, I was like, well, how do you threaten such a seemingly invincible character? Well, the only thing that's vulnerable in Captain Marvel is her mind, right, like she's in the. I write in the comics universe, not the cinematic universe. And so she's recently discovered that she is a half alien. Her mother is actually an alien Spoiler alert, sorry about that.
Author Gilly Segal:So she's sort of grappling with this big identity question of like. For her it's who am I? And how much of all this amazing stuff that I achieved in my past is because I worked my ass off for it. And how and you can't say ass in a marvel book, by the way. You can say badass, but you cannot say ass to mean the backside um, how much of this is because of who she, because of of her own hard work, and how much of it is just because she was born this way, right?
Author Gilly Segal:So she's grappling with a big identity question, and that led me to her villain, who is the flip side of Carol's coin. Right, like she did get her powers from a stone and like, but for some people in Carol's life, like she easily could have been the villain herself, this particular villain. So I think your villain and your hero should exist kind of in tandem, and if they don't, you have to ask yourself why are these two characters in this particular book? If I could swap my villain out with any other villain and still challenge my hero, I think you haven't dug deep enough into your story.
J.D. Myall:Love that. How do you avoid the dreaded saggy middle?
Author Gilly Segal:I don't know if I do, no, I for me it is plotting right, like I am an intense plotter and I get feedback on my plot, like I do outlines, really intense outlines and I get feedback on my outline before I ever put pen to page. So I can sort of try to identify that and then it's if you're. Another signal for me is often, if I'm bored writing it, I have to ask whether the reader is going to be bored reading it. So sometimes your own reaction to a scene is a good gauge of whether or not you're moving the plot along. Your own reaction to a scene is a good gauge of whether or not you're moving the plot along.
Author Gilly Segal:I have this method that I use, called the BCD method, and you can turn. I said before you should get good feedback and you always should. So you can use this with your experienced feedback people and you can use it with inexperienced people pretty effectively as well and you give them a copy of your manuscript and you say everywhere where you're bored, write a B. Everywhere where you're confused, write a C. And everywhere where you don't care, write a D. And if you find in various sections, especially in the middle, that you're getting a lot of Bs and a lot of Ds, your pacing is off, you're in the saggy middle and then you just pull those scenes, you reimagine, you pull, you try different things until you find until you unlock the, the solution, how do you maintain tension?
J.D. Myall:those steps I don't know.
Author Gilly Segal:Um, so for suspense, what I the best tip that I've ever seen about this, and this isn't for me. I can't remember who it's from, so I'm stealing freely. Great, yeah, your suspense comes not from your reader not knowing what's going to happen, but from caring. Right, so it's you have to. It's a very delicate balance of withholding enough information from your reader that they go, ooh, what's coming next? And I care about what's coming next, without confusing them. Right, so you don't. I see a lot of novice writers, particularly in the mystery or thriller genres. They're just sort of they'll get to a place and they'll be like if only she had remembered this important thing that happened in the past, or she couldn't stop thinking about that April. And there's only so much of that that you can do before you frustrate your reader. Right, and at some point in time you're withholding from the reader and you don't want to do that, right, you want your character to be in the dark, but not your reader, and that, I think, is what builds suspense and tension.
J.D. Myall:How do you hook readers from the very first page? What are the essential elements of a good first page?
Author Gilly Segal:What are the essential elements of a good first page? You want to start your story at the moment, before all hell breaks loose, basically right. You want them to immediately have a sense of who we are and where we are. Right. Who are our characters? Where are they? Why do we care about them? So you want to give them something big and important to do on the page. Right, this is the classic. You don't want to open your novel with your character standing in front of the mirror and, you know, admiring themselves or looking out at a field, right Like, those are not things that build tension.
Author Gilly Segal:So you want to build tension on that first page. First page you want to establish who and where we are um.
J.D. Myall:I had something else, but it slipped my mind. It'll come back to me, okay. Um, what are your tips for tying it up like for a compelling ending?
Author Gilly Segal:um, pay it off right. Like whatever you're aiming for, don't forget to pay it off right. Even if you're writing a multi-part series. Every novel should be self-contained. So if we started out with, you know if your character in our first novel I'm Not Dying With you Tonight the character that I predominantly wrote is an incredibly lonely kid. She's been uprooted from her life. She's moved to a new city. Her mom has abandoned her. She's really, really lonely, and her journey has been to find friends where she is now so at the end of it.
Author Gilly Segal:The payoff for her is that she's building a relationship with the other character in the story. So, whatever you started, wherever you started your character, make sure that you have moved them all the way to the place where they need to end up, because that's the payoff for your reader.
J.D. Myall:I love that. What advice do you have for other writers who are considering the co-writing, like you and Kim have done?
Author Gilly Segal:Yeah, have the hard conversation about what you guys can contribute to your project upfront, right, is it whether it's time you know if you are not in the same city what is a realistic expectation? How many pages can you realistically commit to this per week? Make sure that you really respect each other creatively. I have tried to co-author with other people and it fell apart, and in every instance it's fallen apart because we don't actually respect each other. Like each other's creative product at the end of the day, right. So like you can't force. I know that sounds really harsh, but but you know, like if you find yourself wanting to school your co-author about craft, you're not at the same place in your career and maybe you guys are not the best co-authors, right? Or vice versa, if you feel like your co-author is schooling you about craft and you don't really need it, like you have to sort of respect what each person brings to the project and if you don't, it's best to go separate ways early. Like don't invest a lot of time in those projects.
J.D. Myall:Okay, I'm going to jump back to your agent, because I have a question. What does your agent relationship look like? Like, do you submit ideas and then they let you know which they think they can sell, or do you submit whole manuscripts? How does your agent relationship work?
Author Gilly Segal:That's a really good question. So we talk kind of in advance before I invest a lot of time writing something, because I'm a very slow writer and I do have a very demanding full-time day job and three children that I balance all of this with, and so I do not want to spend two years working on something that she turns around and goes. I'm not feeling that. So I run everything by her sort of early on in the process she tends to let me drive. I'll say to her look, I'm interested in this, and she'll be like if that's what you want to do, that's what I'm going to go out there and try to sell for you. Right? She's honest with me.
Author Gilly Segal:I sort of have flirted in the past with the idea of a graphic novel. I have a middle grade graphic novel idea. I'm not an artist though, and she has been very upfront with me that where the market is right now is author illustrators are what the market is prioritizing in the graphic novel space. And she's like she doesn't tell me not to, but she just sort of warns like you might sink a lot of time into this project that nobody's going to look at because you are not an author illustrator. So she's very upfront with me about where the market is and that's what you, you know, that's what she earns her money off of right, like she knows the market, I don't. But also if I say to her, like my next thing that I'm going to go on submission with is like a dual timeline historical and modern narrative, and she was like, if that's what you're, that's where your heart is, that's what we're going to try to sell. So it's a it's a pretty open and honest partnership, I think.
J.D. Myall:That's good. So when she talks to you about the market, what has she mentioned? What seems to be selling now?
Author Gilly Segal:Romantasy is really big right now. Right, the romance, fantasy stuff, mysteries are still pretty hot. Graphic novels for middle grade are very hot, although, like I said, they're really looking for or at least six or so months ago when we talked about this, they were really looking for author illustrators. Sadly, my talent is with words, not with pictures, so that's never going to be me. Yeah, that's kind of in the YA world. I don't really know about the adult market. If any of you are adult writers, sorry about that.
J.D. Myall:So you guys, you guys can ask Gili questions now if you have any. She also is a lawyer so she can answer some of your writerly lawyerly questions, like if you can have your characters visit McDonald's and things like that in your story. So if you have any of those type of questions, feel free to ask those as well. Does anybody have any questions for Gili?
Speaker 4:Hi, I've got a question. First of all, thank you so much for visiting us. I direct the Drexel MFA and we love these craft chats. Jd, you do such an amazing job and I love your questions, and so my question is this in terms of your partnership, I really loved hearing you talk about how you write side by side and how you essentially fill in or edit each other. But my question is this Do you like assign each other chapters, like, okay, I wrote this chapter, you're writing the next one? Like how does that work in terms of actually parsing and doling out the work itself?
Author Gilly Segal:So for both of our two published co-authored novels they're told in two voices. There's two main characters and for our first novel, for the first draft especially, kim primarily took responsibility for one character and I primarily took responsibility for the other. And then, by about the second or third draft of that, we realized that that kind of wasn't working and we would sit side by side and we I mean we talk it like we're all talking right now, and then she did this and then she said that and what would she say here? And we wrote all of our second book that same way. I mean, again, there was still sort of two main voices, characters, and the nice thing about co-authoring is that really ensures that the characters don't sound exactly like one another.
Author Gilly Segal:Right, that's one of the hard parts if you're writing a multi-POV story is, if you're not careful, everybody sounds the same, and for us it's built in that they're not going to cause we have two voices contributing to it, but we don't. We tried the back and forth draft, chapter by chapter thing. I know a lot of other authors who do things that way and it just didn't work for us. Um, which just goes to show there's no one right or wrong way to do things like the. The right. The wrong way to do things is never to change your process If it's failing you, that's. The only wrong way to write is to stick with something that ain't working. But yeah, that's kind of how we literally side by side I'm a typer like I'm a visual and Kim is an auditory person, so she's like talking out loud and I'm like wait, I can't type that fast and we'll stop each other. We also be like we didn't have another code word. This is what I can share because we don't use it to gossip. But I can share because we don't use it to gossip.
Author Gilly Segal:But oftentimes when you're brainstorming and this is a challenge, right is you're looking for that perfect phrase, that perfect thing and I think that's some of what writer's block is right is the gap between our expectations and our reality.
Author Gilly Segal:And so we have developed, we say not but and we are go like. And then she says I hate you now, Jim, not but, and we know that's like a placeholder phrase, something in the sentiment of I hate you, jim is going to go there, but we're not going to halt our forward progress by trying to wordsmith the perfect phrase right now. We'll come back to that on a revision, and you all can have not, but because it's not secret, I will do that in my solo writing too as well, like on my first draft. I will literally have all caps, brackets, something cool here, or you know, she has a revelation about this, and then you know again. I think, particularly if you're someone like me who struggles with drafting, I'm a slow, slow drafter. If I let myself get stalled swirling around perfection I will never finish, and so I have to be like, give myself permission, hold the place and give myself permission to keep writing and come back to it on a future draft.
J.D. Myall:Is it easier to write individual or as a team?
Author Gilly Segal:I think it's easier to write as a team, especially because sometimes you're like I mean it's easier to write as a team, especially because sometimes you're like I have written this novel into a corner, you get it out now it feels like your problem for a little while. But yeah, I mean you have that sort of built in. Writing is such a solitary thing. Except, it's really not Like if you are only writing solitary, I really encourage you to find a writing group that you can go bounce stuff off of Right. Encourage you to find a writing group that you can go bounce stuff off of right, even if you're not sharing pages quite yet.
Author Gilly Segal:For Captain Novel early on I was under a very strict NDA. I was not allowed to share that. I was writing about Captain Marvel for quite a while, and so I had this group of writer friends that I oftentimes will bounce plot problems off of. And so we went to a coffee shop and I'm like, okay, I'm going to be really oblique and obtuse, but I'm going to be like what if I had a?
Author Gilly Segal:There's a mother and daughter thing in the Captain Marvel book. They're not my superhero characters, they're the people that I got to contribute to the Marvel canon and I love them, but they're sort of a mother and daughter situation and I'd be like, okay, so if you were a daughter who was mad at her mother and I'd have to come up with proxies for things like shoots lasers out of her hands, but we sat in a coffee shop and I and bounced ideas off of one another, and so with a writing partner, you have that built in and if you're writing solo, you might have to go out and find your crew that you can do that with.
J.D. Myall:Does anybody else have any other questions?
Speaker 6:I had one. What is your research process and how do you split that with your co-author?
Author Gilly Segal:Oh, that's such a fun question. We are a very people-oriented research group, right, so we talk to and interview people who have the lived experiences that we're trying to put on the page. So for I'm Not Dying With you Tonight. We talk to riot survivors, everything from the Philadelphia riot of the 1960s to Baltimore to LA. Kim interviewed someone who had survived the LA riots, who talked about sort of pockets of violence, and that is directly on the page in our book. I interviewed a police SWAT team to hear, like what would the police really be doing? Like how did they? How does something start small and become really big? What are the conditions in the city? Where would you be responding? Uh, and we split it up kind of based on relationship, like who, who knows the person that they can ask to spend sometimes 30 minutes and sometimes three hours, like I sat with the squat guy for three hours and he was the first thing he said to me was like where's your map? Um, and we had this like janky, like it was like a folded up piece of you know legal paper like this, and I like put it on the page and he marked things on it for me. But it's relationship based and people based For my historical novel that I'm working on right now.
Author Gilly Segal:It's a totally different process, and this one is like the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole scene where she's falling down and like grabbing things would be a very orderly picture of what I'm doing. I mean, it's a lot, a lot of book research. It's a historical novel and the more you write, the more that you discover things like did they have refrigerators during the time period that I'm working on? Or was like at what point? It's like where am I in the history? What did they haveators during the time period that I'm working on? Or was like at what point? And so like where am I in the history? What did they have? What did they wear, what did, how did they communicate, how did they get around?
Author Gilly Segal:And that affects everything, not just from like writing the scene, but also the timeline, right. So I'm writing in the lead up to World War II, the 1930s and early 1940s. Information doesn't travel as fast as I needed it to, so I was like oh shoot, she can't know this in a matter of days, she would not know this for a matter of months, right? So it's going to affect not just the immediate scene construction but sometimes your whole plot. So that is a rabbit hole that I will confess. I'm having difficulty climbing out of this rabbit hole because it's endless.
J.D. Myall:How do you guys handle marketing?
Author Gilly Segal:as a team. Oh, kim is front of house and I am back of house. That's how we handle it. Kim is an amazing order and speaker, and I mean so. I say that a little facetiously, right, like we were both. Um, we do really well in front of crowds.
Author Gilly Segal:This is the thing I'll tell. It's the dirty secret to marketing. Right, I'm gonna ruin some, I'm gonna break some hearts. Right now, there's nothing that you as an individual can do that competes with the money of a big publishing house. Period, end of story. I will brook no challenge, right, if a big publisher decides to put a lot of money behind a book, it's going to be successful.
Author Gilly Segal:Now, that doesn't mean that your career is over, right. What it means is you have to figure out what marketing works for you, and that's where you put your time, treasure and talent. So, for Kim and me, it's getting in front of people. We do the best when we're in front of crowds, so we prioritize things like book conferences, librarian conferences, bookseller conferences, school visits, and we spend a lot of time working on our shtick. Right, like it's not accidental. We get together, we talk about what works and what didn't. We debrief afterwards. We're both trained orators. Kim literally went to clown college at the Ringling Brothers and Parma Bailey Circus Clown College, and I'm a lawyer where an enormous part of my training in law school was public speaking. So that's what works for us and we prioritize. You know, if we have to travel ourselves sometimes to make it to a conference or to an event, we'll do that because we know that that's a successful way for us to sell books.
Author Gilly Segal:Tiktok content, instagram content, all that stuff not successful for me. I don't put a lot of time into that. There are ways to do that successfully. They're just not my natural like, so I don't put a lot of time in that and it doesn't sell a lot of books for me. So it's really like, once you sort of remove yourself from expecting that you're going to be able to compete with a big publisher, what works for you? Where's your audience? This is really dependent upon who you're writing for. My audience is at school and going to school libraries, so for me it's incredibly important to be talking to teachers and librarians, because that's who's putting my book in the hands of kids.
Author Gilly Segal:If you are writing women's fiction, your audience is in book clubs. How are you going to get in front of the book clubs. How are you going to get to them If you are writing nonfiction? I don't know the answer to this. Right, you got to figure, like, where is your audience? And you find out where they are, and then you meet them there. You develop the things that you are. You work hard on the things that you're good at. You develop the things that you're not.
Author Gilly Segal:Here's the other thing I would say. Like if I, when you develop the things that you're not, here's the other thing I would say, when I meet new, young, emerging authors, the number one thing that I would spend my money on if you're not good at public speaking, is media training. There is always going to be an element even if you don't love it of public speaking associated with selling your book, and so, if you are not already a trained public speaker and you are uncomfortable with it, spend time and money developing your skills. You're going to have to be able to pitch your book in under 30 seconds, and it can't be.
Author Gilly Segal:Well, it's an exploration of the identity of a half alien and she's wondering where she fits in society. Like that is not a successful pitch for Captain Marvel book, right? So, before your book comes out, spend time developing your 30-second pitch, spend time developing your shtick, whatever it is right, like if you can make them laugh, make them cry, make them think you have won that public appearance and that's not accidental and you can develop those things. So that's like all the stickers in the world and for pre-order campaigns. Didn't move the needle for my books, but being able to get in front of librarians and make them cry was really successful. So figure out what works for you and spend time on that.
J.D. Myall:And do you have any quick tips for school visits that worked for you? Like, how did you, yeah, be flexible?
Author Gilly Segal:Visuals are great, right, like how did you, yeah, be flexible? Visuals are great, right, like students are. They've got a lot of stuff that pulls at their attention, and so be like this is another thing that you work. You can work on in media. Training is learn to read a room, and when the thing that you're doing is failing, they're bored, they're talking amongst themselves. They're not paying attention. Move, they're talking amongst themselves. They're not paying attention. Move on, like abandon ship. Move on, do something else. School visits require a lot of flexibility, love that Anybody else have any questions for Kaylee?
Speaker 7:Yeah, I had a quick question. Thank you so much for doing this. Sorry the bad resolution of my camera. Here I'm doing a novel that's set in an actual historical event. That was not a historical uh novel, it's. It's like a ya teen fiction novel and it's based on some of my life and some not of my life, but it's centered around a real event and there's some real rumors in there that happened in real time. Do I have to be worried? I'm not letting it stop me from writing the story, mind you, but when it comes time to that being read by people, does that become a worry with the publishers, whatever that they're going to need permissions or that they're worried about what it'll do? It's not like anything's being bad mouthed or anything's unfactual. There is some dramatic license in the timeline, but other than that you know what I mean it's still true to its form.
Author Gilly Segal:Yeah, I mean, if it's inspired by real events, but not actual real events, you're probably okay. You know, be inspired by don't actually be the real events, especially if you're talking about real people. I would be a little bit cautious about real people because you can get into the like defamation and slander space and at that point in time you're also not really writing fiction, you're writing memoir, which is a different story. But so I would sort of say, like, make sure that it's truly inspired by real events and not just a reflection of them.
Speaker 7:Yeah, no, it doesn't go on to slander or talk about any of the people, so much as relate the actual events that are happening as they happen. Like I said, the dates might be a little off, but other than that, the actual events that are happening as they happen, like I said, the dates might be a little off, but other than that, the the actual events are true and they're in the press and all that stuff, I mean they were all legitimate yeah, I mean, nobody owns facts, right.
Author Gilly Segal:Nobody owns factual history. Your, your characters, can go to mcdonald's, by the way, if it's sort of what we call de minimis use, right, like they went to mcdonald's and had dinner and it's not like the whole you're not your book called you know surviving McDonald's so much that it seems like a brand is owning it. But yeah, I mean, facts are facts, right. If these are things that happened, again, just be a little bit cautious about the license that you take, because you know your publisher will ask you for an indemnification. So if you're too close to real events and they're non-factual or they're debatably factual, you have the potential to get asked some hard questions.
Speaker 7:Right, thank you Appreciate that.
J.D. Myall:Any more questions?
Speaker 5:Yeah, sure I'll go Again, like everyone else has already said. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet and do this. Um, it's very interesting to me. Um, actually, how many lawyers end up becoming writers? Uh, everyone I know, and even professors I worked under. Um, I also hate it because every time I tell my mother I get the most satisfying I told you so imaginable from her.
Speaker 5:Because I didn't want to go to law school, I chose to try to do the path of writing while I'm here. But my question is kind of piggybacking off of what Jonathan had been saying how willing are you to deviate away from facts for the sake of the story? Will you incorporate more fictional elements into it, even though this is based off true events that have actually happened? How much are you willing to deviate, and how much are the people that you talk to who experience these situations, or even readers, because we all know how picky readers are when they also like to do the I told you so how much of that are you willing to make up for the sake of your story?
Author Gilly Segal:Yeah, I mean it depends how. You know steely a spine you've got right. It's your story. You get to decide how much you deviate and how much you don't If it all hangs together. You know, if you're telling a great story with deviations from the things that people have shared with you, um, go for it, right, like you're fine.
Author Gilly Segal:If you are talking about real life events and you deviate from them a whole lot in a historical novel, I would be a little bit careful about that. I would be a little bit careful about that, just because it's like, unless you're telling an alt history of some sort, like, why, why do you need to deviate that much? So, for example, the historical novel that I'm working on right now is set in the 1930s. You can all imagine some big world events were taking place in the 1930s. If I don't have Hitler invading Poland at the right time, why am I doing that?
Author Gilly Segal:Right, in a realistic novel, non-alt history, non-fantastical novel, there's kind of no justification to deviate from that massively right. And what I need to do then is figure out how to make my fictional elements align with the historical timeline. Or I've got a bigger problem. But if it's small stuff, I'm trying to think of small stuff that I would deviate from. They did or didn't have a particular event, the movie wasn't out yet and they're going to see a particular movie, right, the small stuff, I think, doesn't matter so much, but huge, huge changes to actual historical facts are. In my opinion. You can do whatever you want, but in my opinion you're going to rub your readers the wrong way and you better have a really good reason to do that, because if you don't, I'm not sure Like that's you serving, that's like self-serving instead of serving the story. Does that make sense?
J.D. Myall:It does Any more questions?
Speaker 6:Yeah, I had a question that you mentioned I guess a legal question when you mentioned you can put in your book like they went to McDonald's. How much of that can you actually get away with, like song quotes or saying you know they went to so-and-so's concert or things like that? Does it ever get to a point where you would face legal action, I guess, for putting that in?
Author Gilly Segal:Yes, and song quotes is a great example. So you're talking about two different things there. One is trademark, and you're talking about three things trademark, copyright and rights of publicity. So trademark is brand names and as long as you're using it to refer to the actual thing in what's called a de minimis way, right. So inconsequential, not important to the story, not a major deal you're unlikely to get sued. Right, because the purpose of trademark is to protect the integrity of the brand name in the eyes of the consuming public. So if your novel about two teens on a road trip has them stopping at a McDonald's, nobody's gonna be confused about the source or origin of your novel. Everybody knows it's not McDonald's. If you use so much of McDonald's that it starts to look like maybe McDonald's sponsored your novel, now you have a problem. But again, if you're doing just self reference to the actual thing in a non-off, again, if you're doing just self, you know, reference to the actual thing in a non-offensive, non-disparaging way, and it's minimal, you're unlikely to get a trademark lawsuit.
Author Gilly Segal:Copyright is really different. So if you're using copyrighted text, almost any amount of song lyrics will get you in trouble. So you're going to and you can license these things right. You're you know, if you have song lyrics throughout your book, you can go and get permission from the owner of the rights of the songs. It'll cost you money Almost always. There's very few times that people volunteer this up. So that is a big, big, big.
Author Gilly Segal:Watch out Song lyrics, quotes from novels that are still under copyright protection, any of those things you want to exercise extreme, extreme caution. Reference to actual living famous people it's sort of the same as the brand, right? If it's minimal, it's just to refer to. You know they went to a Beyonce concert. Beyonce is unlikely to sue you for one reference in your novel. If your whole novel is called Finding Beyonce and it's all about how Beyonce has disappeared because of some terrible scandal that's happened in her life, well, maybe now we have some disparate. Sorry, I didn't mean to give a thumbs up. Now we have some disparagement issues going on, right? So there's a little bit of a spectrum of what you can do safely and what you can't, and again, the Authors Guild is your best source for asking these questions.
Speaker 6:Okay, because I was also thinking when you were talking about historical fiction. How does that work for companies that no longer exist?
Author Gilly Segal:Yeah, you don't really have to worry so much about companies that no longer exist because there's no one who owns any rights left in those anymore. Who's going to sue you? Whose rights are you infringing on if the company is defunct? So is Sears still around? We still have Se. We still have Sears, like if you're talking about she went shopping at the Sears and Roebuck. Sears and Roebuck is not suing me for that. So it's de minimis.
Author Gilly Segal:Use is usually not a problem. A lot of people will do. They will be like he lip synced that song to her about the scarf that goes missing, right? If you're a Taylor Swift fan, you know what I'm talking about, so you can refer to it. But if you're actually quoting the song itself, it's going to depend on how much you change. But in order to keep it recognizable, you're probably going to have to quote enough that it's potentially infringing.
Author Gilly Segal:I would refer to it obliquely or alternatively, like is it necessary to have the real world example or can you create an in-world famous, you know songwriter that they're quoting? Right? So you know, think about, and you'd have to sort of seed this throughout the story. But I always love it when the world is so fully developed that there's a famous singer that you know. In the early chapters it's mentioned briefly and you hear they're in the background on the radio and then later you do get quotes from their songs, but they're ones that you've made up right. But you've sort of created this world that feels very full and whole because you've seeded throughout references to this imaginary famous person. If you're dying to have song lyrics in your book and you can't actually get permission to use them, I would do it that way, with a made up character.
J.D. Myall:And then you get to write your own angsty song lyrics Love that, love that. Anybody else have questions? No, okay, what's up next for you, gilly?
Author Gilly Segal:Well, well, I'm working on this historical novel which, who knows whether it will sell or not, um and uh, and I'm actually working on some screenplay stuff because I wanted to stretch my creative muscles and see, uh, if I can do screenplay work, so we'll see yeah, we'll be seeing you on the big screen too.
J.D. Myall:Thank you so much for joining us tonight oh, this is great.
Author Gilly Segal:It was lovely to meet you. Best of luck. I hope that someday I'm sitting in your craft chats.
J.D. Myall:Yes, ma'am, it's been awesome. And hopefully you consider Drexel for your daughter because it's a good program. We're coming to visit this summer. All right, you have a blessed one, thank you. Thank you everybody.
Speaker 8:That wraps up today's craft Chat Chronicles with JD Mayor. Thanks for joining us. If you liked the episode, please comment, subscribe and share. For show notes, writing workshops and tips, head to jdmayorcom. That's jdmayocom. While you're there, join JD's mailing list for updates, giveaways and more.