Hi, everyone back to Bad on Paper podcast. I'm Becca Freeman. And I'm Olivia Mentor.

And today we are talking to four debut authors whose debuts came out in 2025 about both their books and their experience debuting. So if there are aspiring authors in the crowd or just author interview superfans, this one's absolutely for you.

Yeah, it's a good listen.

But before we get into our mini chats with these authors, Olivia, what was your high this week?

My high has actually been my high for the last couple weeks, or one of my highs.

And that is that I've

developed this very specific morning routine with Winnie. Okay. And it goes a little something like

this. Sounds like I'm going to break into songs. It really does. Five, six, seven, eight. I'm holding

my mic today for a long story we won't get into,

but it kind of does make me feel like I should be musical.

Anyway, not musical, but it is theatrical.

So my routine is that I've been waking up pretty early.

So Jake usually gets out of bed around 5.45.

And I'm usually awake at this point.

Not quite ready to get out of bed.

So I lay there in the dark for

10 more minutes till 6, 6.15. And then at that point, Winnie is still in bed and she has sort of taken

over Jake's warm spot, you know? And so we cuddle a little bit and I then give her a pep talk for the day, which is really a pep talk for me. Okay. So yesterday I had this photo shoot at my house and I was like, okay, Winnie, we're going to have a cool, calm, and collected day. It's going to be beautiful. We're going to feel pretty. We're going to feel confident. You're going to go outside for a walk at some point. It's going to be nice and crisp outside. The leaves are going to be falling. There's going to be lots of smells. And so we go through this together for a while. And then the second I say, sorry, follow up question. Was Winnie featured in any of the photos? No. She stayed in Jake's office just for my own sanity. Okay. And she didn't

bark the entire time. So you know what? I guess it worked the talk that we had because I said

we're going to be calm. We're going to not freak out that there's someone in the house. So anyway,

back to the routine. So at this point, after the pep talk is done, I say, all right, let's get up. And a second I say it, she leaves the room, at which point I then am forced to get up because I don't want my dog to be up and doing stuff before me. That just feels like a failure on my part somehow. Okay. So we get up, we go out the door. We're in the hallway. Winnie starts her descent down the stairs.

And I'm still at the top of the stairs because, you know, I'm going to go into the bathroom and brush my teeth, whatever.

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