Okay, welcome to the Other People Show. My name is Brad Listy. I'm your host. I am in Los Angeles. This is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Thank you for listening. I appreciate it. I hope everything's going

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So my guest today is Rita Bullwinkle, author of a debut novel called Headshot.

I had this thing and I wrote it and then I put it away and then I reread it much later and I reread it start to finish

like in one day and I realized that the only parts of this thing that I'd made that interested

me at all and then I thought were of any kind of semblance of interest or when this character was actually physically fighting in the ring.

And so I thought, okay, well, then that's the book. Then that's actually the book I need to write.

And it's going to be completely contained inside of a boxing match.

And also, I want more of them. I want a tournament of them. I want eight main characters. And like within 15 minutes after finishing reading this draft, I like drew the tournament bracket. I wrote all of the eight character names who stayed the same the whole time.

And then I began writing the first fight.

And it pretty much stayed.

I never, I never deviated.

Once I had the structure, it was, it was very clear.

All right, that was Rita Bullwinkle, author of the debut novel, Headshot. It is available from Viking.

Headshot, as you just heard, is a novel about boxing. The competitors are teenage girls. The setting is a low-rent boxing gym in Reno, Nevada.

The book is structured around a boxing tournament, a series of fights between teenage girls,

a series of intimate and beautifully illuminating portraits of the lives and minds and bodies and dreams and fears of these

young girls. Taken together, Headshot is a deeply memorable novel. Beautifully written,

beautifully paced, psychologically astute. This is a remarkably accomplished debut. I had a wonderful

conversation with Rita Bullwinkle. That is coming up momentarily. A reminder before we get going

that I do a weekly email newsletter. I would love it if you signed up over at bradlisty.substack.com.

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