Attention all passengers.

The Uber ride for Jeff's rugby team will depart in five minutes from Platform 15.

Your ride comes with six toilets and a refreshments carriage that you'll empty within five minutes.

Thank you for booking your tickets on Uber.

Trains on Uber.

Trains on Uber. Hi, something.

Hi, I'm Will, and it's story time.

I don't listen to many podcasts, but one I never miss is writing excuses, which bills itself as a fast-paced educational podcast for writers by writers.

One of the fabulous hosts is my friend Mary Robinette Coal.

Mary Robinette Cole, welcome to the official It's Storytime author chat. I'm so incredibly happy that you're here.

We're going to talk about with her serpent locks, which I fell in love with the moment I began

reading it. I came to it because I heard you talking about it on writing excuses.

And for everyone watching who doesn't already listen to writing

excuses, it was homework. Hey, read this story, then we're going to talk about the story. And I was like,

this is exactly what I need as a writer. Like, it's just terrific. So let's talk about that a little

bit as we get going here. Would you let people who aren't familiar with writing excuses know about

the genesis of

this story, how it started, and then we'll get in a little bit into the process of developing it?

Sure. So writing excuses is a podcast where we take a different aspect of craft and we drill into it every week.

And for this particular episode, one of the things we've realized is that it really helps people if they have a concrete example. So we used one of my stories with her serpent locks, which is basically a Medusa post story, I guess. And honestly, the way the story itself happened is kind of funny. I was running something that I call Make Me

Right, where I literally make writers right. And I give them a prompt. And I often take the

prompt from conversation or environment. And one of the people had said that they were really

...