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Thank you Welcome back to The Dear Prudence Show once again, and as always, I am your host, Dear Prudence, also known as Mallory Orpurg.

With me in the studio this week is Rachel Heron, the best-selling author of almost 20 books, both fiction and memoir, and a person who is proud

to be a New Zealander as well as a U.S. citizen, although her Kiwi accent only comes out when she's

very tired or very drunk. I don't believe you are either of those things at the time.

I am mostly neither right now. Fantastic. Rachel, welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Congratulations on writing not 20 books. What's it going to

take to get you to 20? Finishing the thriller that is about to kill me. Is that going to be number 20? No, that's going to be 19. Number 20 is also mostly in the can, though. Nice. Okay, so you've got a plan to hit 20. Oh, yes, yes. And then you can just walk around saying I just say 20 because who challenges you on that really? Me, clearly. I straight up was like, you haven't written 20 books. What's this almost business? Failure. That is amazing. What of the 20 was like the most difficult book to write? Was it number one? Number one was okay because I accidentally got it right. Number two, when I was under contract, and I had six months to write a book instead of the two years I'd spent writing the first book. Yeah, that's the one where the editor came back to me. She said, wow, you are a great writer, but you have no plot. You must learn now how to write a book because the first one was an accident. This is so much why I'm sort of hoping I can keep sending both proposals to my agent and never write a novel. I just sent off my third one, which I was very jazzed about. It is super not a novel, and it does not have a plot, which is great. But the title does come from an episode of The Simpsons. Can you share that on the air? Probably, sure. Working title is? Yeah, I'm, I'm sure I shouldn't, but like, also who cares? Do you know what I mean?

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