Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's episode is a longer one, part of the series where I interview fascinating people

about how they take their days from

great to awesome and their advice for the rest of us.

Today I am delighted to welcome Serena Bowen to the program.

Serena is the author of the thriller The Five Year Lie, which recently hit number one on

Audible, and she's also a USA Today best-selling author

of several romances, including the Brooklyn Bruisers series. So Serena, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So maybe you could tell our listeners just a little bit

about yourself. Well, I'm a full-time writer of fiction, and sometimes

it really freaks people out when I tell them that I write between two and four books every

year. And a lot of people think I could never do that. A lot of people think, well, they must be really terrible. You know, there's varying reactions. I do possibly leave my house a below average number of times in a week. So that's one way that that happens. but it's something I always wanted to do and writing stories

for a living is really a privilege, and I just try not to forget that. Absolutely. Because you

had a career in finance before this, correct? Right, right. The business

aspects of publishing have always been really interesting to me, and I do spend an above-average

amount of time thinking about it. Was it hard to make that career transition? I mean, what sort of

precipitated that? You know, I just always knew that I would. Like, I knew that I was really

interested in writing and publishing, and I also knew that I went to school on deep financial

aid with student loans that needed repaying. But like I said, business has always been appealing

...