Adobe Express makes it quick and easy to create everything I need for my business, from social posts, TikToks and flyers, all in just a few clicks.

Get Adobe Express for free.

Search for Adobe Express to find out more.

It is that time again. We welcome you back to the bookcase. I'm Charlie Gibson. This is the bookcase with Kate and Charlie.

Hello, book nerds. I'm Kate. How are you? It is good to have you all with us. We're going to do something really different this week. And I hope you will enjoy this idea. As we've started, as we've gone through, we have found this to be not just authors talking about their books, but talking about writing and how you write.

And it's become a sort of master class in writing. And so Kate's husband, David, who handles all

the technical aspects of this podcast, had a great idea.

And took it to you, Kate, you took it to me, the idea being?

The idea being that we wanted to get an eyewitness account from a writer of what writing a book is like from start to finish.

And we talk a little bit about this when we get

started. Writing, I think, is a little bit like fingerprints. It feels to me like when we talk to

writers, everybody does it a little bit differently. And I hope that amongst our audience out there,

we not only have avid readers, but we maybe have one or two people that are thinking about writing,

but maybe are held down by that self-doubt,

that self-criticism that certainly has nagged me all my life, that maybe the fact that everybody

does it differently and there's no quote unquote right way to do it, that it will give people

hope and inspiration, I hope, to maybe sit down and find their own voice, or at least

that's always been a lofty hope of mine. And so when David came to me and said, I bet we could

find a writer who could walk us through their process from, you know, once upon a time all

the way to the end, that that would be a really interesting learning experience for us.

And so the first name we thought of was Kate's

friend with whom she went through University, Northwestern, many years ago, Jay Ryan Straddle,

...