Welcome to another episode of Shooting the Shit with literary agents Carly Waters and Cece Learro,

where we dissect publishing gossip, discuss book industry trends, and the overall state of the book business.

If you've ever wanted to grab a coffee with two literary agents, grab your mug and pull up a chair.

Thank you. agents, grab your mug and pull up a chair. Hello everybody. We hope you're having a lovely day so far. We started off by working on our

lighting because we're recording in the evening and we don't normally record in the

evening. So that was the first thing we did. First time ever. First time ever we're recording in the evening. This maybe should have been our wine episode because we keep saying we should have a glass of wine in the evening and have a little recording. But I thought of suggesting that, but you told me you were sleep deprived and I thought that would be irresponsible of me to be a bad influence and be like, let's also give you wine, you know,

like I don't want to be a bad friend. You know what? You are true. I've been traveling for basically 24

hours. We had some trouble getting home from vacation. Our flight was delayed four hours, which means

we didn't make our connection back to Ottawa, which means we had to stay at a hotel at the airport and kind of go through all of these things. And any Toronto people know there's multiple airports in Toronto. So they dropped us off at Pearson, but they couldn't get us out of Pearson to get to Ottawa. So we had to take an airport transfer to the island airport to get out and get home. So it was like a whole thing. Wait. Did the boys ferry? No, it was so cold. It was so cold. I know we were going to, but we don't have any winter jackets because we came from a warm weather vacation and I didn't want to make them stand out in the cold. But yeah, no, they had a good time. I took off looking at this, Yon Tower. So anyway, we are home. They didn't go to school today. And my saint of a husband is hanging out with them while I caught up on a lot of work.

I had to do. off looking at this, Jan Tower. So anyway, we are home. They didn't go to school today.

And my saint of a husband is hanging out with them while I caught up on a lot of work. I had to dig out of a bunch of emails. I had 240 emails waiting for me. But I did a little bit of reading for fun on my trip, which was good. I wrote down my list so I didn't forget. So I read, well, I started the correspondent. I don't know Cece if you've read the correspondent.

It's an epistolary novel. Yeah, Amy told me all about it. Like the success story. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's one of those like word of mouth books, which is fantastic. So yeah, a pistillary novel. And I'm excited to kind of get back into it. But I normally don't like epistlellery novels because I feel like they're like trying so hard.

But yeah, so I'm going to go back and finish that one.

I read Heart of the Lover.

I read The Irish Goodbye.

And then I'm still working through the sequel to Heated Rivalry, which is called The Long Game.

And so, yeah, that's all the reading I got up to. Fun stuff. I love your vacation reading. Vacation reading is special. Do you not look at your inbox at all? Or do you, like, filter it? Like, while you're away. Tell us the truth. Oh, yeah. So, for many years, I didn't take a vacation. I was like, I'm not allowed because I need to be at my desk. Because if an offer comes in, then I have to be here as my, you know, did, did, did, so I did take a vacation for years. If I did take a vacation, I wouldn't even put it out of office for years because I was like, what if the offer comes in or the contract? I don't want somebody to think I'm not working. Anyway, yada, yada. And then I started putting an out of office on once I had kids because I truly was out of office. Like I can't, you know, be on vacation with them. Of course. I intend emails. Yeah. Yeah. So now what I do is so I set my out of office. I have, I have committed to that. And then I have my assistant. So in my out of office, it says like how to reach my assistant, how to reach our business office for obviously, you know, anything that needs to be taken care of. And there were contracts and deal memos and stuff that were kind of going around and authors that needed to approve. They're audio narrators. And like some things that my assistant could do. Some things our business office could do. And then something's obviously that waited for me. So I didn't do any work. But I mean,

this is like the happy problem. So I can brag about my job. Happy problems, which is I had so

many good news things that happened on vacation. I got multiple starred reviews for clients.

Yay. I got to announce a book deal. There was just all this other stuff kind of coming in.

That was just really nice. And my client, E.J. Dixon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like got mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. I'm

I know. So E.J. was mentioned. Yeah. One bad mother. Yeah. Was mentioned to the New Yorker as the, like,

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