The Secret Behind Immersive Worlds
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
Bianca Marais, Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra
4.8 • 842 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week’s episode, bestselling author J.R. Ward—creator of the wildly popular ‘Black Dagger Brotherhood’ series—joins the show to talk about her new romantasy novel ‘Crown of War and Shadow’ and the evolution of fantasy romance. J.R. and Bianca explore the difference between paranormal romance and romantasy, why collectible book editions are booming, and how immersive worlds help readers experience powerful human emotions in extraordinary settings. J.R. shares her unconventional writing process—“watching movies in her head” and transcribing them onto the page—and discusses the challenges of writing in first-person POV, balancing world-building with pacing, and crafting compelling character arcs. She also digs into storytelling craft, including planting curiosity seeds, revealing character through adversity, and why the best stories make readers care deeply about the people on the page.
Note: CeCe Lyra is a literary agent at Wendy Sherman Associates. If you’d like to query CeCe, please refer to the submission guidelines at www.wsherman.com. Carly Watters is a literary agent at P.S. Literary Agency, but her work on this podcast is not affiliated with the agency, and the views expressed by Carly on this podcast are solely that of her as a podcast co-host and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of P.S. Literary Agency.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi there and welcome to our show. The Ship No One Tells You about writing. |
| 0:11.8 | I'm bestselling author Bianca Murray and I'm joined by C.C. Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates |
| 0:18.1 | and Carly Waters of PS Literary. |
| 0:22.7 | Hi everyone. |
| 0:30.0 | Today's guest is the author of more than 60 novels, including those in her number one, New York Times and US Today best-selling series, The Black Dagger Brotherhood. |
| 0:34.4 | There are more than 30 million copies of her novels in print worldwide, and they have |
| 0:39.4 | been published in 25 different countries around the world. It is my pleasure to welcome J.R. Ward. |
| 0:47.1 | Oh, thank you very kindly. Thanks for having me. For those of you who are not watching on YouTube, |
| 0:52.4 | you must go and have a look at YouTube. |
| 0:54.7 | I am holding up the stunning cover of the book we're discussing today, Crown of War and Shadow. |
| 1:01.3 | It is absolutely beautiful, not just the front of it. |
| 1:04.8 | So the sprayed pages are absolutely stunning. |
| 1:08.0 | And I think that you're going to have a whole series of this in which the |
| 1:11.2 | spray pages are going to make up an image. Is that correct? Yes. And I think it's one of the |
| 1:16.3 | brilliant packaging ideas. Bramble is like so good in the Romantici space with these, I feel like |
| 1:24.0 | this book is a work of art. And the fact that there is a collectible four, sort of four |
| 1:30.6 | element picture that everything's going to form at the end was great. And when we were doing |
| 1:35.0 | like the casings for all this and she was like, all right, so the next three books, what are the, |
| 1:39.5 | you know, what are the people involved? I was like, oh my gosh. So we had to like space it all out. |
| 1:43.9 | It was great. Wow. And also for the people involved? I was like, oh my gosh. So we had to like space it all out. It was great. |
| 1:46.3 | Wow. And also for the people who love maps, I'm holding it up here so you can see the |
| 1:52.4 | stunning maps inside. And when you take off the flat cover, you can see how beautiful the hard copy |
... |
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