I am Sarah Jane Case, and this is Anya Graham and Coffee.

Hello friends, happy Friday. I hope your day is treating you well. Today we are talking with Mary

Adkins. Mary is a writing coach and founder of the Book Incubator, a 12-month program to write,

revise, and pitch your novel or memoir. She's author of the novels when you read this, which is an

indie-backed book, Best Book of 2019, by Goodhousekeeping, and Real Simple. Privilege, which is

today.com, Best Summer Read, New York Post, Best Book of the Week, and Palm Beach, recently named

one of New York Post's Best Books of 2021. Her books have been published in 13 countries,

and her essays in the reporting have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and more.

What a cool job. Mary, welcome to the show. Thank you. I am so excited to be here

and to talk to you. I'm such a fan girl, and I love Anya Graham, but I rarely get to talk to

people about Anya Graham, so I just, I can't wait for all of this. That's how I feel about writing.

Like, I love writing, but I rarely get to talk about it, so we're going to have a lot of fun.

Oh yeah, we'll do it. We'll do it. So as you know, we start every episode with a rose,

but in thorn, what are yours today? Okay, so I will, can I do my thorn first?

Yeah, for sure. Okay, okay, because the rose kind of grows from the thorn. So my thorn is that I

recently had a pregnancy loss, and I've had recurrent pregnancy losses, so this is actually the

third one I've had in a year. And I am, I know we're about to get more into Anya Graham, but I,

I'm a three, which I actually only realized recently. I thought I was a seven. I know you're a seven.

And as a three, I am really trying to like show up more authentically, like not as my persona,

but as like the real messy, you know, me in the world. And so I'm sharing that, but that's what's

going on in me, because that's the reality of it. The rose is that this is giving me an opportunity,

and I like, I genuinely mean this, I don't mean this in like a, you know, like a self-helpy, like

...