Hello, welcome along to a brand new writer's routine.

This week we're chatting to the author Zen show.

I think this is our first official ghost story that we've had on the podcast.

Good timing, what with Halloween, barely a week away.

Zen is a practicing lawyer writing in her spare time. She's written three novels across genres.

And for her new one, Blackwater Sister, it all started with a search for words.

I go to the OED, Oxford English Dictionary online,

which if you live in the UK, often you can get access to via your public library.

And I'd just go and look up old words, basically. You know, I'd go to the the

thesaurus and just look up versions of a word that I was interested in. And as part of this exercise, I dug up a word hag ridden.

So hag as in like old woman or witch and then ridden as in writing around.

And I thought it was really interesting.

It basically kind of means stressed, but it also, you know, it kind of came from this idea

of being ridden around by a witch, like a witch has cursed you. And it gave me the idea, just the word itself, of a person, like a young person

who's hagg ridden by these ancestors and these, they'd be ghosts, really, and they'd be stressing

her out. So that was the very first seed of the idea.

There is more on the way with Zen Cho in this week's Writers' Routine.

Yes, welcome along. It's Writers' Routine.

My name's Dan Simpson. This is where we take a look through an author's working day. I hope you've had a word-filled week, be that writing or reading. Something about autumn just makes me want to read. I probably say that every year. You could skim back to this episode, the equivalent of last year, and I'm probably banging on about the same thing.

I just hoover through pages when the leaves drop here in the UK.

Maybe it's the same for you. This week we're chatting to Zen Cho. Her new novel is Blackwater Sister. It's a ghost story set in Penang, and it's based on ancient Malaysian folklore.

Even the language language too.

...