Welcome And Writer/Reader Grab Bag

Ellie Alexander 0:05

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Reality Rights. I am author Ellie Alexander, and this is the podcast where we talk about all things bookish, writer-ish, and try to give you a behind-the-scenes take on the writing life, and I am here with the tech guide.

Tech Guy 0:21

Hello, hello. Uh, we are back after many travels um the past few weeks.

Ellie Alexander 0:29

Yeah, we've had a busy summer, and um, I thought it was ending, and then no, there's still more to come, but that's okay. I decided that it would be fun to sort of um do a reader grab bag of questions because anytime I've been gone for a chunk of time, I always have a lot of email, which I love. Thank you, darlings, for reaching out to me. But uh, there are some questions that come up more frequently than others. And so we thought it'd be fun to sort of compile some of those. It's totally random. Um, but these are questions that I not only have answered this week in getting caught up on messages and DMs, but also get asked pretty often.

Tech Guy 1:10

Yeah, and they're from both readers and writers too. Uh that is something that, you know, you cover both realms, I guess. So you get questions from a lot of people. And it's nice to be able to have a format like this where we can share them because you do get asked the same questions a lot. And so it's great to be able to then give these answers out in a broader um, you know, format that more people can hear uh the answers to and and hopefully gain some knowledge.

Ellie Alexander 1:40

That's right. That's what we're here to do. We're lending you book knowledge, one reality rights episode at a time.

Tech Guy 1:48

Totally. All right. Uh, do you want to dive right in? Sure. Let's do it. Okay.

Querying Agents In The AI Era

Tech Guy 1:54

Uh I'm going to go down the list of questions that we've grabbed over the past couple of weeks, starting with can you share your top tips on how to query agents in the age of AI? Ooh, this is a good one.

Ellie Alexander 2:08

This is such a good one. Um, and this has come up a lot because, well, I think, you know, I get asked often about the querying process and how to go about finding an agent. And in our Mystery Series master class that we've put together, that there's a whole segment on finding an agent and going through the query process and writing a book proposal, all those things. But things have shifted a lot in the last few years as we have entered the age of AI in book publishing. And let me tell you, darlings, if you are out there, it's a slog right now because we've talked a lot on this podcast about how inundated authors are getting with these ridiculous bots sending these glowing messages about Ellie, we would love to have you featured in our book club. Or, you know, it can be the other thing too, like, oh, I've discovered your writing and I'd love to offer you a publishing contract. None of this is real. It's all fake, it's all AI. But what that has done, it has really flooded the marketplace with a lot of junk. Um, and it's depressing, honestly. Agents are getting inundated with queries that are bots and then are also just clearly written by AI. So I one of my really early recommendations, and we and we'll do a deeper dive into this, but I think you should follow active agents. And someone who I think is doing a really great job, especially online and in social media, is Agent uh Carly Waters. She's all over on Instagram and she shares really great, valuable information. Um, and she just did a really lengthy post about this specifically and what it's like to be on the agent side and be on the receiving end of getting just nonstop AI slop.

Tech Guy 3:56

Yeah. And I would go a step further and say that writers out there, prospective writers and even agents, if there are any agents listening to reality rights, educate yourselves on AI. Like understand what it is and learn to recognize the telltale signs. Um in fact, if you'd like to hear an episode of Reality Rights on that very subject, click that send us a message link in the show notes and let me know because I can spot an AI generated message in an instant. Uh we get them all the time via your website. Um, what stands out? What drew me in? What, you know, it's all this just like there are the all these key catchphrases that AI uses. And these LLMs cannot help themselves. They include those phrases in every single, every single uh query that they send to you. And so we're setting up filters to catch that stuff. And it would be good, I think it would be a great idea for writers and agents to educate themselves on that and learn how to spot that and filter it out. It'll just save you a lot of grief, a lot of time, a lot of frustration down the road.

Ellie Alexander 5:11

And on the agent side of the business, like it's impossible then to keep up because if you are having to, you know, weed through all of these submissions that aren't legit or that are writers, and I'm gonna use this loosely in this, it's gonna be hard potentially for some of you, darlings. But and and actually, I think we have a question about this that we could either just dovetail on now or we'll loop back to at the end of this episode about AI and writing. And, you know, Carly is a perfect example. She's like, I I don't know why you want to work with me if you're using a large language model to generate your story. I'm not the agent for you. Um, so uh going back to though the original question. So, first of all, yes, be proactive, follow these agents, pay attention to what they're asking for. You want to put in the work, you want to do the research into making sure you're finding an agent that's a good match for your project. You don't want to just slam a thousand agents that, you know, might not be even interested or someone who represents mysteries. I think that's one of the number one fails that a lot of new writers have when they're entering this space is not doing their due diligence because there are lots and lots of agents. Many of them only represent niche markets or do nonfiction. So you're just wasting your time and theirs. So that's number one. Number two would be make sure that your query stands out. You want your voice to shine. You want to be your authentic self on the page. And that in the age of AI right now is what is going to make your query stand out because it's not going to be exactly what you're talking about. This just like cloying ridiculous language that you're like, delete, I know immediately. That's that's a bot.

Tech Guy 6:52

Yeah, and stand out, but also operate within the parameters of the agent specifications for a query. So if you're going after a specific agent, make sure that you go to their website, you go to their social media accounts, and you understand how they would like to receive a query and follow those instructions because if you don't, you have failed step one. You had one job, and that was to follow the instructions. Yeah and you didn't do it. So definitely follow the instructions, learn about the agent, and then follow everything else that Ellie just said. It is no surprise that you wanted to go out of order on these questions, but in this case, I think you were correct in wanting to hit this next question uh because we're on the topic already. Um, so unless you have anything else on querying agents, we can move on to number two.

Ellie Alexander 7:45

Uh, the last just little tip I would say on querying agents is there are also all kinds of opportunities to meet agents in real life. If you attend writers' conferences, workshops, conventions. Some agents are hosting query sessions online where you get to have like a five-minute pitch with a bunch of other aspiring writers on a Zoom call. So there are there are other ways that you can connect with agents. Again, to dovetail on your point, you want to make sure that you're following the parameters. So, you know, if you're at a conference, and we've we've talked about this a lot with Ashland Mystery Fest, you're not gonna follow an agent into the bathroom and try to pitch them or bring them your manuscript when they're working with other authors. But agents often will share where they're gonna be and how you can appropriately query them in person.

Tech Guy 8:32

Sounds great. You want to jump to the next question about AI and writing? Sure. Yeah.

Why Voice Matters More Than Ever

Tech Guy 8:37

So this person wrote in and they I think we've talked about this before, but it's it is a subject that is going to have a never-ending dialogue until something gives. And that's what are your thoughts on AI and writing? So I'm I'm presuming that this person is trying to ask maybe for your blessing to use AI for writing. Maybe not. Maybe they're asking because they're not using AI and they see other people doing it. And so they want to know your thoughts on it.

Ellie Alexander 9:09

Yeah. I mean, it's hard to know out of context, right? But I have really strong feelings about this. And I am of the camp and always will be that when it comes to writing and creating, I am fully humanizing that part of the creative process. There is no part of me that uses AI for any of my writing, circling back to what I just said about voice. The way that we develop our writing voice is by writing and practicing and telling a story and having it bomb and then going back and going, all right, what did I learn from that? How do I fix it? How do I make my writing stronger? I've had a few aspiring writers who have reached out to me through my coaching and mystery series masterclass, and they are fully wanting to use large language models to develop their books, which, you know, that's a choice that you're making. I am not the right coach or person for you in that circumstance because I feel so strongly that the way that we grow as creatives and the way that we put creative energy out in the world is to create that art ourselves. There's no replicating it for me. And for me, the creative process is where I throw up. Like that's the entire reason I write. And I can rattle off a thousand examples, but if I am writing about Jules and the Bake Shop and Lance, those characters are so much a part of who I am that I forget that they aren't real. I don't need AI to create that for me. I create that here in my office in my own little head. And it's such a joy and escape for me to step into these fictional worlds. I have as much discovery as I'm writing a book that hopefully you darlings get when you read that book. And even though, you know, if we're talking about mystery specifically, there's a formula that you follow. And I follow that formula, you know, I am sort of a machine. I I write really fast and I write often. And I think I write well. I don't like to um put myself up there in the category of like, you know, incredible literary fiction. But I feel like over the years I've learned to tell a really good story, and that's important to me. But I wouldn't be able to have these interesting discoveries, even within that formula, if something else was generating that for me. It's just magic every time when I know where I'm going with a story. And then partway through my word count for the day, something else takes hold and we're going on a completely different direction.

Tech Guy 11:40

Like, yeah, human creativity rocks.

Ellie Alexander 11:43

It does.

Tech Guy 11:45

For me personally, I have enjoyed people trying to use LLMs to write books because there have been some spectacular failures. Spectacular failures, like super embarrassing authors leaving prompts in the book, in the final printed copy of the book with paragraphs that end a chapter, like this works because you know, which is a tell for those that don't use AI, it's a telltale sign of an LLM answering you your question or your prompt. Uh, just classic. So yeah, I I can I can definitely resonate with that. And I can 100% back up the fact that your characters are real to you. I can't even count the number of times we have been in Ashland where you've said, oh, let's go down to Tort for a coffee. And I'm like, what? No. I mean, yeah, we want to go to mix, like the real life place that you've modeled after Tort. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Ellie Alexander 12:44

Nope. Tort. No, and I mean, even with writing, you know, close to 50 mysteries at this point in time. No, the caveat here is I've been writing for two decades. I've been published for 15 years, and we've done an episode on this as well, which is that, you know, I have built muscle memory over time. And that's what I would encourage new writers to do is just keep practicing. I would rather read a really crappy story that you have written yourself than something that you're generating from a large language model. I mean, I also have this other baseline, which is that all of my previous work was stolen to train these large language models. So there's a whole other can of worms that I feel really strongly and passionate about. But I just was at the final, final stage of copy edits for the next bake shop mystery. And this means that I have touched the book multiple times. This means that now my editor has gone through and done a first pass, and now we are at copy edit. So this is usually where we're just kind of fine-tuning the book and making sure the grammar's right and catching any like major timeline errors or that sort of thing. And as I was working my way through copy edits last week, I had another aha moment. There had been this little thread about a subplot with one of the suspects that I had closed and I felt, I felt good about. Like it was okay, but it wasn't great. But this book, you know, I wrote, I don't know, nine months ago and it's been through all these other rounds of copy edits. And as I was reading it through this last time, I had this new moment of like, oh, wait a minute. No, I know what had been missing the whole time, but I needed to step away from it. I needed fresh eyes. I needed all of those things that I talk extensively about when I'm working with new writers. So I don't think there's any way that you replicate that experience of getting your hands like deep in the creative process with AI. I just don't.

Tech Guy 14:35

You're probably right. I mean, the the other thing, I guess, that I've always wondered is you still have to learn. If you are going to use AI, you need to learn how to use it, right? There's a right way, there's a wrong way. And and there are beginners and there are experts, just like writing. So if you want to be a writer, I would say spend the time learning how to write. Don't spend the time learning how to learn AI to write. Like just, you know, spend the time learning how to write. Like I said, human creativity rocks. In fact, I'm gonna make a sticker of that.

Ellie Alexander 15:08

Ooh, yeah, I want that sticker. I I want that. I like I would wear that around. I feel like I am I'm not coming off my soapbox on this one, starlings. There's no, there's no point. And I, you know, I feel grateful that I was writing long before this was even an issue because and what I think is funny now. Well, there are two things that I think are funny now uh that I appreciate. The first being anytime I get email from somebody pointing out my grammatical errors, I'll be like, yep, that's right. Cause I wrote it. Um, so there's that. And then the second thing is voice. And I it, I know voice and writing seems like this mythical thing and it's hard to pin down. But when you pick up one of my books, I want you to know that you're reading an Ellie Alexander book. And I think I have a distinct style. And sometimes over the course of the last 15 years, and I'm sure it will happen again in my future publishing years, I get frustrated with my own self because I'm like, oh, you know, if you read my Meg Reed series and then you read my Jewels series, or you even read one of my cozy rom-coms, like there's a through line, which is my voice. And so I think in the past I've been disappointed by that. Like, oh, I wish, I wish I could totally change how my voice sounds or how I write for something else. And now I'm so grateful to be like, oh no, like you know that's me. You know that's my writing. You know, I'm gonna do a real deep look into food for a chunk of time and then come back to something else. So yeah, I think to your point, spend that time developing your voice, like figuring out your style. And that is gonna pay off long term because if you're just using a large language model, your writing is gonna sound like everyone else's, even if then subjectively you think it's better, which is what I hear a lot from new writers. It's like, oh, but my writing sounds better when I put it in to this large language model. No, but then it doesn't sound like you, it sounds like everything else. This does need to be a whole episode, right?

Tech Guy 17:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does need to be a whole episode for sure. For sure. Okay. Okay.

Ellie Alexander 17:10

I'll stop.

Tech Guy 17:11

Yeah, that so we we did a couple of writer-related questions. I'm gonna I'm gonna like it's time to give the readers some love. Uh, so we're gonna jump into a couple of reader or questions from readers at this

Audio Rights Kobo And KU Limits

Tech Guy 17:24

point. Uh, we're going to start with this person wrote in and said, Why are some of your books not in audio or available on Kobo? Um, for the darlings out there who don't know, Kobo is an e-reader competitor to Kindle. So the uh Kobo is the format that uh or the device that uh all the independent bookstores can offer ebooks on. And uh, so this person is asking, why are some of your books not in audio or available on Kobo?

Ellie Alexander 17:57

Right. And that is all a publishing question or a pub, the publishing side of the business, I should say. The way that series sales work, this is to talk about audio first. There are there are a handful of my books that are not available right now on audio, namely the Meg Reed series and a few of the Sloan Krause series, the Sloans that we have published. And the reason for this is contractual. So the publishing house still owns the rights to the audio for those series. And until I get those rights back, I cannot produce the audio because that's how publishing contracts work. They sell the audio, any other foreign translation rights and any sort of screen rights separately. And so you as the author don't really have any control over that. So I always want them to be too. It's not just you readers, it's me too. Um, so that's that piece of the question. And then that's also true in terms of formatting. So it's based on my publishing house. So my publishing house for the secret bookcase and novel detective series, they're in the UK. They have different relationships. They put those books on KU first. And so if something's on KU exclusively, it can't be in other formats, basically. And so at some point in time, they will then take it off KU and it will go into Kobo and Nook and be available in other on other devices. I don't know how you say that.

Tech Guy 19:25

Yeah. No, that's that that's exactly right. And this is one of those things that is the difference between being traditionally published and being indie published, you know, the except for the last one that you said, because the the Kindle Unlimited piece is kind of a that's a blocker for anyone that puts their books on Kindle Unlimited. That is a stipulation from Amazon that if you are on Kindle Unlimited, you cannot offer the ebook version of your books on other formats. So it's a competitive thing, and it's just one of the many, many things that authors deal with in the world of publishing.

Ellie Alexander 20:00

Right. And that really you as the author, unless you're indie publishing, don't have control over. And to your point, if you then want to go to KU, which there are some great pros. There's exposure, you get new readers. Um, and then, you know, on the con side, of course, I want my books to be available to everyone in every way, shape, and form. So yeah.

Tech Guy 20:17

Yeah. And also just one point of clarification when you were talking about your publisher and selling um the audio rights, that is to another publisher who specializes in audiobooks. So that is one of the things that can sometimes delay the audiobook version of a book, is that it's not the publisher that's putting out the e-book and print versions of the book that is producing the audiobook. That does happen sometimes, but for the most part, it's a different publisher altogether. And so there are business dealings that have to happen on the back end and rights transfers and all of that stuff that needs to happen for an audiobook format to be released. And it takes time sometimes.

Ellie Alexander 21:01

It takes time. And sometimes those rights don't get sold until after a book is published and an audio book publisher takes notice and is like, oh, hey, we think we can, you know, tag on here. So yeah.

Tech Guy 21:11

Yeah.

Ellie Alexander 21:12

It's complicated.

Tech Guy 21:13

Oh, right. Yeah, it is. I mean, it really is. The the business of publishing seems very simple until you actually get involved in it, and then you realize it's not at all.

Why Trouble Is Brewing Is Ebook Only

Tech Guy 21:23

Not so much. Let's stick with the a similar theme, I guess, which is uh another person wrote in and asked, why isn't Trouble is Brewing available in print anywhere? So, first, why don't you let the darlings know what is the book Trouble is Brewing, and then talk about why it's not available in print?

Ellie Alexander 21:43

Well, and what's so interesting about this, when we got back from this last vacation, I had 17 different messages about trouble is brewing. So I'm like, did it get posted somewhere? Like, why all of a sudden? Like it will be so weird. Like no one will ask me about that for a year, and then boom, all of a sudden it's in the zeitgeun. Or the universe is like, hey, treble's growing.

Tech Guy 22:02

And it's been out for a while. Yeah, it's been out for a while.

Ellie Alexander 22:05

Yeah, a long time. It is just a little short that I wrote really to introduce the Sloan Krause mysteries. My editor at the time was like, hey, wouldn't it be fun? Because she was doing both the Bake Shop and Sloan Krause. Wouldn't it be fun if we had like a little meetup with Jules and Sloan as a way to introduce Sloan as a new character? So this is a very, very short ebook. I don't remember how many pages it is. It's only ebook. It probably was 30 pages, maybe 50 at most. So it's never been in print. It never will be in print because it's tiny. There's not even a body, darlings. They solve a missing keg. Like it is so scooby-doo. Like I loved it. It was really fun to write. But Sloane comes to Ashland to um do a beer fest. And she and Jules meet up and of course have an instant friendship. And then they have to solve what happened to this missing keg. So um it was, it's really fun to write, but that's the only purpose for that book was just to be a launcher, a little promo teaser for the Sloan Krause mysteries. So for all 17 of you, I think I have responded to everyone. But in case you're out there wondering, that's why you're not missing it. And it's so sweet. Like I love it because readers will try to sleuth it out. They'll be like, Ellie, I've read all of these and where is it and how does it fall? Like that, that totally makes my heart happy. It's very sweet. But um, you're not gonna find it in print, is the short answer.

Tech Guy 23:25

Hey, missing kegs is serious business, people. So just let's let's let's let's make it let's be clear about that. This is like, I mean, I would put that above murder, honestly, in terms of having to solve a mystery. Do people have to read Trouble is Brewing to jump in and start the Sloan Krauss mystery?

Ellie Alexander 23:45

No, no, not at all. No, no, no. It's just it it literally was just kind of a whim, like a lark for fun.

Tech Guy 23:51

Yeah, yeah. And and to be clear, I knew the answer to that. I just wanted to ask.

Ellie Alexander 23:56

Yeah, no, I appreciate that.

Tech Guy 23:58

One thing I will say though is that this is the same uh reasoning behind you did write three or have written, I should say, three to this point, three shorts that fit within the Sloan Krause mystery series order. And those weren't printed individually, but we did put them together in a compilation called the First Poor P-O-U-R. Um, and that book is available for print uh and ebook right now. So that is the way that we were able to do that though, because for the same reasons that Trouble is Brewing is in in print format, we could not offer print versions of the individual shorts because they're just they're they're short.

Ellie Alexander 24:45

They're short. They're too short. Yeah, it'd be a terrible experience for you as a reader too, because it's like, oh, I just spent the same amount on this book that's 75 pages, you know. Yeah. But then once I wrote three, we were able to put them in a compilation, and that's a legit book. Like that's 300 pages with recipe with recipes.

Tech Guy 25:04

Oh, interesting, nice segue because the next question has to do with recipes.

Where The Recipes Live Online

Tech Guy 25:10

And you get this all the time. And I the, you know, another person wrote in while we were gone, and I figured this was a great one to add to the list because there are some important reasons for this. But how do I find the recipes from your books online?

Ellie Alexander 25:26

Oh, yeah. Well, you don't. Um that's the short answer. Not from all the books. There's not like there's not one segment of like, here are all the recipes. Uh, we over the years have published a lot of recipes. We've shared, we used to do tort test kitchens. Actually, all summer long, I have been baking a recipe from every book in the bake shop mystery series leading up to the pumpkin vice cafe at the end of September. So that's been fun. And all of the recipes that I'm baking for that project are new recipes that I've never shared before, too. So that's fun. So if you happened to have, you know, like missed out on that, you can go back and um catch up on my social media and YouTube channel. But A, I mean, we would need an entire website just for that because it's so many recipes over the years. And B, then it's copyrighted material because these are all in the books. So there's that issue too.

Tech Guy 26:20

Well, and it's good, they're they're a bonus of owning the book too. Right. Or go or checking the book out from the library or whatever. They're they're meant to be a reader bonus. But the one thing I will say, I haven't even told you this, but I'm so this is a this is a reality rights exclusive right here.

Ellie Alexander 26:37

Breaking news, okay.

Tech Guy 26:39

Uh but I have a day job right now that uh one day will be just working in the LA Alexander writing empire. Um, when I am able to find the time, uh I do have on my ever-growing to-do list a plan to create a recipe section of the website that's just dedicated to all of the recipes that you have baked, cooked, and shared over the years. This will not uh solve the uh issue that this particular person was asking. This isn't going to include all the recipes from your books, but it is going to be a compilation of everything that you have shared. And you have shared some of them, but you but for the most part, these are going to be, and at this point, we're talking hundreds of recipes that that you have shared over the years, uh countless cookies and pies and holiday bakes, and you name it. Um anyway, I have a grand plan to create an Ellie Alexander recipe compilation online.

Ellie Alexander 27:48

I love it.

Tech Guy 27:48

Now I I know that is going to generate the obvious follow-up question is will there be a cookbook that's released with this? And we've talked about this several times. Maybe like someday, it is something that's that you and I both want to do, but there it has to be done right, and that's gonna take time and money, and neither of which we necessarily have at this point.

Ellie Alexander 28:12

So that's right. Well, and just the last thing to add about the recipes that I have shared over the years, a lot of them are recipes that don't make the final cut in the book, which is kind of fun because I always have more recipes to share because Jules is baking even Sloan in that series, you know, and like I talked about, for better or for worse, that is my voice at this point in time. Food and my writing are woven together tightly. So I will go through a manuscript and decide, okay, what are the final six or seven that are gonna be in the back of the book? But then I usually have two, three, four. So over the years, I've shared a lot of those, which is just also fun bonus content because maybe you read about Jules Baking that, but you never actually saw that recipe.

Tech Guy 28:51

That's awesome. All right, we're gonna switch gears here because we got a couple of questions from readers about you and your reading and writing habits.

Christie Doyle And Writing Lore

Tech Guy 29:01

So we're gonna we're gonna start off with are you a fan of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle? You seem to know a lot about them in your novel detective series.

Ellie Alexander 29:14

Um, spoiler alert, yes, yes, I am. I'm a huge fan. I read both, like I read all of Agatha Christie's books. Well, I read every single Agatha Christie book that my library had in stock the summer I was 12 or 13, I don't remember. Um, and that really sent me down a Christie trail. And then I didn't really read Sherlock until later. I think the first Sherlock, I think I read a study in Scarlet in high school. And then I really got hooked on Sherlock. But I also am just so fascinated myself by writing process and their personal stories. So I have read every single biography that I can get my hands on about either of them. I listened to podcasts. I've been listening to this podcast about Arthur Conan Doyle lately. Um, and it's so fascinating how much it stays the same with change. So, you know, all those Sherlock novels were initially short stories published in the Strand magazine. Um, and I find that fascinating given kind of where we're at right now with readers and attention spans, and we're kind of going back to that idea. Like there are lots of platforms now where writers are publishing kind of this serial, you know, a chapter at a time kind of thing, which is really a nod back to that. Or like the Hound of the Baskervilles, he had killed Sherlock off because he was so frustrated by having to write this detective again and again and again. Um, but then he brought him back, and that also was published in The Strand, and the Strand went into like seven printings. He wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles in a month. So I'm kind of like, yeah, I write a first draft in in a month too. So I love all those parallels. And then also just, you know, like the interesting things that he did with that character. Like Sherlock can smell something and know the exact type of tobacco, but he didn't know that the stars revolved around the sun or like the planets did. Like, so anyway, yeah, I I love any lore. The same is true for Agatha Christie. We did, I think we talked about this on a previous podcast where, you know, she was one of the first women to go surfing in Hawaii. And you don't think about that because we see her as this very like matronly person near the latter end of her career, but she had this very like vivacious traveling life before that. Yes.

Tech Guy 31:33

Yeah, that's interesting. It it is funny because whenever I think of Agatha Christie, I always think of like a Miss Marple personality. You always think of like somebody famous, you always think of them as just being that age that they when they gained fame or notoriety and never that they had a life, a whole life all before any of that happened. It's it's kind of wild.

Ellie Alexander 32:00

A whole life that clearly informed their writing, you know. And I think that that that kind of circles back to our whole thing about AI. Like you can see these threads of how their personal experiences, like she went on a dig site with her second husband in Egypt. And here we go. Then we get the death on the Nile, or Arthur Conan Doyle. He was he was a trained doctor. He wasn't a very good doctor, it sounds like. And then he was a spiritualist. He believed in fairies. Like he has this whole other ethereal side to him, which gets woven into the spiritualism of the time. And yeah.

Tech Guy 32:36

All right. One more. And I save the best for last. This will this is this will be of interest, I think, to both writers and readers.

Writing Rituals Playlists And Office Rules

Tech Guy 32:44

Um, somebody wrote in and asked, Do you have any weird writing quirks, rituals, etc.?

Ellie Alexander 32:51

Oh, this is a good one. You know, I think this might speak to like my little OCD-iness or I don't know what it is, but I can't have anything on me physically when I'm writing. Like I don't write with my ring on, I don't write with bracelets or jewelry. Like, I I don't write, I don't get dressed up to write. I write in comfortable clothes. I could not write in pajamas, though. Like I have to get dressed to write, but that would usually be like a glorified version of pajamas, which would be like yoga pants and a comfy sweatshirt. Um, so that's kind of random. Um, and then I I would say my biggest quirk is that I physically need to be in my office to write. That would always be my preferred method of writing right here where you see me. This is where I write 95% of my books. Um, sometimes it works out that uh we're traveling and I have to write in other places, but that's really not my favorite. I like to, I like to get out in the world and research and pay attention to people if I'm like working on a new plot or trying to develop characters. But when it comes to the daily word count, like I am here in my office, I have the same playlist that I listened to. In fact, the other night we were driving somewhere and my jewels playlist came on and I was like, oh my gosh, I can't, I can't listen to this. Like, what's happening? Because my brain wants to then start writing jewels because I hear that I don't even I don't even know what that music is because I'm barely listening to it, but it's just in cellularly in my body now. Um yeah, that's about it.

Tech Guy 34:32

Yeah, it was funny. We were just in the car going somewhere a few days ago, and a weird playlist started playing because you had looked up how to get there on your phone. So you had your car connected to or your phone connected to the car. And all of a sudden you were like, Oh, this is my slide playlist for whatever whatever series. You're like, I can't listen to this right now because I'm not writing.

Ellie Alexander 34:58

No. Turn it off. What are we doing?

Tech Guy 35:01

Yeah, because it puts you it puts you in that frame of mind, and you just, you know, yeah, and and you didn't want to be in that frame of mind because I think we were going to see sound of music. That was it.

Ellie Alexander 35:10

That's right. We were going to see sound of music. And I uh I didn't want to be in, I mean, I usually want to be at tort with but with Jules, but not at that point in time. Yeah. Uh sometimes I'll light a candle. I always get out and exercise before I start writing. Um, and I have kind of my regimented time that I like to write, which is usually sometime between 8:39 and 2 o'clock Monday through Friday. That's about it.

Tech Guy 35:34

It's a good thing you know somebody who makes candles.

Ellie Alexander 35:37

It is a good thing I know somebody who makes candles. Uh, I always have a notebook next to me because I don't make any changes as I go. I just keep going with the story. Um it's not super exciting. I don't wear a special cape. I could. I could try.

Tech Guy 35:51

That was that was that was a good, that was a solid list of writing quirks and rituals. So I think people will be happy about that. All right.

Questions Welcome And Goodbye

Tech Guy 36:00

Well, that brings us to the end of the list of the latest batch of questions that we received. If you, darlings, have a question that you want to know the answer to, please let us know in the comments or drop us a line by clicking that send us a message link in the show notes. And we would be happy to answer your questions.

Ellie Alexander 36:20

All right, on that note, till next time.

Tech Guy 36:22

Until next time.