Hi, and welcome to Everything is Fine, a podcast for Women Over 40.

We are your hosts.

I'm Kim France.

And I'm Jen Romolini.

And Jen, I know from reading your substack newsletter that I got in my inbox this morning.

Yeah.

That you have been working on your novel. I have a little bit. I have a little bit.

I've been doing all sorts of things to have, um, as Beth Pickens calls it, more gentle interiority.

So basically not treating myself like a piece of shit.

Yeah, I've been working on a little bit.

I have this new writer friend named Mary, who's a novelist and used to teach novel writing.

And she was like, you know what you need to get?

It's such a corny book, but you have to get it.

She was like, it's called Save the Cat writes a novel.

And I was like, okay, Mary,

whatever. And I got it. And like, because my biggest fear about this after being a writer for

as long as I've been a writer is that I'm not going to know what the rookie mistakes are and I'm

just going to fall into them and I'm going to make really like dumb cliche. It's just going to be stupid. I don't know what I'm

doing and it's going to be like amateurish, which of course it is the first time I'm doing

something. But this book, if anybody doesn't know about it, who wants to write a novel,

really lays out for you plot and how to build a novel, like all all the steps to build a novel though i don't know

i think that i'm doing that as a as a form of control and maybe i just need to be a little more

...