Hi, everyone. It's Jenna Bush-Hager. You're about to hear a special preview of my podcast, Open Book with Jenna. Each episode, I get to have inspiring conversations with celebrities, authors, fellow book lovers, and more. And in the premiere episode of Season 2, I sit down with best-selling author Rebecca Yaros

to talk about her latest novel, Onyx Storm, and how she drew on her experience with chronic

illness to write the best-selling fourth wing, and her process to plot out five books in the series.

Here's Open Book with Jenna.

Rebecca, I am so excited to be with you. Take me back to when you first knew you were a reader.

Because you are a reader first. I'm a reader, first and foremost. Yeah. I was a reader all through my

childhood, honestly. As a military kid, we moved a lot. And so I found a lot of comfort in books. And then

when I grew up, I became a military spouse. And my husband deployed a lot. And he was injured

during his first deployment. And I stopped sleeping at night. And so I was reading a book a night. And finally, it was his third deployment. I said,

I'm going to write one. I'm going to write an actual book. I'm going to finish this one. And I wrote

a page of night. And when he came home, I had my first book complete. You know, your meteoric rise.

Surreal. I don't know that there's ever been anything like this. I don't, I haven't seen it. I think maybe Colleen Hoover a little bit.

Who I also adore. I love her. And she's who I called. Honestly, before Iron Flame, I was like,

I don't know if I can do this. This is a lot. There's a lot of people. There's a lot of media.

And she was someone I called and that really helped me get through it. You have had similar rises, actually, because you were writing sort of for yourself at the beginning.

You were writing romance, but it was when you really kind of got into this world of romanticcy that you had this huge following.

Yeah, it happened super fast.

Do you remember knowing that you had hit some sort of chord?

I remember them telling me this book was going to be big and thinking, ha ha ha, no.

Like, no, you can't ever guess.

It's like, it's books are hit or miss.

And this is fourth wing, right?

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