Podcasts about 'could

Headlines with Denny the Bull • Episode 14 Dennis Potvin, Red Pill Jenn and Adam Glexy cover and breakdown the top headlines from the week of August 16th 2021 – August 22nd 2021 such as: Headlines: 1 • Study Uses Science to Confirm That Cuddling a Dog Is Good for Your Health 2 • 3 more accusers come forward against Broadway star Alice Ripley 3 • Judds, Ray Charles to Be Inducted Into Country Music Hall of Fame 4 • Carrie Underwood's account clicked like on an anti-mask tweet. The outraged reaction shows what happens when country stars are silent on politics. 5 • Burger King Japan's new bunless burger features two vegan meat patties sandwiching lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, onions, mustard, and ketchup. 6 • Attention Donut Lovers! McDonald's USA Adds New Glazed Pull Apart Donut to the McCafé Bakery Lineup 7 • Body of hiker found 2 years after she went missing in the North Cascade mountain range 8 • A California Family Dies Under Mysterious Circumstances. Toxic Algae May Be To Blame 9 • Mike Richards quits as ‘Jeopardy!' host amid controversy — but is he really out? 10 • Atlanta Falcons become the first NFL team to be 100% vaccinated against COVID 11 • Tim Tebow cut by Jacksonville Jaguars, ending his NFL comeback 12 • Brett Favre urges you to ban football and pleads for no blow'Til 14 13 • Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney+ Series Reportedly Wraps Filming 14 • Haiti earthquake: Tensions rise in struggle to get aid to victims 15 • Bill Maher on chaotic Afghan withdrawal: 'Could it be more Trumpian?' Plus Mt. Rushmore Answered: 4 Best Sci-Fi Heroes And new Mt. Rushmore Question: 4 Best Fantasy Characters And this week's Pop Culture Deep Thinking Question: Worst Places to actually Live In Watch it Live at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGxbsrZa5Iu_s9Nje9rzkFQ https://www.facebook.com/theJoePadulashow The Axe Throwing Place https://www.axethrowingplace.com/ Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Bob: The Last Resort Escort Service by Eldon Parker https://www.amazon.com/Matthew-Mark-Luke-Bob-Service/dp/1480940941 #NationalNews #LocalNews #ClarksvilleTn #HeadlinesWithDennyTheBull #HwDtB #TheJoePadulaShow #Nashville #Tennessee --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/joe-padula/support

England will move to the final stage of easing Covid restrictions on 19 July, but Boris Johnson said the "pandemic was not over" as he urged "caution". Martha Kearney spoke to Graham Medley, chair of SPI-M and Professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He said even if we don't get up to very high Covid numbers, the numbers we get up to might last for six weeks or so. He added "although we might not get over 2,000 hospital admissions a day that's still a considerable burden on health care". (Image: Person wearing a stethoscope; Credit: PA)

A Port Melbourne cafe has made the heartbreaking decision to close after repeated blows due to COVID-19. The Bay Street cafe site was leased at the end of 2019 and underwent renovations as it was previously a kebab shop. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A hilarious on-air moment with Tony Jones on Monday has been declared the "one of the funniest moments in the history of 3AW" by Damian Tardio. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew Pierce talks to Sammy Wilson, Democratic Unionist Party Brexit spokesperson on the row over alleged comments by Joe Biden's team on Britain's ‘sausage war' with the EU in Northern Ireland, and speaks to royal biographer Angela Levin on Harry and Meghan's latest legal row. Plus, with cases of burnout surging after the pandemic, a wellness expert offers tips on how to deal with it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

'Could you imagine what a wonderful world it would be, if you listened to you and I listened to me? Could you see how strong we each would become, if once we did listen, then we became one? Would you stand at the gate of heaven and say, ‘each day I listened to what God put in my way'. For when I listen to me, and you listen to you, we're able to hear what God meant us to do.' ~ Vaun Gramotovich OMG'D, I LOVE this poem. Powerful. It's called , ‘Imagine Listening with Love'. I'm reminded when I hear myself say those words of Demi Lovato's song and the message she brings - is anybody listening? Powerful question to ask. So, for our Tuck Talk Podcast today, I thought to share about a beautiful ancient wisdom and proprietary system that has been a part of my life and work now for almost 20 years. I'm choosing to share this with you today based on this Major time of transition that we are experiencing. My Tuck Talk conversation with you today carries the message of ‘we are right on sacred time' with the challenges and changes in our world. In fact, we are privileged to be here, to have our role in these changes, and HOW we navigate these changes. Will we navigate them in and with fear? OR, will we move forward with a deep sense of knowing and trust - again that we are right on sacred time. Join us today as we Tuck Talk about where we are, where we are going, and more importantly about a tool and system to empower you in getting ‘there'. A system that is designed to open and expand you in new, mutative and powerful ways - balance your life - and balance the world bringing love, peace and happiness. I'm off to listen as love….. Who is this Rebel Belle? Tuck Self is a "personal growth enthusiast" and catalyst with a passion for squeezing as much juice and joy out of life as possible. As a southern woman, she was raised to do what is "appropriate" making everyone else around her comfortable, even at the expense of her own happiness. Her journey has been one of finding and reclaiming her voice and boldly expressing that to the world. Her passion is empowering her clients to find their voice, express it fully and on their own terms! Tuck is a Certified Life Development Coach in Communication, Certified Natural Law Coach, Certified Hypnotist, and a Human Design Specialist and BG5™ Career and Business Consultant. Having studied and mentored with many great Masters of our time ( including Bob Proctor, Dr. Carol McCall, Jennie Marlow, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dr. Jill Ammon-Wexler, Richard Rudd, Christian Pankhurst, Loral Langemeier and many more) she has synthesized the tools and techniques into her Rebel Belle Philosophy. These pathways create a solid foundation, insight and joy in your life that aligns you with your truest path and most authentic essence. Tuck invites you to take an unparalleled leap of faith in yourself. Grab your petticoat ruffles and high step your way to a whole new fun and fabulous life. If you're interested in learning more about Tuck, visit her website at https://therebelbelle.com

CFMEU WA - Pindan collapse 'could have been avoided' See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lisa Thal is an Author, Speaker, and Business Coach.  Simplify Your Sales meetings. She wrote the book "Three Word Meetings."  Lisa coaches leaders on simplifying sales and business meetings with fun and interesting 3-word  topics to get your sales team motivated and inspired.  She has over 34 years of marketing, sales, and leadership experience.   Episode 104, Learn the technique to turning a No into a Yes!   Well, It's human behavior for us to avoid any negative experiences. I think you will agree that no one wants to be a Negative Nelli or face negative experiences if they can avoid them. If you're in sales, you experience the word "No." You can call them objections or rejections, but let's call it what it is, a prospect is avoiding us and perhaps not interested in your product or service.   So the question is, how can you tell they want to say no?   In sales, you want to get the "no" as soon as possible so you can move on. Otherwise, your prospect will steal time from you and drag you along for weeks or months without giving a definitive answer.    I call this "Noping," and it usually sounds like: "Hey, can you call me back?" "Send me an email, and I'll get back to you." "Hey, follow up with me next week." "Sorry I had to cancel; I'll get back to you with a better time."   When I hear "Nope" phrases, I know I'm in trouble. So we keep calling even though they're probably not interested. This situation typically happens when you're setting the next steps after your presentation. Instead of saying "We're not interested right now," which would be ideal, you'll hear, "We'll think about it and get back to you," "Let's follow up in two weeks," or the dreaded "Let me think about what we discussed today.    It may be time to consider implementing the Negative Reserve Selling.     David H. Sandler created negative reverse selling in 1967 as part of the Sandler Selling System. The system aims to convince the prospect that they are pursuing the deal and need the product rather than 'selling' them. Brilliant, right?     It is a reverse psychology technique meaning that it takes the opposite approach to what you would expect.   As a salesperson, you will be asking questions and making statements that would seem to discourage your customer from buying your products while, in reality doing the opposite.   So, how is the negative reverse selling actually happen? There are two main parts of the process:   It starts with a Softening Statement- "Feeling" these phrases and sentences will help you become much better at negative reverse selling than you would have if you only focused on techniques.   The softening Statement clarifies the customer's concern and ensures that they are heard and understood. The softening Statement is to disarm your potential customer while also making sure that the negative Statement doesn't anger or provoke them. Some examples of the softening Statement include "I understand what you mean," "You're absolutely right," and "That is a valid concern," " Tell me More."   Next is the Negative Statement The negative Statement is the opposite of the Statement you would usually make or the opposite of the position you want to take. The negative Statement leans into the concern of your potential client and makes them start defending the product instead of objecting to it. The negative reverse selling technique is about making your customer sell your products to themselves. Most of the time, people tend to argue, so you just need to take the correct position to guide their argument in the direction you need. Negative reverse selling helps you be in control of the conversation, and that's what we want!   Reverse Selling is a strategy of responding to your prospect's question with another question. A seller will do this three times to understand the prospect's motivations or needs better. For example, if the client asks, 'Could you lower your price?' you would respond with, 'What price did you have in mind?'   See, you want to discover the real objection or your prospect's lack of interest and get them to admit the answer is "No" without getting too negative—your finding what is keeping you from working together. Essentially, you're getting the prospect or client to realize they're wasting your time if they do not have the resources or genuine interest in you helping them.   Here's an example:   Prospect: "I need more time to think about it." Salesperson: "Typically, when I hear someone say," I need more time to think about it," it means I have fallen short in sharing the value of my program for you, and I apologize.    Is it fair for me to assume that's the case?"   That's it. The key phrase and framework will save you countless hours. "Is it fair for me to assume that's the case?" gently pushes prospects into giving you a more honest answer about their interest in your product.   A Negative Reverse is a question preceded by a softening statement such as "Hmm" or "I see," or "Good point." The question is in the negative or expressed in a manner opposite to the position you want to establish or the direction you want to steer the conversation.   So I am encouraging you always to be positive, but know in certain situations you may need to be a Negative -Nellie.   If you think someone could benefit from this episode, share it, rate it, or subscribe for Free at Itunes or Spotify, so you don't miss out on the next three-word podcast.   Learn more about how to Simply Your sales meetings using 3-word topics at http://www.threewordmeetings.com .

Julian Kettle is the Senior Vice President, Vice Chair Metals and Mining of Wood Mackenzie and has 30 years of experience in the analysis of metals and mining. In his latest blog - 'Could soaring prices see copper fly too close to the sun?' (below) - Kettle argues that the threat to copper from aluminium as a viable energy transmission alternative is being vastly underestimated. He joined the BizNews Power Hour to discuss this blog and the sustainability of the copper price

Political analysts indicating that federal election could be as early as December following from last night’s budget. - Καθαρά προεκλογικό χαρακτηρίζουν πολιτικοί αναλυτές τον ομοσπονδιακό προϋπολογισμό που κατέθεσε χθες η κυβέρνηση Μόρισον.

The leader of Britain's main opposition Labour Party shook up his top team after disappointing election results, moving his party chairwoman, economy spokeswoman and chief whip in an attempt to exert control over a fractious membership.But the moves by Labour leader Keir Starmer spurred new recriminations in a party that has not been able to make a breakthrough against Prime Minister Boris Johnson's governing Conservatives.Starmer late Sunday moved deputy party leader Angela Rayner from the post of party chairwoman — responsible for election strategy — and named Rachel Reeves his new Treasury spokeswoman, replacing Anneliese Dodds. Long-serving chief whip Nick Brown was replaced by Alan Campbell."The Labour Party must be the party that embraces the demand for change across our country," Starmer said. "That will require bold ideas and a relentless focus on the priorities of the British people. Just as the pandemic has changed what is possible and what is necessary, so Labour must change too."The relatively modest changes drew criticism both from those who wanted a bolder shuffle and from those angry at the sidelining of Rayner, who is popular with the social democratic party's left wing. She remains deputy leader, and Starmer also handed Rayner new responsibilities countering powerful Cabinet Minister Michael Gove, in a sign of her strong base within the party.Labour has been out of office since 2010, and has been struggling to find a way back to power. In elections last week, Labour was defeated by the Conservatives in Hartlepool, a northeast England parliamentary seat that it had held for decades, and lost hundreds of posts on local authorities across England. The results demonstrated the Conservatives' success at winning over voters in former industrial towns who feel neglected by successive governments over several decades. Johnson's promise of jobs and investment has helped the Tories win a clutch of northern England seats long held by Labour.Labour came third in an election for the Scottish Parliament that saw the pro-independence Scottish National Party win a fourth term in power.Labour did better than expected in Wales, extending its 22 years at the helm of the semi-autonomous Welsh government. Labour's vote also held up in big cities, with its candidates winning mayoral races in London, Manchester, Liverpool, the West of England and West Yorkshire. And the party, founded a century ago to represent the industrial working class, made gains at the local level in affluent southern areas and university towns.Starmer was elected leader a year ago, replacing Jeremy Corbyn, who led Labour to election defeats in 2017 and 2019. Starmer, a more centrist figure than the left-wing Corbyn, has struggled to unite a party divided over how economically radical it should be. Last week's disappointing election results have fanned the flames of party discontent."What we want is a strategy for winning from this leadership, because it's clear from what happened over the weekend, particularly what happened in Hartlepool, there's a problem with the strategy," Labour lawmaker Diane Abbott, a Corbyn ally, told the BBC on Monday.Polling expert John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde said Labour's problem is even broader than that. Five years after Britain narrowly voted to leave the European Union, and more than a year after it officially quit the bloc, the electorate remains split between supporters and opponents of Brexit.Curtice said Labour "is a party of 'remain' voters … the party of young voters, of graduates, of the socially liberal, of people living in London. It is not the party of the working class."Curtice said Labour had barely begun to grapple with that major shift."Its reaction seems to be, 'Could we please go back to where we were?'" he said.- words by JILL LAWLESS Associated Press

In today's daily round-up of export, trade and commodity finance news, TXF's Max Thompson covers the latest stories and trends across the market: US-based Freepoint Commodities has closed a $2.63 billion revolving bank facility Standard Chartered has priced its first commodity hedge linked to Environmental, Social and Governance benchmarks with trader Trafigura Digitising business and removing tens of millions of paper documents would boost small British businesses’ overseas trade by £25 billion over the next four years, according to new research by the International Chamber of Commerce  Like what you hear? Hit subscribe to stay up to date and for all the latest news online visit www.txfnews.com today.

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Atlanta Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos joined Dukes & Bell and talked about when Mike Soroka might be ready to make his regular season debut. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Margy Osmond told 3AW Queensland was already feeling the effects of its latest COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent border closures and restrictions. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mercedes Schlapp, former White House Director of Strategic Communications, says that the 9/11-style commission that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is wanting to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot “could backfire” on her because she didn't provide the necessary reinforcements.

Hello Everyone! Big Show... Literally. Callers everywhere for 'Could you have made it', Could you have been a Sporting Great ? That's what we have been looking for today and Your Stories didn't disappoint. . Like The Gentleman from Big Fella Landscaping..... You'll know the feeling yourself once you hear his story. There are plenty more tales of 'Almost Getting There BUT...' as well, so we will leave you to the listening. Have an amazing day, and enjoy!

Caris LeVert arrived in Indianapolis last week feeling perfectly fine.He was eager to meet his new teammates, join the starting lineup and make his Pacers debut. Then came the shocking news from Indiana's team doctors: They found a small mass on LeVert's left kidney. Suddenly everything went on hold and now, as LeVert awaits test results to find out if the growth is cancerous, the 6-foot-6 guard realizes just how fortunate he was to be included in last week's blockbuster trade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ali and Zed continue the conversation about if it is possible to forgive a partner if they cheat on you. The conversation spans from social media representation, dating online, and what actually counts as 'cheating'. NOW ON ALL MAJOR STREAMING SERVICES: Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/canttouchmycrown Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/0RkngQ97krs…oITnSypeBs4Jtaxg Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ctmc…st/id1514579668 Twitter/ Instagram: @ctmcbrand Facebook: Can't Touch My Crown!

In this episode, IGTV’s Victoria Scholar speaks with Tone Vays, derivatives trader, analyst and YouTuber about the outlook for bitcoin in 2021. Vays says his conservative estimate for the cryptocurrency in 2021 is that it could reach $45,000. Any opinion, news, research, analysis, or other information does not constitute investment or trading advice. Follow us on Twitter @IGTV

'Could have f***** everything up' - David Price honest on AJ knocking out Pulev, Fury & AJ comments *BY KUGAN CASSIUS *

This episode was inspired by a message I received recently from an ex student who is now a teacher and wanted to let me know about the impact I had made.   So, I put out the call to a number of my ex students and just said: 'Could you please send me a brief recording of something you remember me teaching you.'   The responses I got allowed me to really consider my teaching philosophy, my goals in the classroom, my values and just the things I think are important when teaching young adults. There is a lot in here for everyone. Definitely one of my fave episodes to put together. I mention the podcast episodes: MEGG THOMPSON: The Behaviour Master Calculus, Careers and Roadmap Ed AS REQUESTED: Learning styles and motivation tips Rise to the Challenge As well as the blog: The Teacher I Needed   Small business shout out (not sponsored) to Flourish Self Care - some beautiful care packages available that would make lovely Christmas gifts.

This episode was inspired by a message I received recently from an ex student who is now a teacher and wanted to let me know about the impact I had made. So, I put out the call to a number of my ex students and just said: 'Could you please send me a brief recording of something you remember me teaching you.' The responses I got allowed me to really consider my teaching philosophy, my goals in the classroom, my values and just the things I think are important when teaching young adults. There is a lot in here for everyone. Definitely one of my fave episodes to put together. I mention the podcast episodes: MEGG THOMPSON: The Behaviour Master Calculus, Careers and Roadmap Ed AS REQUESTED: Learning styles and motivation tips Rise to the Challenge As well as the blog: The Teacher I Needed Small business shout out (not sponsored) to Flourish Self Care - some beautiful care packages available that would make lovely Christmas gifts. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/laura4712/message

Ali and Zed drive around during this episode and discuss the current 'normalised' culture around cheating, 'side tings' and other ideas surrounding fidelity and loyalty in relationships. NOW ON ALL MAJOR STREAMING SERVICES: Soundcloud: @canttouchmycrown Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/0RkngQ97krs…oITnSypeBs4Jtaxg Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ctmc…st/id1514579668 Twitter/ Instagram: @ctmcbrand Facebook: Can't Touch My Crown!

Ever wonder if you can really love what you do?Steve had the amazing opportunity to sit down and talk with Dana Spinola, the visionary founder & CVO of innovative clothing brand, Fab'rik. She shows us how you can love what you do!On this episode Dana shares everything from how she manages her calendar as a busy CEO, to creating a company culture where people look forward to Mondays, and how they actually hold dreaming meetings at work! Dana says, "Dreaming is really just hoping for what your life can be, and being intentional to throw it out there and be bold enough to say, 'Could this possibly happen?"What do you need to dream about and be more intentional with? Tune in for this inspiring, and actionable episode!...Show Links:Connect with Dana! Social | Book | Fab'rikConnect with us! Social | Website | Membership

President Donald Trump tested positive for COVID-19 last Thursday, and was transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for monitoring on Friday. Homeland security expert Juliette Kayyem spoke with Boston Public Radio on Monday about how the rest of the world views the news of Trump contracting the coronavirus. “What our enemies are looking at are unbelievable unforced error at this stage, that basically here is a country already on its knees and now a White House that has failed to protect itself,” she said. “It goes against the narrative of the United States’ ability to beat the virus, since Trump could not keep it out of his own home.” Kayyem is an analyst for CNN, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Pat has an update on college football. Will Joe Biden be able to get through a debate? Biden hasn’t picked his VP yet, but Kanye West has picked his. We should all just move to Cody, Wyoming. Jerry Falwell Jr. appears in weird belly post with a woman. People are receiving random seeds from China. One guy decided he should plant them. Mulan will be released on Disney+. Are movies being released on apps the new normal? Zoe Saldana explains why she shouldn't have been casted in a new movie. Someone put a Trump 2020 sticker on a bear’s collar and now it's a crime. Michelle Obama takes blame for not solving the health care problem. LeBron James says the basketball community isn't sad about Donald Trump not watching the NBA. Odell Beckham Jr. thinks the NFL doesn’t see the players as humans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this installment of The Geology Flannelcast, the boys talk about Iceland volcanoes, a honey moon hike in New Zealand gone horribly wrong, new evidence that suggests that the asteroid impact was the the sole driver in killing off the dinosaurs, increased earthquake activity in the San Jacinto Mountains in California, and a coccolithophore bloom in the the English Channel.Links:Dinosaurs wiped out by asteroid, not volcanoes, researchers sayNewlywed suing Royal Caribbean describes volcano-eruption horror: 'Could feel my skin burning'Over 4,500 Earthquakes Hit Iceland as Volcano Shows Sign of EruptionChanneling a BloomNatural fluid injections triggered Cahuilla earthquake swarm

In today's daily round-up of export, trade and commodity finance news, TXF's Max Thompson covers the latest stories and trends across the market: The container shipping industry could save itself up to $4 billion a year if half of all bills of lading (B/Ls) were dealt with digitally, according to the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) Brazilian iron ore miner Vale has launched a legal action in New York to determine whether funds paid to BSG Resources within the framework of their former Simandou partnership in Guinea were used for property investments in the United State South Korea's government-led KRW40 trillion ($33 billion) corporate relief fund aimed at helping companies weather the COVID-19 pandemic crisis will first go to aid airliners and shippers with minimum debt of KRW500 billion ($407.5 million) and payroll of 300. Like what you hear? Hit subscribe to stay up to date and for all the latest news online visit www.txfnews.com today.

Hey listeners! It’s been a mad mad mad week here (all of you in the future, check the date), and I bet there too. Result: there are no shownotes for this episode. We’re talking about revamping my website to get it in gear for my forthcoming second book. Here’s the image we mention—the before—and for the after (which is still in progress), head over to my site and see what you think. Any questions, shoot me an email (kjdellantonia@gmail.com or reply to this.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ (00:00):Hey #AmWriting listeners, this is KJ and this is my seventh time attempting to record this pre-episode discussion of something really cool that's being authored by Author Accelerator, our sponsor. I think you all know that I loved working with Jennie Nash on revising my manuscript for The Chicken Sisters. Well, if you'd be interested in working in a small group with Jennie, she is offering a Rock Your Revision small intensive workshop for fiction writers ready to revise manuscripts this summer, July 16th - 19th of 2020 in Santa Barbara, California. If that interests you, if it sounds like something you'll be ready for, if it sounds like something that having it scheduled might make you get ready for (and I think that will work) head on over to author accelerator.com click on the retreats and summits link, and then scroll on down to Rock Your Revision to learn more. Is it recording now?Jess (01:05):Now it's recording.KJ (01:06):Yay.Jess (01:06):Go ahead.KJ (01:08):This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing.Jess (01:12):Alright, let's start over.KJ (01:13):Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now one, two, three. Hi, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #Am writing the podcast about writing all the things and getting them out into the world. And that's all I'm going to say about that this week.Sarina (01:37):Really? Well, I'm Sarina Bowen and I write long things, primarily genre fiction and I've written 30-odd romances and my newest one is called Sure Shot. If I ever finish it.KJ (01:50):I can't wait for it. Okay. I am KJ Dell'Antonia, the dithering other voice on the other end of the microphone. I am the author of the novel, The Chicken Sisters coming out this summer and the book How To Be a Happier Parent as well as the former editor of the New York Times' Motherlode blog. And those are the things that I do and it's just me and Sarina today.Sarina (02:23):It is. We're here to work on KJ's launch sequence.KJ (02:26):Yes. And if we sound a little odd, we are (as we often are) working in our local libraries. So, yes. Sarina, as we all know, has many, many, many past identities and for all I know is also cat woman when we're not together. But one of those past identities is helping people, specifically authors, with their websites. So that's our plan today. We're going to go over my website and talk about how I can shift it from being a website, primarily designed for a parenting author to a website designed for an author in general. And the way we're going to do this (if you want to take a look) by the time you hear this, I will have changed it. So we're going to take a lot of screenshots. So if you'd like to see what we're talking about and we will describe it cause you're probably in your car. But if you do want to just head over to the show notes at amwritingpodcast.com and there will be pictures, screenshots of this website as it is today before the dramatic changes that I'm going to make to it. I mean, it's a good website somebody made it for me and I can change it and you know, there's nothing wrong with it other than that there is absolutely no mention of my nove,l at all whatsoever.Sarina (03:55):Right.KJ (03:56):Because that's the first thing that's wrong with it. Check.Sarina (03:59):So I usually get involved with an author's website at about this same point. Sometimes I'll get calls earlier before people have cover art for their book and those people have been told that they must have an author website and start building their platform and blah, blah blah, but they don't have a book cover. And that is fine. Like, it's great to be invested in handling your book launch, but if you really do your website before you have cover art, you're wasting your money because it, you know, it would be disappointing to do a website all in purple and to find that your book cover is bright yellow. So, you know, I gently dissuade people from spending their hard earned cash early on, but you're ready to go because you have your cover art.KJ (04:50):I do.Sarina (04:51):And I have to say that I have seen some smashingly beautiful author websites over time, just so original and stunning that angels weep.KJ (05:03):That's not really what I'm going for.Sarina (05:04):Well, that's not really what I go for either. I mean, I think that the most important, pretty much the only important thing is that your website do two things. One is that it helps readers bond with your book before they're ready to click that one-click button. So that means that they're familiar with the cover art. So when your page loads at kjdellantonia.com we should see the new cover art immediately. That's pretty much step one. And the second thing is that most readers, I mean they can learn about us anywhere, right? Like social media, Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, there's so many places. But if they actually take the trouble to find their way all the way to your website, it's probably because they have a question. So we're going to anticipate that question and try to answer it within one to two clicks, two being the absolute maximum. So if you can do those two things, you're doing so, so well.KJ (06:10):Excellent. And one of the reasons I'm leaping on this is that I searched another author somebody that I know because I knew that they had a new book coming out, and I couldn't remember the name, and I needed to know for various reasons. And I went to their website and it wasn't there. And that's exactly what someone could do for me. Although let me just say that author's book is coming out before me. Okay. So that person had better just get on it.Sarina (06:40):And this is sometimes difficult, like not everybody likes noodling with websites. Like I love it, honestly.KJ (06:46):I'm happy to crawl around in there, too. I just want to have a mission.Sarina (06:51):Right. And for some people this is like the hardest partKJ (06:55):And if it is the hardest part, hire someone. You don't have to do this yourself.Sarina (07:01):It doesn't have to be fancy.KJ (07:02):It doesn't. Or you like Squarespace, right?Sarina (07:06):I love Squarespace. But there are even easier things to do. Like did you know that if you join the Author's Guild for approximately $200 a year, you get a free website from them and they will help you set it up?KJ (07:18):I did not.Sarina (07:19):Yeah. And you won't have as much control over it as I like to have over mine. But if you just hate websites, that is not a bad option.KJ (07:27):You know, we don't need blogs anymore. You know, your website is probably (correct me if I'm wrong) a largely static entity.Sarina (07:38):Well, mine is not actually.KJ (07:40):No, I know yours isn't. Because you are a person who puts out many, many books a year. So if you're that, then you're working with a website with probably shopping, and possibly merch, and some other things. I, on the other hand, am a one book every couple of years author at the moment, although I'd like to speed that up. And so I am not really needing to use my website to inform you of immediate developments.Sarina (08:10):Right. So I would like to add a third thing to our little to do list, though. Because I don't want to burden everyone and say that you have to do a million things on your author website. But honestly, this third thing could save your career, which is that you must have a way for people to sign up for your newsletter that is both easy without being irritating.KJ (08:29):That's a challenge.Sarina (08:31):Yeah. Well, I mean, we're all quite used to popups now. There are obnoxious ones and less obnoxious ones. And anyway, I'll leave that to our readers to decide.KJ (08:41):I turned my pop-up off because it was outdated and I could not figure it out. So normally I have a pop-up.Sarina (08:49):I turned my off as well because I didn't like the conversion rate of it. Like I thought, wow, I'm irritating 97 people for every three that type their email address in. But, instead I have many other very useful solicitations for email addresses.KJ (09:10):If you want to sign up for my email, you can go to followkj.com and there you will find my website sign up.Sarina (09:16):That's great.KJ (09:17):I think so, I'm pretty pleased with it. Wait, you'll laugh, I have to show it to Sarina. Because I changed it very on the fly recently I had to come up with an image very quickly and...Sarina (09:34):Oh, you know, that is funny. And I saw this the other day. I don't remember why, but I looked at it.KJ (09:39):It's a Playmobile character barfing into a tiny little Playmobile toliet.Sarina (09:42):Yes, we're going to have to work on this, KJ.KJ (09:44):I know, but I figured it would get attention.Sarina (09:48):It does, but your book cover needs to be right there.KJ (09:49):Let's start with the website and then we'll do the signup in a minute.Sarina (10:00):So right now, KJ's website has a bunch of wonderful parenting pictures on it, which suited her last book perfectly.KJ (10:07):And they're all in a sort of a red - pink theme.Sarina (10:10):Yes. I would quibble with the way that your cover art is not above the fold here. I will just tell you a couple of things about this challenge. So, websites as we design them on a screen are usually horizontal. Books are vertical. This is the main challenge of my life, aside from plotting novels. So KJ also just opened the website on her phone because this is something that I beg people to do and they don't usually listen. But more than half of your website visitors will be on their phones. And that is really hard for authors to figure out when they're struggling to get their hands around their website in the first place, that the phone part is almost more important. You know, people will come and say, 'Could you move my name a half an inch to the right?' And I usually let fly that line from The Matrix. Because most modern web building tools, i(ncluding Squarespace and the better templates at WordPress) now build a website on the fly for every single visitor based on the dimensions of their screen. So there is no one website, you can't design it like a movie poster anymore, you have to make something responsive. And that's why I use Squarespace because they're very good at that. And obviously lots of WordPress themes are too, I just am not as familiar.KJ (11:37):Mine is a WordPress theme, so we're not going to mess with the backend. I'm going to go and do that on my own. We're just going to talk about what it looks like and what it ought to look like. So step one...Sarina (11:48):You have a banner on yours with your name kind of in the middle instead of here above the main navigation. For displaying cover art I actually think that's a little trickier, but you can probably find a way around it or you can just move your name to the top. I know it's boring but it works. Okay? And then your main navigation is terrific. You have a home, you have the book which is going to have to change to books at the top and one of those books will be your new one. You have share the book, which is a great idea, you have blog, the podcast, resources, about KJ Dell'Antonia, and media, which are all great. So I actually wonder if about KJ Dell'Antonia and media couldn't become one thing if you wanted them to be. There's nothing wrong with there being two. So people get tunnel vision and let's say somebody wants to book you on The Today Show for your new book. So one of these things should say contact, because people get tunnel vision and I'm sure your contact information is here. But I've been like half asleep, needing coffee, and not spotting it on a website, and you really don't want that to happen to you. So, contact should always be one of those things. And also, if you did dispense with your pop-up and you're leaving that that way, then the thing on the far right should be subscribe. And that can hop right to that page you showed me a second ago, the follow KJ page, but it should be there. Yeah, so we're doing great. Now, if you scroll down on KJ's front page you do get her most recent book before this new one. Oh, okay, I would've put the bio links right here, but you have them fairly close. So that's all good. And then you could also have, instead of this got a book club thing (not that there's anything wrong with it) an email signup here, as well. So I would like to have one up in the main nav and then here on the scrolly scrolly front page. So the reason that websites got scrolly scrolly is because of phones.KJ (14:01):Let's have a look at it scrolling on my phone. So on the website you see things laid out, like you see the book cover and then to the right you see the text about the book. On the mobile, you see the book cover and then you scroll down and you see the text about the book, and then you scroll down and you'll see the by the book in a vertical list.Sarina (14:25):So the buttons are horizontal on the laptop and they're vertical on the phone. And that's because you have a properly responsive website. Now, there are some authors who had their websites built more than 10 years ago, and the site still looks good when you pull it up on the computer. But if you pull it up on the phone, it's quite broken. And here's the reason that's not good. Google will punish you. They promote (in their search rankings) sites that perform on a mobile device and they sort of demote sites that don't. And you don't want to be demoted by Google. You know that old joke like, where's the best place to hide a dead body? On the seventh page of the Google search result. Okay, so don't be that dead body.KJ (15:21):So, but it's okay to have the scrolly scrolly first page is what I'm hearing. So the fact that if you just keep scrolling, you just get stuff, after stuff, after stuff is fine. It's just that maybe the stuff is not in the right order.Sarina (15:38):Well, your stuff was in a decent order. It's like the New York Times - you know, above the fold, below the fold. So here's the thing, when I'm helping an author with a website, I send a questionnaire. And these are the questions on the questionnaire. Which author websites in your own genre do you like best? Cause that's not a bad place to get inspiration; to take a shortcut to figure out what other people are doing. Right?KJ (16:06):That's how we made our podcast. There's a podcast, it's called Hurry Slowly. I love her and I love the design of her website. And I basically was just like, this really looks great. I'm going to make ours look pretty much just like this and it is. Thank you very much, Jocelyn Keighley.Sarina (16:26):Then the second question, the colors on your site will be chosen to compliment your cover art, but please tell me what colors do you not like and what are you hoping to see? And so with you, you have a lot of colors between your two books, but they compliment each other and that's just where you know we would go.KJ (16:41):Yeah, we're going to lose the pink-iness of this theme and shift it.Sarina (16:47):And shift it to highlight the yellow. And then it will look right. So then, one of the hardest decisions is what do you want your visitors to see first when they arrive on your site. In other words, the most valuable real estate should be allocated to which of the following? And these four choices cover almost everybody. So choice one - your newest cover art and a blurb quote, which is never a bad choice. So maybe you have that cover because you want readers to bond with it immediately. And you have a very short blurb quote, like the best little bit of something that somebody said. And then a button that says 'Read more' so you can put that person right onto that book's page. So that's always a good decision if you have a book coming out. Then choice two - a view of all of your covers, like an art gallery. Like if you have an extensive backlist and you want readers of your most recent book. Cause what if someone arrives on your site with a question, what else did she write? So that's the one click thing. And in your case we would have it in a dropdown menu probably cause the art gallery doesn't really work for you. So choice three - your newest blog post. So this is usually not the right choice for my clients, but it could be if you are a very active blogger and your blogging was related to the book you were trying to sell. Then that might work. And the last choice I have here - is a book representing each of your various series.KJ (18:18):And that's what yours looks like.Sarina (18:20):Yes. And the websites that have the most content on them are the biggest challenge. Because when we have that question - what question did the person arrive with? The more books you have, the more varied that question could be. Like what's next and this or that series, which audio book did I not listen to? You know, the questions get more complicated with the more books someone has in their catalog.KJ (18:44):Yeah. I don't think that there are that many questions you're going to come to my website looking for an answer to. I guess a peculiarity of my website is that I have these resources. And they are parenting resources. You can get holiday survival guides, you can get an ebook about homework, you can get the 10 mantras for happier parents. I mean, I have quite a few of them. Most fiction readers aren't going to be here coming after these things. But my parenting book is also coming out in paperback. So some people will be coming out for them and sometimes I will be talking about them, so it's a little more complicated.Sarina (19:28):I wonder if your website shouldn't have two book covers sort of facing each other on the front of it. With The Chicken Sisters on the left and The Happier Parent on the right. And it's basically like, people make a grand choice the minute they arrive at your website because they're probably there for what topic. And then you would sort of move the person on to the page that deals with that and your resources might be down at the scrolly scrolly bottom of the parenting book.KJ (19:56):And right now the resources require you to add your email and they might as well continue to require you give your email. That seems like a good idea although in terms of my personal ability to adjust this website, hopefully I can pull it off. I've done them. Somebody else did this one. I don't have the money to have them go back in and fix it. I might get somebody else. But see on this page your name is at the top, not in the middle. So you just need to duplicate a page like this. You're right. So what I can do is abandon the current - just to get a little bit into the weeds, but you might be in my position too - is abandon the current. So right now, when you go to kjdellantonia.com it's actually not pointing to what's called home here. It's pointing to the book. So I can pick anywhere. So you can pick anywhere for you know, u.com to point to. I mean home is probably not a necessary piece of it. Okay. Like you said, I can do some redesigning here.Sarina (21:14):And you know, as you move through the process of pre-launch, to the book launch, to after the launch, your needs change a little bit. I am accustomed to people who come back once a year to have their website gussied up for their new book. One thing I would like to mention for any listeners who are considering paying to have a website done is please don't hire someone who wants you to pay them on a monthly basis forever. This used to be the way it was done. And there are still some people out there who are paying for a website which is static and they're just paying to have it hosted cause they're stuck. And you don't have to do that. You can pay someone to design a thing and to set up the hosting for you, but then you have to have the keys, you know?KJ (22:10):So part of your design process, and it was part of mine, should be the person walking you through the most basic changes that you might want to make on your website. So, to change the pictures, to change the pop-up, to change where the homepage points, you should know how to do those small things. And I do, it's more that I think they used something called Bakery Builder to build this. And it's not my more familiar thing. I can do it. And I will say, you can find that, just ask around. Ask your author friends for who has designed their website but do ask around, because I also have a friend who's been working on designing her website with her web designer for let's see, since August. Yeah. The person is really slow and she called me fairly recently and was like, 'Is this normal?' And I was like, 'No, absolutely not.' Of course, this friend also draws a picture of what she wants it to look like and then sends that to the web designer. So the web designer may also be a little frustrated. There may be fault on both sides, but I don't think so. I think it just should not be taking anywhere near this long. It's crazy. Somebody should be able to get you rolling fairly quickly.Sarina (23:39):And also just to have the ability to say when it will be done.KJ (23:45):Alright. What's next?Sarina (23:47):Well, if you really like working with your website, there are so many things you can do to help guide your author destiny using your own website. For example, you can give away a free book in exchange for an email signup. So the parts of my website that you can see when you just navigate to Sarinabowen.com is like just the tip of that iceberg because I have lots of other hidden content there that is serving special purposes for me. And the more comfortable you are touching your own website and making pages, the more fun you can have with that. So during launch week, I usually have a contest where people enter it by sharing the book. Now, not every reader of my books is interested in entering the giveaway and sharing the cover, and that's fine. But for that core of people who is really interested in helping me promote it (for whatever reason) I have a contest on a hidden page in my website where you enter the link of where you shared it, and you put in your name, and the winner gets a $25 gift card or something. So there's all kinds of things you can run off of your own website that are more controllable than social media. And if you think about Facebook, which we all basically have to use when we promote a book, it's ugly and you can't make a post do what you want. You can't make it have a button. It's just not a friendly, friendly place in the world. And when you become a little more comfortable with using your own site, you suddenly figure out how much you can do.KJ (25:34):I think a lot of people who have a website don't realize that you can have pages on your website that aren't immediately visible to every visitor to your website. And it's not that they're hidden. It's not that someone who typed you know, KJDellantonia.com/potatocakes wouldn't get to the potato cakes page, but who's gonna do that? And it's not in your menu. So you can have, you can have a hundred potato cake pages or whatever. And I think even I forget that sometimes.Sarina (26:13):So if you're doing an event in Chicago, you could have kjdellantonia.com/chicago if there was something, a resource there that you wanted those people to have.KJ (26:20):And if you want to, you can buy you can buy a special URL. Like you can create a page within your own website. So it's kjdellantonia.com/potato cakes. But instead you buy the website you know, potato lovers.com and then you just point it, you don't create a website for potatocakelovers.com. You just point it to that page on your website. So there's all kinds of playful things. So for example, this follow KJ link, I just own that and I just point it to different things. Right now it's actually pointed to the Flodesk, which is the email software that I used to create my emails. But it used to be pointed to a page within my website. And before that it was pointed to a Mailchimp page. I can point that wherever I want to.Sarina (27:08):Right. And you actually bring up a really good point, which is it's usually better to point your signup at your own website. Like you have this capacity to point at different places which protects you. But I have a friend who can never leave MailChimp because she has the MailChimp signup link in the back of a 40 book backlist. So she's stuck there at their new higher prices because she can't go and change. She literally can't, because the people that bought that book before now and they read it and click on that link are going to her old spot.KJ (27:50):Yeah, no she's stuck. I remember you telling me about that cause I had kind of fallen into that cause I pointed something that I couldn't unpoint because I forgot things.Sarina (28:01):So I use a service called Genius Links and it's a page short linker, but you can change the destination link of absolutely anything.KJ (28:13):That is very nice because you can't do that with tinyurl.com.Sarina (28:17):Right. So Genius Links is great. There are probably others. I believe smartURL allows you to change the ultimate destination. But the other thing that Genius does (it does several things well, actually) it also points people to the Amazon store of their geographical location. So I can make one Amazon link, but it's a Genius link and if that person is in France, it will take them to Amazon.Fr. And the other thing it does (it pays for itself) is that if you have affiliate accounts at Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, (those are the ones that come to mind) you put that information into Genius and it just adds it to every single link. And that is very helpful to me as well. Yeah, not Kobo actually. But anyway, there's lots of ways. So, I just got a check from Apple Affiliates for 500 bucks, which I'm sure paid for my entire year's worth of Genius linking. So it's not just this added expense, but it can actually put money in your pocket.KJ (29:30):So, what's next? Should we look at anything else on my thing specifically?Sarina (29:36):I think your work is cut out for you in a way that is quite doable. You're gonna change some colors around.KJ (29:45):I'm going to just have fewer things up here at the top, I think. There's already some chickens so I'm partly set.Sarina (29:52):You're going to get both of those books on the front page and probably lose some more personal pictures because they won't make as much sense to your novel.KJ (30:02):So I'm just going to abandon some of these pages. I'm just going to make a new page - a new landing page.Sarina (30:12):Just like if you were going to redo chapter four of your work in progress, you wouldn't delete chapter four, you copy it, and tinker until we're satisfied. So this will be the same.KJ (30:23):Yup. That's my plan. Any other thoughts for people as they embark on either changing or creating their own websites?Sarina (30:32):I would look into the Authors Guild if you're really hesitant to play with websites. I would look into Squarespace if you're slightly more adventurous. I dislike WordPress with the fire of a thousand suns, so I can't in good conscience recommend it. Although lots of people like it, I'm not a fan of Wix. Usually the platforms that have a free option look kind of...I don't know, but I don't like them. But one free option that is, you know at least more user friendly is Blogger. Like you can still make a website at Google and it is what it is, but if you need a landing spot and you have no funds to devote to that at this point then there are ways to make happen.KJ (31:26):I'm trying to think if there's anything else we should say about websites before we move on. You should have one.Sarina (31:35):You should have one. It won't sell your book, though. It's great to be find-able and to help you answer questions.KJ (31:45):I wanted to talk about the whole, should I have a blog page? Not me personally, but as a general rule. If a blog feels like a like a mandatory additional task to you, then my thought for you is no, you don't really need to. Cause there's nothing worse than clicking on someone's blog page and seeing three entries from 2016.Sarina (32:11):Right. Well the other thing is you can call it news. And you can just put something there three times a year when you have news. Like, here's my new cover. And the nice thing about having that there is that it's also then you can put the link to that news on Facebook instead of typing the news into Facebook.KJ (32:33):And the other nice thing is that typically if you use the blog software of whatever you are creating, that is designed to be easily updatable. So if you use that for your news, it's designed so that you could just pop in and be like, 'I'll be in Chicago.' And that's it. You don't have to sort of change something that feels more set on your page. So there's reasons to use that software, but maybe not to call it blog.Sarina (33:03):Yeah. It used to be, like 15 years ago. Every agent would say you have to blog. But that's just not true anymore. People consume their news differently.KJ (33:39):The first decision is going to be to go in here, put the two book covers up and close off everything else while I revise it. Basically I'm going to just do that. So if anyone comes in the meantime, there are two book covers, there are links to the books and I'm playing around in the background.Sarina (33:58):Right. And when you link your book, you should do a few vendors. Cause nobody wants to live in a world where Amazon is the only store. No. And we do have that new one.KJ (34:12):What's it called again? I can't remember.Sarina (34:17):Is it BookShop?KJ (34:17):Maybe...Sarina (34:18):We're going to find this and put it in the show notes.KJ (34:20):Yeah, because it's important. Yeah, we've been linking to Indiebound, but it's changing. The booksellers association is creating a new way for authors to link to an Indie supporting platform, which can help you sell books. Cause I will say Indiebound affiliate linking is agonizingly painful (as the person who does it). And also, you listeners typically don't end up buying the book that way. And I get it. But I could see why you're not buying it on Indiebound, but we don't want to link to Amazon because while we're all buying stuff from Amazon, we don't want them to rule the world.Sarina (35:17):So bookshop.org is the new storefront and it's new, new, new, like it just launched within the last four weeks. And they're going to take some of the friction of buying from Indiebound away. So give bookshop.org a look and they also have an affiliate program, but every book that is purchased on here kicks profit into a fund, which is divided among the member bookstores, which is most independent bookstores.KJ (35:48):And the cool thing that they're doing is helping those independent bookstores set up their own websites. So this doesn't really apply to us, but it's kind of neat. I'm pleased, I'm delighted that it's out there.Sarina (35:59):After I read about it, I thought, Oh my goodness, this should not have taken so long.KJ (36:06):Now we got to figure out what we've been reading.Sarina (36:08):Oh, I know. I'm ready. Well, yesterday I opened an envelope and discovered a copy of Chasing Cassandra by Lisa Kleypas inside, which means that at some point I pre-ordered it and I never preorder anything, but I love this author so much and she has a new novel about once a year, which is just about right because if she had more of them, I would never get anything done because she is my queen. She is a romance author, her series is set in the Victorian era, actually in England. But she's so skillful with characters and just so amazing with dialogue that I have to take a few deep breaths after I finish her book and go look at my poor excuse for a book afterwards.KJ (36:59):I think everybody has somebody that is like that. So I have just finished Minor Dramas and Other Catastrophes by Kathleen West. I don't think I've mentioned it on the podcast yet, but I loved it. If you liked The Gifted School, if you have liked books by Tom Perrotta, basically if books set in hothouse schools (public, not boarding schools, that's a different genre) but books set in a hothouse schools full of crazy parents are something that you enjoy (and I do) then this is one for you. It's a really fun story of a dedicated teacher who's a little bit too too intense about teaching her students about the social evils of the world and how the parents around her react to that. It just fun, it's a weekend read, it's entertaining, it's smart, the characters are great. I think you'll enjoy it. So that's Minor Dramas and Other Catastrophes from Kathleen West. Alright, that is our podcast, but before we shut down, let me please remind you to head out to Facebook if you can stand it and join our Facebook group where we don't talk about any of the things that you avoid Facebook for. Instead, we talk about all things writing related, and writerly questions, and just about anything you can get it answered. If you want to find the show notes and the screenshots from the website that we're talking about that's amwritingpodcast.com, which is also where you can find links to support the podcast if you'd like to with a small donation and supporters of the podcast get (pretty much weekly) top fives and small mini podcasts, five minute long shorts, little bits of advice from one of us to all of you that drop right into your podcast player once you get it set up, you don't have to go somewhere special to listen. I think that's cool. That's it. Now you can take us out.Sarina (39:35):Until next week, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Robotic process automation could change the face of utility management by automating the way in which we manage energy bills and even procurement itself. That's the suggestion from Catalyst Commercial Services - we spoke to Chief Executive Officer Chris Hurcombe and Chief Commercial Officer Scott Pickavance about the independent energy consultancy's place in the market and the innovative new products it is bringing to its customers.

An investigation into East Kent Hospitals Trust has concluded the deaths of at least seven babies since 2016 might not have happened if standards had been higher.Bosses have already apologised admitting standards "fell short" - and say they're reviewing their service with some of England’s leading maternity experts to make rapid improvements.Also in today's episode: a doctor is urging us not to panic too much about a deadly virus in China, a car dealership has been targeted by thieves for a third time, and a former striker has told us what it's like to play under Gillingham manager Steve Evans. https://www.kentonline.co.uk/

Language experts actually have theories about why people say they "could care less" (instead of they "couldn't care less"). We dig deep to find the root of the problem. LINKS AND SPONSORS | Learn how you can get my LinkedIn Learning course free: https://t.co/coQuXJRtrT | GRAMMAR GIRL EMAIL NEWSLETTER | https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/newsletters | GRAMMAR POP iOS GAME | Optimized for iPad: http://bit.ly/iPadGrammarPop | For iPad and iPhone: http://bit.ly/GrammarPopMobile | PEEVE WARS CARD GAME | https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/grammar-girl-s-peeve-wars | GRAMMAR GIRL BOOKS | http://bit.ly/GrammarPopBooks | GRAMMAR GIRL IS PART OF THE QUICK AND DIRTY TIPS PODCAST NETWORK | VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)

She writes Emmy-winning television comedy, bestselling children’s books, plays, and sentences for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Is there nothing Jill Twiss can’t do?Musical theater actress and stand-up comic Jill Twiss dreamed of writing for television but did not know how to break in to the world of late-night comedy shows. The stars aligned when a few supportive women called some chits on her behalf, and lo, she landed a spot in the writing room of the Emmy-award winning show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Her work on Last Week Tonight has earned her multiple Emmys, WGA and Peabody Awards, and led to a series of bestselling children’s books as well as the opportunity to write humorous “Can I have that word in a sentence, please?” hints for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. This week, Jill and Jess talk about how Jill got her start in television, her love of Vice President Mike Pence’s pet rabbit Marlon Bundo, how her children’s books came to be, their shared need for pressing deadlines, and Jill’s play-in-progress about the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, you know we dropped the Top Five Ways to Find the Right Agent to pitch into everyone’s inbox last Monday. What will our supporters find there this Monday? It’s SO FRESH WE DON’T EVEN KNOW. But if you become a supporter, you will. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month. As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. Want to share this one? Click here to share on Facebook, and here for an editable tweet. LINKS FROM THE PODCAST#AmReading (Watching, Listening)Jess: Good Luck with That by Kristan HigginsJill: The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America by Isaac Butler and Dan KoisOur guest for this episode is Jill Twiss.Last Week Tonight with John OliverA Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo The Someone NewEveryone Gets a SayThe Marlon Bundo episode of Last Week Tonight (full episode): Just the excerpt about A Day in The Life of Marlon Bundo with a clip of the animated all-star cast audiobook: This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.The image in our podcast illustration is by Kate DeCarvalho. The music in our podcast is by Max Cohen.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ:                                        00:01                    Hello fellow writers. The beginning of the year is a great time to think about what you really want from your writing life and if one of the things that's filled you with joy in the past is time spent encouraging, editing, and helping another writer you might want to consider becoming a book coach yourself. Our sponsor, Author Accelerator provides book coaching to authors like me, but also needs and trains book coaches. And they'll be hosting a free book coaching summit in January for anyone who wants to learn more. If that's got your ears perked up, head to authoraccelerator.com/summit. Is it recording?Jess:                                     00:39                    Now it's recording.KJ:                                        00:40                    Yay.Jess:                                     00:40                    Go ahead.KJ:                                        00:41                    This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone and try to remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess:                                     00:45                    Alright, let's start over.KJ:                                        00:47                    Awkward pause and I'm going to rustle some papers.Jess:                                     00:50                    Okay.KJ:                                        00:50                    Now one, two, three.Jess:                                     00:58                    Hey, I'm Jess Lahey and this is #AmWriting. Our podcast about writing all the things, the podcast about sitting down, getting the work done and often that work looks like pitches, looks like queries, looks like invoicing so that you can get paid for all that stuff. But really this is just the podcast about the nuts and bolts of being a writer.Sarina:                                 01:22                    I'm Sarina Bowen, when I do my writing it's about fiction and novels. I'm the author of 30-odd romance novels and my new one is called Heartland.Jess:                                     01:32                    And I'm Jess, again. And my work of writing is about mostly nonfiction and I'm in the process of writing a new book and in the process of editing it. But my first book is the Gift of Failure, How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. And we are missing KJ again today. She is still hockey tournament-ing. And we are going to have an interview today with someone really, really cool. But I wanted to catch you at the beginning of this, Sarina to tell you that you and our guest today have something in common.Sarina:                                 02:01                    We do, what?Jess:                                     02:03                    So a couple of years ago you sent us a text, KJ and myself, a text about the fact that someone had gotten a tattoo in your honor. And are we still at a couple of people, two people who have tattoos of your books?Sarina:                                 02:18                    I know of three...Jess:                                     02:19                    Three people. And what do they have on their bodies?Sarina:                                 02:22                    Well, the first one had the cover of Him.Jess:                                     02:27                    Okay. Him being one of the books that you have written.Sarina:                                 02:31                    Right. And then another one has a quote from The Year We Fell Down.Jess:                                     02:35                    Oh, that's cool. A quote, I love that.Sarina:                                 02:38                    And hers is in French because she helped me proofread the French edition. And then I have a lovely friend, Claudia, who has a tattoo of The True North titles.Jess:                                     02:49                    That's just so permanent. It's so permanent. I mean, number one, you gotta be a super fan to get a tattoo of. Well the other thing is you said that one of them has The True North novels, which means this is a tattoo that will expand over time, maybe.Sarina:                                 03:05                    Well, perhaps...Jess:                                     03:11                    What if you end up writing like 70 books in this series? It'll be like all the way up her arm or his arm.Sarina:                                 03:16                    Yeah, but I'll be dead from writing all those. So you know, we have bigger problems...But, so tell me about our guest.Jess:                                     03:24                    So our guest today is Jill Twiss and she is a writer on the show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. And she found someone who has a tattoo of a rabbit on them and that rabbit's name is Marlon Bundo. Do you know who Marlon Bundo is?Sarina:                                 03:41                    He's the bunny in her book.Jess:                                     03:43                    The bunny in her book. And we'll talk to her a little bit about that tattoo and what it was like to find out that she has landed a place of permanence on someone's body, which just to me, blows my mind. I can't even picture. It's just amazing.Sarina:                                 03:57                    You know what blows my mind?Jess:                                     03:58                    What's that?Sarina:                                 03:59                    If your first book in Amazon is a picture book with like 8 million reviews and went viral, like I'm so excited for this.Jess:                                     04:09                    I know, this is going to be great also because as you will find out when you listen to this interview, it's her first writing job.Sarina:                                 04:16                    That's amazing. Okay, I'm ready to have my mind blown.Jess:                                     04:20                    Alright, so with no further ado, here is my interview with Jill Twiss. I am here today with Jill Twiss. She is a senior writer at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She has a crazy, amazing story. She has Emmies, she has WGA awards, she has Peabody awards. There are some other things she does that I am so excited to talk about. I'm not going to burst the the surprise right off the bat. But Jill, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.Jill:                                       04:52                    Thank you so much for having me. I'm such a huge fan of your podcast and I'm so excited to be here.Jess:                                     04:58                    What was really funny was when I first asked you to be on the podcast, you were on Twitter, I was on Twitter, and we were following each other and I messaged you about being on the podcast and you were so excited. You're like, I'm a fan. And I'm like, I'm a fan. So we got to fan girl a little bit. It was very, very exciting.Jill:                                       05:14                    Well, I'm new-ish to book world. And so this podcast was sort of as I was thrown into it, how I learned about what I was supposed to be doing.Jess:                                     05:26                    Well, and you come at it from a really unconventional angle, which is part of what I want to talk about today. Speaking of books - so you have now two books. One is about to come out. But you have a book out that some of our audience may have heard of, which is called A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, which is a children's book. And I wanna talk a little bit about how that book came to be. But I'm also going to link to a wonderful article that you wrote for Glamour about why you wrote this children's book since it seems in contrast with what you do day to day, which is to write for a late night audience. Which is a story that I love. Could you tell us a little bit about how Marlon Bundo came to be? Because he is a cool, cool character. Oh, and by the way, before I keep going, you tweeted recently that you saw someone with Marlon Bundo tattooed on them. How did that happen? How did you come across that?Jill:                                       06:28                    Okay, well, it was at my gym. I just happened to be there and I go to sort of a very fun, weird gym where we all know each other pretty well. And so we do a name game at the beginning of every class. And this woman heard me say, my name was Jill and she said, 'Are you Jill Twiss?' And then she held up her arm and she had a full Marlon Bundo tattoo. And she said she'd gotten them with her cousin. It was the craziest thing. I can't imagine ever even getting a tattoo of my own books, much less someone else's, but it could not be a bigger honor.Jess:                                     07:06                    Well, and I mentioned in the introduction to Sarina because she knows of three people that have tattoos of her books on them and one is a line from one of her books and two of them are just pictures of the books. And that blows my mind. That's a level of permanence and fandom that I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine. So tell us a little bit about this book, Marlon Bundo. Who in the heck is Marlon Bundo?Jill:                                       07:33                    Sure. Okay. So as you said at the beginning, I am a writer at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. And I have been a writer there since the show started. So I am a pretty, you know, dark, angry, comedy writer kind of person.Jess:                                     07:51                    And I just realized that with you saying that, that I started in absolutely the wrong place. I don't have KJ here to kick me under the table to say, 'No, no, no. You're starting in the wrong place.' Which she does so brilliantly. Because am I correct - I heard somewhere that this is your first writing job, the Last Week Tonight. Is that correct?Jill:                                       08:11                    It was my first professional writing job, yes. I had done stand up comedy,Jess:                                     08:17                    I'm sorry, but we have to talk about how that happens because the idea that your very first job, professional writing gig out of the gate is with a late night television show. I guess we kind of have to start there before we can even talk about how Marlon Bundo came to be.Jill:                                       08:32                    Sure, it's a lovely story about women helping women, actually.Jess:                                     08:40                    Oh, we like those stories a lot.Jill:                                       08:42                    I don't want to mislead you, it wasn't an accident. I was very much trying to get a late night writing job. I had done standup comedy. I'd loved the comedy part, but the standing up in front of people made me sort of sick to my stomach all the time. And part of me was like, if you're not happier when people clap, maybe you're a writer, maybe this isn't for you. And I started to try to find writing jobs. And as everyone listening I'm sure knows, it's really hard. And the TV late night world is just really hard to break into because it's really hard to find out how those jobs are out there. And crazily I got an email one day from a woman named Nell Scovell, who I now know was the co-writer of Lean In. She wrote for The Simpsons. She wrote for David Letterman. I had never met her, or at the time heard of her, and she said, 'Have you ever wanted to write for late night?' And I said, 'Yeah, that's all I want. Who are you? What are you talking about?' And she said, 'I've been reading your Twitter. I think you'd be great at it. She said, you know, she had been a woman writing comedy for decades and sort of thought that was enough. You know that she was the woman in the writer's room, wasn't she doing enough for women? And she realized things weren't getting any better. So she wanted to start to find women. So in any case she said, I can't get you a job but I can get your packet read, I can get someone to read your stuff. So, literally within four months I had this job.Jess:                                     10:23                    You do realize that you're inadvertently ratifying David Sedaris's advice that he gave on our show (which is to never, well, and I'm sure you weren't like in a position of just sitting in your apartment waiting for opportunities to come to you) but his advice on our show was to never ask anything of anyone and just wait and be ready when the opportunities come to you.Jill:                                       10:47                    Well, if I go back one more step. I actually did ask something of someone because my job (I was a musical theater actress and I was a standardized test tutor) and I tutored a real smart kid whose mom worked for David Letterman. And when he did really well on the SAT I asked his mom if she would meet with me and if I could write a packet, and I ended up asking someone who I didn't really know to read over that packet. She was a writer for Conan and it turns out five years later Nell had gone to her and said, 'Do you know anybody that should be writing for TV?' And she said, 'I read this packet years ago. She should be writing for late night.' So I did ask for a little help in someone just reading something and giving advice. And she couldn't help me at the time, but when she could, she did.Jess:                                     11:42                    That is so cool. And you've used the word packet a couple of times, and that's a word I don't think we've ever heard on our show before. So I'm sure there are people out there saying, 'Oh my gosh, what's a packet? I don't have one. I need it. What is it?' .Jill:                                       11:55                    Fair. In the late night world, and that's, you know, shows like The Daily Show or Jimmy Fallon show, all the Jimmy's shows, Jimmy Kimmel's show. Instead of doing what you do I think in narrative television, which is you write a spec script of like a whole show, they want packets and every show wants a different packet. So you might write a whole bunch of monologue jokes that happen at the beginning of Stephen Colbert's show. For a show like ours, you're going to write something similar to what is going to air on the show and they give you that assignment. So you have to find out about the packet. At the time I did it, we didn't have a show, so it was a lot looser. It was a little bit like, guess what John Oliver might do on a show that doesn't exist yet. I think specifically they asked to write a domestic and an international story. For something like The Daily Show, you would write maybe something similar to what happens in like a seven minute increment. They might tell you exactly what they want, they might not. Every late night show has a different packet, but you generally have to write it specifically for that show.Jess:                                     13:09                    So there's no just like writing some vague generalized packet and hoping that it lands right.Jill:                                       13:15                    No, although weirdly I would recommend that, just because there's no way to practice this but to do it. And so I had written packets for shows that I never, ever got to submit that were just me trying to figure out, you know, how do you do this? How do you write a packet for this show? I had seen (it sounds crazy now) but I used to read like every article about writing for late night and someone had said, 'You know, well, at this late night show, they write monologue jokes. They show up at 9:00 AM and then they write till noon.' And I was like, great, three hours, I can write monologue jokes for three hours every day. So that's what I did. You know, I just tried to find like, let's pretend I have this job and figure out how to do it until finally, and it took a long time, someone gave me the opportunity to show what I'd been working on all that time.Jess:                                     14:08                    Is there a magic format for a packet? Like there are certain tells for hacks. Like you know, if I try to send in a spec script in just the wrong format or in a way that doesn't adhere to the look of the standard spec script, someone's going to ding it right away cause they're going to say, 'Oh, this person doesn't have the slightest idea what they're doing.' Or, we had a children's book author come on and she said one dead giveaway of people who don't know what they're doing with children's books is that they send in the wrong format, or an odd number of pages, or they say, and here's the illustrator I need to have in order to write this book.Jill:                                       14:52                    I did all of those wrong things, by the way. Literally, all the things you just said I'm pretty sure I did, but whatever.Jess:                                     14:58                    So is there a magic format for a packet? Is there a program out there that you have to have that adheres to this magic format?Jill:                                       15:07                    Weirdly, no, like late night I think is the Wild West of everything. Every show is different. I can't tell you they're going to be great about telling you what they want, but I think some of the best shows will give you samples of what their scripts look like and you can do your best to copy them. The closest I can give you is that you have to put it in the language of the show. You know, the packet you write for John Oliver is not going to be the same packet you write for Trevor Noah. Even if you're writing on exactly the same topic. So the big thing that they're looking for is, 'Yeah, are you putting some of yourself in there because we're hiring you because of you, but also are you in the voice of the show? We're not interested in you changing the whole format of the show. I think some people like to come in and be like, you know, I have a new idea. Like what if Jimmy Fallon was in space the whole time? And it's like, well, you're not showing us that you can write the show that we have. This is really you showing you could start today and fit in with the show that's already there.Jess:                                     16:16                    I was a political speech writer for a while and part of the fun (for me anyway), was the challenge of writing in someone else's voice completely and not letting my voice dominate. So that's a really interesting balance. And are there times when you write scripts and then the person who for example, John Oliver, will put his own particular read on it so you don't have to be too worried about writing it exactly the same way he would say it?Jill:                                       16:41                    Oh yeah. I think of course he's going to put everything in his own words. I will say, because some of us have been there since the beginning, I've absolutely adapted to John's voice, but I think in some weird ways he's adapted to our voices, too. There are jokes he tells because I love them or because you know, someone else loves that voice and he (I think) has just a lot of skill at doing lots of different kinds of jokes. So I for sure have adopted his speech patterns, but I think he has in some ways altered his speech patterns for all of us, too.Jess:                                     17:20                    That's fascinating. Alright, so back to Marlon Bundo. So you're writing on a television show, which isn't the normal pattern of things that the next thing on your plate, affiliated with the show is a children's book. Will you tell us how that came to be?Jill:                                       17:37                    Sure, yes. We are not a children's show. We say a lot of words that you wouldn't say on children's shows.Jess:                                     17:45                    But you do have a lot of very cute, mascot looking creatures that come on the show.Jill:                                       17:54                    It's true, we do love that. So it happened that I was and am obsessed with a very real bunny named Marlon Bundo. Who is, if you don't know, the Vice President, Mike Pence's actual pet.Jess:                                     18:10                    Now is he still around? Bunnies don't have the longest lifespan. Is the real Marlon Bundo still around?Jill:                                       18:15                    To my knowledge, the real Marlon Bundo is still around. I don't want to start any conspiracy theories here. I believe that there is still a Marlon Bundo living.Jess:                                     18:29                    I will put it in the show notes if I find otherwise.Jill:                                       18:32                    Right. Yeah. Don't blame it on me. And Marlon Bundo had an Instagram and I loved this bunny. It's a very cute bunny. I am not, perhaps, the biggest fan of Mike Pence and some of his policies. And one day I saw an announcement that they were releasing a book about Marlon Bundo. And for some reason I got like weirdly territorial, as though I had any ownership of this bunny, which I obviously do not. And I was like, 'No, I want to write the book about Marlin Bundo.' So I pitched it, I just wrote an email that said no, we should write a book about Marlon Bundo. That, you know Mike Pence himself does not have the kindest record perhaps with same sex marriage. And so we decided to make Marlin Bundo a gay bunny.Jess:                                     19:27                    So you pitched it to the show, not necessarily to a literary agent first?Jill:                                       19:31                    Oh, not at all. No, that was in no way involved.Jess:                                     19:35                    Did you have a literary agent at that point?Jill:                                       19:37                    Nope, I did not. I also didn't have a TV agent, for whatever that's worth. No, I just pitched it to the show as like we should put out a book, which, you know, I pitch a thousand things to the show and most of them don't happen. But they said, 'Okay, yeah, let's do it.' And we had a quick meeting just to decide if it should be an actual children's book or if it should be one of those like parody books that's really for adults, but looks like a children's book. And I think we just decided why not? Like, why not write a kind book for kids about a thing that really matters to us.Jess:                                     20:20                    Now the writer in me and the person who now understands publishing timelines is freaking out. Because if you have just seen that a press release or some sort of release on the Twitter feed about the fact that they're going to come out with this book about Marlon Bundo, how on earth do you get a children's book out in time to have it still be relevant to the release of the other book? Because that was part of the deal when it was announced is that it was a competing book with the real Marlon Bundo's book. So how do you make those timelines work? Publishing moves slow, Jill.Jill:                                       20:55                    The great news is I didn't have to do any of it. I wrote the book, actually I didn't even... I went back to my office and we didn't even assign a book at that point. We were just kind of like pondering some ideas and I said, 'You know what, I'm just going to write something that way it'll be easier for them to be like, Oh no, not that. Now that we see that, we'll say, not that, we want something more like this.'Jess:                                     21:26                    You have a comfort with rejection of ideas that will be so refreshing to so many of our listeners because still - there's a pitch I put out there like two weeks ago and I haven't heard back and I am just feeling all sorts of rejection and yet now I can have Jill Twiss's 'almost everything I say gets rejected at some stage of the game' You're my new voice in my head. I love it.Jill:                                       21:52                    I mean, all of us probably write I would guess 30 to 50 jokes for every joke that goes on the show. So that's just the norm for sure. So I wrote this - just a thing just to be like, 'Hey, I don't know what about this?' And they said, 'Oh yeah, that. We'll just publish that.' So, it turned out to be like a day-long process. We changed literally a couple of words, had someone help us with things that you're talking about now. Like this is the number of pages or whatever. And I now realize that the publisher, Chronicle, was probably flipping out. But, not my problem. I didn't know. I had no idea. We found, again, what I now know is an extremely fast illustrator. We just picked the best person we found. Who was E.G. Keller, who is fantastic.Jess:                                     22:55                    I have to say, the illustrations are absolutely fantastic. I love the illustrations.Jill:                                       22:59                    When you were saying earlier you can't ever come in demanding an illustrator, that's exactly what I did for my next book. I didn't demand anything. That's not at all true. But after this (we're skipping ahead), I did get a literary agent, and she did sell us together. So my next two books are also with the same illustrator.Jess:                                     23:20                    And your next two books, including the one that is going to be coming out soon, which is called The Someone New...Jill:                                       23:26                    Oh, that one's out.Jess:                                     23:27                    Oh, that one's out now. Okay.Jill:                                       23:28                    That one was out last June so you can buy that one right now.Jess:                                     23:31                    Okay. So the two books you're talking about are in addition to the Marlon Bundo book and The Someone New?Jill:                                       23:37                    No, sorry, I'm saying this weird. So Marlon Bundo exists in the world of the show. My first book, that is entirely outside the show, was The Someone New and that is about welcoming someone new to your life, or your country, or your whatever.Jess:                                     23:57                    It is delightful, and beautiful, and sweet. I got a little choked up reading The Someone New. Well, mainly, I mean the town that I live in (I'm right near Burlington, Vermont) has been a sanctuary city. You know, there are lots of someone news in Burlington. Every single time I'm out and about in Burlington I run into people who are new to town and it had a really important place for me in terms of thinking about what it must be like to try to be new somewhere. And I love the book. I absolutely loved The Someone New.Jill:                                       24:36                    Thank you so much. I went to 11 schools in 12 years, so I was always the someone new. So when it came down to, Hey, you can actually write anything now, generally when I write for the show, I have very specific parameters. So when it came down to I had a literary agent, I could write a children's book on anything I wanted. What I wanted to write about are the things that really mattered to me right now, which is welcoming someone new to our country, but also just - kids are faced with new things every day. And new things are scary. You know, you don't know when you're a kid. And I really wanted to help that new kid in school...Jess:                                     25:23                    Which gets back to your Glamour article, you talk in that article about the fact that it can be really, really difficult to reach people who are adults, who can be really entrenched in their thinking, and really entrenched in their views. Whereas with kids, there seems to be more of an openness and (that's not easier to write to) but it's a welcome and it's the reason that I've been a teacher for so long is it is so wonderful to be able to reach someone when before they've become completely entrenched in their views one way or the other and have a conversation about things that are difficult.Jill:                                       25:59                    Yeah, I think that whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, one thing that we're all experiencing is just finding out that adults are tough sometimes. They're frustrating. It's hard to watch things happen and realize that people are just so set in their ways and they don't want to hear always what's true. They want to hear what they want to hear. And kids, everything's new, you know, and they are perfectly willing to learn a new fact, take it in, change their mind if it changes what's previously there. There's just such a wonderful openness and I have so much hope for the next generation and I need that hope right now.Jess:                                     26:48                    Yeah. There was a moment when I was teaching at my very first teaching gig, I was teaching middle school kids and there was a kid who came from a really, really remote rural town. You know, he came into my classroom and from the first day he would say things that I could tell were not his words. He was parroting things that he'd heard from other adults. And it was really interesting cause he was putting things out there to see what our reaction would be. And it led to some really, really interesting conversations and moments when he realized, 'Oh, I do believe that thing I said', or 'No, I don't believe that thing I said, but I'm just putting it out there because I've never had the opportunity to get feedback on the thoughts that I hear from the adults around me. So it's just really cool to be able to get inside of a kid's head and see how their thought process is when they're forming their identity, and their views, and their beliefs, and their ethics. It's really cool.Jill:                                       27:47                    I've really fallen in love with the book world, first of all. But the children's book world and just like the chance to go and read books to kids and sing songs with kids. I don't have kids, so this is new to me. Everything I've learned in the children's book world has been a shock as far as like what age kids read what kind of books, like all of that stuff. I'm learning at sort of double speed as I go through this. But it is just delightful to get to work with kids and see them and you get nice emails instead of mean emails, you get nice pictures of children and dogs with your books instead of like me and emails of people threatening to you know, hurt you.Jess:                                     28:33                    Well, and speaking of kids you do something that I just had never even thought of as a task. You write sentences for the Scripps Spelling Bee. How did that come about? And how is that a gig that you become aware of and get?Jill:                                       28:52                    Yeah. Well first of all, I'm obsessed with the spelling bee. I have been for years. So it was very much on our radar. And again, I would pitch it as a story for the show and we did do it on the show once as just a short, funny story in the show. Right around then, I hit this stage of my life that I would I highly recommend, which is just ask for things you want. I don't know. Maybe they'll say yes. I've never done that before. But we did that story about the spelling bee and then I went to our executive producer and I said, 'Do we have a contact there? Can I ask them if I can write for them?' And she was like, 'Why would you want to do that?' And I was like, 'Fine, not your problem. It's fine. And I literally just emailed the spelling bee, told them what I do and that I had worked on the piece for the show and I said, 'I know you must have comedy writers write sentences. Like, I've seen the sentences that show up there, can I be one of them?' And they said, 'Yes'. That was really that easy, which I know is not how life works. And I know I had many years of opportunities not coming like that. So, now that I have a little clout and a little something, I'm just asking for all the weird things that I want. My next goal, I'm just going to put this out in the world, I want to write for the Tony awards. So if you know anyone, if you could make it happen, let me know.Jess:                                     30:20                    Very cool. So wait, they give you the word and then you write the sentence to go with the word that helps? So when the kid says, 'Could you give me that word in a sentence?' you're writing that sentence?Jill:                                       30:31                    Yes. Not all of the sentences. They have like really great experts writing sort of I'll say 'not funny sentences'. But, yes. So they do that to make sure everything is grammatically exactly what it needs to be. It's really important. It's so much more important that the sentences be correct than that they be funny. But they have comedy writers that go through maybe a month before the B and write a certain number of comedy sentences for it. And then this year for the first time, I actually got to go to the spelling bee. And as it was on the air, we were up there writing sentences for words that were coming up because they could switch the order of the words, for anyone that saw it this year, everything went crazy because there were eight champions and so everything was sort of getting decided on the fly. So we write sentences there, too.Jess:                                     31:31                    Wow. I actually had read somewhere, I think it might've been at the Tony awards one year, that they were writing - it was the year that Neil Patrick Harris rapped at the end and they were writing the rap during the show as winners were announced. First of all, Neil Patrick Harris, all hail Neil Patrick Harris and his ability to learn that stuff and perform it with like 10 minutes to spare. But the television world always to me, you know, Shonda Rhimes talks about writing for television as laying tracks while you're on the train that's going to... Sorry, Shonda, I'm sure I said that terribly, but it has always petrified me because of the speed at which things need to happen. So I'm always amazed when I hear things like the script story, where you're actually under pressure writing stuff while the show is happening.Jill:                                       32:20                    I was nervous because our show is once a week. And I have a lot of people, I have a lot of oversight on Last Week Tonight. But I actually found it incredibly calming. There's something really nice about not being able to read over what you've done. I'm writing a play right now and it could not be more stressful because I just have infinite time to revise and do and if it's up to me I will just revise for the rest of my life and no one will ever read anything I've written. So there's something really calming about being there and being under time pressure and being like, well it's out there. It worked or it didn't work. Who knows?Jess:                             &

DawgNation Daily -- the daily podcast for Georgia Bulldogs fans -- featuring... Beginning of the show: An explanation of why one of the ESPN College Game Day personalities thinks it's possible the score gets out of hand for Georgia-Notre Dame on Saturday, and a discussion of how a rabid UGA crowd could influence that. 10-minute mark: I discuss the challenge for UGA coach Kirby Smart of coaching a big game while simultaneously hosting a number of elite recruits. 15-minute mark: Former UGA QB David Greene joins the show. 30-minute mark: I take a look at other SEC headlines including the latest on a former 5-star signee who allegedly "quit" on Alabama. 35-minute mark: CBS Sports' Brad Nessler joins the show. End of show: I share the Gator Hater Updater.

DawgNation Daily -- the daily podcast for Georgia Bulldogs fans -- featuring... Beginning of the show: An explanation of why one of the ESPN College Game Day personalities thinks it's possible the score gets out of hand for Georgia-Notre Dame on Saturday, and a discussion of how a rabid UGA crowd could influence that. 10-minute mark: I discuss the challenge for UGA coach Kirby Smart of coaching a big game while simultaneously hosting a number of elite recruits. 15-minute mark: Former UGA QB David Greene joins the show. 30-minute mark: I take a look at other SEC headlines including the latest on a former 5-star signee who allegedly "quit" on Alabama. 35-minute mark: CBS Sports' Brad Nessler joins the show. End of show: I share the Gator Hater Updater.

It's the final week of Pride Month 2019. The guys wish everyone celebrating World Pride in NYC a wonderful time. Jeff talks about being homesick for New York and missing playing hockey. Pose's early season 3 renewal is praised. Will talks about the special Masterwork Experiment happening on The Story Grid Podcast where they are breaking down and analyzing the story structure of Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain. Jeff and author/blogger Lee Wind have an extended interview in which Lee discusses his debut YA novel, Queer as a Five Dollar Bill and how he's become engaged in discovering queer history. They also talk about the YA book blog I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell Do I Read? that Lee began over a decade ago. Lee also recommends a couple of his favorite YA books and the queer history project he's trying to jump start on Instagram. Complete shownotes for episode 194 along with a transcript of the interview are at BigGayFictionPodcast.com. Interview Transcript - Lee Wind This transcript was made possible by our community on Patreon. You can get information on how to join them at patreon.com/biggayfictionpodcast. Jeff: Lee, welcome to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. Lee: Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here, Jeff. Jeff: Now, I recently read your debut novel, "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill". In fact, I reviewed it back in Episode 189. And absolutely love it. Now, tell people in your own words what this YA novel is about. Lee: So it's all about the fact that I don't have a time machine. When I went...in 2011, I went to a game in summer camp kind of weekend. And there was a guy talking about the letters that Abraham Lincoln wrote Joshua Fry Speed that convinced him that Abraham was in love with Joshua. And I just thought he was full of it. Like how could that have been possibly been true? It's the first time I heard about it. And I went to the library, and I got the letters and I read them and because the emotions Lincoln speaks about are the same emotions I experienced when I was closeted in dating girls and sort of judging it the right thing to do, but not feeling it, I had this moment of sort of goosebumps, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I think maybe Lincoln was in love with speed." And I thought, "Oh, if I had a time machine and go back and tell my 15-year-old self that the guy on Mount Rushmore, the guy on the $5 bill, the guy on the penny, was maybe in love with another guy, I think it would have changed my whole life. I don't think it would have taken me until I was 25 years old to fully come out. I think it would have been a game changer. But I don't have a time machine. So "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill" is my paying it forward. I'm a writer, I wanted to write the story about a 15-year-old who's closeted and bullied and dating a girl because he kind of judges it's the right thing to do, but he doesn't feel it. And then he's assigned a book report on Lincoln and he gets the same book that I got from the library, he reads the actual letter, where Lincoln is asking his best friend, after the best friend has gotten married to a woman, "Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment, glad you're married as you are? From anybody but me, this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated, but I know you'll tolerate it for me." And he ends the letter saying, "Please tell me quickly, I feel very impatient to know." And we don't have Joshua's answer, because Mary Todd burned all the letters on that side of the correspondence. But we do know it was only four weeks later that Abraham had married Mary. So to me, it felt like wow, that, like what would happen if a kid today found that out and decided that he wants the world to know? Because everyone loves Abraham Lincoln in our country. And he thought, "Well, okay, so if he tells - the main character, Wyatt - if he tells the whole world that Abraham Lincoln was in love with another guy, he thinks it's going to change how everyone feels about gay people, cue the songbirds and the rainbow and happy ending." I do think if in our culture today if someone was to go really viral with the information that Abraham Lincoln was, wrote these letters and was in love with Joshua Fry Speed, I think there would be a huge conservative backlash and media firestorm. And that's really that what I wanted to show in the novel, how this Wyatt, how Wyatt, this main character makes his way through this incredible maelstrom of fury that he's ignited by just sharing what actually is part of American history. And then to kind of ratchet the stakes up even further, I wanted to make it, like, how was it important for a teenager today? Why is Abraham Lincoln important? So I kind of situated him in Lincolnville, Oregon, a town I kind of made up. His parents own the Lincoln Slept Here Bed & Breakfast. And when the economy of the town kind of starts to tank and they're threatened with losing their business, they bring in a civil rights attorney to help and she has an openly gay son and sparks fly between the two teens. But the main character Wyatt can't do anything about it. Because gay kids saying Lincoln is gay is really different than a straight kid saying Lincoln is gay. And he's faced with his choice, does he follow his heart and see if something might be happening with this guy, Martin? But the cost of that is letting this secret fade back into history, and nothing will ever change in our world. Or does he sort of sacrifice himself and his own happiness, and persist with the story that Lincoln was indeed in love with another guy and see if he can change the world a little bit, even though it won't change for him? So that's the story of "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill". Jeff: And I feel like even before I read this book that I had heard, you know, some of the rumblings that Lincoln may have had a relationship, may have been gay. So I think it kind of dances around the edge of what some people know, because I can't even begin to tell you where I heard it or anything else, just that it had been kind of back there somewhere in the memory of I don't know, something. Does that even make sense? Lee: Well, it's been a big thing on "Will & Grace", the revived series. They've been doing a whole run on jokes about Jack doing a one-man play called Gaybraham Lincoln, which is sort of all about Lincoln being gay, which I think has been good on the one hand, because it's letting more people know that this is something that people are talking about, but it's also doing so as if it's a farce, as if it's not true at all, and completely made up in a complete flight of fancy on the part of this bigger than life character. When in fact, if you read the letters, it is remarkable how to me it feels so clear that Lincoln was in love with Joshua. Jeff: What was your process for researching the history? Because there's more in here than just the letters themselves. There's a lot of Lincoln history, there's comparisons drawn between Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. In my review, you know, I kind of likened it a little bit, you know, you go see "Hamilton" and you get this big infusion of history, while you're wildly entertained. What was kind of your process around gathering all the pieces you needed? Lee: Well, first of all, thank you for comparing it to "Hamilton." That is like the best compliment ever. I need to embroider that on a pillow or something. I did a lot of research. I started out with the letters and then I realized that I just didn't know enough. I looked around and I live in Southern California. And it turns out in Redlands, California, there is an Abraham Lincoln Memorial shrine and museum. And it's like a three-room edifice that has display cases and a gift shop. And so many of the things that ended up being part of the bed and breakfast that Wyatt's parents own were kind of taken from that real-world experience of going to this place and seeing that they actually had, you know, civil war chess sets. And they had, you know, little teddy bears that were gray or blue. And they had, you know, Confederate Flag and a Union Flag. And that was hugely helpful. And then just starting to dig in deeper to some of the things I discovered there, there's a whole sort of subplot about how Wyatt feels that there's no one he can actually talk to. And so he's developed this strange internal dialogue with this image of a soldier in the background of one of their display cases. And I actually have a photo of it from when I went to this Lincoln shrine. And it was there, it was behind all these ammunitions. And I don't know that my gaydar works 150 some years later, but definitely, there's somebody in that, they're one of the soldiers in that photo does look like he could be gay. And I thought, "Wow, what if this was the only way that Wyatt felt that he could have somebody that recognized who he was, and how sad that was that he didn't really have a friend?" And that was why I was excited to create the character of Martin so he had somebody. Jeff: Were you a history buff all along? Lee: No, I hated history. And I'm sure that they're all these teachers that are like hitting their foreheads in shame right now. But like, honestly, I never had a history teacher that kind of got me excited about the stories of history, because I really feel like the way we teach history today, and my daughter's in 10th grade right now and her history textbook could have been my history textbook from the 1980s, where basically, it's the stories of rich, white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied men from Europe. And, you know, history is more than that. There are the stories of disabled people and people of color and women and men who loved men and women who loved women and people who looked outside gender boundaries in history. And I kind of feel like, we have to crack that facade of that false facade of history and let people know that that there's all this amazing light and you can see yourself in history. And, you know, Lincoln and Joshua are just sort of like the tip of the iceberg. There's, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, there's Mahatma Gandhi and his love for this German Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach. There's the pharaoh Hatshepsut in Egypt, there is Safa, there's so many stories that impact us today. But we don't really know them because they don't get taught, or when they are taught, they're not taught in a sort of, queer inclusive or respectful manner. So I kind of feel like now I love history. And in fact, I wrote this novel, but as I was writing the novel, there was so much history, there was so many things that came up, so many more pieces of evidence, so many more pieces of the pie, things that made me surprised, like, I didn't really know that Lincoln was sort of a racist, even though he's credited with freeing all the slaves, he had this whole plan that he signed off on with Congress at that time to sort of, you know, explore shipping all black people back to Africa. And I didn't know that. And the deeper I dug, when I found a piece of information that kind of contradicted what I knew, I really wanted to find a way to include it in the story. Because I feel like that's what we should be doing when we find things that show that history is complex, and that people are not black and white, that it just makes it all so much more real and so much more relatable. And if we can see reflections of ourselves in the past, like if we know that there were men who love men in the past, then we can believe that we have a place at the table today. And if we know that we have a place at the table today, we can envision a future that is sort of limitless. And I want that for everyone that doesn't feel like their history is included. I want it for all the women and all the people of color and the disabled people and the women who love women and the people who lived outside gender boundaries, too. Because that's, you know, we call it LGBTQAI+ or QUILTBAG or whatever. But really, the job is about being an ally to other people. And me as a gay man, I have to think, "Well, how can I be an ally to everybody else?" And hopefully, they're thinking the same thing. And that's how we start to create societal change. Jeff:: That is wildly profound. And especially, given that this episode of the podcast is dropping in the last week of June, as you know, the queer community celebrates Stonewall 50. Lee: Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I love that we're celebrating Stonewall, I love that the gender non-conforming people that were there, the transgender people, the drag queens are getting some respect now that they were part of that and they were in fact, the leaders of standing up to the police finally. But for many, many years, Stonewall had a banner, the Stonewall Inn had a banner outside that read "Where Pride Began". And I think that's really misleading. And we talk in the queer community in America as if that's where pride began, right. Like, pride, "Hey, we're celebrating 50 years of Stonewall, Hooray." But wait a minute, Karl-Maria Kertbeny came up with the word homosexual 100 years before Stonewall. Right? Like Lincoln and Speed were writing these letters to each other 20 years before that. You know, you can go back thousands and thousands of years and there's this beautiful story from China before China was unified, where the State of Wey that the guy that ruled it, his name was Duke Ling and he had a guy he loved his name is Mizi Xia. And they were walking through the orchard one day and Mizi Xia picks a peach off a tree and starts to eat it. And halfway through, he stops because it's so delicious. He wants to share it and he gives the half eaten peach to the Duke and the Duke makes a really big deal out of it. Like, "I can't believe your love for me is so profound that you would sacrifice your own happiness to give me the peach." And something about that moment captured the imagination of people in that pre-unified China. And for over 1,000 years, the way in Chinese that they said gay love was love of the half-eaten peach. Like we have this amazing, amazing history. And we just need to kind of breakthrough that facade and let all this amazing rainbow light shine through. So that's kind of what I feel my mission is to kind of let people know that we have all this amazing history, and we can start to dive into it. Jeff: Is this all history? Because you mentioned earlier that you're not, you weren't a history buff and you hated history. Have you gathered up all of this new knowledge since you were researching to write "Queer as Five-Dollar Bill"? Lee: Yeah. So while I was writing "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill," like I mentioned, there was just so much stuff that came up, so much evidence that I was like, "I can't really cram all this into a novel, because at the end of the day, the novel is really about a kid today." And I didn't want it to feel like a historical novel. I wanted it to be this page-turner. So I realized that maybe it was two books, maybe there was the novel. But what if there's a nonfiction book as well that presents the primary source materials, like a popup video thing on MTV or VH1, whatever it was, helps interpret, or at least how I interpret the thing? So like, there's all this talk about Shakespeare's Sonnets, and how, while they're very rarely taught, over 100 of the sonnets, Shakespeare wrote to another guy. And these are love sonnets that include really, really famous lines that we all recognize, like, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day. Thou art more worthy, yet more temperate." That's a line that Shakespeare wrote to another guy. For hundreds of years, they had changed the pronouns of that in one of the folios. So it ended up being that for hundreds of years, people thought that Shakespeare wrote all those poems to a woman, to the Dark Lady. But when "The Riverside Shakespeare" came out, the editor of that section, he talked about how, "Well, we've restored the sonnets to their original, you know, pronouns, but you shouldn't mistake that, you know, the affection men felt for each other in the 1500s was nothing like the homosexual attraction today." He wrote this in 1970s. And I'm like, "Really? Really?" Because, you know, "A man in hue all hues in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth," it sounds pretty romantic to me. So what I realized what I wanted to do is to create a book that wouldn't be just a book about Lincoln and Speed, but it would be a book about the broader thing, about men who love men and women who love women and people who lived outside gender boundaries. So there's 15 chapters. One is about Lincoln and Speed, one is about Shakespeare. And then there's, like, you know, a bunch of other amazing people in history, and it really presents the primary source material. And I'm really excited because today - that we're recording this - is the day that I'm signing the contract for that book with a publisher. Jeff: Oh, that is exciting. Congratulations. Lee: Thank you. It's been a long journey, long and crazy journey. Because the book originally was set up at one of the big five publishers, and I worked on it for a year and a half with them. It was approved, we were talking cover design. And then two weeks after our current president was elected, they canceled the book. I think they were concerned that it was going to be too controversial. They just didn't have the courage to proceed. And that was really devastating. And it took a long time to find a new home for it. There were a lot of shenanigans, a lot of plot twists. The agent I had had at the time turned out to be a criminal who, well, she was telling all her clients she was submitting things and that they were having all these pending book deals. She was lying. And the book was never submitted anywhere. Even after it was returned, the rights were returned to me. And the novel, "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill" ended up getting crowdfunded because I thought that I was being, well, stonewalled by the children's book industry and they didn't want word to get out about Lincoln and Speed so much so that no one would even respond to the submissions. So I crowdfunded it. I have a blog, I think we're talking about that a little bit later. But I have a bunch of people that know who I am and what I was trying to do, and they all supported me to not just publish the book professionally, but also, what I wanted to do is raise enough money to donate at least 400 copies of the novel to LGBTQ and allied teens, and the Kickstarter funded in six days, it was amazing. And then it went on for another 24 days. So we ultimately raised enough money to give away 910 copies. So that's been really, really gratifying. Jeff: That's incredible. I mean, it's really one of the great things about publishing today is that there's really no more gatekeepers out there. Anybody can publish, get it on Amazon, get an audiobook done, etc, and get their messages out there. Lee: There still is the thing, though, that being with a traditional publisher, you generally can reach more, especially when we're talking about like middle grade, you know, or books, where you go into libraries, which I think that this nonfiction book really is a, you know, hopefully, it'll sell like hotcakes. But also, I do think that to get it adopted more broadly into schools and into libraries, I think that coming from an established publisher is really useful and really helpful. So I'm excited about that. I do think that yeah, that there are many, many fewer boundaries than there used to be - or barriers than there used to be. But at the same time, we have the additional challenge that while access to the marketplace has never been easier, the marketplace has never been bigger. So getting noticed in a marketplace, where there's over a million books that are published every year now in the U.S., is a challenge. And that's why it's so important to have safe places to find out about these things, like your podcast, and my blog. Jeff: Yes, absolutely. To spin back on "Five-Dollar Bill" a little bit and talk a little bit more about it. What were your inspirations for both Wyatt and Martin and the type of teenagers they would be? Lee: When I was growing up, or when I was coming out, I think it felt like you couldn't be gay if you lived anywhere except for one of the big cities like San Francisco or New York. And I really wanted to have a character that felt connected to nature. And that one of the thematic subplots would be, 'Could he be himself where he was? Could he be himself in small town America, in a rural community, was there a way through for him to be successfully himself and authentic?' I feel like I spent so much of my life being inauthentic, that I want to do everything I can to help teens be authentic now. So on the one hand, Wyatt was the study of a kid that was on a journey to be authentic and Martin was the flip side of that. Martin was the character that already was authentic, and was already reaping the benefits of that level of confidence. And you know, as soon as you, for me, when I came out, it was like this huge burden off of me. And suddenly, I realized the weight of it was on everyone else, right? Like, if they had a problem with it, that was their problem. But it wasn't me hiding or holding back, or pretending or acting, which I did for so long. My husband and I have a joke, where when you go to a Starbucks or something, they're always like, "What's your name?" And every time my husband changes his name. Like he just makes up different names every single time. And they ask me and I'm always Lee because it took me 25 years to even start to like myself and to accept myself. And I finally got here. And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm not anybody else. I am me. I am Lee." It's funny. I take a spin class and as a motivational thing the spin instructor does, "Who do you want to be today?" I'm always like, "Me, I want to be me." I spent so long being other people. And then also, it was really cool when I was creating Martin's character, to think about him being African American. And that being an opportunity for me to talk about the complexity of Abraham Lincoln and him not being so perfect and explore those themes a little more. And it's funny because I hear from a lot of people how much they love Martin. And yeah, he's pretty lovable. Jeff: Yeah, I really liked them both in their individual ways. For sure Wyatt...I grew up, I spent like middle school, high school, college in Alabama. So I could totally relate to where Wyatt was in his journey like he knows, but there's no way he's telling anybody. And I didn't have a Martin for a best friend. So I also loved Martin, because he was the ideal friend to have for Wyatt in the moment to show him what could be. Lee: Yeah, exactly. Jeff: What do you hope the audience takes away from this kind of history/fiction mashup? Lee: So I think a lot about words, you know, being a writer, and I think that the word homosexual isn't helping us. I think that if we, because we're so reactive and weird in our culture, in America about sex, and we are obsessed with it, and we don't want to acknowledge it. And especially we don't want to talk about it to teens. So when we talk about homosexual rights and homosexual history, all straight people are hearing, you know, to paint with a broad brush, is they're thinking about sex and that we have sex differently than they do and how do we have sex. And I just don't think that's particularly helpful. And I think that if we talked about love as sort of the binding element that makes me and my husband and our teenage daughter a family, or the love between you and your husband, if we talked about HomoLOVEual rights and HomoLOVEual history, I think we'd have a very different cultural conversation. So what the tagline of my book is, "What if you knew a secret from history that could change the world?" And I love this because it gets a little meta. But it's the challenge that Wyatt faces, right? He finds out the secret about Abraham Lincoln writing these letters and maybe being in love with Joshua Fry Speed. And he decides that he's going to tell the world because it could change the world. And then it's the same challenge that I faced because I knew the secret from history and I thought this drumming sense of responsibility, like I had to share it, I had to get it out in the world. And because I wasn't getting anywhere with traditional publishing, I thought, "Okay, well, I'm going to crowdfund it, I'm going to get it out in the world, myself." And then what I am really excited about is that it's also the challenge that the reader faces. Because when you've read the book, or you even heard me talk about the book, you know that there is something more to the story of Abraham Lincoln that has been taught to you. And it's that first crack in that facade of history. And it makes you think, "Well, wait a minute, when you see the picture of Mount Rushmore, or when you pick your kid up at the Lincoln middle school, or you're driving on Lincoln Boulevard, you know, does it occur to you that, you know, our culture has not shared that part of who Lincoln is? And does it make you feel a little more pride about the fact that you know what, we do have history, queer people, and we need to lean into it? And we have the opportunity to because there are hundreds of years of historians that are going to argue with us and that are going to say, "Yeah, yeah, it's not true. It was very typical for men to share beds on the frontier." Not that Springfield, Illinois was the frontier. But for four years, you know, Abraham and Joshua shared a bed long after Abraham could afford his own bed. "Well, it was cold." Okay, yeah. But they shared a bed for four years. It's not proof. But it's interesting. And I think that as all those things add up, we can all make our own determination of what we think, you know. Is it important for me that I convince the world that Abraham Lincoln was in love with Joshua Fry Speed? No. I think a lot about Anne Lamott, she's a writer, and she writes about writing. She has a beautiful book called "Bird by Bird". And in that book, she talks about lighthouses, and how they don't run all over an island looking for boats to save, they just sort of stand there and they shine. And I think a lot about that. Like, I need to be a lighthouse. Like I found out this amazing, cool stuff about history, and how it relates to today, and how empowering it is. And I just want to shine. And if people are interested, they can come closer to the light. And if they're not interested, no worries, you know, watch out, there's some rocks over there. Jeff: Any chance of a sequel? Because I know I would love to see more of Wyatt and Martin at some point Lee: I haven't really come up with a good angle on a sequel, I had this funny idea for...one of the other pieces of history that really struck me was Mahatma Gandhi and the story of his love for Hermann Kallenbach. And we talk a lot about Gandhi having this sort of breakthrough where he talked about it doesn't matter whether you pray facing left and I pray facing right - I may have that reversed. We're all praying to the same God. Like he had this huge breakthrough, not just in terms of, you know, a peaceful protest, Satyagraha. He changed our world in such profound ways. And at the same time, he was in love with this German Jewish architect named Hermann Kallenbach. And if he was in love with a Jewish guy, like that's actually really interesting and really germane. Like maybe that's why he had that inspiration, that insight about it doesn't matter who you're praying to, because it's, we're all sort of bonded by this sense of spiritual connection. Like, that's really exciting. And I feel like there's so many stories like that, like Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. Eleanor Roosevelt was the woman that after, you know, her husband died, she went to the UN and became this advocate for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And would she had done that if she didn't have this experience of being in love with another woman, and feeling that sort of outsider status, while at the same time being this empowered woman in our world? History starts to open up like a flower. So I don't have an exact idea for a sequel for Wyatt and Martin, but I will put it in the hopper as ideas. Reason I brought up Hermann Kallenbach and Mahatma Gandhi was that I thought, that would be an interesting thing to talk about a kid finding out about that, and how that would have changed their life. And then about, "Wait, that's the exact same story over again, I don't need to do that. I already wrote that." So for now, I'm going to focus on the nonfiction piece and some other fiction writing that I want to get to that, actually, I'm very inspired by your book too, by the "Codename: Winger" series, because I love the idea of mashing up a gay teen with a sort of spy thriller. Jeff: And I can't wait to read what you might do with that. So please, bring that to the marketplace. Lee: Thank you. I keep thinking, "Is there a way I can get gay history in here somehow?" I haven't figured that either yet. But, you know, I'll work on it. Jeff: You'd mentioned earlier that you've got your blog, which I was so excited to find right around the same time as finding the book. You've been a YA blogger for more than a decade now. I believe you said it'll be 12 years in September. And the blog is called "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I Read?" What led you to starting that? Lee: Thanks. Yeah, there was no safe space to find out what were the books with queer characters for kids and teens. And I remember, there was a review on Amazon for a really sweet picture book called "The Family Book" by Todd Parr. And it's sort of a cartoon-y book. And there's like one page, it says, "Some families look alike." And it's a bunch of dogs that they all have similar features. "Some families look different." And it's a tree with all these different kind of animals in it. "Some families adopt children." And it's a bunch of ducks. And on the back of one duck is a penguin. And then you turn the page and it's, "Some families have two moms or two dads." And it's a picture of two women and two men. And then it continues, and there was a review, pretty high up that said, "If you tear out the page with the two moms and dads, then this is a lovely book on diversity." And I thought, "Wow, way to miss the entire point of what diversity is." And I got so upset and so hurt, you know, because I'm a gay dad. And I thought this was an amazing book for my daughter, but also for all of my daughter's classmates to see and recognize, "Yeah, yeah, you know, some families do have two moms and two dads." And to Amazon, that wasn't hate speech, it didn't violate their terms of service, it was just somebody's opinion. Albeit kind of, you know, nasty, or at least I interpreted as nasty. And it got me thinking about how there really needed to be a safe place online, where a kid could go and find out what are the books that were out there. And when I started, there were maybe 30 books total that were inclusive of LGBTQ characters and themes for kids and teens. And what's happened over the years is that by keeping this curated safe space, where I'm not vetting all the books, but I'm making sure that no nastiness is happening on the site. We have over 500 books now in many, many categories. And it's been really exciting to see that sort of explosion of content. And yet, it's that sort of similar problem again. Like now, suddenly, there's so much content, how do you make your way through it? How do you find the things that you want? So the idea behind it was to post about the books, what's queer about the books, and then let readers add their own reviews. There hasn't been a lot of review, there's just too many places for people to leave reviews these days. So I don't see a lot of that. But I also didn't want to make it, you know, "Lee's favorite book site" because I think that that has a limited value, I thought that there was more value in it being a site that felt really comprehensive. And that's what I aim for. And then it just became a place where I could talk about the stuff that I really care about, that I want queer and allied teens to know about. And over the years, what I've discovered is that the readership is split into thirds. There's about a third, queer teens and queer and allied teens on it. There about a third of librarians and teachers and people that work with LGBTQ teens. And then there's a whole bunch of adults that are sort of reading the books for themselves and sort of healing their inner teen. And I think that there is a healing that happens. Every time I read a queer book that has a happy or even a hopeful ending, there's a healing that happens. And I think maybe that's part of why romance as a genre is so popular. I know Will was saying in a previous episode that people get on his case for like ruining the ending, but it's all romance, you know it's going to be a good ending. And I think maybe that's why people turn to it. So I know how empowering it is for me when I read something where I see a reflection of myself, and it's a positive thing. Because when I was growing up, there was nothing to read, nothing positive. The only queer characters were like evil pedophile villains, it wasn't particularly helpful. Jeff: Yeah, that's, unfortunately, the case in the history that you and I have from that era when we were growing up. In the decade-plus that you've been running the site, other than just more YA, how have you seen it all evolve? Lee: There's more, and there's better and there's deeper, and there's less preachy and there's room for it all. It's funny, there was a kind of push a few years back for...well, maybe we're beyond the coming out story. And I kind of got my dander up a little bit on that. And I felt like, "Well, we're never going to be beyond the first love story when it's, you know, a straight romance. So, Andrew Solomon has this great book that he wrote called "Far From the Tree" and it's a nonfiction piece. And he talks about how, you know, when your identity is...where you're the apple that does fall far from the tree, or falls from the tree and rolls across the, you know, down the hill and across the orchard, when you're queer, most likely your parents were not. And so you have this moment where you have to find your sense of community outside of the family that you grew up in. A lot of other identities, you share that. Like, usually, like me, I was raised Jewish and so I would, you know, my parents were Jewish. So I sort of shared that identity. For all of our identities, we sort of are either sort of close to the tree or far from the tree. And when you're far from the tree, there's more work involved. So coming out, I think is going to continue to be this universal thing. Because just like, you know, my daughter has two dads, but she's straight. So in a funny way, she's going to have to, you know, she had a bit of a coming out where she had to tell us, sort of, you know, abashed, hoping that we'd be okay with it, that she was straight. And we had a good laugh about it. Because it's not that big a deal for us. We just want her to be her authentic self and to be happy. So we do want to have coming out books, and we also want to have books where being gay, like your character Winger, Theo, where it's the least interesting thing about him. I loved when you said that in your interview. Because yeah, we want those stories, too. It's like in acting, right? In improv, the rule is yes/and. So we want these books, and we want those books. We want the fantasy, we want the romance, we want the science fiction, we want all of it because truly, if you look at the numbers of books that are published - traditionally there about 5,000 books published a year for kids and teens. And then, if you look at the world of self-publishing, let's say that 5,000 are doing it really beautifully. And the books are indistinguishable with the quality of that from traditional publishing. That's 10,000 books a year, a year. And you have all those years going back too. So what we want is the opportunity to sort of have all of those books and right now we still only have like 500. So we have a long way to go. We need lots more books, we need lots more voices, we need people writing their own voices, stories, we need more diversity included in everybody's stories because truly, you're not going to have a classroom today that doesn't include someone that's LGBTQ, we need it all. Jeff: That's very true. Given that you had the blog, did you always see yourself eventually writing the YA novel that you did? Or did that just kind of manifest itself because you have the story to tell? Lee: I've always been a writer. I've written...I remember one summer when I was like between 9th and 10th Grade in high school, I was like, "I'm going to write a novel." I sometimes think of those poor characters still trapped in the broken space station that was orbiting the Earth. And I'm like, "Oh man, I have to do something with that someday." I don't think I will. I've always written. I think that for the last 14 years, I've really focused on writing for kids and teens. I also write picture books and middle grade. And when I found out this thing about Lincoln and Speed, it really inspired me to focus on writing that as a novel. I think that the blog has been a way to have my voice heard in a more direct way, and not wait for somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say, "Okay Lee, we're ready for what you have to share." So that's been really empowering. I remember, when I started the blog, there were very few people reading it, and I would get all excited, I'd be like, and I'd tell my husband, "Hey, 15, people went to my blog today." And I was so, so excited. And now, all these years later, we passed 2.6 million page loads. I get between, you know, 15,000 to 25,000 page views a month. It's remarkable, and humbling, and also a really cool responsibility to continue to maintain this safe place. And at the same time, I'm trying to keep writing and work on the new stuff, which has been really a good thing, because balancing the day job and the blogging, there's a lot but I have stories I want to tell. And I'm going to keep trying to tell them. Jeff: Good. Yeah, keep putting it out there. Because we always need more, to be sure. For people who haven't seen the site yet, and we're certainly going to link to it in the show notes. It has an amazing hero image across the top of the superhero. Where did that come from? And where did the name come from? For folks who might question the name too, because I have a pretty good idea where the name came from. But let's hear it from you. Lee: Sure. So "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I read?" is a play on words of something we chanted in Act Up in the '80s and '90s. The chant was "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it." And I thought, well, my issue is a little more "What the hell do I read?" Because I felt so starved for any books that included somebody like me. I mean, you know, I grew up and I really and truly thought I was the only person in the world that felt the way I felt about other guys. And which was super ironic, because I have an older brother, who's five and a half years older, and he's gay too, but we never spoke about it. We are the children of immigrants and when my parents came from Israel, they sort of brought all their homophobia with them. And the American culture at the time was super homophobic, especially where we lived outside Philadelphia. It was not a safe place. And it's so amazing to think that you can grow up and feel like you're the only person and everything I read, I was obsessed with the series by Anne McCaffrey called the Dragonrider series. And there was this super between the lines, sort of thematic thing that you could maybe interpret that there was gay stuff happening in that world, but you had to really stretch for it. And looking back, I think, well, maybe that's why I was so obsessed with that book, with that series, because there was some faint, not even mirror reflection, but like the gleam of a tarnished piece of silverware. I was like, "Wait, wait, maybe that's me." So that's where "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I read?" came from. The image happened a few years later. I had been running the site for about two years, it had been doing really well. And I realized I wanted to have a customized image. And yet, it's a pretty wordy title. So I realized I needed an image that didn't have any additional words to it. So I contacted someone I knew, an artist I knew, Jim DeBartolo. And, I said, "Look, I need an image that says empowerment." And he came up with this sort of superhero moment of like ripping the denim shirt off. And there's this sort of T-shirt underneath with the sort of superhero logo, which is the website, which is leewind.org. And it was funny. We tried to play with the sort of partial face that you see, we tried to, you know, could we make it a person of color? Could we do some things with you, know, the physique? But ultimately, it was sort of an avatar of me, and it took me years to admit it that's sort of what of course it is, it's an avatar of me, but I don't have that good a jawline. But at least in my mind, I think that it's been this sort of symbol of empowerment. And that's really what I hope that people get from visiting the site, from reading anything I write. I want them to feel empowered. Jeff: I like that. That's a great story behind that. Lee: Thanks. Jeff: So relying on your...I'm going to call it a YA expertise because of the site that you run. What are three or four titles of current YA that you would recommend our audience to take a stab at? Lee: Sure. So I have to start with "Carry On" by Rainbow Rowell. I know it's not super recent. But this is the gay Harry Potter book that I wanted so badly. And I was so frustrated that JK Rowling didn't include Dumbledore as being gay in the canon. It sort of was outside the books that that revelation happened and you can go back and sort of, you know, read subtexts and stuff. But I really was hoping that there would be some sort of, you know, on the page, queer love or something, and it didn't happen, there was really nothing. And, you know, Rainbow Rowell, she wrote two books, one about the girl that writes the fan fiction, which is called "Fangirl", which is really good. And then there was this book, which was the fan fiction, that ended up being a huge success on its own, called "Carry On". And I don't want to say too much, but it is absolutely brilliant. And if you are queer, or love queer stories, and you had any connection to Harry Potter, and that sort of world of magic, you've got to go read this. It's just wonderful. Jeff: Excellent. Her books have been on my TBR forever. And I actually need to take the leap and read them. Lee: Read this one first. It's just you will be so happy you did. Jeff: So you mentioned the nonfiction that you've just signed the contract on and other stuff noodling around in your head... anything else you want to shout out that's coming up soon for you? Lee: So there are a bunch of things percolating. But nothing has come to full boil yet. So I will let you all know when it does. Jeff: That is fair. I can't wait to hear what they are. Because I think that, yeah, having read the one book from you, I'm looking forward to reading so much more. So where can people keep up with you? There's leewind.org as we talked about, which is the "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I read?" site. Anyplace else people should be looking for updates? Lee: Yeah. I mean, I'm playing around with Instagram. I'm trying to do this thing. I had the idea that we could do a #queerhistoryiseverywhere. And I wanted people to upload photos of Abraham Lincoln or the word Lincoln wherever they saw it and just start posting it on Instagram. It hasn't exactly caught on yet. But I still like that idea. Jeff: Maybe our podcast listeners will play along with that. Lee: Oh, yeah, that would be really fun. And also, I mean, as, you know, more queer history happens. I was speaking at the Bay Area Book Festival recently and someone came up after my panel and they said, "Did you know that Bābur from the Bāburnāma when he was a teen he was in love with another boy?" I was like, "Really?" Totally, I have sitting on my desk right next to me right now the "Bāburnāma" and indeed, when he was 18, he was in love with this other boy. And it's so exciting to find out this stuff. So I feel like because it's been hidden, the more we can crowdsource this information and share it and then all amplify each other. I think it's very, very exciting. Jeff: Very cool. So we will link to all that stuff, the books we talked about - everything else - in our show notes. And Lee, I'm so glad we got the opportunity to talk, spread the word a little bit more about this book and the website and thank you for all you're doing to get more out there about YA literature too. Lee: Thank you, Jeff. I really want to say thank you to you and to Will. I'm really a fan of the podcast and getting to be on it as a real thrill. So thanks.

Nadda Mean? Noshey the Juggler is taking it in with you. An unnamed Tucson man taught me a thing about toe perseverance. D-Ron will drive his drone, rendering all other transport caveman blood. I tend to a new game/slash segment called 'Could you imagine'. Can you imagine not waiting for a cupcake to be finished? What if a lion walked by a tiger and said, "You're a lion"?

Poet and playwright Murray Lachlan Young digs deep with Jo about inter-dimensional beings and other theories about aliens and asks the all important question, 'Could there be curry on Mars?'

Josh & Trevor take a look at the coaching carousel around the National Football League. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pack-a-day-your-daily-packers-podcast/support

欢迎听众朋友加入我们的会员俱乐部，收听完整版本的课程内容和享受更优质的增值服务！无论您是近期要参加各种英语口语考试，英语口语面试，生活英语交流，职场英语口语会话，还是纯粹的英语爱好者，您都会在这里收获良多！新东方王牌名师李延隆老师主讲的课程和其他优质英语学习资源请关注：李老师最新微信：liyanlong07微信公共号：李延隆老师003A: Could you do me a favor?Could you give me a hand?Could you help me?B: Sure, no problem.It depends.想了解李老师的更多英语课程？有各种澳洲、美加、欧洲移民和留学相关的疑惑？有各种英语疑难问题和英语考试问题，辅导班、辅导老师的选择，子女的英语教育等问题要咨询李老师？请关注：微信公共号：李延隆老师新浪微博：@李延隆老师 获得第一手的宝贵资源和李老师专业、权威的亲自解答。

'Could it be ... Satan?' Oh man, what an episode!!! This is what we have all been waiting for. Some amazing story telling in this episode. Listen as the Two Dads find very little wrong with this episode and gush over everything that was fantastic. Which was pretty much the entire episode. This season is shaping up to be one of the greats. Let's see. Warning, Corey and Clay go down a political rabbit hole for a little while. Not too long, but it ends in a a story about Corey's dad forgetting about him completely, so stick around for that. It is hilariously sad. Remember to follow us on social media: @TwoDadsReview. Also, subscribe, share, and leave us a review so we can reach more people. And as always, thank you for listening.

  I never thought that I would get here, but here I am. China, that is. I'm so excited that I'm sure even my sentences will have grammatical errors. This was an unexpected(1) trip, an opportunity that suddenly came my way. I would have been an idiot to not take advantage of my good fortune. Of course, I could have(2) stayed at home for the week, and done the usual things, you know: work, cooking, laundry, walk the dogs. However, as I have my mother and in-laws available to help, I jumped at the chance to come here, to China, instead. So, this is my first day, in Shanghai. My husband is in a business meeting, and as I write, I am hanging out in the hotel room which has an incredible view of the city. We are up on the 59th floor; I'm surprised that it doesn't make me feel dizzy. My first surprise when I arrived was to see how many trees there are in the city. There are more trees than in Seattle! Even the highway is bordered by either a line of deciduous trees, or indeed a forest. In fact, wherever there is space between the buildings, there are masses of trees. And I have never seen so many buildings, high rises, in my life. They stretch out like a giant lego project into the horizon. And yet everything is so neat, organized, and clean. Directly below our hotel is a park that looks like a mini-forest(3). There is a large pond in the middle, and I can see the roof of a restaurant, partly hidden by the canopy of the trees. After my husband's meeting, we will go there for a walk, and maybe have a bite to eat. One thing I realize as I talk to the hotel staff, and move around, is how ignorant I am. Seriously; I know so little about China, and my Chinese is practically non-existent. When I was in school, our history curriculum taught us very little about China. And our news media in UK and U.S has only recently given some time to news about this country. I think we can be inadvertently kept quite separate from other continents if we're not careful, don't you think? Mind you, all of that can change with a little effort, especially now that we have access to the internet. So, one of my goals for today, when I have finished this podcast, is to get on Youtube, to watch some Chinese history, and learn a few words and phrases. That's where I will begin. 1. 'Unexpected' What a great word! It's very common, and with a bit of practice, is not too difficult to pronounce. a. I had some unexpected news yesterday from my sister. b. There was an unexpected interruption to their journey, so they had to rearrange their plans. 2. 'Could have/ would have'. We've practiced this plenty of times, but it's essential for fluency. a. I could have flown to Beijing, but instead I flew to Shanghai. b. You should have checked your receipt; I think they overcharged you. 3. The use of 'mini'. We can unofficially use mini with all sorts of nouns to create our own sentences. a. Our party was a mini-disaster. Frank fell on the cake. Sue fell down the stairs. And Rodger broke his ankle. b. Students, tomorrow we will have a mini-exam, so make sure you study your notes tonight. 

More special words - CTBW a five minute podcast Four words that may just change your problems or issues A throw away line from a really nice guy, Ed Latimer, speaking on the Jordon Harbinger show (a podcast) and four little words that lit up my mind from what's the worst that can happen and flying off into the future and imagining all the things that haven't happened. What were these 4 special words? 'Could this be worse?' and they bring you right back into the now becasue the worst hasn't happened and you can see things for what they really are and allow you also ask 'what can do to make it better!'. Now you can form a outcome and take intuitive ACTION! And to ensure you also eliminate overwhelm write down your thoughts so you can work out a way and learn without it swirling around in your mind. 'What is the smallest baby step I can do now to resolve this?' Then it's just a matter of using those 5 keys to success we discussed in an earlier podcast. Side note to you - If you want to be able to search through all the back episodes get the app 'Castbox'. It's completely free and you can subscribe there to ;0) end of note It's amazing what we can learn and use from throw aways when we are curious I know your time is valuable and if you do want to help grow this integrated field of learning please do keepon sharing this or any other of your favorite episodes Shine brightly Paul Please remember you can leave a comment or email me with questions, requests and feedback. If you have enjoyed this or any other episode please share and subscribe. Just click on the iTunes logo or any of the other buttons at paulclough.co.uk and even get updates via email. Go to paulclough.co.uk/subscribe to learn more If you want to access my FREE HYPNOSIS tracks go to paulcloughonline.com/podcastFollow and inter-react on twitter @pcloughie Why not look for me and the podcast on SPOTIFY I'm also in iHeart radio require(["mojo/signup-forms/Loader"], function(L) { L.start({"baseUrl":"mc.us15.list-manage.com","uuid":"30612b94733ec8817b42aa877","lid":"0f91b35653"}) })

Congress votes to reopen government, passes massive budget deal. Dozens of Russian athletes lose appeal, keeping them out of the Winter Olympics. White House says it 'could have done better' regarding Porter allegations. Assemblywoman leading #MeToo movement at California Capitol accused of sexual misconduct. Upbeat Lens is released Monday through Friday by 7:30am EST. Email us at contact@UpbeatLens.com and subscribe today!

'Could you spare a few minutes to talk about our lord and saviour Stephanie McMahon?' The post “Why All Ronda?”: WWE Royal Rumble 2018 Review – Pt 2 (LMKO #007) appeared first on Last Minute Continue.

‘We Have Rapists Here In This Building’ — California Legislators Hear Horror Stories Of Broken Harassment Reporting System,White House Plans Tillerson Ouster From State Dept., to Be Replaced by Pompeo,Six Minutes to Counterattack: South Korea Shows Plan to Strike Back at North’s Missiles,University Event Highlights 14 Ways ‘Whiteness’ Oppresses Society

Josh Taylor fought Ohara Davies and it went a bit like this: Once upon a time there was a boy called Ohara. He was a boxer and everyone thought he was a brave super boxer with a bright future, but secretly, he'd always wanted to be a hedgehog. Then one day another bright boxer called Josh came along and he was really good too. When they got in the ring and started fighting, no matter what Ohara did, Josh was too good - magical. "That's it!" thought Ohara, "He'll have the powers to make my dreams come true." So Ohara threw a few more pointless punches, quietly asked Josh if he could do it and Josh smiled and said "Hedgeyoss Pricklyoss"! Ohara then magically curled up in a ball and said "I give up" and Josh won the fight. ....but if you want the Terry and Martin's version, you'll have to listen. Fwank had a card on at the Copperbox, where the crowd was exclusively made up by ninjas and elite martial artists from around the world but oddly, they were dressed like fat, drunk guys from London - so weird. The World Boxing Super Series was struggling to raise credibility for itself, only having every Cruiserweight Champion in the mix for the Ali trophy and having them hand pick each other in an eye to eye stage ceremony was making people ask 'Could this get any more boring?!'. It needed some....spectacle! LUCKILY Eubank Senior was there to add some much needed spectac........no wait, MONOCLE monocle

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was one of the first women hired at Google, and today she is the only female CEO within Google. She says the internet "could use a lot more women." Interview recorded October 18, 2016. Produced by Haley Draznin, CNN.

Jess Blair is joined by Mary Van den Heuvel, Robin Hughes and David Jones to discuss the latest Pisa results for Wales, and their implications.

In the immediate aftermath of the Uruguay versus Italy World Cup game, the lads discuss Luis Suarez's predilection for chowing down on opponents. Also covered is the Fat Pride phenomenon, the trailers for the new Dumb and Dumber and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the blur documentary 'No Distance Left to Run', Edge of Tomorrow and Cla's prospects as a stand-up comedian.  Opening song this week is 'Could be You' by blur and the closing song is 'Under the Westway', also by blur. Send your emails to hogensmith@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter, @hogensmith, like us on Facebook.com/hogensmith and then review us (positively!) on iTunes.

Chocolate and cocoa firm Barry Callebaut has identified the flavored milk market as one of the best opportunities for use of its cocoa flavanol EU health claim.

On Saturday, May 26, "The Writers Studio Reading Series" celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Yale Review, with authors who have some connection to the quarterly. The lineup of authors, including Louise Glück, Caryl Phillips, Edmund White and Michael Cunningham, read from their works at Le Poisson Rouge. All of the readers—with the exception of Edmund White, who has been published in the journal—teach at Yale. The writers were introduced by J.D. McClatchy, the current editor of the Review, who discussed the journal's impressive and colorful history as well as the difficulty small magazines face in the Internet age. “The literary quarterly is a threatened species,” he observed. However, if the packed room was any indication of the future of the Yale Review, McClatchy has nothing to fear. J.D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review, on the written word online versus in print: "I think that if writers had the choice between elegant paper and a beautifully printed piece or [being published] online and having thousands of more readers, I suppose they would answer that they want both." McClatchy on Robert Frost: "Robert Frost was a long-time contributor to the Yale Review and once wrote to the editor complaining about the $10 fee that he was paid for one extraordinary poem after another. 'Could he get more money?' The editor wrote back and said, 'No, this is going rate.' And Frost wrote back and said, 'Well, I regret your decision, but I’d rather be published in the Yale Review and make less money then be published elsewhere and make more.'” Caryl Phillips, Yale professor and author of "In the Falling Snow," on the pleasures of writing fiction: "One of the nice things about being a writer of fiction is that one is able to hide. Hiding one's personal life, hiding the tracks and the footprints that have led you to where you are now always seems to be one of the few pleasures of writing fiction. You can disappear, be offstage." Edmund White, Princeton professor and author of "City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s" on reaching out: "My new best friend is John Irving and he just sent me his book and it’s all about being gay—and mine has all these daring straight scenes. Well, at a certain age, I guess you have to start reaching out."

--{ New Gods of Taser-Cattle-Prods: "All Systems Go, Tasers on Stun, Shooting High Voltage from Cattle-Prod Gun, 14-Year Tucumcari Girl Shot in the Head, Then Fried with High Voltage, Almost Dead, Cop Fired on the Run, Took Hasty Aim, Dart Went through Skull into Her Brain, 'Could have been Worse,' Cop Story Persistent, He Had to Shoot, Her Act was 'Delinquent,' We're being Trained in This New Normality, Obey or Be Fried, the Latter's Formality" © Alan Watt }-- Impact of Satire, Exaggeration - Mark Twain, Christian Science "Healing" - Judge Sotomayor's Remarks, Her "Better Judgement" - Eradication of White Males - Shock and Awe, Acceptance Today. Public Belief in Politicians - Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Fabianism - Government Talking Directly Down to You - Mad Magazine, Life Too Bizarre to Lampoon. Constitutions, Exercising Individuality, Knowing Rights - Nothing Fazes Us Anymore - Tasers (Cattle Prods with Wires) Used on Public, Electrocution, Compliance. 14-Year-Old Tasered by Police in New Mexico (U.S.), Dart Shot in Head (Brain) for "Delinquent" Act - Police "Trying to Help", Justification, Rationalization of Acts - Cops Hunting for Prey. "Ecoscience" by John Holdren and Ehrlich(s) - "Comparative Effectiveness" Health Care (e.g. Aspirin instead of Morphine). Fabianism - Breaking Down Families, Parents' "Contaminated" Ideas, State Gives Indoctrination - Bertrand Russell, Promotion of Sex for Pre-Pubertal Children, UK NHS. Swine Flu Vaccination for Britain - Flu Shots Always "Wrong Combination" - Viral Theories, Mutation into Killer Flu, Bogus "Crossover Protection". European Union, MEPs, Show of "Democracy" - EU Army Soldiers (Eurocorps) at Ceremony in Parliament - Abstract Government (an Idea). Blackwater, International Mercenaries - China, Cop Pay-offs - Pirates' System. (Articles: ["Tucumcari police chief Tasers 14-year-old - Girl recovering after dart surgically removed from her head" by Chelle Delaney (pntonline.com and qcsunonline.com) - July 3, 2009.] ["Pupils told they have a 'right' to a good sex life: That's the advice for youngsters from the NHS" by Daniel Martin (dailymail.co.uk) - July 12, 2009.] ["Swine flu vaccine to be given to entire population" by Ben Leach (telegraph.co.uk) - July 12, 2009.] ["Federalists accused of 'hijacking' European Parliament opening" by Bruno Waterfield in Strasbourg (telegraph.co.uk) - July 13, 2009.] [Video: "Obama Depopulation Policy Exposed!" [See Obama's Top Man Emanuel Leave Quickly When His Pro-Euthanasia Policy is Exposed] (youtube.com).]) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - July 14, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

There /l/ is silent, and the vowel /ʊ/ is the same as the 'u' in the word 'put'. Full episode transcripts at www.pronuncian.com/podcast.