Podcast appearances and mentions of Marissa Meyer

Marissa Meyer joins me to answer reader questions, walk down memory lane, and share some secrets for upcoming projects!Happy 6 Years to Prince Kai Fan Pod! This podcast is by Bethanie Finger and produced by the Three Sisters Podcast Network. Logo Art created by Cosmic Nova Flare. Intro/Outro music composed by Emma Pavvo. 

If you love audiobooks, you've probably heard her voice before—she's narrated so many incredible books, including The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer, Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber, and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. She's also lent her voice to animation, video games, and theater, bringing so many stories to life. Beyond her amazing career, she's also a mom, balancing creativity with motherhood—something we love talking about here! I can't wait for you to hear our conversation.https://www.rebeccasoler.com/https://www.instagram.com/rebeccasoler1Support the showFollow Moms Who Create:Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/momswhocreatepodcast/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/momswhocreatepodcastMonthly Meeting Book Club - https://www.facebook.com/groups/momswhocreatebookclubWebsite - https://www.momswhocreate.com/

She might not be the fairest of them all but she a baddie (in the worse way). Today we are talking about Fairest by Marissa Meyer, the prequel to the Lunar Chronicles series. In this book we get a villian orgin story, lots of royals getting killed, and of course, brain control. Listen to hear why Levana is a victim turned very problematic villian. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/book-cult--5718878/support.

The teen council kicks off their book club by reading and discussion Cinder by Marissa Meyer.  Is it a dystopian novel or a unique mix of scifi and fantasy? Does the familiarity of the Cinderella story make it more engaging or take away from the story? Should you read the sequals? Listen to this discussion to see what we thought. Other titles discussed are: Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini No No Boy by John Okada Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare Renegades by Marissa Meyer

How do you keep the happiness and joy in your writing practice, along with managing the business side of being an author? Marissa Meyer gives her tips. In the intro, How authors can price their books for profit [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; How to recover from author burnout [Self-Publishing Advice]; my Brooke and Daniel crime series […] The post The Happy Writer With Marissa Meyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.

If you're in SF, join us tomorrow for a fun meetup at CodeGen Night!If you're in NYC, join us for AI Engineer Summit! The Agent Engineering track is now sold out, but 25 tickets remain for AI Leadership and 5 tickets for the workshops. You can see the full schedule of speakers and workshops at https://ai.engineer!It's exceedingly hard to introduce someone like Bret Taylor. We could recite his Wikipedia page, or his extensive work history through Silicon Valley's greatest companies, but everyone else already does that.As a podcast by AI engineers for AI engineers, we had the opportunity to do something a little different. We wanted to dig into what Bret sees from his vantage point at the top of our industry for the last 2 decades, and how that explains the rise of the AI Architect at Sierra, the leading conversational AI/CX platform.“Across our customer base, we are seeing a new role emerge - the role of the AI architect. These leaders are responsible for helping define, manage and evolve their company's AI agent over time. They come from a variety of both technical and business backgrounds, and we think that every company will have one or many AI architects managing their AI agent and related experience.”In our conversation, Bret Taylor confirms the Paul Buchheit legend that he rewrote Google Maps in a weekend, armed with only the help of a then-nascent Google Closure Compiler and no other modern tooling. But what we find remarkable is that he was the PM of Maps, not an engineer, though of course he still identifies as one. We find this theme recurring throughout Bret's career and worldview. We think it is plain as day that AI leadership will have to be hands-on and technical, especially when the ground is shifting as quickly as it is today:“There's a lot of power in combining product and engineering into as few people as possible… few great things have been created by committee.”“If engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be small teams who deeply understand the customer need that they're solving, who have a maniacal focus on outcomes.”“And I think the reason why is if you look at like software as a service five years ago, maybe you can have a separation of product and engineering because most software as a service created five years ago. I wouldn't say there's like a lot of technological breakthroughs required for most business applications. And if you're making expense reporting software or whatever, it's useful… You kind of know how databases work, how to build auto scaling with your AWS cluster, whatever, you know, it's just, you're just applying best practices to yet another problem. "When you have areas like the early days of mobile development or the early days of interactive web applications, which I think Google Maps and Gmail represent, or now AI agents, you're in this constant conversation with what the requirements of your customers and stakeholders are and all the different people interacting with it and the capabilities of the technology. And it's almost impossible to specify the requirements of a product when you're not sure of the limitations of the technology itself.”This is the first time the difference between technical leadership for “normal” software and for “AI” software was articulated this clearly for us, and we'll be thinking a lot about this going forward. We left a lot of nuggets in the conversation, so we hope you'll just dive in with us (and thank Bret for joining the pod!)Timestamps* 00:00:02 Introductions and Bret Taylor's background* 00:01:23 Bret's experience at Stanford and the dot-com era* 00:04:04 The story of rewriting Google Maps backend* 00:11:06 Early days of interactive web applications at Google* 00:15:26 Discussion on product management and engineering roles* 00:21:00 AI and the future of software development* 00:26:42 Bret's approach to identifying customer needs and building AI companies* 00:32:09 The evolution of business models in the AI era* 00:41:00 The future of programming languages and software development* 00:49:38 Challenges in precisely communicating human intent to machines* 00:56:44 Discussion on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its impact* 01:08:51 The future of agent-to-agent communication* 01:14:03 Bret's involvement in the OpenAI leadership crisis* 01:22:11 OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft* 01:23:23 OpenAI's mission and priorities* 01:27:40 Bret's guiding principles for career choices* 01:29:12 Brief discussion on pasta-making* 01:30:47 How Bret keeps up with AI developments* 01:32:15 Exciting research directions in AI* 01:35:19 Closing remarks and hiring at Sierra Transcript[00:02:05] Introduction and Guest Welcome[00:02:05] Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co host swyx, founder of smol.ai.[00:02:17] swyx: Hey, and today we're super excited to have Bret Taylor join us. Welcome. Thanks for having me. It's a little unreal to have you in the studio.[00:02:25] swyx: I've read about you so much over the years, like even before. Open AI effectively. I mean, I use Google Maps to get here. So like, thank you for everything that you've done. Like, like your story history, like, you know, I think people can find out what your greatest hits have been.[00:02:40] Bret Taylor's Early Career and Education[00:02:40] swyx: How do you usually like to introduce yourself when, you know, you talk about, you summarize your career, like, how do you look at yourself?[00:02:47] Bret: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we, before we went on the mics here, we're talking about the audience for this podcast being more engineering. And I do think depending on the audience, I'll introduce myself differently because I've had a lot of [00:03:00] corporate and board roles. I probably self identify as an engineer more than anything else though.[00:03:04] Bret: So even when I was. Salesforce, I was coding on the weekends. So I think of myself as an engineer and then all the roles that I do in my career sort of start with that just because I do feel like engineering is sort of a mindset and how I approach most of my life. So I'm an engineer first and that's how I describe myself.[00:03:24] Bret: You majored in computer[00:03:25] swyx: science, like 1998. And, and I was high[00:03:28] Bret: school, actually my, my college degree was Oh, two undergrad. Oh, three masters. Right. That old.[00:03:33] swyx: Yeah. I mean, no, I was going, I was going like 1998 to 2003, but like engineering wasn't as, wasn't a thing back then. Like we didn't have the title of senior engineer, you know, kind of like, it was just.[00:03:44] swyx: You were a programmer, you were a developer, maybe. What was it like in Stanford? Like, what was that feeling like? You know, was it, were you feeling like on the cusp of a great computer revolution? Or was it just like a niche, you know, interest at the time?[00:03:57] Stanford and the Dot-Com Bubble[00:03:57] Bret: Well, I was at Stanford, as you said, from 1998 to [00:04:00] 2002.[00:04:02] Bret: 1998 was near the peak of the dot com bubble. So. This is back in the day where most people that they're coding in the computer lab, just because there was these sun microsystems, Unix boxes there that most of us had to do our assignments on. And every single day there was a. com like buying pizza for everybody.[00:04:20] Bret: I didn't have to like, I got. Free food, like my first two years of university and then the dot com bubble burst in the middle of my college career. And so by the end there was like tumbleweed going to the job fair, you know, it was like, cause it was hard to describe unless you were there at the time, the like level of hype and being a computer science major at Stanford was like, A thousand opportunities.[00:04:45] Bret: And then, and then when I left, it was like Microsoft, IBM.[00:04:49] Joining Google and Early Projects[00:04:49] Bret: And then the two startups that I applied to were VMware and Google. And I ended up going to Google in large part because a woman named Marissa Meyer, who had been a teaching [00:05:00] assistant when I was, what was called a section leader, which was like a junior teaching assistant kind of for one of the big interest.[00:05:05] Bret: Yes. Classes. She had gone there. And she was recruiting me and I knew her and it was sort of felt safe, you know, like, I don't know. I thought about it much, but it turned out to be a real blessing. I realized like, you know, you always want to think you'd pick Google if given the option, but no one knew at the time.[00:05:20] Bret: And I wonder if I'd graduated in like 1999 where I've been like, mom, I just got a job at pets. com. It's good. But you know, at the end I just didn't have any options. So I was like, do I want to go like make kernel software at VMware? Do I want to go build search at Google? And I chose Google. 50, 50 ball.[00:05:36] Bret: I'm not really a 50, 50 ball. So I feel very fortunate in retrospect that the economy collapsed because in some ways it forced me into like one of the greatest companies of all time, but I kind of lucked into it, I think.[00:05:47] The Google Maps Rewrite Story[00:05:47] Alessio: So the famous story about Google is that you rewrote the Google maps back in, in one week after the map quest quest maps acquisition, what was the story there?[00:05:57] Alessio: Is it. Actually true. Is it [00:06:00] being glorified? Like how, how did that come to be? And is there any detail that maybe Paul hasn't shared before?[00:06:06] Bret: It's largely true, but I'll give the color commentary. So it was actually the front end, not the back end, but it turns out for Google maps, the front end was sort of the hard part just because Google maps was.[00:06:17] Bret: Largely the first ish kind of really interactive web application, say first ish. I think Gmail certainly was though Gmail, probably a lot of people then who weren't engineers probably didn't appreciate its level of interactivity. It was just fast, but. Google maps, because you could drag the map and it was sort of graphical.[00:06:38] Bret: My, it really in the mainstream, I think, was it a map[00:06:41] swyx: quest back then that was, you had the arrows up and down, it[00:06:44] Bret: was up and down arrows. Each map was a single image and you just click left and then wait for a few seconds to the new map to let it was really small too, because generating a big image was kind of expensive on computers that day.[00:06:57] Bret: So Google maps was truly innovative in that [00:07:00] regard. The story on it. There was a small company called where two technologies started by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who are two of my closest friends now. They had made a windows app called expedition, which had beautiful maps. Even in 2000.[00:07:18] Bret: For whenever we acquired or sort of acquired their company, Windows software was not particularly fashionable, but they were really passionate about mapping and we had made a local search product that was kind of middling in terms of popularity, sort of like a yellow page of search product. So we wanted to really go into mapping.[00:07:36] Bret: We'd started working on it. Their small team seemed passionate about it. So we're like, come join us. We can build this together.[00:07:42] Technical Challenges and Innovations[00:07:42] Bret: It turned out to be a great blessing that they had built a windows app because you're less technically constrained when you're doing native code than you are building a web browser, particularly back then when there weren't really interactive web apps and it ended up.[00:07:56] Bret: Changing the level of quality that we [00:08:00] wanted to hit with the app because we were shooting for something that felt like a native windows application. So it was a really good fortune that we sort of, you know, their unusual technical choices turned out to be the greatest blessing. So we spent a lot of time basically saying, how can you make a interactive draggable map in a web browser?[00:08:18] Bret: How do you progressively load, you know, new map tiles, you know, as you're dragging even things like down in the weeds of the browser at the time, most browsers like Internet Explorer, which was dominant at the time would only load two images at a time from the same domain. So we ended up making our map tile servers have like.[00:08:37] Bret: Forty different subdomains so we could load maps and parallels like lots of hacks. I'm happy to go into as much as like[00:08:44] swyx: HTTP connections and stuff.[00:08:46] Bret: They just like, there was just maximum parallelism of two. And so if you had a map, set of map tiles, like eight of them, so So we just, we were down in the weeds of the browser anyway.[00:08:56] Bret: So it was lots of plumbing. I can, I know a lot more about browsers than [00:09:00] most people, but then by the end of it, it was fairly, it was a lot of duct tape on that code. If you've ever done an engineering project where you're not really sure the path from point A to point B, it's almost like. Building a house by building one room at a time.[00:09:14] Bret: The, there's not a lot of architectural cohesion at the end. And then we acquired a company called Keyhole, which became Google earth, which was like that three, it was a native windows app as well, separate app, great app, but with that, we got licenses to all this satellite imagery. And so in August of 2005, we added.[00:09:33] Bret: Satellite imagery to Google Maps, which added even more complexity in the code base. And then we decided we wanted to support Safari. There was no mobile phones yet. So Safari was this like nascent browser on, on the Mac. And it turns out there's like a lot of decisions behind the scenes, sort of inspired by this windows app, like heavy use of XML and XSLT and all these like.[00:09:54] Bret: Technologies that were like briefly fashionable in the early two thousands and everyone hates now for good [00:10:00] reason. And it turns out that all of the XML functionality and Internet Explorer wasn't supporting Safari. So people are like re implementing like XML parsers. And it was just like this like pile of s**t.[00:10:11] Bret: And I had to say a s**t on your part. Yeah, of[00:10:12] Alessio: course.[00:10:13] Bret: So. It went from this like beautifully elegant application that everyone was proud of to something that probably had hundreds of K of JavaScript, which sounds like nothing. Now we're talking like people have modems, you know, not all modems, but it was a big deal.[00:10:29] Bret: So it was like slow. It took a while to load and just, it wasn't like a great code base. Like everything was fragile. So I just got. Super frustrated by it. And then one weekend I did rewrite all of it. And at the time the word JSON hadn't been coined yet too, just to give you a sense. So it's all XML.[00:10:47] swyx: Yeah.[00:10:47] Bret: So we used what is now you would call JSON, but I just said like, let's use eval so that we can parse the data fast. And, and again, that's, it would literally as JSON, but at the time there was no name for it. So we [00:11:00] just said, let's. Pass on JavaScript from the server and eval it. And then somebody just refactored the whole thing.[00:11:05] Bret: And, and it wasn't like I was some genius. It was just like, you know, if you knew everything you wished you had known at the beginning and I knew all the functionality, cause I was the primary, one of the primary authors of the JavaScript. And I just like, I just drank a lot of coffee and just stayed up all weekend.[00:11:22] Bret: And then I, I guess I developed a bit of reputation and no one knew about this for a long time. And then Paul who created Gmail and I ended up starting a company with him too, after all of this told this on a podcast and now it's large, but it's largely true. I did rewrite it and it, my proudest thing.[00:11:38] Bret: And I think JavaScript people appreciate this. Like the un G zipped bundle size for all of Google maps. When I rewrote, it was 20 K G zipped. It was like much smaller for the entire application. It went down by like 10 X. So. What happened on Google? Google is a pretty mainstream company. And so like our usage is shot up because it turns out like it's faster.[00:11:57] Bret: Just being faster is worth a lot of [00:12:00] percentage points of growth at a scale of Google. So how[00:12:03] swyx: much modern tooling did you have? Like test suites no compilers.[00:12:07] Bret: Actually, that's not true. We did it one thing. So I actually think Google, I, you can. Download it. There's a, Google has a closure compiler, a closure compiler.[00:12:15] Bret: I don't know if anyone still uses it. It's gone. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of gone out of favor. Yeah. Well, even until recently it was better than most JavaScript minifiers because it was more like it did a lot more renaming of variables and things. Most people use ES build now just cause it's fast and closure compilers built on Java and super slow and stuff like that.[00:12:37] Bret: But, so we did have that, that was it. Okay.[00:12:39] The Evolution of Web Applications[00:12:39] Bret: So and that was treated internally, you know, it was a really interesting time at Google at the time because there's a lot of teams working on fairly advanced JavaScript when no one was. So Google suggest, which Kevin Gibbs was the tech lead for, was the first kind of type ahead, autocomplete, I believe in a web browser, and now it's just pervasive in search boxes that you sort of [00:13:00] see a type ahead there.[00:13:01] Bret: I mean, chat, dbt[00:13:01] swyx: just added it. It's kind of like a round trip.[00:13:03] Bret: Totally. No, it's now pervasive as a UI affordance, but that was like Kevin's 20 percent project. And then Gmail, Paul you know, he tells the story better than anyone, but he's like, you know, basically was scratching his own itch, but what was really neat about it is email, because it's such a productivity tool, just needed to be faster.[00:13:21] Bret: So, you know, he was scratching his own itch of just making more stuff work on the client side. And then we, because of Lars and Yen sort of like setting the bar of this windows app or like we need our maps to be draggable. So we ended up. Not only innovate in terms of having a big sync, what would be called a single page application today, but also all the graphical stuff you know, we were crashing Firefox, like it was going out of style because, you know, when you make a document object model with the idea that it's a document and then you layer on some JavaScript and then we're essentially abusing all of this, it just was running into code paths that were not.[00:13:56] Bret: Well, it's rotten, you know, at this time. And so it was [00:14:00] super fun. And, and, you know, in the building you had, so you had compilers, people helping minify JavaScript just practically, but there is a great engineering team. So they were like, that's why Closure Compiler is so good. It was like a. Person who actually knew about programming languages doing it, not just, you know, writing regular expressions.[00:14:17] Bret: And then the team that is now the Chrome team believe, and I, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm pretty sure Google is the main contributor to Firefox for a long time in terms of code. And a lot of browser people were there. So every time we would crash Firefox, we'd like walk up two floors and say like, what the hell is going on here?[00:14:35] Bret: And they would load their browser, like in a debugger. And we could like figure out exactly what was breaking. And you can't change the code, right? Cause it's the browser. It's like slow, right? I mean, slow to update. So, but we could figure out exactly where the bug was and then work around it in our JavaScript.[00:14:52] Bret: So it was just like new territory. Like so super, super fun time, just like a lot of, a lot of great engineers figuring out [00:15:00] new things. And And now, you know, the word, this term is no longer in fashion, but the word Ajax, which was asynchronous JavaScript and XML cause I'm telling you XML, but see the word XML there, to be fair, the way you made HTTP requests from a client to server was this.[00:15:18] Bret: Object called XML HTTP request because Microsoft and making Outlook web access back in the day made this and it turns out to have nothing to do with XML. It's just a way of making HTTP requests because XML was like the fashionable thing. It was like that was the way you, you know, you did it. But the JSON came out of that, you know, and then a lot of the best practices around building JavaScript applications is pre React.[00:15:44] Bret: I think React was probably the big conceptual step forward that we needed. Even my first social network after Google, we used a lot of like HTML injection and. Making real time updates was still very hand coded and it's really neat when you [00:16:00] see conceptual breakthroughs like react because it's, I just love those things where it's like obvious once you see it, but it's so not obvious until you do.[00:16:07] Bret: And actually, well, I'm sure we'll get into AI, but I, I sort of feel like we'll go through that evolution with AI agents as well that I feel like we're missing a lot of the core abstractions that I think in 10 years we'll be like, gosh, how'd you make agents? Before that, you know, but it was kind of that early days of web applications.[00:16:22] swyx: There's a lot of contenders for the reactive jobs of of AI, but no clear winner yet. I would say one thing I was there for, I mean, there's so much we can go into there. You just covered so much.[00:16:32] Product Management and Engineering Synergy[00:16:32] swyx: One thing I just, I just observe is that I think the early Google days had this interesting mix of PM and engineer, which I think you are, you didn't, you didn't wait for PM to tell you these are my, this is my PRD.[00:16:42] swyx: This is my requirements.[00:16:44] mix: Oh,[00:16:44] Bret: okay.[00:16:45] swyx: I wasn't technically a software engineer. I mean,[00:16:48] Bret: by title, obviously. Right, right, right.[00:16:51] swyx: It's like a blend. And I feel like these days, product is its own discipline and its own lore and own industry and engineering is its own thing. And there's this process [00:17:00] that happens and they're kind of separated, but you don't produce as good of a product as if they were the same person.[00:17:06] swyx: And I'm curious, you know, if, if that, if that sort of resonates in, in, in terms of like comparing early Google versus modern startups that you see out there,[00:17:16] Bret: I certainly like wear a lot of hats. So, you know, sort of biased in this, but I really agree that there's a lot of power and combining product design engineering into as few people as possible because, you know few great things have been created by committee, you know, and so.[00:17:33] Bret: If engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be small teams who deeply understand the customer need that they're solving, who have a. Maniacal focus on outcomes.[00:17:53] Bret: And I think the reason why it's, I think for some areas, if you look at like software as a service five years ago, maybe you can have a [00:18:00] separation of product and engineering because most software as a service created five years ago. I wouldn't say there's like a lot of like. Technological breakthroughs required for most, you know, business applications.[00:18:11] Bret: And if you're making expense reporting software or whatever, it's useful. I don't mean to be dismissive of expense reporting software, but you probably just want to understand like, what are the requirements of the finance department? What are the requirements of an individual file expense report? Okay.[00:18:25] Bret: Go implement that. And you kind of know how web applications are implemented. You kind of know how to. How databases work, how to build auto scaling with your AWS cluster, whatever, you know, it's just, you're just applying best practices to yet another problem when you have areas like the early days of mobile development or the early days of interactive web applications, which I think Google Maps and Gmail represent, or now AI agents, you're in this constant conversation with what the requirements of your customers and stakeholders are and all the different people interacting with it.[00:18:58] Bret: And the capabilities of the [00:19:00] technology. And it's almost impossible to specify the requirements of a product when you're not sure of the limitations of the technology itself. And that's why I use the word conversation. It's not literal. That's sort of funny to use that word in the age of conversational AI.[00:19:15] Bret: You're constantly sort of saying, like, ideally, you could sprinkle some magic AI pixie dust and solve all the world's problems, but it's not the way it works. And it turns out that actually, I'll just give an interesting example.[00:19:26] AI Agents and Modern Tooling[00:19:26] Bret: I think most people listening probably use co pilots to code like Cursor or Devon or Microsoft Copilot or whatever.[00:19:34] Bret: Most of those tools are, they're remarkable. I'm, I couldn't, you know, imagine development without them now, but they're not autonomous yet. Like I wouldn't let it just write most code without my interactively inspecting it. We just are somewhere between it's an amazing co pilot and it's an autonomous software engineer.[00:19:53] Bret: As a product manager, like your aspirations for what the product is are like kind of meaningful. But [00:20:00] if you're a product person, yeah, of course you'd say it should be autonomous. You should click a button and program should come out the other side. The requirements meaningless. Like what matters is like, what is based on the like very nuanced limitations of the technology.[00:20:14] Bret: What is it capable of? And then how do you maximize the leverage? It gives a software engineering team, given those very nuanced trade offs. Coupled with the fact that those nuanced trade offs are changing more rapidly than any technology in my memory, meaning every few months you'll have new models with new capabilities.[00:20:34] Bret: So how do you construct a product that can absorb those new capabilities as rapidly as possible as well? That requires such a combination of technical depth and understanding the customer that you really need more integration. Of product design and engineering. And so I think it's why with these big technology waves, I think startups have a bit of a leg up relative to incumbents because they [00:21:00] tend to be sort of more self actualized in terms of just like bringing those disciplines closer together.[00:21:06] Bret: And in particular, I think entrepreneurs, the proverbial full stack engineers, you know, have a leg up as well because. I think most breakthroughs happen when you have someone who can understand those extremely nuanced technical trade offs, have a vision for a product. And then in the process of building it, have that, as I said, like metaphorical conversation with the technology, right?[00:21:30] Bret: Gosh, I ran into a technical limit that I didn't expect. It's not just like changing that feature. You might need to refactor the whole product based on that. And I think that's, that it's particularly important right now. So I don't, you know, if you, if you're building a big ERP system, probably there's a great reason to have product and engineering.[00:21:51] Bret: I think in general, the disciplines are there for a reason. I think when you're dealing with something as nuanced as the like technologies, like large language models today, there's a ton of [00:22:00] advantage of having. Individuals or organizations that integrate the disciplines more formally.[00:22:05] Alessio: That makes a lot of sense.[00:22:06] Alessio: I've run a lot of engineering teams in the past, and I think the product versus engineering tension has always been more about effort than like whether or not the feature is buildable. But I think, yeah, today you see a lot more of like. Models actually cannot do that. And I think the most interesting thing is on the startup side, people don't yet know where a lot of the AI value is going to accrue.[00:22:26] Alessio: So you have this rush of people building frameworks, building infrastructure, layered things, but we don't really know the shape of the compute. I'm curious that Sierra, like how you thought about building an house, a lot of the tooling for evals or like just, you know, building the agents and all of that.[00:22:41] Alessio: Versus how you see some of the startup opportunities that is maybe still out there.[00:22:46] Bret: We build most of our tooling in house at Sierra, not all. It's, we don't, it's not like not invented here syndrome necessarily, though, maybe slightly guilty of that in some ways, but because we're trying to build a platform [00:23:00] that's in Dorian, you know, we really want to have control over our own destiny.[00:23:03] Bret: And you had made a comment earlier that like. We're still trying to figure out who like the reactive agents are and the jury is still out. I would argue it hasn't been created yet. I don't think the jury is still out to go use that metaphor. We're sort of in the jQuery era of agents, not the react era.[00:23:19] Bret: And, and that's like a throwback for people listening,[00:23:22] swyx: we shouldn't rush it. You know?[00:23:23] Bret: No, yeah, that's my point is. And so. Because we're trying to create an enduring company at Sierra that outlives us, you know, I'm not sure we want to like attach our cart to some like to a horse where it's not clear that like we've figured out and I actually want as a company, we're trying to enable just at a high level and I'll, I'll quickly go back to tech at Sierra, we help consumer brands build customer facing AI agents.[00:23:48] Bret: So. Everyone from Sonos to ADT home security to Sirius XM, you know, if you call them on the phone and AI will pick up with you, you know, chat with them on the Sirius XM homepage. It's an AI agent called Harmony [00:24:00] that they've built on our platform. We're what are the contours of what it means for someone to build an end to end complete customer experience with AI with conversational AI.[00:24:09] Bret: You know, we really want to dive into the deep end of, of all the trade offs to do it. You know, where do you use fine tuning? Where do you string models together? You know, where do you use reasoning? Where do you use generation? How do you use reasoning? How do you express the guardrails of an agentic process?[00:24:25] Bret: How do you impose determinism on a fundamentally non deterministic technology? There's just a lot of really like as an important design space. And I could sit here and tell you, we have the best approach. Every entrepreneur will, you know. But I hope that in two years, we look back at our platform and laugh at how naive we were, because that's the pace of change broadly.[00:24:45] Bret: If you talk about like the startup opportunities, I'm not wholly skeptical of tools companies, but I'm fairly skeptical. There's always an exception for every role, but I believe that certainly there's a big market for [00:25:00] frontier models, but largely for companies with huge CapEx budgets. So. Open AI and Microsoft's Anthropic and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud XAI, which is very well capitalized now, but I think the, the idea that a company can make money sort of pre training a foundation model is probably not true.[00:25:20] Bret: It's hard to, you're competing with just, you know, unreasonably large CapEx budgets. And I just like the cloud infrastructure market, I think will be largely there. I also really believe in the applications of AI. And I define that not as like building agents or things like that. I define it much more as like, you're actually solving a problem for a business.[00:25:40] Bret: So it's what Harvey is doing in legal profession or what cursor is doing for software engineering or what we're doing for customer experience and customer service. The reason I believe in that is I do think that in the age of AI, what's really interesting about software is it can actually complete a task.[00:25:56] Bret: It can actually do a job, which is very different than the value proposition of [00:26:00] software was to ancient history two years ago. And as a consequence, I think the way you build a solution and For a domain is very different than you would have before, which means that it's not obvious, like the incumbent incumbents have like a leg up, you know, necessarily, they certainly have some advantages, but there's just such a different form factor, you know, for providing a solution and it's just really valuable.[00:26:23] Bret: You know, it's. Like just think of how much money cursor is saving software engineering teams or the alternative, how much revenue it can produce tool making is really challenging. If you look at the cloud market, just as a analog, there are a lot of like interesting tools, companies, you know, Confluent, Monetized Kafka, Snowflake, Hortonworks, you know, there's a, there's a bunch of them.[00:26:48] Bret: A lot of them, you know, have that mix of sort of like like confluence or have the open source or open core or whatever you call it. I, I, I'm not an expert in this area. You know, I do think [00:27:00] that developers are fickle. I think that in the tool space, I probably like. Default towards open source being like the area that will win.[00:27:09] Bret: It's hard to build a company around this and then you end up with companies sort of built around open source to that can work. Don't get me wrong, but I just think that it's nowadays the tools are changing so rapidly that I'm like, not totally skeptical of tool makers, but I just think that open source will broadly win, but I think that the CapEx required for building frontier models is such that it will go to a handful of big companies.[00:27:33] Bret: And then I really believe in agents for specific domains which I think will, it's sort of the analog to software as a service in this new era. You know, it's like, if you just think of the cloud. You can lease a server. It's just a low level primitive, or you can buy an app like you know, Shopify or whatever.[00:27:51] Bret: And most people building a storefront would prefer Shopify over hand rolling their e commerce storefront. I think the same thing will be true of AI. So [00:28:00] I've. I tend to like, if I have a, like an entrepreneur asked me for advice, I'm like, you know, move up the stack as far as you can towards a customer need.[00:28:09] Bret: Broadly, but I, but it doesn't reduce my excitement about what is the reactive building agents kind of thing, just because it is, it is the right question to ask, but I think we'll probably play out probably an open source space more than anything else.[00:28:21] swyx: Yeah, and it's not a priority for you. There's a lot in there.[00:28:24] swyx: I'm kind of curious about your idea maze towards, there are many customer needs. You happen to identify customer experience as yours, but it could equally have been coding assistance or whatever. I think for some, I'm just kind of curious at the top down, how do you look at the world in terms of the potential problem space?[00:28:44] swyx: Because there are many people out there who are very smart and pick the wrong problem.[00:28:47] Bret: Yeah, that's a great question.[00:28:48] Future of Software Development[00:28:48] Bret: By the way, I would love to talk about the future of software, too, because despite the fact it didn't pick coding, I have a lot of that, but I can talk to I can answer your question, though, you know I think when a technology is as [00:29:00] cool as large language models.[00:29:02] Bret: You just see a lot of people starting from the technology and searching for a problem to solve. And I think it's why you see a lot of tools companies, because as a software engineer, you start building an app or a demo and you, you encounter some pain points. You're like,[00:29:17] swyx: a lot of[00:29:17] Bret: people are experiencing the same pain point.[00:29:19] Bret: What if I make it? That it's just very incremental. And you know, I always like to use the metaphor, like you can sell coffee beans, roasted coffee beans. You can add some value. You took coffee beans and you roasted them and roasted coffee beans largely, you know, are priced relative to the cost of the beans.[00:29:39] Bret: Or you can sell a latte and a latte. Is rarely priced directly like as a percentage of coffee bean prices. In fact, if you buy a latte at the airport, it's a captive audience. So it's a really expensive latte. And there's just a lot that goes into like. How much does a latte cost? And I bring it up because there's a supply chain from growing [00:30:00] coffee beans to roasting coffee beans to like, you know, you could make one at home or you could be in the airport and buy one and the margins of the company selling lattes in the airport is a lot higher than the, you know, people roasting the coffee beans and it's because you've actually solved a much more acute human problem in the airport.[00:30:19] Bret: And, and it's just worth a lot more to that person in that moment. It's kind of the way I think about technology too. It sounds funny to liken it to coffee beans, but you're selling tools on top of a large language model yet in some ways your market is big, but you're probably going to like be price compressed just because you're sort of a piece of infrastructure and then you have open source and all these other things competing with you naturally.[00:30:43] Bret: If you go and solve a really big business problem for somebody, that's actually like a meaningful business problem that AI facilitates, they will value it according to the value of that business problem. And so I actually feel like people should just stop. You're like, no, that's, that's [00:31:00] unfair. If you're searching for an idea of people, I, I love people trying things, even if, I mean, most of the, a lot of the greatest ideas have been things no one believed in.[00:31:07] Bret: So I like, if you're passionate about something, go do it. Like who am I to say, yeah, a hundred percent. Or Gmail, like Paul as far, I mean I, some of it's Laura at this point, but like Gmail is Paul's own email for a long time. , and then I amusingly and Paul can't correct me, I'm pretty sure he sent her in a link and like the first comment was like, this is really neat.[00:31:26] Bret: It would be great. It was not your email, but my own . I don't know if it's a true story. I'm pretty sure it's, yeah, I've read that before. So scratch your own niche. Fine. Like it depends on what your goal is. If you wanna do like a venture backed company, if its a. Passion project, f*****g passion, do it like don't listen to anybody.[00:31:41] Bret: In fact, but if you're trying to start, you know an enduring company, solve an important business problem. And I, and I do think that in the world of agents, the software industries has shifted where you're not just helping people more. People be more productive, but you're actually accomplishing tasks autonomously.[00:31:58] Bret: And as a consequence, I think the [00:32:00] addressable market has just greatly expanded just because software can actually do things now and actually accomplish tasks and how much is coding autocomplete worth. A fair amount. How much is the eventual, I'm certain we'll have it, the software agent that actually writes the code and delivers it to you, that's worth a lot.[00:32:20] Bret: And so, you know, I would just maybe look up from the large language models and start thinking about the economy and, you know, think from first principles. I don't wanna get too far afield, but just think about which parts of the economy. We'll benefit most from this intelligence and which parts can absorb it most easily.[00:32:38] Bret: And what would an agent in this space look like? Who's the customer of it is the technology feasible. And I would just start with these business problems more. And I think, you know, the best companies tend to have great engineers who happen to have great insight into a market. And it's that last part that I think some people.[00:32:56] Bret: Whether or not they have, it's like people start so much in the technology, they [00:33:00] lose the forest for the trees a little bit.[00:33:02] Alessio: How do you think about the model of still selling some sort of software versus selling more package labor? I feel like when people are selling the package labor, it's almost more stateless, you know, like it's easier to swap out if you're just putting an input and getting an output.[00:33:16] Alessio: If you think about coding, if there's no ID, you're just putting a prompt and getting back an app. It doesn't really matter. Who generates the app, you know, you have less of a buy in versus the platform you're building, I'm sure on the backend customers have to like put on their documentation and they have, you know, different workflows that they can tie in what's kind of like the line to draw there versus like going full where you're managed customer support team as a service outsource versus.[00:33:40] Alessio: This is the Sierra platform that you can build on. What was that decision? I'll sort of[00:33:44] Bret: like decouple the question in some ways, which is when you have something that's an agent, who is the person using it and what do they want to do with it? So let's just take your coding agent for a second. I will talk about Sierra as well.[00:33:59] Bret: Who's the [00:34:00] customer of a, an agent that actually produces software? Is it a software engineering manager? Is it a software engineer? And it's there, you know, intern so to speak. I don't know. I mean, we'll figure this out over the next few years. Like what is that? And is it generating code that you then review?[00:34:16] Bret: Is it generating code with a set of unit tests that pass, what is the actual. For lack of a better word contract, like, how do you know that it did what you wanted it to do? And then I would say like the product and the pricing, the packaging model sort of emerged from that. And I don't think the world's figured out.[00:34:33] Bret: I think it'll be different for every agent. You know, in our customer base, we do what's called outcome based pricing. So essentially every time the AI agent. Solves the problem or saves a customer or whatever it might be. There's a pre negotiated rate for that. We do that. Cause it's, we think that that's sort of the correct way agents, you know, should be packaged.[00:34:53] Bret: I look back at the history of like cloud software and notably the introduction of the browser, which led to [00:35:00] software being delivered in a browser, like Salesforce to. Famously invented sort of software as a service, which is both a technical delivery model through the browser, but also a business model, which is you subscribe to it rather than pay for a perpetual license.[00:35:13] Bret: Those two things are somewhat orthogonal, but not really. If you think about the idea of software running in a browser, that's hosted. Data center that you don't own, you sort of needed to change the business model because you don't, you can't really buy a perpetual license or something otherwise like, how do you afford making changes to it?[00:35:31] Bret: So it only worked when you were buying like a new version every year or whatever. So to some degree, but then the business model shift actually changed business as we know it, because now like. Things like Adobe Photoshop. Now you subscribe to rather than purchase. So it ended up where you had a technical shift and a business model shift that were very logically intertwined that actually the business model shift was turned out to be as significant as the technical as the shift.[00:35:59] Bret: And I think with [00:36:00] agents, because they actually accomplish a job, I do think that it doesn't make sense to me that you'd pay for the privilege of like. Using the software like that coding agent, like if it writes really bad code, like fire it, you know, I don't know what the right metaphor is like you should pay for a job.[00:36:17] Bret: Well done in my opinion. I mean, that's how you pay your software engineers, right? And[00:36:20] swyx: and well, not really. We paid to put them on salary and give them options and they vest over time. That's fair.[00:36:26] Bret: But my point is that you don't pay them for how many characters they write, which is sort of the token based, you know, whatever, like, There's a, that famous Apple story where we're like asking for a report of how many lines of code you wrote.[00:36:40] Bret: And one of the engineers showed up with like a negative number cause he had just like done a big refactoring. There was like a big F you to management who didn't understand how software is written. You know, my sense is like the traditional usage based or seat based thing. It's just going to look really antiquated.[00:36:55] Bret: Cause it's like asking your software engineer, how many lines of code did you write today? Like who cares? Like, cause [00:37:00] absolutely no correlation. So my old view is I don't think it's be different in every category, but I do think that that is the, if an agent is doing a job, you should, I think it properly incentivizes the maker of that agent and the customer of, of your pain for the job well done.[00:37:16] Bret: It's not always perfect to measure. It's hard to measure engineering productivity, but you can, you should do something other than how many keys you typed, you know Talk about perverse incentives for AI, right? Like I can write really long functions to do the same thing, right? So broadly speaking, you know, I do think that we're going to see a change in business models of software towards outcomes.[00:37:36] Bret: And I think you'll see a change in delivery models too. And, and, you know, in our customer base you know, we empower our customers to really have their hands on the steering wheel of what the agent does they, they want and need that. But the role is different. You know, at a lot of our customers, the customer experience operations folks have renamed themselves the AI architects, which I think is really cool.[00:37:55] Bret: And, you know, it's like in the early days of the Internet, there's the role of the webmaster. [00:38:00] And I don't know whether your webmaster is not a fashionable, you know, Term, nor is it a job anymore? I just, I don't know. Will they, our tech stand the test of time? Maybe, maybe not. But I do think that again, I like, you know, because everyone listening right now is a software engineer.[00:38:14] Bret: Like what is the form factor of a coding agent? And actually I'll, I'll take a breath. Cause actually I have a bunch of pins on them. Like I wrote a blog post right before Christmas, just on the future of software development. And one of the things that's interesting is like, if you look at the way I use cursor today, as an example, it's inside of.[00:38:31] Bret: A repackaged visual studio code environment. I sometimes use the sort of agentic parts of it, but it's largely, you know, I've sort of gotten a good routine of making it auto complete code in the way I want through tuning it properly when it actually can write. I do wonder what like the future of development environments will look like.[00:38:55] Bret: And to your point on what is a software product, I think it's going to change a lot in [00:39:00] ways that will surprise us. But I always use, I use the metaphor in my blog post of, have you all driven around in a way, Mo around here? Yeah, everyone has. And there are these Jaguars, the really nice cars, but it's funny because it still has a steering wheel, even though there's no one sitting there and the steering wheels like turning and stuff clearly in the future.[00:39:16] Bret: If once we get to that, be more ubiquitous, like why have the steering wheel and also why have all the seats facing forward? Maybe just for car sickness. I don't know, but you could totally rearrange the car. I mean, so much of the car is oriented around the driver, so. It stands to reason to me that like, well, autonomous agents for software engineering run through visual studio code.[00:39:37] Bret: That seems a little bit silly because having a single source code file open one at a time is kind of a goofy form factor for when like the code isn't being written primarily by you, but it begs the question of what's your relationship with that agent. And I think the same is true in our industry of customer experience, which is like.[00:39:55] Bret: Who are the people managing this agent? What are the tools do they need? And they definitely need [00:40:00] tools, but it's probably pretty different than the tools we had before. It's certainly different than training a contact center team. And as software engineers, I think that I would like to see particularly like on the passion project side or research side.[00:40:14] Bret: More innovation in programming languages. I think that we're bringing the cost of writing code down to zero. So the fact that we're still writing Python with AI cracks me up just cause it's like literally was designed to be ergonomic to write, not safe to run or fast to run. I would love to see more innovation and how we verify program correctness.[00:40:37] Bret: I studied for formal verification in college a little bit and. It's not very fashionable because it's really like tedious and slow and doesn't work very well. If a lot of code is being written by a machine, you know, one of the primary values we can provide is verifying that it actually does what we intend that it does.[00:40:56] Bret: I think there should be lots of interesting things in the software development life cycle, like how [00:41:00] we think of testing and everything else, because. If you think about if we have to manually read every line of code that's coming out as machines, it will just rate limit how much the machines can do. The alternative is totally unsafe.[00:41:13] Bret: So I wouldn't want to put code in production that didn't go through proper code review and inspection. So my whole view is like, I actually think there's like an AI native I don't think the coding agents don't work well enough to do this yet, but once they do, what is sort of an AI native software development life cycle and how do you actually.[00:41:31] Bret: Enable the creators of software to produce the highest quality, most robust, fastest software and know that it's correct. And I think that's an incredible opportunity. I mean, how much C code can we rewrite and rust and make it safe so that there's fewer security vulnerabilities. Can we like have more efficient, safer code than ever before?[00:41:53] Bret: And can you have someone who's like that guy in the matrix, you know, like staring at the little green things, like where could you have an operator [00:42:00] of a code generating machine be like superhuman? I think that's a cool vision. And I think too many people are focused on like. Autocomplete, you know, right now, I'm not, I'm not even, I'm guilty as charged.[00:42:10] Bret: I guess in some ways, but I just like, I'd like to see some bolder ideas. And that's why when you were joking, you know, talking about what's the react of whatever, I think we're clearly in a local maximum, you know, metaphor, like sort of conceptual local maximum, obviously it's moving really fast. I think we're moving out of it.[00:42:26] Alessio: Yeah. At the end of 23, I've read this blog post from syntax to semantics. Like if you think about Python. It's taking C and making it more semantic and LLMs are like the ultimate semantic program, right? You can just talk to them and they can generate any type of syntax from your language. But again, the languages that they have to use were made for us, not for them.[00:42:46] Alessio: But the problem is like, as long as you will ever need a human to intervene, you cannot change the language under it. You know what I mean? So I'm curious at what point of automation we'll need to get, we're going to be okay making changes. To the underlying languages, [00:43:00] like the programming languages versus just saying, Hey, you just got to write Python because I understand Python and I'm more important at the end of the day than the model.[00:43:08] Alessio: But I think that will change, but I don't know if it's like two years or five years. I think it's more nuanced actually.[00:43:13] Bret: So I think there's a, some of the more interesting programming languages bring semantics into syntax. So let me, that's a little reductive, but like Rust as an example, Rust is memory safe.[00:43:25] Bret: Statically, and that was a really interesting conceptual, but it's why it's hard to write rust. It's why most people write python instead of rust. I think rust programs are safer and faster than python, probably slower to compile. But like broadly speaking, like given the option, if you didn't have to care about the labor that went into it.[00:43:45] Bret: You should prefer a program written in Rust over a program written in Python, just because it will run more efficiently. It's almost certainly safer, et cetera, et cetera, depending on how you define safe, but most people don't write Rust because it's kind of a pain in the ass. And [00:44:00] the audience of people who can is smaller, but it's sort of better in most, most ways.[00:44:05] Bret: And again, let's say you're making a web service and you didn't have to care about how hard it was to write. If you just got the output of the web service, the rest one would be cheaper to operate. It's certainly cheaper and probably more correct just because there's so much in the static analysis implied by the rest programming language that it probably will have fewer runtime errors and things like that as well.[00:44:25] Bret: So I just give that as an example, because so rust, at least my understanding that came out of the Mozilla team, because. There's lots of security vulnerabilities in the browser and it needs to be really fast. They said, okay, we want to put more of a burden at the authorship time to have fewer issues at runtime.[00:44:43] Bret: And we need the constraint that it has to be done statically because browsers need to be really fast. My sense is if you just think about like the, the needs of a programming language today, where the role of a software engineer is [00:45:00] to use an AI to generate functionality and audit that it does in fact work as intended, maybe functionally, maybe from like a correctness standpoint, some combination thereof, how would you create a programming system that facilitated that?[00:45:15] Bret: And, you know, I bring up Rust is because I think it's a good example of like, I think given a choice of writing in C or Rust, you should choose Rust today. I think most people would say that, even C aficionados, just because. C is largely less safe for very similar, you know, trade offs, you know, for the, the system and now with AI, it's like, okay, well, that just changes the game on writing these things.[00:45:36] Bret: And so like, I just wonder if a combination of programming languages that are more structurally oriented towards the values that we need from an AI generated program, verifiable correctness and all of that. If it's tedious to produce for a person, that maybe doesn't matter. But one thing, like if I asked you, is this rest program memory safe?[00:45:58] Bret: You wouldn't have to read it, you just have [00:46:00] to compile it. So that's interesting. I mean, that's like an, that's one example of a very modest form of formal verification. So I bring that up because I do think you have AI inspect AI, you can have AI reviewed. Do AI code reviews. It would disappoint me if the best we could get was AI reviewing Python and having scaled a few very large.[00:46:21] Bret: Websites that were written on Python. It's just like, you know, expensive and it's like every, trust me, every team who's written a big web service in Python has experimented with like Pi Pi and all these things just to make it slightly more efficient than it naturally is. You don't really have true multi threading anyway.[00:46:36] Bret: It's just like clearly that you do it just because it's convenient to write. And I just feel like we're, I don't want to say it's insane. I just mean. I do think we're at a local maximum. And I would hope that we create a programming system, a combination of programming languages, formal verification, testing, automated code reviews, where you can use AI to generate software in a high scale way and trust it.[00:46:59] Bret: And you're [00:47:00] not limited by your ability to read it necessarily. I don't know exactly what form that would take, but I feel like that would be a pretty cool world to live in.[00:47:08] Alessio: Yeah. We had Chris Lanner on the podcast. He's doing great work with modular. I mean, I love. LVM. Yeah. Basically merging rust in and Python.[00:47:15] Alessio: That's kind of the idea. Should be, but I'm curious is like, for them a big use case was like making it compatible with Python, same APIs so that Python developers could use it. Yeah. And so I, I wonder at what point, well, yeah.[00:47:26] Bret: At least my understanding is they're targeting the data science Yeah. Machine learning crowd, which is all written in Python, so still feels like a local maximum.[00:47:34] Bret: Yeah.[00:47:34] swyx: Yeah, exactly. I'll force you to make a prediction. You know, Python's roughly 30 years old. In 30 years from now, is Rust going to be bigger than Python?[00:47:42] Bret: I don't know this, but just, I don't even know this is a prediction. I just am sort of like saying stuff I hope is true. I would like to see an AI native programming language and programming system, and I use language because I'm not sure language is even the right thing, but I hope in 30 years, there's an AI native way we make [00:48:00] software that is wholly uncorrelated with the current set of programming languages.[00:48:04] Bret: or not uncorrelated, but I think most programming languages today were designed to be efficiently authored by people and some have different trade offs.[00:48:15] Evolution of Programming Languages[00:48:15] Bret: You know, you have Haskell and others that were designed for abstractions for parallelism and things like that. You have programming languages like Python, which are designed to be very easily written, sort of like Perl and Python lineage, which is why data scientists use it.[00:48:31] Bret: It's it can, it has a. Interactive mode, things like that. And I love, I'm a huge Python fan. So despite all my Python trash talk, a huge Python fan wrote at least two of my three companies were exclusively written in Python and then C came out of the birth of Unix and it wasn't the first, but certainly the most prominent first step after assembly language, right?[00:48:54] Bret: Where you had higher level abstractions rather than and going beyond go to, to like abstractions, [00:49:00] like the for loop and the while loop.[00:49:01] The Future of Software Engineering[00:49:01] Bret: So I just think that if the act of writing code is no longer a meaningful human exercise, maybe it will be, I don't know. I'm just saying it sort of feels like maybe it's one of those parts of history that just will sort of like go away, but there's still the role of this offer engineer, like the person actually building the system.[00:49:20] Bret: Right. And. What does a programming system for that form factor look like?[00:49:25] React and Front-End Development[00:49:25] Bret: And I, I just have a, I hope to be just like I mentioned, I remember I was at Facebook in the very early days when, when, what is now react was being created. And I remember when the, it was like released open source I had left by that time and I was just like, this is so f*****g cool.[00:49:42] Bret: Like, you know, to basically model your app independent of the data flowing through it, just made everything easier. And then now. You know, I can create, like there's a lot of the front end software gym play is like a little chaotic for me, to be honest with you. It is like, it's sort of like [00:50:00] abstraction soup right now for me, but like some of those core ideas felt really ergonomic.[00:50:04] Bret: I just wanna, I'm just looking forward to the day when someone comes up with a programming system that feels both really like an aha moment, but completely foreign to me at the same time. Because they created it with sort of like from first principles recognizing that like. Authoring code in an editor is maybe not like the primary like reason why a programming system exists anymore.[00:50:26] Bret: And I think that's like, that would be a very exciting day for me.[00:50:28] The Role of AI in Programming[00:50:28] swyx: Yeah, I would say like the various versions of this discussion have happened at the end of the day, you still need to precisely communicate what you want. As a manager of people, as someone who has done many, many legal contracts, you know how hard that is.[00:50:42] swyx: And then now we have to talk to machines doing that and AIs interpreting what we mean and reading our minds effectively. I don't know how to get across that barrier of translating human intent to instructions. And yes, it can be more declarative, but I don't know if it'll ever Crossover from being [00:51:00] a programming language to something more than that.[00:51:02] Bret: I agree with you. And I actually do think if you look at like a legal contract, you know, the imprecision of the English language, it's like a flaw in the system. How many[00:51:12] swyx: holes there are.[00:51:13] Bret: And I do think that when you're making a mission critical software system, I don't think it should be English language prompts.[00:51:19] Bret: I think that is silly because you want the precision of a a programming language. My point was less about that and more about if the actual act of authoring it, like if you.[00:51:32] Formal Verification in Software[00:51:32] Bret: I'll think of some embedded systems do use formal verification. I know it's very common in like security protocols now so that you can, because the importance of correctness is so great.[00:51:41] Bret: My intellectual exercise is like, why not do that for all software? I mean, probably that's silly just literally to do what we literally do for. These low level security protocols, but the only reason we don't is because it's hard and tedious and hard and tedious are no longer factors. So, like, if I could, I mean, [00:52:00] just think of, like, the silliest app on your phone right now, the idea that that app should be, like, formally verified for its correctness feels laughable right now because, like, God, why would you spend the time on it?[00:52:10] Bret: But if it's zero costs, like, yeah, I guess so. I mean, it never crashed. That's probably good. You know, why not? I just want to, like, set our bars really high. Like. We should make, software has been amazing. Like there's a Mark Andreessen blog post, software is eating the world. And you know, our whole life is, is mediated digitally.[00:52:26] Bret: And that's just increasing with AI. And now we'll have our personal agents talking to the agents on the CRO platform and it's agents all the way down, you know, our core infrastructure is running on these digital systems. We now have like, and we've had a shortage of software developers for my entire life.[00:52:45] Bret: And as a consequence, you know if you look, remember like health care, got healthcare. gov that fiasco security vulnerabilities leading to state actors getting access to critical infrastructure. I'm like. We now have like created this like amazing system that can [00:53:00] like, we can fix this, you know, and I, I just want to, I'm both excited about the productivity gains in the economy, but I just think as software engineers, we should be bolder.[00:53:08] Bret: Like we should have aspirations to fix these systems so that like in general, as you said, as precise as we want to be in the specification of the system. We can make it work correctly now, and I'm being a little bit hand wavy, and I think we need some systems. I think that's where we should set the bar, especially when so much of our life depends on this critical digital infrastructure.[00:53:28] Bret: So I'm I'm just like super optimistic about it. But actually, let's go to w

#1 New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer spoke with me about, cutting her teeth on fanfiction, working briefly in publishing, and THE HAPPY WRITER, a guide to writing with less stress and more JOY. Marissa Meyer is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lunar Chronicles, Heartless, The Renegades Trilogy, and Instant Karma, as well as the graphic novel duology Wires and Nerve. Marissa also created and hosted a popular podcast, The Happy Writer, that inspired her debut writing guide, The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond. Described as, “Applicable to writers in all genres and disciplines—from screenwriters to novelists, journalists to picture book authors, aspiring to many-times published—The Happy Writer is a heartfelt and optimistic guide that will show you the way to a happier writing journey.” Marissa holds a BA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University and a MA in Publishing from Pace University. [Discover The Writer Files Extra: Get 'The Writer Files' Podcast Delivered Straight to Your Inbox at writerfiles.fm] [If you're a fan of The Writer Files, please click FOLLOW to automatically see new interviews. And drop us a rating or a review wherever you listen] In this file Marissa Meyer and I discussed: How an overactive imagination led to a lifetime of storytelling What she learned about the author/editor relationship early on  Why optimism has always been a part of her brand How to bring more joy to your writing “process” Embracing lifelong creativity And a lot more! Show Notes: marissameyer.com The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond By Marissa Meyer Marissa Meyer Amazon Author Page Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book On Novel Writing You'll Ever Need by Jessica Brody (Amazon) Marissa Meyer on Facebook Marissa Meyer on Instagram Kelton Reid on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2024, we celebrated the new additions to the romantasy space, the fun in sprayed edges, and the increased popularity of books! Now, we're looking into our bookish crystal ball for 2025 . . . What do we think will happen in the book world? Listen to this episode to find out! Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Patreon or Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. Keywords: A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, Shatter Me, Victoria Aveyard, Bookworm, Book Nerd, Bookish, Book, Books, Bookstagram, BookTok, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Clare, Young Adult, New Adult, Read, Reads, Reading, Reader, Readers, ACOTAR, TOG, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

Marissa is joined by repeat podcast guest, author, longtime critique partner, fellow Sailor Moon fanfiction writer and now, cowriter, Tamara Moss. Discussed in this episode: Tamara and Marissa's writing accomplishments for 2024 and how they celebrated (hint: Tamara shares the kind of ‘celebration' we don't recommend), the benefits of cleaning and decluttering, looking forward to what's ahead for 2025, Parkinson's Law, goal-setting and breaking down goals to be manageable, being kind to yourself, SMART goals, staying motivated, and more! Show Notes: Tamara's other episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/950767/episodes/4229966-epic-world-building-advice-with-tamara-moss-lintang-and-the-pirate-queen The Deadbolt Mystery Society: https://deadboltmysterysociety.com/ Getting Things Done: https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9780143126560The Happy Writer at Bookshop.orgPurchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Amplify MarketersOur mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.Red Herrings SocietyUse the code HappyWriter at RedHerringWriters.com to try the first month for free.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Order The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377 Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

It's time to get SPOILERY! No holes are barred in today's episode. We're getting into the nitty gritty with Alex Aster's LIGHTLARK. Dare to listen? Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Patreon or Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. Keywords: A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, Shatter Me, Victoria Aveyard, Bookworm, Book Nerd, Bookish, Book, Books, Bookstagram, BookTok, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Clare, Young Adult, New Adult, Read, Reads, Reading, Reader, Readers, ACOTAR, TOG, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

If you had the power to dish out karma, would you do it and who would you give karma to? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/daniellesreadingnook/support

On a unique scale from 1 - 7, how much did Keimi and Taylor love LIGHTLARK by Alex Aster? Find out in this 15 minute book recommendation! (NON SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

HURRY! We only have 300 seconds to talk about Alex Aster's LIGHTLARK. Do you think we can fit in all of our thoughts and feelings for this YA Fantasy in just 5 minutes? Listen to find out! (NON-SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Patreon or Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

Today we are talking about the 4th book in the Lunar Chronicles, Winter by Marissa Meyer. If you like teens overthrowing a monarchy, robots with the worst luck, girls who are okay with dating a guy with a snout, and finding out that maybe your birth mom is the real villian then this is the book for you!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/book-cult--5718878/support.

Smack and Gabi continue to face off in their 4th Annual Showdown Throwdown in which we compete to see who had the better reading experience during Mysterious Galaxy's Summer Bingo.  This round, Smack is up against a super fun dark academia trilogy that ended up being one of Gabi's all-time favorite reads, Gabi has to contend with some nonfiction and memoir powerhouses that Smack read, and we both benefit from an incredible collection of speculative short stories. In this part two of two, the books showdowned throwdowned include: A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland v. The Last Graduate (The Scholomance #2) The High Mountain Court (The Five Courts of Okrith #1) by A.K. Mulford v. The Undermining of Twyla and Frank (Hart and Mercy #2) by Megan Bannen Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes v. Murdle: Vol. 1 (Murdle #1) by G.T. Karber Botanical Curses and Poisons: The Shadow-Lives of Plants by Fez Inkwright v. The Thursday Murder Club (Thursday Murder Club #1) by Richard Osman What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo v. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez The Rogue Crown (The Five Courts of Okrith #3) by A.K. Mulford v. The Night Ends with Fire (The Night Ends with Fire #1) by K.X. Song The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles (The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti #2) by Malka Older v. Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation by David Rothkopf v. A Deadly Education (The Scholomance #1) by Naomi Novik The Enchanted Hacienda by J.C. Cervantes v. The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance #3) by Naomi Novik Capture the Sun (Starlight's Shadow #3) by Jessie Mihalik v. The Mimicking of Known Successes (The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti #1) by Malka Older Evocation (The Summoner's Circle #1) by S.T. Gibson v. The Silvered by Tanya Huff Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah v. Winter (The Lunar Chronicles #4) by Marissa Meyer

Marissa and Joanne are joined by Rebecca Soler and Gabi Epstein – the narrators for the LET IT GLOW audiobook (You may also recognize Rebecca's voice from most of Marissa's other audio books!). Discussed in this deep dive episode all about audio books: the similarities and differences between audiobook narration and stage acting, how much interaction narrators have with authors and co-narrators, the process of recording and editing, what typical recording days look like, narrator voice tips and tricks, narrator pet peeves (hint for writers: read your books out loud!), how song lyrics work in audio (includes a behind the scenes [not] fun fact about the song in LET IT GLOW), how to get started as an audiobook narrator, and so much more!Ahab voice collaboration website: https://www.ahabtalent.com/ Thank You for Listening: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9780063095588 Mark Thompson's audio catalog: https://libro.fm/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Mark+Thompson The Happy Writer at Bookshop.orgPurchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Amplify MarketersOur mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.Red Herrings SocietyUse the code HappyWriter at RedHerringWriters.com to try the first month for free.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Order The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377 Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

Send us a textIn today's episode we have a HUGE gift-able stack!  Books are one of our favorite items to give anytime of year. We hope you'll find something for every reader on your list...Happy Holidays!  Featured Books:Series:The Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden  (LH)The Lost Queen Series by Signe Pike (LP) Horses of Fire, Daughters of Bronze by A.D. Rhine (LH)Brooklyn, Long Island by Colm Toibin (LP) Historical FictionBy Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult (LP) The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali (LH)The Women by Kristin Hannah (LP) A Well-Behaved Woman by Therese Anne Fowler (LH)FantasyPowerless by Lauren Roberts  (LH)Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (LP)Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan (LH)Touch of Magic The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman (LP)Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune (LH) The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston (LP)Literary FictionHello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (LH)Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy (LP)Fifty Words for Rain by Asha Lemmie (LH)Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford (LP)A Little Hope, A Quiet Life, The Same Bright Stars by Ethan Joella (LH)We Begin at the End by Chris Whittaker (LP)TwistyThe Trap by Catherine Ryan Howard (LH)The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (LP)The Soulmate by Sally Hepworth (LH)Middle GradeLet It Glow by Marissa Meyer and Joanne Levy (LP)Winterhouse by Ben Guterson (LH)The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman by Gennifer Choldenko(LP)Young AdultGone Wolf by Amber McBride (LH)I Will Always Write Back by Caitlin Alifirenka & Martin Ganda (LP)Graphic NovelQuiet Girl in a Noisy World: An Introvert's Story by Debbie Tung (LH)Non FictionThe Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (LP) DystopianThe Silo Series by Hugh Howey (Wool) (LH)A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher (LP) Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (LH)MemoirThe Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop (LP)Books Mentioned In This EpisodeA Long Way Down by Jason ReynoldsMe Moth by Amber McBrideLittle Women by Louisa May AlcottSilence of the Girls by Pat BarkerThe House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. KluneSomewhere Beyond the Sea by T.J. KluneThe Covenant of Water by Abraham VergheseWays to contact us:Follow us on Instagram - @thebookbumbleFacebook:  Book BumbleOur website:  https://thebookbumble.buzzsprout.comEmail:  bookbumblepodcast@gmail.comHey Friends, please rate and review us!

On this episode of Currently Reading, Kaytee and Meredith are discussing: Bookish Moments: relying on books when sick and bookish themed parties Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: bookishness that we are thankful for The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site) .  .  .  .  1:29 - Ad For Ourselves 1:53 - Currently Reading Patreon 8:19 - Fabled Bookshop 9:13 - Our Bookish Moments Of The Week 11:33 - Currently Reading Patreon 12:42 - Our Current Reads 13:03 - The Ruins by Scott Smith (Meredith) 14:15 - 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered by Sadie Hartmann 17:55 - The Turtle House by Amanda Churchill (Kaytee) 18:01 - Commonplace Books 19:40 - Betty by Tiffany McDaniel 21:09 - Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten (Meredith) 26:56 - Bonk by Mary Roach (Kaytee) 29:43 - Gulp by Mary Roach 31:01 - The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey (Meredith) 36:12 - Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross (Kaytee) 36:27 - Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross 36:35 - Fairyloot 38:51 - All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 39:51 - The Rook by Daniel O'Malley 39:52 - Stiletto by Daniel O'Malley 40:26 - Bookishness We Are Thankful For 41:47 - The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis 41:56 - Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh 42:17 - Are You There? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume 43:52 - Matilda by Roald Dahl 44:00 - The Witches by Roald Dahl 44:01 - The Twits by Roald Dahl 44:02 - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl 45:27 - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 45:35 - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 47:05 - A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman 48:16 - Lobizona by Romina Garber Russell 51:56 - A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer 52:18 - A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas 52:56 - Nevermoor by Jessica Townsend 53:30 - Cinder by Marissa Meyer 54:26 - Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery 56:04 - The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny 56:09 - Meet Us At The Fountain 56:13 - I wish you would consider the new airpod 4s as a gift to yourself this year. (Meredith) 56:16 - AirPods 4 1:01:36 - I wish to press Mr. Dickens and his Carol by Samantha Silva. (Kaytee) 1:01:37 - Mr. Dickens and his Carol by Samantha Silva  Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. December's IPL is a recap of the 2024 year!  Love and Chili Peppers with Kaytee and Rebekah - romance lovers get their due with this special episode focused entirely on the best selling genre fiction in the business.  All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the behind-the-scenes insights of an independent bookseller From the Editor's Desk with Kaytee and Bunmi Ishola - a quarterly peek behind the curtain at the publishing industry The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Production and Editing: Megan Phouthavong Evans Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

Marissa and Joanne chat all things holiday gifting in this special bonus super-sized episode where they share their favorite presents received and offer their suggestions, along with a few submitted by listeners (thank you!). From free ideas to the lavishly spendy, items to services, you're sure to find the perfect something for the readers and writers on your list.  Pentel Energel Pens: https://www.pentel.com/collections/energelWaterproof notepad: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LID8V54 Writing prompt cards: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004PICKDS Books are Magic Book club (options for adults/kids/teens and across genres) https://app.table22.com/product/books-are-magic-book-club The Book Drop: options for various ages https://www.thebookdrop.com/all-monthly-mailings The Banned Book Box: https://www.bannedbooksbox.com/ Book of the Month (adult popular hardcovers): https://www.bookofthemonth.com/ Libro.fm audiobook gift subscription: https://libro.fm/gift Fairyloot Fantasy Book Box subscriptions (YA, Adult, Romantasy): https://us.fairyloot.com/ Litjoy: https://litjoycrate.com/collections/special-editions-books Bose noise-cancelling headphones: https://www.bose.com/c/headphones/noise-cancelling A cozy reading blanket: Topsy Farms: https://www.topsyfarms.com/collections/wool-blankets-1 Retro keyboard: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2BJK52J Ergonomic keyboard https://kinesis-ergo.com/products/  Jennifer Nielsen's Episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/950767/episodes/8094293-nerding-out-over-cryptology-with-jennifer-a-nielsen-rescue Lisa McMann's Episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/950767/episodes/5299816-school-visits-and-morally-gray-characters-with-lisa-mcmann-the-unThe Happy Writer at Bookshop.orgPurchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Amplify MarketersOur mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.Red Herrings SocietyUse the code HappyWriter at RedHerringWriters.com to try the first month for free.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Order The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377 Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

HURRY! We only have 300 seconds to talk about Carissa Broadbent's THE SERPENT AND THE WINGS OF NIGHT. Do you think we can fit in all of our thoughts and feelings for this adult romantasy in just 5 minutes? Listen to find out! (NON-SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Patreon or Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

On a unique scale from 1 - 7, how much did Keimi and Taylor love THE SERPENT AND THE WINGS OF NIGHT by Carissa Broadbent? Find out in this 15 minute book recommendation! (NON SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

It's time to get SPOILERY! No holes are barred in today's episode. We're getting into the nitty gritty with Carissa Broadbent's THE SERPENT AND THE WINGS OF NIGHT. Dare to listen? Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Patreon or Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. Keywords: A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, Shatter Me, Victoria Aveyard, Bookworm, Book Nerd, Bookish, Book, Books, Bookstagram, BookTok, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Clare, Young Adult, New Adult, Read, Reads, Reading, Reader, Readers, ACOTAR, TOG, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

In this episode of the Middle Grade Matters podcast, authors Marissa Meyer and Joanne Levy discuss their new holiday-themed middle grade book Let It Glow. They also talk about the origins of The Happy Writer Podcast, the differences between writing for young adult and middle grade audiences, their collaborative writing process, the joy they hope to impart to young readers, and their personal journeys as writers. They share insights on audiobook narration, their daily routines, and upcoming projects, while also reflecting on their favorite middle grade books and offering advice to aspiring writers. Wellness Thru Reading Greetings and salutations book lovers. Welcome to Wellness Thru Reading. A podcast...Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifyFor bonus content and info on upcoming episodes, subscribe to the Middle Grade Matters newsletter here: Newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Twitter.I love audiobooks! If you do, too, consider switching to Libro.fm, a platform that supports indy bookstores.If you're enjoying this podcast, please leave a rating and review (thank you!).

Marissa and Joanne get together to tape this special episode (less than 24 hours after they met in person for the very first time!) as they embark on their LET IT GLOW tour! They answer listener-submitted questions on topics like their origin stories, the origin story for LET IT GLOW, writing fanfiction, the inside story on their collaboration, what they love about the characters, their favorite scenes and what they loved best about the process, how they started working together, a couple favorite holiday reads, and so much more.For Lunar Chronicles and Renegades questions see Episode 200: Marissa's AMA episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/950767/episodes/15212600-ask-me-anything-marissa-meyer-talks-writing-books-life-and-more-for-our-200th-episode-celebration The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Storyhttps://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781952119613How the Grinch Stole Christmas!https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9780394800790 The LET IT GLOW playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0putR6JHGHk0dcLwmEutqu  The Happy Writer at Bookshop.orgPurchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Amplify MarketersOur mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.Red Herrings SocietyUse the code HappyWriter at RedHerringWriters.com to try the first month for free.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Order The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377 Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

HURRY! We only have 300 seconds to talk about Sangu Mandanna's THE VERY SECRET SOCIETY OF IRREGULAR WITCHES. Do you think we can fit in all of our thoughts and feelings for this adult magical realism story in just 5 minutes? Listen to find out! (NON-SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

It's time to get SPOILERY! No holes are barred in today's episode. We're getting into the nitty gritty with Sangu Mandanna's THE VERY SECRET SOCIETY OF IRREGULAR WITCHES. Dare to listen? Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. Keywords: A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, Shatter Me, Victoria Aveyard, Bookworm, Book Nerd, Bookish, Book, Books, Bookstagram, BookTok, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Clare, Young Adult, New Adult, Read, Reads, Reading, Reader, Readers, ACOTAR, TOG, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

On a unique scale from 1 - 7, how much did Keimi and Taylor love THE VERY SECRET SOCIETY OF IRREGULAR WITCHES by Sangu Mandanna? Find out in this 15 minute book recommendation! (NON SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Shoutout to the wonderful ERIN ARMSTRONG for editing this podcast! Explore Erin's portfolio at ⁠www.erinarmstrong24.com⁠ and follow on Instagram: @migrantsnorer. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

Send us a text1:30 - Scarlet (2) by Marissa Meyer/ Cinder by Marissa Meyer 16:55 - Cinder by Marissa Meyer 17:10 - Knife Of Dreams by Robert Jordan 18:10 - Crossroads Of Twilight by Robert Jordan 18:13 - Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling 24:24 - Spin A Black Yarn by Josh Malerman (5 Novellas) / We Used To Live Here by Marcus Kliewer 41:50 - Daphne by Josh Malerman/Goblin by Josh Malerman 43:00 - The Watchers by A. M. Shine44:02 - Feathers Floating Through Ember by Trinity Dunn 44:40 - The Long Walk by Stephen King 52:00 - Rage by Richard Bachman aka Stephen King 52:46 - Daphne by Josh Malerman 53:14 - I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones 54:24 - The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones Support the showBe sure to keep yourself Happily Booked! We are Amazon Affiliates, Any link you find available above will redirect you to Amazon. We earn from qualifying purchases with these links. Becky's Homestead Etsy Page: bobwhitehomestead.etsyInstagram/ TikTok - happilybookedpodcastFacebook - Happily Booked PodcastLikewise - BrookeBatesHappilyBookedGoodreads - Brooke Lynn Bates Storygraph - brookebatesratesbooks / magbeck2011 THE Sideways Sheriff - Permanent Sponsor Insta/ TikTok - Sideways_sheriffFacebook - Sideways SheriffYoutube - Sideways Sheriff

Derived from the classic tale of Alice and Wonderland, Heartless tells the story of how a normal kid was transformed into the notorious Queen of Hearts. This Thursday, Eden Banks and Sloane Meyers discuss Marissa Meyer's #1 New York Times bestseller.

It's Monday, October 7th, 2024 and welcome to Hills Review -- the High School East Student Podcast. Emmy award winning producer Beth Pearlman has spent her life overseeing a variety of projects for a variety of networks, including: CBS, The Food Network, Discovery and The Hallmark Channel. On Tuesday, Joshua Pollack talks to Pearlman about her experiences in TV and maintaining a work-life balance. College, although a choice, is important in order to achieve well paying jobs and opportunities. However, the price of tuition for college is a factor that limits many. On Wednesday, Julia Tilleli looks at why colleges should lower their costs. Derived from the classic tale of Alice and Wonderland, Heartless tells the story of how a normal kid was transformed into the notorious Queen of Hearts. This Thursday, Eden Banks and Sloane Meyers discuss Marissa Meyer's #1 New York Times bestseller. Artificial intelligence has gained much popularity in recent years. With this increased attention, there has been debate regarding the positive and negative effects of AI. Oddly, it seems that these debates rarely involve the wisdom of tech professionals. On Friday, Joseph Masalin examines AI with the help of members of the IT community. Hills Review is produced by members of the Podcasting and Filmmaking Club. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, see Mr. Beatty in room 216. If you like this podcast – please tell a friend about it. Word of mouth is the best way to get more people listening to our show. Thanks for listening and have a great week.

In this bonus craft episode, Marissa shares her steps and processes for revisions. Hint: they begin in the drafting process! Also discussed: celebrating milestones and accomplishments, the importance of letting a project simmer, how to know when to jump back in, making a plan to tackle revisions and the different methods, how many rounds of revisions are typical, things to watch for in each pass, crutch words and how to get rid of them, and so much more!  The Happy Writer at Bookshop.orgPurchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Amplify MarketersOur mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.Red Herrings SocietyUse the code HappyWriter at RedHerringWriters.com to try the first month for free.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Order The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377 Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

I talk about Instant Karma the 1st book in the Fortuna Beach series by Marissa Meyer.   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53174679-instant-karma Thanks to David Hilowitz for the intro/outro music. If you have any questions or comments send them to LibromancyPod@gmail.com.  Please Like and Subscribe wherever you get your podcast from.

I talk about With a Little Luck by Marissa Meyer. This book 2 of the Fortuna Beach series.    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63291997-with-a-little-luck Thanks to David Hilowitz for the intro/outro music. If you have any questions or comments send them to LibromancyPod@gmail.com.  Please Like and Subscribe wherever you get your podcast from.

In this episode of "The Book Fix," hosts Yajaira and Cheli continue the gilded duology by revieing Marissa Meyer's enchanting sequel, "Cursed." This book continues to follow our main character Serilda who is trying to survive the ghostly mansion and the Erlking. Tune in to hear their final thoughts, ratings, and whether they think "Cursed" lives up to the expectations set by "Gilded." Whether you're a fan of the series or new to Meyer's work, this episode offers an entertaining look at the magic and mystery of "Cursed." The Poetry Podcast with AThe Poetry Podcast with A is designed for you to learn new skills in the writing...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Support the Show.become our Patron ♡ https://www.patreon.com/BookFixbuy us a book ♡ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thebookfixBusiness Inquiries: thebookfixpodcast@gmail.comfollow us on Tiktok! ♡ https://www.tiktok.com/@thebookfix

In this week's Thursday episode of The Book Fix, Yajaira and Cheli dive back into another world created by Marissa Meyer. Gilded is a reimagining of the classic Rumpelstiltskin tale (which one of us didn't even know it was a retelling of it) but this version brings a fresh and darkly magical twist that captivates the hosts. The story follows our FMC, Serilda, who is a gifted storyteller cursed by the god of lies, and through these lies she gets noticed by the Erlking. Join the besties as they discuss the plot, the main characters and the slow burn romance between them. Support the Show.become our Patron ♡ https://www.patreon.com/BookFixbuy us a book ♡ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thebookfixBusiness Inquiries: thebookfixpodcast@gmail.comfollow us on Tiktok! ♡ https://www.tiktok.com/@thebookfix

What went into creating MORE THAN LIFE, a YA historical fantasy that's perfect for fans of Pirates of the Caribbean and All the Stars and Teeth? Recently, we had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Bethanie Finger, the host of Prince Kai Fan Pod. Get caught up with all the facts and secrets behind this sweet and adventurous debut! (NON SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more.  Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird  Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com.  Keywords: A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, Shatter Me, Victoria Aveyard, Bookworm, Book Nerd, Bookish, Book, Books, Bookstagram, BookTok, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Clare, Young Adult, New Adult, Read, Reads, Reading, Reader, Readers, ACOTAR, TOG, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

On a unique scale from 1 - 7, how much did Keimi and Taylor love WHEN AMONG CROWS by Veronica Roth? Find out in this 15 minute book recommendation! (NON SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more.  Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird  Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com.  Keywords: A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, Shatter Me, Victoria Aveyard, Bookworm, Book Nerd, Bookish, Book, Books, Bookstagram, BookTok, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Clare, Young Adult, New Adult, Read, Reads, Reading, Reader, Readers, ACOTAR, TOG, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

It's time to get SPOILERY! No holes are barred in today's episode. We're getting into the nitty gritty with Veronica Roth's WHEN AMONG CROWS. Dare to listen? Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more.  Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird  Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com.  Keywords: A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, Shatter Me, Victoria Aveyard, Bookworm, Book Nerd, Bookish, Book, Books, Bookstagram, BookTok, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Clare, Young Adult, New Adult, Read, Reads, Reading, Reader, Readers, ACOTAR, TOG, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

HURRY! We only have 300 seconds to talk about Veronica Roth's latest release, WHEN AMONG CROWS. Do you think we can fit in all of our thoughts and feelings for this adult fantasy in just 5 minutes? Listen to find out! (NON-SPOILER) Are you a book lover? We are too! Join Kiwi and the Bird as we discuss and debate YA and NA's hottest releases. This podcast is perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo, and more. Curious about us? Keimi (the Kiwi) works at the local library and has a passion for gummy sweets, parkour, and soft bois. Taylor (the Bird) is an aspiring author who secretly loves romance, chocolate milkshakes, and stoic, brooding love interests. Follow Kiwi and the Bird! Instagram: @kiwiandthebird TikTok: @kiwiandthebird Twitter: @kiwiandthebird www.kiwiandthebird.com Thanks for supporting us nerdy book lovers. If you'd like, donate to our show via Venmo! @kiwiandthebird Please kindly send business inquiries to kiwiandthebirdpodcast@gmail.com. Keywords: A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, The Cruel Prince, Shatter Me, Victoria Aveyard, Bookworm, Book Nerd, Bookish, Book, Books, Bookstagram, BookTok, Rick Riordan, Cassandra Clare, Young Adult, New Adult, Read, Reads, Reading, Reader, Readers, ACOTAR, TOG, Percy Jackson --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kiwiandthebird/support

In this bonus craft episode, Marissa shares her seven best tips and strategies for balancing multiple writing projects. Discussed in this practical episode: how many projects she works on at any given time and what stage in the process they are at, how she prioritizes, what she does in the times when she isn't or can't be drafting, and so much more!  Extra bonus: This episode also includes upcoming book announcements that you may have missed!The Happy Writer at Bookshop.orgPurchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Amplify MarketersOur mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.Red Herrings SocietyUse the code HappyWriter at RedHerringWriters.com to try the first month for free.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Order The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377 Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

In this 200th (!) episode of The Happy Writer Podcast, Marissa (with some help from Joanne) answers many of your burning questions. Topics discussed: dealing with burnout, crafting three-dimensional characters, writing to trends, co-writing, balancing writing with parenting, and so much more. Also included: much-anticipated updates on TLC production, upcoming tours, new books, and yes, a couple of first-time-heard future project reveals! Order and find out more about LET IT GLOW: https://www.marissameyer.com/let-it-glow/Marissa's book playlists: https://www.marissameyer.com/extras/playlist/Melanin in YAYour source for all things Black in traditional Young Adult publishing.Amplify MarketersOur mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.The Happy Writer at Bookshop.orgPurchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Red Herrings SocietyUse the code HappyWriter at RedHerringWriters.com to try the first month for free.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Order The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377 Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

Pace (they/them) and Emily (they/them) follow the hidden path of the Sith to the planet Exegol as they discuss the final film of the Skywalker saga: Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. They talk about ancestors, comp-hetting, and so much more. CW: racism and genocide mentions in the deep diveMedia referenced in this episode:  -Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker novelization by Rae Carlson -The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina  -Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina -Lunar Chronicles Book 2: Scarlet by Marissa Meyer  -Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H -Call yo Allyship: Preparing Your Congregation for Leaders of Color edited by Angela T. !Khabeb -Attack from the '80s edited by Eugene Johnson -Remains to be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa edited by Lee Murray -Poe Dameron: Free Fall by Alex Segura -Star Wars: Spark of the Resistance by Justina Ireland -Will from Another Look Podcast Letterboxd Review of Rise of Skywalker Support us on Patreon! Buy some merch! Subscribe to our newsletter! Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for all the latest updates about upcoming films, news, and other announcements. If you would like to submit your own real life church horror story for a future minisode, follow this link (https://bit.ly/HNACMinisodes) or email us at horrornerdsatchurch@gmail.com And don't forget to comment, rate, and subscribe to us on your favorite podcast provider!  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/hnacpod/support

¡En este episodio nos vamos hasta Suiza para conocer a uno de los escritores contemporáneos más destacados en el género del thriller! Joël Dicker es conocido por su estilo narrativo envolvente, los giros inesperados en la trama y sus personajes bien desarrollados. Sin duda, tiene un don muy especial: el de saber contar historias. En esta ocasión, nos platicó acerca de su obra más reciente, “Un animal salvaje”. Esta novela revela los motivos ocultos que hacen tambalear la aparente vida perfecta de Sophie Braun, una mujer de 40 años que, cerca de su cumpleaños, se da cuenta de que su integridad corre peligro. También traemos para ti un adelanto lleno de magia, que seguro te recordará los cuentos de tu infancia: “Gilded”, de Marissa Meyer, un retelling de “Rumpelstiltskin”. ¿Te suena? No te pierdas, además, nuestra sección de Anuncios Clasificados.¡Te invitamos a perderte en la ficción por un buen rato! ¡Dale play!

Pace (they/them) and Emily (they/them) are joined by Brooke McLain (she/her) on a journey to Ahch-To, Canto Bite, and beyond as we discuss the film Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. We talk about the art of failure, hero worship, and the nature of hope. Also, is this the best Star Wars movie?  -Nerds at Church's Pentecost episode on the Holy Spirit  -Sigourney Weaver to appear in the Mandalorian film  -The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi -Seasparrow: A Graceling Realm Novel by Kristin Cashore -Cinder: Book One of the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer  -Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate  -Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray -The Last Jedi by Jason Fry -The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot -(Sometimes) Vol 35 by Stefanie Kaylor -The Spirit Bears its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White -Chlorine by Jade Song -Bad Cree by Jessica Johns -Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White -Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up At Night by Barbara Brown Taylor -Wookiepedia article on Deities in the Star Wars universe  -Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (NOT Barbara Brown Taylor as Pace mistakenly said in the episode) Media Referenced: Support us on Patreon! Buy some merch! Subscribe to our newsletter! Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for all the latest updates about upcoming films, news, and other announcements. If you would like to submit your own real life church horror story for a future minisode, follow this link (https://bit.ly/HNACMinisodes) or email us at horrornerdsatchurch@gmail.com And don't forget to comment, rate, and subscribe to us on your favorite podcast provider! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/hnacpod/support

Marissa shares her top 10 tips for improving your work-life balance. From starting with a focused to-do list, to reframing goal time frames, to the best way to approach multitasking, and so much more, you're sure to find something helpful in this practical episode. Note: For more writing-specific productivity tips, you can also check out episode 141 where Marissa and Joanne share their favorite productivity hacks. https://www.buzzsprout.com/950767/12094972168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, Laura VanderKam https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781591844105 Preorder your copy of The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377 The Happy Writer at Bookshop.orgPurchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Writing Mastery AcademyUse the code HAPPYWRITER at WritingMastery.com for $20 off your first year of unlimited access.Amplify MarketersOur mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.Red Herrings SocietyUse the code HappyWriter at RedHerringWriters.com to try the first month for free.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

Between the Covers book club pick this month was It Happened One Fight by Maureen Lee Lenker!Next month we're reading Heartless by Marissa Meyer. Join us May 18th at 630 for baked goods and fun discussions. Questions/comments/concerns/recommendations? Email us at ragingromantics@nopl.org.

On this episode of Currently Reading, Kaytee and Mary are discussing: Bookish Moments: fun new hobbies and maybe not having a bookish moment Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: our love for all things memoir The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site) .  .  .  .  .  1:39 - Our Bookish Moments of the Week 8:06 - Our Current Reads 8:14 - Bride by Ali Hazelwood (Mary) 10:29 - Wolfsong by T.J. Klune 11:58 - Unhinged by Vera Valentine 12:29 - Renegades by Marissa Meyer (Kaytee) 12:40 - Cinder by Marissa Meyer 15:47 - The Extraordinaries by T.J. Klune 16:47 - Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera (Mary) 19:55 - An Inconvenient Cop by Edwin Raymond (Kaytee) 20:03 - Booktenders 24:51 - A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall (Mary) 28:26 - @ginnyreadsandwrites on Instagram 28:44 - Fairyloot 29:07 - Pango Books 30:16 - Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson 30:34 - Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross 31:53 - A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan (Kaytee) 32:10 - Betty by Tiffany McDaniel 35:29 - Deep Dive: Our Love For Memoirs 36:10 - Sarah's Bookshelves 39:49 - The Black Count by Tom Reiss 41:43 - My Life in France by Julia Child 42:30 - Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me by Mindy Kaling 42:32 - Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling 42:46 - Bossypants by Tina Fey 42:51 - Spare by Prince Harry 43:12 - Becoming by Michelle Obama 43:42 - Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe 43:47 - I Have Something to Tell You by Chasten Buttigieg 44:04 - I Have Something to Tell You by Chasten Buttigieg (young readers' edition) 44:59 - Waypoints by Sam Heughan 45:31 - Finding Me by Viola Davis 46:20 - As You Wish by Cary Elwes 46:58 - Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes 47:50 - Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother by Beth Ann Fennelly 47:55 - Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly 48:06 - Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan 48:10 - These Precious Days by Ann Patchett 49:04 - Soil by Camille T. Dungy 49:15 - An Exact Replica of A Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken 50:29 - Dancing at the Pity Party by Tyler Feder 50:37 - What Looks Like Bravery by Laurel Braitman 50:43 - After This by Claire Bidwell Smith (amazon link) 50:58 - Tragedy Plus Time by Adam Cayton-Holland 51:15 - Maybe You Should Talk To Someone by Lori Gottleib 51:30 - When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi 51:53 - A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter 52:02 - At Home in the World by Tsh Oxenreider 52:52 - Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver 53:05 - The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green 53:12 - A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg 53:43 - The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton 53:45 - Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson 53:48 - The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore 54:03 - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer 54:15 - I Take My Coffee Black by Tyler Merritt 55:17 - Meet Us At The Fountain 55:21 - I wish to press the Ember Quartet series, starting with Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. (Mary) 55:30 - Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir 56:52 - A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas 56:53 - Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros 57:22 - Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros 58:38 - My wish is for more bookish board games. (Kaytee) 58:47 - By the Book game Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. April's IPL comes to us from A Room Of One's Own in Madison Wisconsin! Trope Thursday with Kaytee and Bunmi - a behind the scenes peek into the publishing industry All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the special insights of an independent bookseller The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

Episode Summary: In this episode, Kelly and Alix delve into the Sarah J. Maas phenomenon and share books they recommend reading if you loved Throne of Glass. Check out the LitJoy + Sarah J Maas Collection at litjoycrate.com/collections/sarah-j-maasTopics Discussed:[0:57] Sarah J Maas is Taking Over the World[16:24] Books to read if you loved Throne of Glass[18:53] An Ember in the Ashes Series by Sabaa Tahir[22:40] Folk of the Air Series by Holly Black[28:40] Lunar Chronicles Series by Marissa Meyer[33:56] Shadow and Bone Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo[41:33] The Nevernight Chronicle by Jay KristoffCorrection: According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of romance titles grew 52.4% from 2021 to 2022.Other Resources MentionedHolly Black LitJoy CollectionLitJoy Heartless Special EditionLitJoy Podcast Interview with Marissa MeyerThrone of Glass series by Sarah J MaasACOTAR series by Sarah J MaasCrescent City series by Sarah J MaasEmpyrean series by Rebecca YarrosKing of Scars duology by Leigh BardugoThe Hunger Games series by Suzanne CollinsKing's English BookshopLitJoy March Madness BracketCassandra ClareFollow LitJoy!Make sure to RATE & REVIEW The LitJoy Podcast wherever you listen.Join our Lunacorns private membership group at https://litjoycrate.com/podcast-lunacornsFollow us on Instagram @litjoycrateFollow us on TikTok @litjoycrateCheck out LitJoy's officially licensed author collections!Use the code PODCAST10 for a 10% off discount! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode Summary: In this episode, Alix and Kelly interview author Marissa Meyer.Guest Bio:Marissa Meyer is the host of The Happy Writer Podcast and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Lunar Chronicles, The Renegades Trilogy, Heartless, the Wires & Nerve graphic novels, Instant Karma, Gilded, and Cursed. She lives in Tacoma, WA, with her husband and twin daughters. Topics Discussed:[3:25] Book Tour[4:40] Becoming an Author[8:24] Writing Fairytale Retellings [15:14] Developing Characters[18:12] Marissa's Writing Process[25:18] Instant Karma Inspiration[29:28] Marissa's Favorite Series[30:32] Writing Different Genres[33:02] Marissa's Characters[36:35] Co-writing Let it Glow[40:38] The Happy Writer Podcast[43:14] Dream Home Location[45:28] Coffee with Marissa's Favorite Author[48:10] LitJoy Special Edition of HeartlessBooks Mentioned in This Episode by Marissa Meyer:Cinder by Marissa Meyer (The Lunar Chronicles, book 1) bookSailor Moon, Volume 1 written and illustrated by Naoko Takeuchi bookInstant Karma by Marissa Meyer bookGilded duology by Marissa Meyer bookThe Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer bookLet it Glow by Marissa Meyer and Joanne Levy bookPride and Prejudice by Jane Austen bookPersuasion by Jane Austen bookOther Books Mentioned in This Episode:Heartless by Marissa Meyer bookFairest by Marissa Meyer bookWith a Little Luck by Marissa Meyer bookSense and Sensibility by Jane Austen bookFollow Marissa!The Happy Writer Podcast@marissameyerauthorWhat's New at LitJoy?LitJoy x Marissa Meyer Heartless Annotated Special EditionUse the code PODCAST10 at litjoycrate.com/podcast for a 10% off discount! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week's episode, the first of the 2024 season, Marissa chats about her brand-new book, WITH A LITTLE LUCK, the companion to INSTANT KARMA. Featured in this episode are two special guests: Chuck Gonzales, the illustrator for the comic book pages inside WITH A LITTLE LUCK, and Stacy Carolan, the book's audio edition narrator.  Discussed in this episode: the process of illustrating graphic novel panels (in black and white) as spot illustrations through a novel, illustrating a story within a story, the challenges of some of the finer details of illustrations, how the pandemic inspired the move into audiobook narration, behind the scenes of being an audiobook narrator, starting out in the industry, how narration is more acting and not merely reading a book, what makes audiobook narration fun, and so much more. Also in this episode, a special exclusive clip of the WITH A LITTLE LUCK audiobook!Show notes: Chuck Gonzales, Illustrator https://chuckgonzales.com, https://www.instagram.com/cgonzaillo/Stacy Carolan, Audio book narrator https://www.mrstacycarolan.com/  The official Marissa Meyer/The Happy Writer merchandise shops: https://www.etsy.com/shop/happywriterstorehttps://thehappywriter.creator-spring.com/ https://www.teepublic.com/user/the-happy-writer The Happy Writer at Bookshop.org Purchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores. Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/