Red Fern Book Review by Amy Tyler

Canadian Book Club Award Winners Part 3: Evie Alexander, Susan Jane Wright, Susan Wadds and Jayson Adams

• Amy Tyler • Season 5 • Episode 9

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I had the chance to talk with four of the 2024 Canadian Book Club Award Winner about the writing and publishing process. We talk titles, character development and backstory. Each of the authors has written in a different genre, which made for a compelling discussion. Our conversation was far-reaching—from sex parties and trips to Mars to roadkill and stately homes.

Books discussed:

Love Ad Lib by Evie Alexander

Fortune Favors the Dead by Susan Jane Wright

What the Living Do by Susan E. Wadds

Ares by Jayson Adams

About The Canadian Book Club Awards:

Follow the Canadian Book Club Awards:

Instagram: @thecanadianbookclubawards

Website: canadianbookclubawards.ca

Follow the Authors:

Evie Alexander

Website: eviealexanderauthor.com

Instagram: @eviealexanderauthor

Susan Jane Wright

Website: susanjanewright.ca

Instagram: @susanjjwright

Susan E. Wadds

Website: writeyourwayin.ca

Jayson Adams

Website: jaysonadams.com





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Amy, hello. Welcome back to the red for book review, I am your host, Amy Tyler, and today I'm going to be interviewing four authors who are all award winners with the Canadian book club awards, and it's part of a series I'll be doing over the summer. And all four of these authors, they're located all around North America and the UK. They've each of them have written works of fiction, but each one is in a different genre. So I had a chance to sit down with them and ask them. Most of them, I asked them the same question, and it was really interesting how they had completely different answers. But the four books and the four authors are what the living do. By Susan was Fortune favors the dead by Susan Jane Wright, and love ad lib by Evie Alexander and Aries by Jason Adams. And just a little reminder about the Canadian book club awards. It's Canada's largest Readers Choice Award, and it's open to all authors, regardless of your publishing type, whether you're self published author, a traditionally published author, or a mix of the two. And the idea is it's supposed to be books that are more popular or just generally readable, and you can still submit submissions if you want your award considered for next year's awards and and also if you're interested in being a verified reader. So you the authors can be located anywhere, but the readers that actually choose the winners have to be Canadian. So if you want to get more information, log on to the Canadian book club awards.ca. Now let's move over and talk with the authors. Hello. Hi everybody. Hi. How are you? Hi, hi. Evie, Jason, Susan, I'm so glad to have you here on the podcast, and so I had a chance recently I interviewed some of your peers who won in the nonfiction category. So all of you, I grouped you all together because you've written works of fiction, but I wanted to start off by asking a question about the beginnings of your books. And Jason, you, I'm going to let you kind of kick us off, because you wrote an interesting thing about kind of the start of your books, and how you grab people right away. And my question for all of you, I kind of want to go around, is, how do you decide how to start a book? And how is that? How do you, I'm sure you think about the distractions competing for people's attention. And so how do you go about hooking a reader from the very first page? Jason, why don't you start and tell us about what you've kind of said in the past about grabbing people on the first page. Yeah, I guess I kind of wrote a little manifesto on, like my books, they get started from the first sentence, and they were like, throw you into the fire, and everything pushes forward. So my thinking there was when someone lands on Amazon on your book page, after the they look at the blurb, and then they look at the rating, then they go on to read the sample. And so you kind of have just those few pages to convince them that your book is worth their time. So really, to do that, you have to jump straight into the conflict, or you have to steadily build tension from the very first line. So, yeah, my goal is to is for the reader to feel kind of constant momentum, and that's what keeps them turning the pages. So Evie, I'm going to jump over to you. I don't even know what to say about your opening. I started to read. I was like, wow, okay, on the very first page. So I think you subscribe to Jason's school of thought. Do you want to tell us more about your opener? Yes, yeah. 100% you have to get you can't set up a world. You've got to take the reader right into it, right from the get go, and you've got to go, here we are. And I like setting. I like starting all my books with some kind of drama and a juxtaposition. So in this book, Love ad lib. You've got Lord Henry Fox Brook, who is a British aristocrat, but he is very well. He's very, very uptight, and his parents. His parents, there's three. He has three parents are involved in a poly amorous relationship, and they're very kind of loose and happy, and he's very, he's very embarrassed by them. And so the whole setup of the book is about them trying to get him to come home and to take his rightful place in the family. And he doesn't want have anything to do with that. So the easiest way for me to set up the kind of jarring juxtaposition is to have him being called back in the middle of the night, and he is straight into the family home to this like Downton abbey on steroids, and there's his parents are running a sex party. And of course, he's mortified and doesn't want anything to do with it. And his father said, Look, we're really worried about you. You know you need to find love. And he goes, and he makes up the fact he's got a girlfriend, so it's a fake relationship love story. And so his dad says, Don't worry. No, this is the boy said he had a girlfriend. Don't worry. And his dad has got a room full of women for him. And he's like, What are you doing? And he goes, this is not what I want. So she his father says, Don't worry. And then he takes him across the corridor, where there's a room full of men, and he goes, this might be more your thing. So I deliberately started the book with something completely outrageous to not only hopefully hook the reader, but to show the difference of why Henry doesn't want to come home, because this is what his family set up His life, and he doesn't want to have anything to do with it. Well, you it is outrageous. And I was like, what? Okay, I didn't even know what to think, and it definitely made me want to keep reading. And Susan wads, what about you? Well, my book is literary fiction, so I don't you know, start with the an explosion. I want to hook people. I want to hook my reader with an emotional response. So even though the book starts with an image of Michelangelo peeling cadavers skin to see what's underneath it. I just and then immediately going into my protagonist scraping road kill. So, I mean, it is kind of sensational, but my main drive was to create an emotional response so that people want to know the character and what's driving her? Yeah, definitely in media res, but it's, you know, it's a it's a little quieter. Adore that. That's great. Yeah. So you're creating curiosity, all of your Korean curiosity, but you're at a lower volume. And I would say the same goes for you, Susan, right? Because, and I have to say, I read a fair bit of mysteries, and I felt that you, you obviously are a love, lover of old fashioned mysteries, and I felt there's a bit of a build there. So can you talk about that? Maybe it's a bit different with mystery? Sure, sure. Well, I do agree with what everyone else has said with respect to trying to find a hook to get them into the story, because, as Jason was saying, You need to make sure they stay with you after they see the cover and the blur. And what I did in my book to start it was I had one character, hadiza, arguing with a chef about something screwed up, and the protagonist, Evie in my book, basically trying to say, let's just not get too carried away with this. We can put in fiddlehead ferns instead of these wild asparagus. And then the next line basically says that while we're having this argument, Finley dying behind a dumpster at the BAM Springs Hotel. So the idea there was to try to get someone to say, okay, there we got two people arguing about some kind of function at the band Springs Hotel, and there's a dead guy dying somewhere here, and it's, I love what reading Margaret Atwood stuff. She's not a mystery writer, per se, but what she said was, if you're going to write a mystery, you want to drop a body within 10 pages, because people are expecting that, and they're looking for something like that. So we need to draw them in, to give them that expectation. And then you're right. Then it starts just more of a slow burn. It's not more it's not like an action thriller where things are blowing up every paragraph or every chapter. It's more of a How did we get here? What's going on? What are the dynamics of the people involved, and what, you know, why on earth has been dead, and how does this? Did this happen? So I, like the others, were saying it's, it's a way of trying to just draw them in there, when there's so much competition for attention with all the different books and the genres that we see out there. Okay, um, you know, it just also occurred to me, I wanted to ask you about, um. Place as a, as a, as a character, so to speak. Because I think in this questions for Susan Wright and for Evie, both your the buildings are characters. So can you talk about that? And I know what Susan Wright, why don't you start because I know particularly mysteries that's very common to have, like a grand home, and why is that such a good setting for a mystery? Well, as you said, it's a grand home. It's when you've got the band Springs Hotel, which has been around since like, 1883 or something, and it's huge. It's got staff everywhere. It's got history. It has its own kind of character in that it's this grand dam in the middle of a national park. It's got what I loved about it, and I've gone there quite a few times, and we've gone on private tours, so we've had a chance to hear firsthand from the tour guides about the fact that people think that the hotel is haunted. And there's a woman who died on her wedding day because she tripped on her wedding gown years ago, and just broke her neck when she fell and and there's Sam the Bellman, who was was a ghost who was there in the 1960s who people swear has helped them get into their rooms. So the atmosphere of this place and the fact that there's so many people in the background that we don't see who are actually making the whole thing work, it just struck me as a really good place to try to set the story. And what about you, Evie, what about you? And the home worth Well, I grew up in a small market town called caution in Wiltshire. And caution court is the stately home which I kind of, I don't know if you can see, is Fox Brook Manor, and so I grew up, and when we were at school, part of going to school was you went to caution court, you learned about the history. And it's so interesting, because just outside of caution court is what looks like this massive old, crumbling ruin, but it's a Victorian folly, actually, maybe slightly earlier, because the whoever it was who lived in caution court, just decided he didn't want to see poor people's houses, so he built this fake ruin, which is called a folly, so he didn't have to look at the poor people. And so I grew up in caution. I grew up with caution court. And because the geography of the place whereby you had the town, you had caution, but on the very edge with the biggest state then. So it wasn't like it was in the middle, it was on the edge. And so I wanted to write about something that I knew I love, I love aristocrats. I love aristocrats gone wrong. And also, when I was growing up in caution, when I was a little kid, there was a very flamboyant couple who lived in another stately home in the next kind of town along and they were into naturism, and they were very bohemian, and they would wander around Horsham shopping, essentially naked, and this was in the 70s, and me and my brother would be going, Mommy. Why are they dressed like that? And they, you know, these were this completely crazy couple that stayed with me, so that's why I want to kind of get that vibe and mix it with the stately home that was in caution. Okay, that makes sense. I want to know you, all of you, tackle some weighty themes, whether it's technology, environment, health, and it's clear to me that you either because some of the backgrounds, your professional backgrounds before, or there are things you're looking to say more than just only entertain. So could you talk about how much are you motivated by desire to educate versus entertain, and how do you balance those two things when you're writing a novel. Susan Wright, I would like to start with you. Okay, so my background is, I'm a lawyer. Did law for many, many years in house corporate. Corporate lawyer became part of the executive management team, and in the course of my my career, I've had an opportunity to work with many, many, many very rich, very powerful men. And what I'm always astounded by is just how much freedom they think they have to do whatever they want to do in the interest of the corporation and their own well being. And so I'm, I'm, I always try to look at the world with from the perspective of people who think they can do whatever they want, or who have a huge ambition. And in this story, there are people who aren't quite that rich, but they have a huge ambition to be that rich, versus what kinds of things happen as a result of that, you know. So like I said, I was in the energy sector, and you have the balance between fossil fuels. And in my case, we were talking about a fossil. This, this little thing. This is an Amy light. Oh, yeah. In the story, yeah. And in the story, they're mining Amy light, because Amy light is the the stone that the provincial stone for Alberta. And these things actually are turned into little gems. But they're, they're amazingly special things, and they're being torn on the ground. You have to be. How you do them, and you may or may not have to give them to the museum if they're perfect. And in my story, there's a fellow who's driven just the way somebody in the Klondike Gold Rush would be to make a fortune doing this, and believes he can. So it's the whole idea of somebody who has a huge ambition with a lot of power versus the real world, which is trying to say, Hold on, wait a minute. This could be dangerous. This, you know, you have to watch what you're doing and the impact he has on his life, his family, people around him. So that's that's an important thing for me, and it comes up off and on in all my books. But the trick is, as you said, to find the balance, because people don't want to be lectured to. You know, you're reading a fiction book and you're trying to learn stuff where you find interesting scenes, but you don't need someone harping at you to do it. So that's sort of the way I try to approach it. What about you? Susan, lads, oh yeah. It's funny. When I saw that question, it kind of made me laugh, because I thought, well, I totally, I don't think the word entertain so I write what I'm compelled to write, and I don't have like a target audience. I write because I need to write this story. You know, it's like Emily Dickinson said, You got to tell it. Tell it all true, but tell it slant. So I had a story that was, you know, my story, but it's funny because I, when I first wrote it, it was 10 pages long, and a friend of mine said, Wow, this is like you're yelling. Everything was happening all at once. So I had to take the story and sort of stretch it out. So I think ultimately, what I was trying to get across was that disease, illness, even death, isn't anyone's fault, you know that, and this might this is what my protagonist is struggling with, is the belief that, belief that her cancer is somehow is payback For, you know, things that she feels guilty for. So although I did not kill my family or feel like I killed my family, I had to make it a little bit more dramatic. So anyway, I needed to write it. I needed to, yeah, get it down, and then, and then see where it landed, see what, you know, throw that spaghetti at the wall and see where it's stuck in. Luckily, it's stuck in a lot of places. And you know, when you write the personal, when you write intimately, it will hopefully reach the universal. And evidently, that's what it did. But I don't, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I just write it because I need to, honestly, I'm a total pantser. You know, you know what that is, yes, tell, tell, tell the listeners, what a pants. It's someone who flies by the seat of their pants. I am not a plotter, which means I cannot. I try. I really, really try to make structure to make. I've got all kinds of Scriveners and notes and whatever, and but then I just go madly off in so many different directions that, and that's to me, that's the delight is to find out. Oh, okay, so I have this character. She feels guilty. Well, why? What did she do? So then I have to create that. Well, I have to make her kind of tough. Okay, so give her a job where she's working with men and shoveling road kill and having to sort of work in this misogynistic world. So these things come in as I write. It's not like, I decide ahead of time. It's like, oh, I need this. I need a best friend. What's she going to be like? It's like that. So I, you know, finding a balance totally but it kind of comes after, you know, after I've got all the scenes, and then I'm like, Okay, now, now we have to, now we have to structure this thing so the structure comes after all the writing. So there's a lot of pages that get discarded, unfortunately, that make that makes sense. What about you? Jason, so I'm generally not aiming to educate. It's more like entertain by presenting an idea for your consideration. So my background is tech, and in that world, people are very enamored with technology, and I feel like I have kind of a more balanced view of that. So Aries, which is science fiction about the first manned mission to Mars. The main theme is that man carries his problems with him, even to the stars. So we think about space travel as like a fresh start, but I wanted to present to the reader, you know what if this grand, noble admission of exploration was actually something far more base than they were expecting? So yeah, so my priority is always to tell a compelling story, not to deliver a lesson. And I kind of feel like if you, if you take a moment to preach, you can end up killing momentum. So if you have anything that you want to say, you kind of have to seamlessly work it into the events of your story. Well, you said you have such an accomplished background in tech, so I was assuming that maybe. You do have more of a it sounds like maybe this is an escape for you. Just passion is that green writing in general. So I've started some software companies. I worked for Google on the Chrome browser for about 10 years, and but computers for me were more of a like a creative outlet then, sort of like a technology thing. And I guess, yeah, right, writing science fiction has become my new creative outlet. Okay, so you know what I want to go come back to you, Susan wads, because I do have a question about character building. All of you have female protagonists, and I wanted to talk about how you go about. There's so many different ways to develop your characters. And it sounds like you were saying you just kind of write from an inner place, and then you go back and develop. Can you talk a bit about how you created your character, and are they based on anyone? And do they have a back story? Tell me, oh yeah, they have a backstory. No, I love I love this question because I love my character. Sherry Coleman is a theater writer, but she has this thing that she calls the sacred image, which is that that image that stays with you, that is, can be the epicenter of what it is you're going to write about. And for me, it was a woman standing on a road crew with a stop slow sign. And I thought, what if, you know, because there never seemed to be down in the ditches. They're just standing there, poor things in the sun. And I thought, well, what would, what would a woman be like if she was on the crew? Well, she'd have to be kind of tough. And so I like to flip the script in a lot of ways, give her a job that is traditionally held by men. She's 37 her boyfriend is 26 he's more in love with her than she is with him. I just, you know, I just wanted to play a little bit those kind of dynamics and so. And I also say what Brett Catlin is, is my sort of alter ego, if you will, that she's very scrappy. She's digs her heels in. She's kind of, she's very stubborn all the things that I'm not, but I kind of wish I was, but, you know, so she's, yeah, the sublimated self, if you will. So it was really fun to have a really scrappy character that, you know doesn't give a shit about who's feeling she's hurting, and, you know, she's not careful. And, yeah, so that's sort of the formation of Brett to make her a little bit interesting, and just, you know, how would she be? So that really helped me write the story of how she navigated, you know, the cancer, the fact that all the different things that happened in her past, she definitely has backstory. It comes pretty early in the story that she was groomed by her older cousin after the fire that killed her father and baby sister. So you know, there's all this trauma in the background. So this is why she developed such a such a tough skin. I did an event recently where I was sitting at a table and people come up and say, so what's your book about? Like, trauma, it's about cancer and wanting to die. Would you like to read it? So it's a hard sell, as far as you know, a pitch, an elevator pitch goes. But ultimately, the book is about hope and about, you know, redemption and all of that kind of stuff, which is a just hard to say when you're sitting at a table in a mall. But the nice thing is that when people read it, they get it and they, you know, they relate to it anyway. Well, it's very well written clearly, because the subject matter, on the face of it, isn't something that people are dying to read, and yet, you've made it. I mean, you've won an award, your people are reading it, and it says a lot about your writing style. So okay, Evie, I want to know about you. I'm assuming maybe this couple you talked about. I'm not sure if I want to know if you see yourself in any of these characters. But no, no, not at all. And I'm always attracted to people to write about, people that are not like me. And so Libby Fletcher, the lead character in love ad lib she's a an improv comedy actress, so she runs improvisational comedy workshops, and I had gone to a meeting a few years ago that I was expecting to be about x. And the moment I go into this meeting with most people I've never met before, this woman comes bounding up to me with this massive smile and goes, Hello, what's your name? And I was just completely and utterly. Taken aback by this woman, like complete in my face being beaming at me, so enthusiastic, and she and it turned out this meeting was going to be an improvisational comedy workshop, and I was terrified. I just wanted to run away. I did. Was not expecting it, because it sprung on us, and I ended up kind of loosening up and having a really good time. So in so Libby is kind of based on Heather, this lovely lady who was just so enthusiastic, and it was that kind of energy. And I put my reaction into Henry. So Henry who so in their meet cute is an improvisational comedy workshop at his work, and he works in the City of London, and he's completely side swiped and terrified and doesn't want to be there. So I kind of put myself into Henry, and then, yeah, Libby was very much based on my first impressions of Heather. Okay, that's a that's very specific. And do you do have like, I know one thing that people do, maybe Jason, I'll ask you this question, do you have sometimes people develop a whole bunch of storylines that actually the reader never knows about, and it's a way for them just to create a deeper character? Do you do anything like that? Or what's your process going it's kind of the opposite. I guess it's sort of pantsing a little bit, even though I plot out my novels. But the character doesn't start really with too much of a backstory, but it kind of grows as I write more about them. I don't have a great example from my current book, but from my from Aries, but my current book there, there are two characters, and I had them on the page, and they started bickering as a wearing dialog. And then I could actually, like feel that there was something deeper, kind of fueling that friction. And then what surfaced to me was that they had dated in the past, and that the woman had called off the relationship. And so then so that actually became, that's part of the story that I never, like really thought about as I sat down and pictured these characters. But it kind of, it kind of came out of me just having them interact on the page. So that's kind of, yeah, so my characters, they kind of develop as I as I write about them. Okay, so kind of a lot like Susan watts, I think, yeah. What about you? Susan Wright, how do you develop your your protagonist? It's at it's almost like halfway between plotting out who they are, because I do have a sense of who they are before I start the story, I figure out, you know, how old they were and where they went to school, and very just short notes on that, and maybe a sense of what their character would be. But then, like Jason said, as they start working on the page, it's interesting how things start to happen with the characters. It's almost like they become they come alive on the page for you, and you start going down little paths to find out more about them, which is weird. It's hard to explain that to people. And as a lawyer, you know, most people, when they're lawyers, they're pretty fundamentally cut and dried, rule of law, blah, blah, blah, but I think a lot of lawyers are frustrated actors and writers and comedians and whatnot. So there's a bit of that that comes out, I think, in the book, just from the perspective of people are a little different than you expect. So Evie is in a law firm. She started her own law firm after this terrible blowout in the big firm that she used to work at with another partner, and they picked up a third, younger partner that is now working with them. And what I like about the dynamic is that we've got the older fellow, not that much older than Evie. He's the guy that came with her from the big firm, who's more cut and dry, driven by the rules, careful, cautious, doesn't want to get into trouble. And Evie tends to look before she leaves, which is not a classic legal lawyer characteristic. Normally you tend to be more careful. And AJ, who's the third partner there, is kind of in between the two of them. He's almost like the voice of reason in between the two of them. And what happens as a result of that is that most of the lawyers I know like the law. They went into the law because they like the rules. But what you learn as you go is that the law doesn't necessarily deliver justice, and that's a real dilemma for I think, the world, and it's certainly a dilemma for Evie, in the situation she finds herself in because she wants to see justice done, and so that's what will push her to go farther than her other partner, for example, and that's what pushes her into situations that can lead to trouble for her so and I like that about her. So you talk about how the character is kind of leaving you. So does that mean you don't know the ending of your book, or do you know the ending of your mystery beforehand? That is a really good question, because what drives me nuts is, as I'm going through my book, and I know I start with kind of an idea of, this is what happened. This is the person who got killed. And this. Who killed that person, and Evie eventually will figure that out. And then, as I'm going along, I still usually have the same person who's the victim, but my killer starts to change, which is, you know, can make you bananas when you're trying to set up a mystery story and you've got clues that suddenly this is irrelevant. This doesn't matter. And it's, I work with my daughter as my editor, and so when we are working together on something, and she'll ask me where I am on the book, and I'll say, I'm not sure if I'm going to have blah blah be the killer after all. And she goes, You can't do this. We have a deadline. We have to get this thing done. What do you mean? This isn't the killer, and it just happens, right? And then I'll go and I'll work my way through and I'll get comfortable with who I am going to have the killer be. But I've done this. I thought at first maybe it was just the first book that I had this issue with, but I've done this every single time, and I'm working on my fifth book now, so I guess that's a bit of the Panther element, even though I do have a rough idea of what I'm going to do, but yeah, it's fun. Let me I want to ask you all about the titles of your book, and I'm currently editing a few books myself, and I've been working with the author on the title, and one of the titles completely changed, like completely and I'm just wondering, How did you land on those titles? Did you come up with them? Did an editor and did you? Did you have an alternate title that you want to share with people? Um, what about you? Jason, I feel like my my titles just kind of fall out as of what's expected of science fiction. So like the Mars mission is Aries, the ship they take to get there is called Aries. It's named after the god of war. I don't know that it's necessarily a great title, though, because that it feels I don't know, maybe, perhaps obscure. There's one award I went to pick up, and the person mispronounced the name, so she obviously didn't know what ares was, which is interesting, yeah, but yeah, my titles, it's, they just kind of fall out. I don't really have, I might have a for other books. I've had working titles, but they're, they're not at all like titles you would use, right? What about you? Evie, well, a lot goes into my decision on titles. The first is, how long is it? Because when you've got a romance cover, you know you want to give the lead characters room to be on the cover, so you can't have, like, a massive load of text. So I tried to go for three words, two or three words for this series. So I planned out all the titles of the series before I've even written and then the second thing I do is to have my list of titles that might work. Then I go onto Amazon, I write them in and say, How many other books are called blah, blah, blah. So obviously you want to go with the title that is the right length. Has never been used before, or if it has been used before, then hardly you know the books that have written. No one's read them. Then I wanted to have maybe love or something like that in the title. And love ad lib because lib she's Libby, so it's love ad lib. And ad lib is because it's a fake relationship, romance. She's an improvisational comedy actress. They're making it up as they go along. So they fall in love. So it's love ad lib with Libby being obviously Liv being her. So that's how I got the title for love ad lib. It was, is it short? Has it been used before? Is it relevant? And, you know? And this was nice because it linked the comedy, the improvisation stuff, and her name. That's interesting about having room for the characters on the top on the cover of romance. That makes a ton of sense. What about you? Susan watts, yeah. So the original title was roadkill. And I was like, that was a bit sloppy. So we changed that. And then I thought, okay, so the whole motivation of this story comes from a house fire. So I called it and her longing for home so I called it home fires. And a friend of mine had it printed up in an arc for me, and it looked like home fries. So I thought, we're not doing that then. So, but there's this beautiful, beautiful poem by Marie Howe called WHAT THE LIVING do. And it's about, she's talking to someone who has passed away. And and I thought, Oh, my God, this is perfect, because the whole quest of my protagonist is to figure out what the living do, how to go on living. And it just, you know, it was a goose bumpy. Moment when I when I came upon that, oh, that's I love that. What about you? Susan Wright, titles are really hard for me. My books spend a lot of time being book number one, book number two, book number three. I have a really tough time with titles, and as I go through, as I'm writing them, I start jotting down things because you use phrases or the theme lends itself to certain things. But when you're writing in the mystery genre, it's a little like what Jason was saying. There's certain expectations of what a title would be, so that when someone picks it up, they don't go, Oh, this must be literary fiction, or this must be something else you want to give them a clue. Now, having said that this one actually did use the word dead, like it's a little bit like what Amy was saying, where you check with Amazon, you see what the names are and what what works in this genre. So dead, murder, something like that helps. But I just find it really tricky. So I try to keep my titles to about three words or so, and they come to me towards the end, and then I have a big debate with my daughter editor, who says to Me, you can't use that. Everyone has used that. No one will ever find your book on Amazon if you use that, which is true. So then I have to come up with something else. She's very good at that, and and I am hopeless at that. So it's one of the huge it's a big challenge for me, you know, just want to say it's so interesting that a couple of you have said you need to have really short titles. And I guess it's a genre based thing, because now there are some titles that go on for like, three sentences. You know, they're often funny or humorous or clever, but it's, I don't know. Sometimes I think there's no hard and fast rule for anything, but you guys seem to have nailed it well. So that's kind of all my questions. And I really appreciate all of you for joining and want to congratulate all of you, and that's really interesting about the title. I'm going to think about that more now. More now pertaining to genre, and obviously searches and that kind of thing. But anyway, thank you so much, and I will talk with you later. Thank you so much for hosting us. So nice meeting you. Nice to meet you. Thank you. Amy, thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thanks so much to all four of the Canadian Book Club Award winners that I had the chance to interview today, and I just wanted to remind you of their titles and names. And today, I interviewed Jason Adams and his sci fi book is called Aries and Evie Alexander's very unique rom com is called love ad lib. And Susan Jean Wright's mysteries set in the Banff Springs Hotel is called Fortune favors the dead. And the final book is what the living do, by Susan wads, and it's a beautifully written book about loss and love. So thanks so much. And also, I want to remind you, if you're interested in becoming a verified reader for the Canadian book club awards for the 2025 awards, which will be judged starting this fall, you can log on to their website at the Canadian book club awards.ca. You do need to be Canadian to read the books, but you don't to if you have a book you want to submit, anyone in the world can do that. So you can also log on to the Canadian book club awards.ca, and find out the links for how to submit your book for consideration. So thanks so much for listening, And I'll talk to you later. You