What’s Hot Right Now
Caitlin: I’ll go ahead, start with introductions and just get everybody introduced here. My name is Caitlin. Thank you, everybody, for joining today’s Red Feather Romance Book Club author chat. I’m a content specialist at Written Word Media and the brand manager for Red Feather Romance as well.
Selena: My name’s Selena. I am also a content specialist at Written Word Media and I am the brand manager for NewInBooks.
Caitlin: Joining us today, we have award-winning Mississippi author Kait Nolan. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kait.
Kait: Hi.
Caitlin: I’ll just do a quick introduction. Kait believes in love, laughter, and that tacos are the world’s most perfect food, which I totally agree with. [laughs] When she’s not writing, reading, or wrangling family, you can find her watching The Great British Bake Off. Our book club pick for this month was her book When You Got a Good Thing. It’s the first book in the Misfit Inn series and it follows Kennedy Reynolds as she returns back home to Eden’s Ridge, Tennessee, for the first time in 10 years.
She sees her sisters and her high school sweetheart, Xander, and it just follows their story through. Thank you again for joining us. We’re really excited to chat with you today.
Kait: I’m happy to be here.
Caitlin: Before we jump into our questions, I do want to let our attendees know that the Q&A function is open. If you have any questions as we’re chatting, go ahead and throw them in the Q&A section and we’ll take a peek at that a little bit later, go through your questions and see what we can get answered there. To start it off, Kait, would you mind telling us just a little bit about your journey as an author, and how you got started writing romance?
Kait: I was one of those people who started writing very young. I was not into the journaling, a lot of people get into it from that. I actually met my best friend, Adrian, in the sixth grade. It’s been so many years. I can no longer remember why this happened, but at the end of our first phone call, for whatever reason, we decided we were going to write a book together. We did that, and rewrote it every year, for several years after that, and of course, aged up the characters, who were, very transparently, us.
At the end of it, I realized that I love telling a story, I love doing all of this. My buddy, that was not her thing. It ignited this whole, like, “Oh, I really love doing this kind of thing.” I have always loved love stories. I came to romance as a genre, as a reader, when I was about 14, because I was a huge mystery reader, and I basically wiped out the entire catalog of all of my favorite mystery authors at the time, that we had in our library. I stumbled into Nora Roberts’ Montana Sky, the romantic suspense side of things.
That was how I got pulled into romance. I’m like, “This is all the mysteries and the story that I love, with romance? I love this. Where’s this been all my life?” That was how I came to it as a reader and it just ignited this lifelong love of the genre. I was all about this incredibly hopeful sort of thing, because the world, regularly, is not a great thing. It’s nice to see all of these people going through all of these trials and tribulations, and coming out the other side with a great, happy ending.
This is a thing we are not guaranteed in real life. When I really started writing, I wrote off and on all through high school and college, not grad school, because grad school there was no time. My last year of grad school was the point at which I decided– I was finishing my master’s, in the process of applying for PhD programs, and I’m like, “This is not going to make me happy.” While I was writing my thesis, my master’s thesis, I was like, “I’m going to start treating this like a job.”
That was when I started writing fiction, and writing romance, and treating it like a job, putting that time and effort into it. That was back in 2005. I just started very slowly, it was like 500, 600 words a day, that was what I could fit into my incredibly packed schedule. I fell into that, and over the course of years, just did this on the side while I was working at 1.3 jobs on top of that, and getting married, having a family, and all of these things.
It was just always the constant in the background, the thing that kept me sane. That’s how I process what’s going on in my world, through my characters. I like to think that makes me really well-adjusted. [laughs]
Caitlin: [laughs] I love that. I love it. Awesome.
Selena: Awesome. What inspired you to write When You Got a Good Thing, and the Misfit Inn series, in general?
Kait: Well, we acquired a teenager. We bypassed the whole baby thing and we went the faster route. We acquired our teenager when she was 13. That was, of course, a big adjustment for everybody. When you have an infant, you see them form, and you help them form. When you acquire them as a teenager, they are a fully formed human and you have to figure out, “What do I do with you?” We had done a lot of the stuff you have to do with the foster system and whatnot, learning all of the things that go along with that.
In fiction, so often, foster kids are presented as coming from these tragic, traumatic backgrounds, and it’s usually a really horrible thing. I used to work in the community mental health. That is a real thing. That is a thing that exists in the world, and it’s terrible, but that’s not the only thing. I started thinking about– What would this look like in a positive fashion? I created Joan Reynolds, who is basically this posthumous character, who has had this huge impact on all of these people.
She’s died at the very beginning of this book, this is the thing that brings everybody back together, but she was this amazing, awesome foster mom, that established these incredible links between all of her kids, and really gave them a sense of found family, in a very real way, that echoes through the lives of all these people. That was a big part of the motivation for the original series, which I never expected to spin off into all these other things. That is what my brain does.
I had the four sisters and I wanted to trace through her impact in their lives, even after the fact, and how they built their family, because I love found family, and the family that you make. There are so many people in the world who are not necessarily born into great families. It’s a message I want to continue to put out in the world, like, “Does your family suck? That’s terrible. You can build your own, and that’s no less valid.”That’s really where the impetus of that series came from.
Caitlin: Got you. I can definitely see that, where you got the inspiration from. Going off of that, you have a great cast of characters, even in just this first book. You introduce the whole family there. Then some of them go on to have their own books as well. Do you have a favorite character, or one that you have enjoyed writing the most?
Kait: Probably my favorite character, because she’s appeared in the entire core series, all of the— There’s a spinoff, Men of the Misfit Inn series, about foster brothers. She’s appeared in all of their books and a number of the other books that are set in this universe, because everything’s connected. She hasn’t had her own books. It’s actually Ari. Ari is the teenage daughter child. She was who their mother was in the process of adopting when she was killed in a car accident.
A lot of the family stuff is around protecting the kid, making sure that the kid is safe and that they can keep her through all this stuff. She is this incredible, hopeless romantic, because she is surrounded by these great examples of love stories in her own life. She has been so much fun because she imagines herself as a matchmaker. She is, but she’s totally nudging people, like, “Oh, no, no. You need to go. Go, be on a date with him, or do whatever.” It’s just I find her enormously amusing, gratifying, and fun to watch.
She’s a sneaky, sneaky little matchmaker, and eventually, she will age up enough and I will write her story. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. It’s going to be wild. In book world, she’s like— I don’t know, 16 or 17 now. [laughs]
Caitlin: I was going to ask, do you have a story planned for her, eventually?
Kait: Eventually. It’s been through a few iterations in my brain, and the suggestions that my editor and one of my critique partners made. I’m like, “You’re basically asking me to torture my child. No.” [laughs] I don’t know when that’s going to happen, or what I’m going to do with that, exactly. Because she is a hopeless romantic, I know it’s going to be some situation where someone broke her heart in a second-chance romance, because that is my favorite, favorite trope.
Caitlin: Yes. That’d be a good one. I could see that. Well, we’ll have to wait and watch, and see for when that’s ready.
Selena: Yes. I’m very excited for this storyline to then develop. You did touch on this a little bit, but what do you hope readers take away from your books?
Kait: Hopefully, they’re entertained, that’s always the goal. My background is actually in psychology, so I may get into a little bit of research stuff here. Fiction is a way for people to like try on different lives and different perspectives. It’s this idea that it’s called social surrogacy. This is a good way for people to experience other points of view, that they’re not necessarily going to do, whether that be the perspective of a different family, a different race, a different whatever, pick a thing. People tend to be very insular.
One of the things that I have always hoped to do, in my work, is to show these other perspectives in a way that is very humanizing and very personalizing, that just on a low level in the back of their brain, makes people think about like what it is to be whatever these other things are, that we’re dealing with, and to normalize all of these things, that may not be like their world. I think that’s very important for the general growth of humanity, as a concept. I don’t necessarily always go in, like, high brow, “I want to teach this lesson.”
It’s about the story. I want to make you laugh, cry, and go, “Oh, that’s so sweet.” I want to have them walk away from the end of the book with, like, “I am angry that this is over because it was really good, and I would like more of it.” Here are these other series, right over here. We need more hope in the world. At the end of the day, I want them to walk away feeling more hopeful than they did when they walked in. That’s more or less what I want them to really get out of it.
Selena: Absolutely.
Caitlin: Definitely. I think in When You Got a Good Thing, you have all those moments where you laugh, or you cry, you have those reactions. I love reading it and going through all that.
Kait: I make myself cry. I’ve listened to the book earlier this week, because it’s been a minute, and totally sobbing at the funeral, again. [laughs]
Caitlin: Definitely. That was a point, yes. On a little bit of a lighter note, what was your favorite part of writing When You Got a Good Thing? Was there anything, any scene or theme throughout, that was your favorite part of writing that book? I know you said it’s been a while, but—
Kait: I think my favorite part probably was just getting to explore a new town and a new family, a new world. Before that, my flagship series is in Mississippi. It’s called Wishful. It’s a very townhouse character, a small-town romance. It’s a very happy, fluffy place. The town is always coming together to solve problems and stuff. I had a lot of fun with that, but this was a chance for me to start stretching into other areas. I really wanted to stretch my craft, to something that was a little more emotional.
Not really angsty, not what I think of as angst anyway, just something that has a little bit more depth. I enjoyed the challenge of finally getting to do that.
Caitlin: Yes, definitely.
Selena: Going along with some lighter-themed questions here, if you could adapt When You Got a Good Thing into a movie, who would you cast in the leading roles?
Kait: I legit have spent the last four days trying to answer that question, and I still don’t know the answer. [laughs] I tried to think, and I’m like, “No. no.” Usually, I don’t have a picture of a particular actor, or person, or whatever, in my head. They are who they are. It’s that thing where— When you see a movie adaptation of a book, it’s like, “They don’t look at all like so and so,” and I think it’s that. I can’t answer that question.
Caitlin: Isn’t that like when you read the book first, then you see a movie version, and you’re like, “It’s almost, but just not quite what I imagined.”
Kait: I know. “That’s not right.” I always watch the movie first and then go read the book, because the book’s always better and then I can enjoy the movie for what it was, and I can enjoy the book. It’s like, “Oh, that’s so much better.”
Caitlin: I think that’s the right way to do it. I love that. Let’s see. We touched on this a little bit earlier. Many of your books are either series or they’re spinoffs from the first series, that are interconnected in some way. I think that’s one of my favorite ways to read books, as a reader. I think it’s really fun to get to explore the world a little bit more and not have to put the book down and be done with the world. What is it that you like about writing books this way?
Kait: It’s useful for marketing, I guess, from a very practical standpoint, but I do not understand how people write standalones. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. The first Men of Misfit Inn book was actually intended to be a standalone. My kid was leaving for college, I’m like, “I have feelings I need to process about this.” It wasn’t connected to anything, when I started. It was just this completely for me, fun book. Then it turned into— I think we have like five or six books.
Well, they’re not all written yet, but anyway, there’s more coming. I can’t keep it to one book. I am incapable. I have another book I’m going to be releasing in January. It was supposed to be a standalone. I’m like, “This is my ‘hold my beer’ book, to prove I can write a standalone.” I cannot write a standalone. There’s going to be five. It’s more compulsion than intention.
Caitlin: If it just evolves that way naturally, then I love that. I think that’s really cool.
Kait: It’s like people be talking onto the page, and they’re like, “I have a story.”
Caitlin: Sometimes the characters tell you, right?
Kait: Yes. You’re like, “I know, you can squeeze in this novella.” Okay. [laughs]
Caitlin: Hey, when you have a story to tell, you just got to do it. I love that.
Selena: Absolutely. Hey, it keeps you busy too, so— [laughs]
Kait: That is a true statement. [laughs]
Selena: Yes. You did mention that you went from reading mysteries to starting to read romance books when you were a teenager. I can assume that you’re a pretty big romance reader yourself.
Kait: Oh, yes.
Selena: Do you have any books or an author that you’ve enjoyed reading lately?
Kait: I have recently binged everything Catherine Cowles has written. She’s one of those people that was like on my periphery for quite a while, then I didn’t get around— I think I grabbed something that had been free for a while, a long time ago. I do most of my reading in audio, while I’m walking my dogs, and exercising, because otherwise, my butt is at a computer and I am producing works.
I ended up stumbling across— She had recently put out a box set in audio, of the first three of her Sutter Lake books, which was her, I believe, first series. I was like, “Ooh.” I really liked them. I ended up binging all of them. Now I’m very eagerly awaiting book four to drop in her latest series.
Caitlin: That’s awesome. I love that. There’s so many good romance books out right now. My list just keeps getting longer and longer every day.
Kait: Yes. I feel like if you cannot paper a wall with your to be read list, you’re doing it wrong.
Selena: Oh, absolutely. [laughs]
Caitlin: I’ll have to agree with that. Going off that, you said that you started reading mystery first, and I know you have, I believe, a romantic suspense series as well. Have you ever considered writing another genre than romance, or—?
Kait: I’ve looked at other subgenres of romance. I will never not write romance. I am in it for the love story, that is my whole raison d’être. I don’t care if there’s not a love story, which is why I frankly read very few men in the fiction arena, because there’s not likely to be a love story, and if there is, they’re probably going to do it wrong. They’re dudes, they can’t help it. They’ve been socialized. The stuff that I’ve done so far, I call it romantic suspense light, because it’s not that even distribution of romance and suspense.
There’s a touch, influencing things. I do actually want to get into mainstream romantic suspense. That’s been planned for years now, and life keeps happening. We’ll get there eventually. [laughs]
Caitlin: There’s so many subgenres to explore, though. I feel like that’s a really popular one right now, though. I love that.
Kait: I started in paranormal, a very, very long time ago. Most of that got taken down because it was very, very early days of self-publishing, and I was playing around with a lot of paranormal stuff. Life was not great at that moment. I needed the escape of going to complete other world kind of stuff. It ended up landing me an agent and I spent a couple years pursuing traditional publishing in New York, which was very detrimental to my creative process.
When I finished that whole thing, my agent and I, mutually, were like, “This is not working out for us,” it’s like, “Cool, we’re still friends.” I couldn’t keep going in paranormal, because I was horrifically burned out. That was how I landed in contemporary, just by accident, because I was writing another fun-for-me book, which was Be Careful, It’s My Heart, because I love White Christmas. It is my favorite Christmas movie. I watched it every, every year.
That year, I thought it would be fun to just write a story that was a retelling of White Christmas against a stage production of White Christmas, where basically, a couple of the characters were playing matchmaker for another couple of the characters. That was horrifically freeing and so much fun. I fell in love with the town. That was where Wishful came from, and that was why the series got written out of order. [laughs] I had to go back to start at the beginning. That was not the beginning.
The paranormal stuff, I knew at that point, I was not going to go back. I ended up taking almost all of it down because it felt bad to have to keep telling readers, “Yes, that’s never going to get finished.” [laughs]
Caitlin: Yes. That’s fair enough.
Kait: I have one random YA that’s still out there, that was a werewolf book.
Caitlin: Cool. It does sound like you have written a number of books now, and your series are ever-growing. Do you have a favorite book, out of all the ones that you’ve written, or one that you just particularly enjoyed the experience of writing?
Kait: I really love Let It Be Me. That was the fun one that I wrote working out my empty nest sensations, because Caleb is the biggest, most awesome cream puff, cinnamon roll of a hero, who’s every woman’s perfect fantasy, like, “He is going to take care of things, and take care of you,” and it’s like, “Yes, please” [laughs] Really, I enjoyed just wallowing in that. That was a lot of fun. I connect everything, my heroin in that one is an audiobook narrator.
There is an author who is introduced in there, Paisley, who ended up being the heroin in one of my other series. I had the best time writing her book. There was frankly a lot of me in there, it’s like, “Oh, I can put all the blank parts of my job in the book.” It was another second-chance romance, because I love second-chance romance. It was just a fun book because there’s a lot of me, there’s a lot of my dog, and wildly different from my actual life, but it was just fun to play with.
Caitlin: I love that. I’ll have to check that one out then. [laughs]
Selena: Add it to the ever-growing to-be-read list. We were also wondering if you could tell us what you’re working on next. What can readers expect?
Kait: Well, right now, I am wrapping up the last book in my Bad Boy Bakers series. After that, I am going to take a jaunt across the pond to Scotland.
Caitlin: Cool.
Kait: This is a book that has been kicking around in my brain since 2014, and I have never been able to fit it in or quite make it work with what I was doing at the time. This is the thing, it was supposed to be the standalone, that is now the five books. It’s called— I haven’t posted this anywhere so you guys are the first to hear, it’s called Cowboy in a Kilt. It is about this guy who gets— He’s from Texas and he gets screwed out of the inheritance of his family ranch.
His buddy takes him to Vegas, and while he is in Vegas, he ends up winning a Scottish barony in a poker game. He’s like, “This can’t be real.” He goes to check it out, or whatever, and turns out, yes, this is in fact real, but it’s not just a simple, “He has inherited a Scottish barony in a poker game.” There is a marriage pact, that’s about 400 years old, and he’s going to have to marry the chick that is at the neighboring estate, or both of their estates get forfeited to the crown.
It’s just like a marriage of convenience kind of situation. He’s like, “Okay, I’m going to marry you, is there any—” This was 400 years ago, there was nothing in the law, or the pact, or whatever, that said you can’t get divorced later, but of course, they aren’t going to do that, because that’s not how that trope works. Anyway, so I’m dragging my cowboy to Scotland, and then there are a lot of people involved in that story, who are like, “Me next.”
Caitlin: That sounds super exciting. I love that. [laughs]
Kait: It’s going to be a lot of fun. I studied abroad in Scotland, way back in college, and fell in love with the country, it is so much fun. There’s so much I really enjoyed about that experience. This is my opportunity to go play with that and share all of those things that I love with everyone else. [laughs]
Caitlin: I feel like that’s a really great setting for that.
Kait: It should be fun.
Caitlin: Did you visit Ireland as well, when you were studying abroad over there?
Kait: Yes.
Caitlin: When you said that, it made me think of the beginning of When You Got a Good Thing, and she’s in Ireland.
Kait: Yes. My teenager, who’s actually no longer a teenager, she just turned 20, we had promised to take her on a senior trip, that was supposed to be for a senior in high school thing, and then of course, she graduated in 2020, so yes. It’s not going to be anymore like a senior in college kind of thing, but we’re going to go to Scotland and Ireland, I’m going to show her all of my old stomping grounds and stuff, so that’ll be a lot of fun.
Caitlin: That’s amazing. I love that. That’ll be a fun trip. [laughs] Awesome. Well, that was very exciting, to hear what you’re working on next. We’ll have to keep our eyes open for that. [laughs]
Kait: That’s supposed to be launching in January.
Caitlin: January. Cool. Not very far away, then.
Kait: Don’t remind me.
Caitlin: Never mind. You have plenty of time. You’re good. [laughs] Well, with that I think we’ll go ahead and take a peek at the Q&A section. I think we’ve got a couple of questions in there. Let’s see. Emma asks, “Do you still write parts of yourself in your characters, if maybe not in a quite as obvious way as you did when you were in sixth grade?” [laughs]
Kait: I think there’s a degree of deliberateness and then there’s also the unconscious things that show up. I feel like my best characters come out when I figure out, “Okay, how is this like me?” It’s definitely not like, “Oh, I’m going to put myself on the page on purpose,” in that sense, but just trying to figure out how I relate to whoever the character is, because if I don’t have that, they feel, at least to me, a lot more cardboardy, and not real.
Even if I don’t agree with a whole host of the things, like the heroine I’m working on now, I’m like, “Why did you do that?” I would never do that, but I have to put myself in her shoes and figure out, “How is this like me, and how can I make this play in a real way?” Then there’s all of the very subtle things. You can very reliably tell what I was craving when I was writing a book. [laughs] I love to talk about food. I had an adult-onset food allergy to dairy, and it’s very clear, in my work, when that got diagnosed.
All I wanted was cheese, sour cream, and all of these things. I’m Southern, we don’t know how to cook without these things. [laughs] There is, definitely, always going to be parts of me on purpose and not, in all of my characters.
Caitlin: Got you. Cool. Thank you for answering that for Emma.
Selena: Caroline asks, “What’s your dream travel location, and would you want to have a book set there?”
Kait: I’m doing that, because I do love Scotland, I would love to go back. Australia is also on my list. We’re actually going there next year, for our 20th wedding anniversary, so that’s fun and exciting. In terms of wanting to set a book, you can certainly write about places that you’ve never been, and I have done that, but I find it a lot harder. Most of my brand has been set very largely around the south, because that is what I know.
It’s not the only place I’ve lived, but I’ve lived here the longest. I’ve got like Mississippi, I’ve spent a lot of time in Tennessee, I’ve got another series planned, eventually, for Georgia and Texas, that kind of thing, because these are places that I know very well. Even though I’m usually making up a town because I don’t want to have to worry about the realities of like, “Is there really a Chick-fil-A on that corner? I don’t know.” [laughs]
I find that a lot easier, personally, for me, because I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time in world-building. I’m more in it for the character motivations, that kind of thing. I’ve lived at Scotland, so I’m really excited. It’s dated, at this point, but I did live there. I am really looking forward to getting to explore this small-town thing in that context. I don’t know. If I find somewhere that I really love and fall in love with, and a story presents itself, then I am a slave to my muse, to a point. So—
Caitlin: Awesome. We’ve got one other one from Kelly. Kelly asks, “What does success look like to you?”
Kait: I think the answer for that was different, at different points in my career. When I got started treating writing as a job, I was working three other actual jobs. I had a full-time research position, two different teaching positions on top of that, because student loans are real. We were paying all that stuff off. To begin with, it started as being able to drop a job. It was a huge thing when I was able to quit teaching entirely, because I hated teaching.
I am not made for that. Getting down to just the one full-time job in writing, that was a huge thing. The ultimate measure of success, for me, was being able to finally leave the full-time job to do this full-time, which I did in January this year. That’s been amazing and wonderful. I’m so incredibly grateful that I have gotten to a point where I can actually do this. I was the payoff and the fruition of all of these things that I basically denied myself, avoided, skipped, and did whatever, because I was working.
It’s been really awesome to be able to do the thing that I love as my job, and also have time for a life. I’m still figuring out what that looks like, because I basically didn’t have one for 15 years. It’s really that. There’s the financial component to it. I would like to be able to pay my bills and save for retirement, and all of those run-up fancy things, but it’s really about the joy of getting to do what I love every day.
Selena: Yes. Absolutely.
Caitlin: That’s cool. Let’s see. Let me check if there’s more. If you could give any advice to an aspiring author, what would it be?
Kait: There are so many things.
Caitlin: This is great.
Kait: One of the things that— It depends on whether you’re asking from the writing standpoint, or from the business/career standpoint. I think, probably, the most helpful thing for me is remembering that, especially if you’re looking at doing this as a career, this is a long-haul game. You’re not likely to be that overnight success. Frankly, none of the overnight successes were actually overnight successes. You didn’t know about all the work that they did for the years before that one book went kablooey.
Being aware that putting in consistent work, whatever way that looks for you, just being aware that there’s not going to be a silver bullet, perfect thing. Everything builds on the thing that you did before, and whatever happens with each book, whether that is the level of success that you wanted for it or not, a writing career is made out of writing. It’s never built on just one book, or just one series, or whatever. Writers write, at the end of the day.
You have like Harper Lee, who had the one hit and it was great, but– Not that she’s not a writer, but it’s very different to be that person versus someone who is like Nora Roberts, who’s written well over 300 books. Not that everyone has to do that to make a writing career, for the record, because she’s a special unicorn. Nothing’s going to happen overnight, and don’t let that discourage you, I guess is where I’m working my way around to.
Caitlin: Absolutely. I think that’s very true. Thank you for answering that. It looks like we’ve got one more that came in. We’ll go ahead and do this one as our last question. Kali asks, “Like Selena mentioned, we all have a super long to-be-read list. Do you have a long list of book ideas to write, or to pursue further?
Kait: So, so many. I use Evernote. Evernote is one of my— I cannot be without it. I think I have 182 partially plotted books,-
Caitlin: Oh, wow.
Kait: -in the hopper. People are, “Aren’t you worried you’re going to run out of ideas?” I just laugh like a maniac, because no, that’s never going to be a problem. I always have random ideas. I’m throwing random new ideas in the hopper every day. I’ll get a piece from here, a piece from there, but it comes from everywhere. Things that I overhear at the tire shop, things that I’m reading, things that I’m watching, something that people said, something I heard on a podcast.
It’s all percolating in my brain, and it’s like, “Oh, what if?” There’s always that question of, “What if? What would this look like?” There’s many of them, that will never see anything, that nothing will ever come of them. This is just a reflexive thing that my brain does. Then sometimes, there will be just that right cocktail of a concept that clicks in my brain, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s the thing.” To a point, you go where the energy is. What I’m excited about, what I really want to do.
As I have gotten further in my career, there’s more of a strategy involved. Wishful was, in some ways, a hot mess. It was not a well-planned series, in the sense of you knew who was coming next. I wrote who I felt like, which was fun for me. When I wrote the Misfit Inn, I was like, “Okay, we have the four sisters. It is very clear whose book is next.” There’s more practical decisions that get made on that front.
It’s very much who I am excited about, because technically, I was supposed to be starting my romantic suspense stuff next year, and then my Cowboy was like, “Hey, I have friends.” I’m like, “Oh, man.” I pivot, and I change, and it’s fine.
Caitlin: I love that you have so many ideas written down. That’s fantastic. I’m sure those come from all over as well. I love that you mentioned that you get inspiration from a lot of different things. That’s great.
Kait: It can come from the weirdest— I once got a random book idea from a reflection in the hinge, in a bathroom stall. My brain is a strange, strange thing.
Caitlin: You never know. I love that. Amazing. Well, I think with that last question, we’ll go ahead and wrap up for today, and close out our chat. It was awesome talking to you. Thank you so much,-
Kait: This was fun.
Caitlin: -for joining us. I do want to let our attendees know, really quick. We’ll be reaching out to our giveaway winner later this afternoon. Just watch your Book Club’s direct messages, and we’ll reach out to you there. Our next meeting will be September 29th, with author Jacki Delecki. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, @RedFeatherRomance, and also on our Book Club’s page.
We’ll keep you up to date with all of that information, our next book pick, and everything. Thank you so much for joining us. It was really lovely to have you with us today.
Kait: This was so much fun.
Caitlin: Awesome. Well, I hope everybody enjoyed this, and I hope you all have a great day. We’ll see you next time. Bye. Thank you.
Kait: Bye.
Selena: Bye.
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