Bookwild - Young Rich Widows by Kimberly Belle, Layne Fargo, Cate Holahan and Vanessa Lillie

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

This week, I talk to the thriller writing power group behind Young Rich Widows, Kimberly Belle, Layne Fargo,, Cate Holahan and Vanessa Lillie!Young Rich Widows came out first on Audible last year, and as of today, it's available in print!  We dive into what it was like writing in a group, who write which characters, and plans for the rest of the series!The next book in the series, Desperate Deadly Widows is available on Audible now and will be available in print next year.Young Rich Widows SynopsisWhen the four partners of a prominent law firm are killed in a mysterious plane crash, their widows must come together to uncover the truth in this explosive, edge-of-your-seat novel.It’s 1985 in Providence, Rhode Island, and the four partners of a prominent, mafia-affiliated law firm have been killed in a private jet that went down outside New York City. Four very different women have just lost the loves of their lives: Justine, a former fashion model adjusting to suburban life; Camille, a beautiful, young second wife some suspect is a gold digger; Krystle, committed to leaving the firm to her sons after her husband worked his whole life to support them all; and Meredith, a stripper at the local club who was in a secret relationship with the firm’s sole female partner. While the crash is initially ruled a tragic accident, something’s not adding up: The team wasn’t supposed to be in New York that day, and it’s soon revealed that there was a very large sum of cash that burned up with the plane. The women find themselves thrown together in search of the truth, with new danger and threats unfolding at every turn.Could a dissatisfied client be seeking revenge? Or were the partners involved in something bigger—something dangerous and deadly? What other secrets were the partners keeping, and how far might people go to ensure they stay hidden? The widows must find the answers in order to protect their inheritance, their families, and their lives.  Get Bookwild MerchCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackCheck Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck out the Imposter Hour Podcast with Liz and GregFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrian 

This week is a very uniquely exciting episode because I got to talk with four of our favorite thriller authors who came together to write a book for Audible last year called Young, Rich Widows. It is a really campy, fun thriller set in the 80s where a bunch of women who normally wouldn't work together are kind of forced to work together to make up for the sins of their lousy husbands. So it is quite a ride, and I really enjoyed reading it. But the setup is that it's 1985 in Providence, Rhode Island, and the four partners of a prominent mafia-affiliated law firm have been killed in a private jet that went down outside New York City.

Four very different women have just lost the loves of their lives. Justine, a former fashion model adjusting to suburban life. Camille, a young beautiful second wife, some suspect is a gold digger. Crystal committed to leaving the firm to her sons after her husband worked his whole life to support them all. And Meredith, a stripper at the local club who was in a secret relationship with the firm's sole female partner. While the crash has initially ruled a tragic accident, something's not adding up. While the crash has initially ruled a tragic accident, something's not adding up. The team wasn't supposed to be in New York that day, and it soon revealed that there was a very large sum of cash that burned up with the plane.

The women find themselves thrown very much into the search for the truth with new danger and threats unfolding at every turn. Could a dissatisfied client be seeking revenge, or were the partners involved in something bigger, something dangerous and deadly? What other secrets were the partners keeping, and how far might people go to ensure they stay hidden? The widows must find the answers in order to protect their inheritance, their families, and their lives. It is just a really, really, really fun, like I said, can't be thriller. Like, we have the mafia involved. We have women coming together who would normally be at each other's throats, and they kind of are at each other's throats even as they're trying to solve it.

And it is just a very, very, very, very fun read by some of my favorite author. coming together, which I thought was just such a cool process, and I was really excited to talk to them about how they managed to do this and how they approached it. So let's get into it. Blaine Fargo, Vanessa Lilly, Kate Hollahan, and Kimberly Bell, who are the writing team that brought us young rich widows. So welcome all of you. This is the largest cast of a podcast that I've done so far. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm so excited to talk about this one.

So this one's a little bit unique. It came out on Audible first. So what was the genesis of this book? Like, just pick a place and start anywhere. Well, it started from the place of, loneliness um because um it was in despair so the world was in lockdown this was like the fall of 2020 and my agent at the time had said that audible was buying um like short story thrillers and i'd never written a short story but there was something exciting about you know writing for audio

and i just said you know i'd had this idea and what if we i wrote 20 000 words and then three other great authors also wrote 20,000 words and we had a whole book. And she's like, uh, maybe. So I found three incredible authors whose books I had read and I've been lucky enough to meet at conferences before everything shut down and thought we would all vibe. And we wrote a proposal and Audible was really into it. And we were able to do our first ever group project. It's set in the 1980s, which is why I look crazy. So it's our first kind of historical, if you will. It was our first time writing for kind of audio first. But we just all jumped into it because we thought it would be fun.

And that is sort of the vibe of young rich widows is it's campy. It's a thriller, but it's really campy fun. Like first wives club with murder. Yes, totally. So it sounds like it was kind of the impetus was that Audible was like buying stories in a different way. who or like not necessarily who you might have all thought of it together but where did you get your initial like idea from like where the book would go plot wise so the kind of germ of young rich widows is the idea that there are four partners in a law firm and their plane blows up and they leave behind

four widows and so we each write a widow character and that's about as far as i'd gotten in terms of premise. I then kind of kicked it to each of these authors to develop the characters that they wanted. I kind of thought of creating an Italian American character. There's a big Italian American history in Providence, where I live now, where the book is set. I listened to a few podcasts, including the first season of Crime Town, which is all set in Providence, like, mobbed up Providence. It was infamously one of the biggest mob towns in like the, well, 60s all the way through, like the late 90s. So we kind of wanted to include those elements. But then I'll let the ladies talk about their amazing characters that they really created as well. Yeah. And also for like the plot,

I think we all got together and really had to not only hammer out the characters when we saw them arcing, but also just like what we wanted to do with the plot, how we wanted to show off these women becoming stronger and really going from four ladies that have every reason to hate each other to making it a story about female friendship, which I think was something we were all craving one of the reasons why we got involved in this project. And then we wanted that to reflect in the book. And I think that's also one of the things people love is that they're laughing with these characters, but they also get that catharsis of, you know, being women that are kind of pitted against each other. And then all of a sudden coming together to, well, I don't want to do a

spoiler, but there is a sequel. So to save the day kind of. They survive for the sequel, at least enough that we can write one. So I think that that was a really cool thing, how we did that. We really got together and we had Excel spreadsheets. You got to love writers because we use accounting software solely for plots. I wonder if Microsoft knows that that's a niche for Excel. So, you know, we're putting the plots in those cells and rearranging them. really trying to get a story that would have lots of twists and turns, but also really have

these characters develop and have a lot of heart. And Vanessa gave us very basic, like, I think we have the names, and, like, I knew my character, Meredith was in a relationship with the sole female partner in the law firm, which, like, in the 80s would have been much more scandalous than today. So based on that, we all kind of brought our own. own interests and background and voice and everything to these characters. Like for Meredith, I wrote my master's thesis on burlesque and strip teas, so I wanted to make her a stripper. That was my very first. I was like, it's the age. She's a stripper. And yeah, so it just kind of went from there. Like, we all could have just put our own spin on it. I don't know if Kate and Kim,

you want to talk more about your characters, Justine and Camille. Yeah. So Camille ended up being from a South, which if you've ever read any of my other books, it's not a huge shocker, I don't think. You know, but she, she also is kind of a man-killer, you know, like kept woman kind of character who, as it turns out, is sleeping with Justine's character, or Justine, Kate's character's husband, one of the other partners in the law firm. So, and that, of course, comes out in the very early part of the story, so I don't think I'm giving anything away. But, you know, she's, she's very similar in a lot of ways to the characters that I write, being that she's from the South,

and she kind of has that mindset, but she's also very different in that she's not exactly the nicest person when the story starts out, but she learns and grows, and, you know, that's part of her arc for these books as well. Yeah. And Justine is a biracial character like myself. She's half black and half Jewish. And she is kind of a bit of a fish out of water in Providence because she doesn't have any family or friends there. She moved there because her husband got this job and was brought in as a partner to the sperm. And so she's been a single mom. She has a young, I guess he's in the first book, he's what, three, four. I think he's four. So in the first book he's four, and she's kind of lost who she is being a mom, because that's

where she's put her focus. And she's kind of lost what kind of gives her pizzazz and makes her special. And so that's her arc is kind of rediscovering that, who she is aside from being Jack's wife and JJ's mom. And so as much as she's angry with Camille in the beginning, I think she has to take a little responsibility in that she's kind of forgotten. what made her so lovable in the first place. Yeah.

I know you guys, you kind of touched on it already, but that was one of the things that I thought was really cool is like they couldn't be more at odds with each other at the beginning. Like you just never would have, like they never would have chosen each other's friendship, that's for sure, like there's that. But then there's also some of the things

where like, yet just seen and Camille have some like, legit, like, personal grievances against her. Like, it's pretty rough. It's not something where you ever think that you would have to help your husband's mistress clean up all of your partner's mess that they left behind. So it is, like, so unique from the very beginning. But it is cool how, again, without spoilers, like, they do end up, like, kind of like, if you're in a, if you're in a, like, messy situation,

where there's lots of danger. Like you're going to kind of just have to learn to work with each other in some way. Yeah, but there are plenty of cat fights along the way, campaign growing. It doesn't really hash it out, which was also part of the fun of writing this story is because they had, like you said, every reason to really not like each other. But they were forced together by necessity and then later by friendship. I think we wanted to play with some of those like 80s tropes of, I mean, there's so many 80s movies, mostly starring Michael Douglas, where the other woman is, like, demonized and this poor innocent man, you know? So I think we wanted to have our own spin on that where, like, maybe at first the other woman is demonized, certainly by Justine, but then we see Camille as a whole person and understand, like, why she was having this affair.

And maybe, like, let's blame the man a little bit. I don't know. Right. Right. I know. That's what I thought. It's like they all just have to like deal with. Obviously there's one woman, but it's mostly these men who like made bad decisions and passed it on to their wives or their partners or whatever it is that it plays out.

But yeah, it is one, I was so frustrated just thinking of that. Like, okay, so you die and now I have to deal with stuff? Like this sounds terrible. It's such a like rough inciting incident there at the beginning of it. So you kind of talked about like having an Excel sheet where you were kind of working out the ideas. How like did you guys know the plot beats that you wanted to hit? Or were you like writing a chapter with a character and then like someone would pick up with the next chapter? like how did you guys have structure amongst like all four of you? Yeah, that was one of the luckiest things.

And if there are any kind of writers out there who are thinking about co-writing, this is some advice we learned after the fact, which is always find out kind of how they write in a plotter or panster situation. Because, you know, there are so many incredible writers that if you plot out, it takes the juice away from them and they don't, that's just not their process. But we got so lucky because all four of us really like structure and had no qualms, you know, taking two weeks to kind of plot everything out. And then from there we knew we wanted to kind of round rob in the chapters.

And we had, I mean, a pretty set structure. And we changed things along the way, which is like part of the fun. But we knew each week we kind of talk about what we'd written, what we saw coming the next week, you know, and then you have to get your chapters done because someone else is coming after you, which is great motivation. And, and then, you know, you're reading everything at the end of the week and it's just constantly a process of like editing and revision. And it was crazy how fast we got this done. Basically in 12 weeks, we had a really well edited version because we essentially edited it four times. And we were writing four chapters a week, each of us a chapter. So it just went,

We flew through it. We could only do that because we had the outline ready to go. That's what I wondered about. Yeah, like if someone had an idea in the middle of their chapter, that would be hard if you didn't have like the general idea where you're headed. And that happened. But he did change. You know, like up now and then, yeah, there would be because we would, so we did all this work to plot it out.

And then as we're writing, you know, characters start to develop. They do little things. And then sometimes we had to stop and go, Okay, wait a second. So this is happening and now this is happening, which is going to change. We'd like go through the Excel spreadsheet like this that happens over here. So let's talk about, you know, how, given how the characters are developing, how then would the plot change? And we'd go in and we'd be jigger.

So we're always kind of being responsive to who our characters are because you don't never want to put a plot and slam it on top of characters. And then they end up doing things that don't make sense, right? Because you want to make it where the plot is coming out of character. But I also think we did a lot of work on really understanding who these women were beforehand. So we had a good sense of where they were going to go. And then we let everybody be the lead on their own character. So not only did they write the point of view character chapters, but they could dive in and go, hey, Kate, you know, I don't think,

Crystal would say it this way, or I don't think Meredith would do that right there or whatever it is. And then they could go in and tweak or read change. So that way the characters really were consistent. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it's just, I just think it's so cool that you guys were able to do that. What were your favorite parts about writing this collaboratively? Well, Lane has to go first because she didn't like group projects before that.

Yeah, I was a little, when Vanessa asked me to do this, I was a little skeptical because I just, in school, I always hated group projects. because I was the nerd who got stuck doing all the work. A lot of us had that experience. So, yeah, I was a little skeptical, but it turned out, you know, when everybody is equally invested in the process, and it's great. I mean, do a fourth of the work and have a book in 12 weeks and all that stuff. But I think what was the most fun for me is just, like,

bouncing ideas off of each other and seeing how they would grow and change and get bigger and better. like Vanessa is especially the one who's always like, how can we make this like wilder and more dream and more 80s and more, you know, all this stuff. And it was like pushing me in a way to add humor and fun and things that I might not focus on as much in my own work.

And it actually like it changed how I write my own work now. I feel like I do focus more on those things. I mean, you want to feel that like joy and fun and kind of self-indulgence, I guess I would say, which I think that's. the best thing in fiction if you can just tell the author is reveling in it like having so much fun and that's what we did on this project yeah i i i loved i love the like getting to have fun because i mean in all of our respective books generally they're just they're all pretty dark and serious um i mean i was working on a pretty serious you know book at the time and it's like to be able to just turn to this and be

like, all right, we're going to have a limousine cat fight scene. And there's going to be like champagne and slapping. And then they're like tumbling out of the limo and jamming faces in the grass. Like it just feels good sometimes to be ridiculous. And so I loved like it felt like often we were trying to like make each other laugh. And like, because you knew they were going to be reading right away. So it's like, okay, let's see what they think about this scene or, you know, bits of dialogue. I don't know.

It was just always so fun to have, like, writers whose work I love, like, writing. Like, I was just like, yes, a new chapter from Kate. Yay, Lane's got, you know, like, it was just fun to see what people had working. I felt lucky because I got to, like, read their work all the time. It was, like, a blast. And then it also made me get my stuff done, which is good. And in, in addition to editing, we would leave each other notes in the document that were just like, what?

That's crazy. Like, just going to be on. So there was a lot of fun just in that sort of editing commenting process, too. And on top of that, what I loved, I mean, the fun part was by far the best part. But the other thing I loved about this group project and when we did it again, same thing, is that anytime, like normally writing is so solitary, right? And when you, you know, when we're writing our own solo books and we run across something, that messes up our plot, or there's a plot hole that we didn't see coming,

or any of the million of different things that, you know, problems you can run across in your own manuscript as you're writing. With us, we had like a text thread that was going 24-7 pretty much, and we'd be like, hey, I just realized, blah, blah, blah, blah. And instead of having to like think about it by yourself in your lonely room all alone, You had three other really smart brains who knew the story, knew the characters, and they were like, well, how about this? And so your problems would get solved really quickly,

which kept the momentum going as well as we were writing. That's really cool. Yeah. It's like you could even just have like real time feedback versus just like sitting there in your head, like overthinking things. Yeah, I love that. So all of you write thrillers. obviously separately and not together.

What draws you guys to writing thrillers? I love the puzzle of it. I love, well, one, I think I love the stakes, right? You're always kind of worried when you're writing a book like, oh, is it keeping people turning the pages because, like, do people get the danger? And the nice thing about thrillers, it's like, yes, they literally could die. Right? So the stakes are always kind of built in as pretty high.

And then on top of that, it is fun to play with your reader where you're showing your cards, but it's a little like a poker game that you're playing, where you're showing some cards, but not others. And at the end, you want surprises and you want also to kind of get across a theme. In this case, we had a theme kind of running through a female friendship and what brings women together and having to rely and rediscover your own strengths and not being defined. particularly in 1980s as a society might like to define you as a woman right so we wanted to get that in but also really surprise our readers and i just think that um thrillers give you that opportunity

to have that kind of gameplay in a way that um sometimes other genres don't yeah yeah i really feel like lane should talk about this too seeing she has a book coming up it's not necessarily a thriller right That's true. Yeah. So in my solo work, I'm actually moving away from thrillers. We're into women's fiction. And part of it is I just don't have a brain for coming up with twists after twist. Like, I'm so impressed by these career thriller authors who can, like, every book come up with this fresh, surprising twist and mystery.

And that's just not how my brain works, to be honest. I need three other brains to help me do that. But what I do love about thriller that is carrying over into my women's fiction book is just, that sense of tension, just like ratcheting up the tension as much as possible. I think I just prefer for my own work where it's like sexual tension, relationship, drama, not so much like life or death. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. It is like a puzzle, as Kate says.

I think I just need help during the puzzle. That book is coming January 2025, The Favorites, Pre-Order Now. My favorites, coming in January 2025, thank you. That's the best at marketing. I like forget to you. She is. And I've heard it's Ruthering Heights meets competitive ice skating. Yeah, it's ice dance with Wuthering Heights.

It's very dramatic. It does have like a little thriller element, but it's more relationship-based and it was a lot of fun to write. Oh my gosh, I will be reading it for sure. I think that's part of kind of even genres are so interesting. I just had a book come out, Blood Sisters, and I called it a thriller forever, and then all of a sudden it's, everyone calls it like a mystery. And I'm like, oh, okay, I'm a mystery writer now. Also, it's set 2008, which is apparently historical fiction. So I went from writing contemporary thrillers to historical fiction mysteries.

Genre is weird. But what I love about all of the book. that I've written and including this one is like I do actually love the real details, like the reality of it, the like truth in the fiction. That's kind of my favorite part, which is where you can research a place and you can research the historical context and you have to think of how to make it interesting, right? You don't want it to be a lecture. But often, you know, a lot of the elements that are in like young rich widows and the sequel,

desperate deadly widows available now through Audible is there's a lot of historical fiction in it because Providence was a wild place. I mean, it was mobbed up. There was like, there's environmental crimes. There's like real estate development crimes. Like we didn't really have to make a lot of the big plot points up because they really kind of related to at least generally things that were going on. we've got a thread in the sequel, you know, around the Narragansett tribe, which, you know, had battled the city around some like tribal rights and land. And so we kind of just learned about those issues as well. And I just think as a reader or listener, it's so cool when you can be interested in something and then you Google it and you can just go down rabbit holes and it's real.

And so, you know, as a reader, I think that works really well in like a mystery thriller. space, but really any space where you can tell there's like passion in the writing because, you know, they really, you know, get into it. Like even like ice dancing, like Lane's like going to competitions and obsessing over video. Like it's just so cool as a reader when you can feel the passion they have for like the subject. And we really, the young rich widows, like, there's a scene that is all of these things I'm about to say are true from real life. There's a scene at a like coked out swingers party full of politicians hosted by a mobbed like kingpin who had wolves like all of that's from real life it's like you didn't need to make anything up it's like too me with wolves that's

I don't know that they had flower names like we gave ours but yeah yeah yeah sometimes truth is what's stranger than fiction actually yeah um so we're talking about specifically young rich widows because it um as this gets published is available in physical book form so that is super exciting did you guys know it would go it would eventually go that way or was that just like a result of like oh there's interest we hoped that it would like we always did because we would get a lot of comments from people when the audiobook came out saying like oh I really want to read this but I don't do audiobooks or I don't subscribe to audible like I think a lot of people myself included to be honest just prefer like the old

school physical media so we always hope that it would happen but Vanessa was kind of the one again who made that happen I don't know if you want to talk about that Vanessa yeah I just I I had met the person who had become our editor from source books at a conference. And I love publishing as an industry. I'm very interested in it. And I had several friends who published its source books. And they'd actually published Lily Chew, who does more like romance, Audible onlys in print.

And so we felt like, oh, you know, they're interested in that. And, you know, we just reached out to them. and our editor was game for, you know, a conversation, and we just felt like they were the perfect place. They're really inventive. They have such fun marketing. Obviously, they're great with covers. We love that.

And they've just been such a blast to work with. And I think that was sort of, because this is a little non-traditional, I mean, it originally was in audio. You know, you needed to find a partner who could kind of see a path for how it could be successful. So we're really excited. In fact, it's going to be in Walmart. which I've never had a book in Walmart, and I'm really excited about that. Yeah.

So we're, you know, we've had such a great experience with them, and they bought both books. So Desperate Deadly Widows is out now on Audible, and so a year from now, it'll be out through source books in print. And in the actual print copy, we had like just a few extra things if people had listened, but they're kind of curious. Like there's a little Q&A and there's some discussion questions. So just like a few little fun bonuses for people who do. pick up the print copy yeah if you meet to my next question i did want to know if this next one if it would be as a book as well i i want to be an audiobook person but like i feel like i end up not paying as much attention sometimes like if i'm doing it while i'm

reading or while i'm reading while i'm cleaning so then it ends up like i just end up absorbing more of the information when i can read it as a book so i don't think you're a lot a lot of people are like that. And it does feel like it's a different part of your brain. But for me, I love audiobooks and I love, especially when I find a narrator like our narrators, they're so good at these voices and these accents and bringing these characters to life. And so it really, for me, if you find the right story with the right narrators, it can really bring it alive in a way that maybe doesn't happen on the page. But I get that everybody, you know, has different ways of, of, um, you know, reading a story or listening to a story. My mother is like, I can't listen to it. She waited

for a print copy, but yeah. So I'm thrilled that we have it in multiple different ways for our readers and listeners. Yeah. Yeah, well, because we're storytellers and we just want to, you know, tell the stories and the ways that people want to absorb them. And in this particular case, it's like we feel like these characters are so strong that we think that they work in different mediums and I mean we could even see them on TV and hopefully other people will too right but I just think that we create I think if you get a character that people love and you you really flesh them out and they become whole people that they work in different formats right for different people yeah totally they would be really they'd be great on TV that scene you're talking that

Vanessa was mentioning in the limo with the champagne was like it was like uh real housewives basically happening in the midst of all the little inspiration from them yes the line when she was like he slept with my husband I wouldn't have thrown champagne I'd hate you with a bottle I was like oh my gosh I was like this is too amazing so yeah I feel like we'd translate to TV well 80s if you're a housewise fan yes it's be for you and you love the is yeah that's the mix right there it is it really was was there did you guys do anything different in your approach in writing the second one was there anything that just was different for any reason bigger hair bigger lies yeah you got to research in person that was new because we were in

covid times for the first one oh yeah so we everyone came in um and we were able to able to, we knew we wanted to set it in Newport. So we got to go do some IRL research, and that was just really fun to kind of hang out and talk through things and be like, oh, that would be cool and what if we did this? And when we're kind of together, there's a vibe, you know, we were like pitching ideas, all that kind of stuff. So that was really fun to get to actually bring everyone to Rodey. And there's a pivotal sequence that involves a yacht in the sequel, and we went and again, Vanessa is just like the boldest one of us, I feel like, we'll just walk in anywhere and like own the place.

So we went, we kind of snuck onto this dock and we're like talking to the guys about their boats and they invited us like to come on the yacht for a beer, which we did decline because, you know, we're thriller authors. We know how that can go. Right. It's so fun to just be together. And there is this, it's so funny because like we are all very different people. We didn't really know each other very.

well before this, but there's this chemistry in this group, and you see it when we're all in the same room where just one of us is like, oh, what about this? And then we all, like, add on a little bit. It's like improv almost. I was like, yes, yeah, we were even together, what, was it last week? I don't know, it's all a blur. We were together last week for the launch of this audible book number two, Desperate Deadly Widows. And we were talking about book number three, like just bouncing ideas, and they kept getting bigger and bigger and crazier and funnier. So, I mean, there is something to be said for being in the same room and really just kind of like brainstorming and letting your mind go. And we have big plans for these ladies.

That's what I was going to ask. So there is some hope for book three. And four. Yeah. Well, so in our head, each character gets a book where the book, It's not really their book, but, you know, one character kind of gets the spotlight in the book. And so Desperate Deadly Widows, that was Camille, and then for the third, we have Meredith. She gets her story and maybe a happy ending in there.

And then the last one is Vanessa's character, Crystal, she could say, yeah. And the first one was Justine. Right. I did it accidentally at first, where it ended up that Justine started and ended the book, so had like an extra chapter in there. And she really, I would say, like, went on the biggest journey and changed the most in the first book. So it kind of just worked out that way. But now we're doing it intentionally, which I feel like that's kind of the story of these books.

It's like we're accidentally doing things and then we intentionally repeat it. Yeah. Sometimes that's how the best stuff comes about, doing it that way. That's really cool. So I just had one other random fun question for you, Kimberly. did you expect to have so many books come out with the word widow in it because I know you're because my solo book is the Paris widow. So it does get a little confusing sometimes because we have young rich widows desperate to and the Paris widow and all coming out in a span

of what three months. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. It's all widows all the time in my house. the widow this year. You need one of those hats with like the veil that people wear to funerals and that can be your own now. I love it. Just associate you as a widow basically. I don't know how your husband will feel about that, but you know. Yeah, I don't think you love it.

Yeah, he'll be like, wait, do you have plans? What's happening? Yeah. He already slicks with one eye open. As they should, as they should. No, totally. Good. Well, as of today, you can buy young rich widows. I'm getting all the names mixed together now. Young Ridge Widows available on in paperback. Is it all paperback? Is it hardback? Paperback? Paperback? Ebook. Paperback? A book. Paperback and eBook, too, for the back and forth. Yes, totally. So make sure you guys go get that. And then you could also go right into Desper Deadly Widows with audio if you were really feeling it.

So we're just building people's TVRs all the time on the podcast. They're like, add to do more. But where can people follow each of you guys to keep up with everything, your solo projects and your projects you work out together? So I'm Vanessa Lilly, and I'm always on Instagram. Please tell me to get off Instagram and finish my book. And then I also have a website and a newsletter that you can send out for on there. And my website is lanefargo.com and I'm at lane fargo on Instagram and technically some other social media platforms, but that's the only one I really use.

Yeah. I'm Kate Hollahan at Katehollahan.com and also on Instagram, though I am not in Facebook, though I'm not as good about posting as everyone else. You can get really good around launches. It's really good at her lunches. Yeah. And I am at Kimberlybell Books.com, and you can find all my socials listed there, as well as the Killer Author Club, which is an author interview series I do with Heather Gudenkov and Kara Ruda. We interview authors every other Tuesday night. So check those out as well.

And that's all the links are on my website. Those are fun. I've definitely watched a few of those. so I think that's it I think that's all I'm hopefully we'll be back to talk about desperate deadly widows here as well a little bit more when it comes out as a physical book as well and we'll send you some 80s stuff next time

yeah and I can actually be dressed right appropriately