At the time of recording this episode Rachael was preparing her day-long workshop for the RWA Conference, which is happening this weekend. Sophie was meant to attend but, due to personal circumstances, had to cancel, so we aren’t seeing each other in person as planned. Yet we are together on screen and in audio in this episode, which we recorded about three weeks ago.
We meant for this episode to be the follow-up to the 9th episode of the season, which was answering questions from aspiring and emerging writers who attended a workshop Sophie ran at Rachael’s readers retreat in Geelong in June, and which I didn’t have time to answer fully there.
Instead of getting to the questions, though, we started talking about Rachael’s workshop, which is about writing romance novels, and that led to us talking about a whole host of things, including the rural romance genre - which is what Rachael was writing when she was first published - and the difficulties of discoverability for Australian authors.
We talked for so long that there wasn’t time to address the questions, but we have done that in a subsequent recording which we’ll release in a fortnight’s time.
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