Bianca Marais

And I hate first drafts and I love the editing phase.

Something you do as well that like a lot of people get cautioned against, but you did it really well, is that if you can have multi-POV characters, don't have them discussing the same scene.

you know, have one scene told from one character's perspective and then move on to a second scene.

And that can be told from another character's perspective.

But you discuss like certain events from different characters' perspectives while still making it interesting.

The reader's not going, I already know this.

I already know this.

Why are we going over this ground?

So again, like, can you give us,

your approach to that to ensure that the reader was never bored, that even though it's the same event, they're getting completely different information in terms of plot, motives, characterization.

Right.

Excellent.

Excellent advice there.

Let's talk about the podcast sort of interstitials.

You have a transcripts from a podcast.

Was that there all along in the beginning?

Was that something that came with the rewrites?

Yeah, that is so important.

You know, if people are using newspaper headlines or podcast transcripts or, you know, it does need to flow throughout the book because if you suddenly get it in the second half, it does feel a bit weird.

Same goes for like mostly alternating characters because people attach to the character they meet first.