Pen Pals Pod

65 Episodes

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What’s Your Core Flaw?

2026-11-1001:03:44

Kelton updates her comps, Krisserin queries a new agent, and the two compare notes on what querying actually asks of you. Krisserin walks through the surprisingly hard questions on one agent's query form and they talk about what it means when agents say their inboxes are full of well-written queries with no weirdness. From there: rom-com vs. upmarket, setting a book in a specific year, the miscommunication trope they can't stand, and why so much fantasy looks like misty medieval England. In...

“Think of Your 401(k) as Punk Rock” with Guest AJ Ayers

2026-11-0301:27:56

Kelton checks in from a van (long story) after a productive weekend spent away in a luxurious hotel thanks to the generous owner. Krisserin shares what she’s changing in her querying. Then Kelton sits down with AJ Ayers, CFP and CEO and co-founder of Brooklyn FI, author of the Substack Money Changes Everything, and author of the upcoming Creative Money from Penguin Random House. AJ walks us through her path from a 16-year-old bookstore clerk to book publishing, Bandcamp, and wealth managemen...

What We Keep, What We Cut: Kim Garza on Her Family Epic, Between You a River

2026-10-2701:23:02

Krisserin and Kelton start with the weekly check-in: 775 of 1,500 words, thirty pages of Wandering Stars, and the logline assignment neither of them could quite pin down. Krisserin reads her pitch for Parasocial, Kelton reads the long and short versions of The Second Wind, and they talk about why shrinking your book to a few sentences is so hard (and how Leigh Stein’s plot class helps). Then Kimberly Garza joins us. Krisserin met her at an AWP panel on Filipinos in diaspora, and as a fellow ...

Unfortunately, You Have to Tell People You're a Writer

2026-10-2058:36

Kelton shows up with new baby bangs and a question she can't shake: who do you want to be on a book cover forever? From there the hosts check in on the week. Kelton spent a six-hour Saturday editing and crossed 90,000 words on her "chunky rom-com." Krisserin squeezed out 590 words and got pulled into Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars and Jeffrey Ostler's The Lakotas and the Black Hills as research for her novel. They also get into what music to write to, whether 94,000 words is too long for YA, ...

"If This Doesn’t Work Out, It’s Going on Wattpad": Querying for the Third Time

2026-10-1354:17

Want in on our invite-only writers accountability group? Fill out the interest form here: https://forms.gle/QSdWNYc9cptJ3ZVBA Back in the same room after last week’s voice notes, Kelton is fighting off the sickness she warned us about and admits she didn’t touch her edits. Instead, she spent the week making a mock cover for her rom-com out of a stack of old magazines. Krisserin, meanwhile, queried three agents at 8:20 a.m. on one agent’s deadline day without rereading her letter. Now that th...

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