Don't Do This To MEEEEEEEEE: An Interview with Kim Barden

This week we're joined by Kim Barden who just finished her Finding Ever After Series joins us for a talk about the bittersweet moment of finishing her sweeping fantasy, Bring Your Own Book, and Space Em or Embrace Em. And yes, we tortured her with the options. 

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Once Upon a Time meets Grimms dark fairytales in this tale about vengeance, curses and love. Eveline Rafter has a gift. Not only can she hit every target with her twin golden knives, but she can find lost things. When Princess Snowfall of Bellatorre goes missing, Eveline is hired by the mysterious Huntsman to find her. With enough medallions to ransom a king, she knows she can't resist. But when she's thrust into a power game with old and terrifying magic, Eveline can't ignore the brewing unrest, or the shadows, or the secrets fighting to break free. When her dark past begins to catch up with her, Eveline begins to question the one thing she trusted most: Herself. Confused by her desires for the Huntsman, Eveline tries to navigate her curse, her fate and her friendships. But with a bloodthirsty Queen out to eat their hearts, Eveline and her companions soon find that not all stories have a happily ever after. Set against the dark forests of old fairy tales, in a kingdom ruled by an evil queen who consumes hearts for their youth and power, The Gilded Mirror is a YA dark retelling of the original Grimm's fairytales. GoodReads reviews:
'This was a wonderful fairytale rendition of epic proportions.'
'The Gilded Mirror was an action packed, super fun read, full of adventure.'
'This fantasy elegantly blends a story based in fairytales seamlessly with an effortless flow.'
'The Gilded Mirror is an epic YA Fantasy read that I thoroughly enjoyed. I laughed out loud, feared for the hero and her motley crew and even rooted for the amazingly in-depth villain.'
'This is the most glorious ride through the familiar land of fairytales.'

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Transcript

Booked All Night 0:02

Welcome to Booked All Night, the podcast where hot takes meet craft notes and no one gets enough sleep. I'm Jess. I'm Katie. I'm Julia. I'm Maggie. Get ready for unhinged hot takes. A whole lot of books, midnight giggles, and zero shame. Grab your blankets, booklets. It's time to get booked all night. Welcome to Booked All Night, the podcast for hot takes meat craft notes. I'm Jess, and today we are joined by Kim Barden, author of the Finding Ever After series. So welcome to the show, Kim.

Kim Barden 0:34

Thank you. It's so good to be here.

Booked All Night 0:37

Yes, and good morning to you all the way across the world.

Kim Barden 0:40

Yes, and good evening to you.

unknown 0:42

Thank you, thank you.

Jessica 0:43

So tell us about the series.

Kim Barden 0:46

Well, uh, the Finding Ever After series is kind of like a dark fairy tale retelling where once upon a time the TV show basically meets the original Grimm's fairy tales. Uh, it's about a woman who's hired by the Huntsman to find the lost princess Snow, and it basically takes us across this epic journey where we meet a ton of fairy tale characters that you've never met before. Um, ones that you have met before or ones that you might not recognize, but they've all got a little bit of a twist to it. So Rumpel Stiltskin weaves dreams instead of gold, Rapunzel's gone a little bit crazy in her tower. Um, you know, there's the Sea Witch, but she's also a sea queen, and there's a whole bunch of interlocking history there with uh all of the kingdoms. So it's just a really fun dark fantasy, and um, I'm really excited to be wrapping it up this year.

Booked All Night 1:32

So wrapping it up, it's coming coming to a to an end.

Kim Barden 1:37

That is exciting and like a little bittersweet, like so bittersweet, but a very big year, very exciting year. So, yes, we just had um yeah, it's been a long time coming, so it's been it's very exciting, and I did I did cry a little bit when I finished it, but um we're here, so yay.

Booked All Night 1:55

Well, you had me at fairy tale retelling, so that's just we'll just add that Syria, and then it's done, so I could just get the whole series at once, and I don't have to wait, so I'm privileged in that sense.

Kim Barden 2:04

Yes, 100%.

Booked All Night 2:07

So we're gonna start the official podcast with a quick game of superlatives, just basically the end of the year book, sort of most likely to, etcetera, etcetera. So who is most emotionally dang who is the most emotionally dangerous fairy tale trope?

Kim Barden 2:24

In my series or in fairy tales in general? The most emotionally the most emotionally dangerous you would think would be the evil queen, but I'm actually going to say Princess Snow for this one. Yes.

Booked All Night 2:38

The character you would trust with your life.

Kim Barden 2:41

I'm gonna go for the huntsman. Yes, he's he's a massive cinnamon role, and there's just something um there's just something about him that you just know he will he will take care of you and his weirdly a bad ass at the same time. So Hansel can wrap me up and protect me any day of the week.

Booked All Night 3:00

Perfect. The villain who almost convinced you that they were right.

Kim Barden 3:06

Uh, the evil queen, Queen Morena. So she's a big theme in this series is um basically finding happily ever after. So uh everybody's got their own version of Happy Ever After, and some of it's darker than others because humans and people are complex, right? So Mirenna's Happily Ever After is obviously terrible for everyone else, but she'll she wants it badly and she'll do anything to get it. And you throughout the series really understand her motives, and even when I was riding her, there were a lot of things where I kind of thought, you know, that makes sense, or I can see why she would want that, or um, so yeah, very uh humanized, and I yeah, definitely the evil queen for that question.

Booked All Night 3:46

Yeah, that's perfect. I had a teacher, Joe McGee, uh, and he had taught this whole lesson. He actually had like a whole workshop on it at one point about villains and how like the best villains are the ones that were kind of like, Well, I sort of agree with you, and that's a little bit of a problem because you're evil, and I should not, but like that's what makes a really great villain, is that it kind of drags you in with it, and you're like, Wait, are you wrong?

Kim Barden 4:12

Yeah, and it's it's that you know, that age old saying as well that like you know, you're a somebody's a villain in somebody else's story, like so you know, and you might not be in your own, so it's yeah, it's such an interesting concept, and I love complex villains. I love villains that I am unsure about that I kind of understand why they're doing things. So uh Mirena was definitely probably the most fun to write because of that.

Booked All Night 4:35

That sounds fun. What was the scene you were most afraid to write?

Kim Barden 4:40

Well, speaking, I guess speaking of finales, writing the ending. So there's one pivotal uh scene right at the end, like it's actually the epilogue of the final book that I would probably say was the hardest scene to write for me because there's so many threads in this series that come together, and this one particular character we've been following for such a long time, and I really wanted to give them an ending that felt right, but that was also true to their character, and that was really hard to do in a way that equals happily ever after, if that makes sense, but also not destroy the reader at the same time. So, um, as we were saying, it's it's bittersweet finishing it. So I think there was a little bit of logging in there of not really wanting to finish it, but knowing that I had to finish it and just giving it that right amount of hope and heartbreak and that all-round satisfaction at the same time that kept it true to the story and true to this particular character. So, yeah, I'm gonna have to say the epilogue of the absolute final book.

Booked All Night 5:42

And then in the entire series, what was the moment that you felt everything changed across your whole series?

Kim Barden 5:51

Oh I'm going to say book three about halfway. So, for those who haven't read it, book book like there's a lot of point of views in this series, right? Because there's a lot of different fairy tale characters and they all interlink. Like every single character has a place and a point and a reason for being there. So at the end of the series, you kind of go, I see I'm picking up what she was putting down. Um and book three and two, when I was writing them, they are on the same timeline. So while there's five in this series, there was just a bit too much happening all at once. So I kind of split book two and three. So I wrote book two's timeline with a certain set of characters, and book three's timeline with a certain set of characters, and I wrote them before publishing them at the same time so I could interlink where I needed to. But I think three really changed for me because I could see an ending forming, and it was a different ending than what I had originally planned, but it was so much better than what I had originally wanted, and so I then had to link it to book two and change a lot of things in those two books specifically, and I think that's where my big pivotal aha moment was, uh, where I knew exactly what was going to happen in book four, and I knew exactly what was going to happen in book five, and I could see everything coming together in a really clean way, and it was a super exciting pivotal moment. Um, yeah, I just I don't know, it's the weirdest thing being a writer. You slog and you slog, and then all of a sudden you have these aha moments, and it makes all of those blood, sweat, and tears just absolutely worth it.

Booked All Night 7:23

Yes, I call that that slushy, awful part 20k limbo because I get there and I'm like, oh no, decision where to next.

Kim Barden 7:33

Yeah.

Booked All Night 7:34

Uh crap.

Kim Barden 7:36

Yeah, for me it's the 30k, usually around 30k in a book. I'm like, do I need to reevaluate where I'm at? Or I'll put it down for a little bit and then come back. And um, yeah, it seems to be a common thread that you get to a certain point and then you kind of have to see what you want to do next.

Booked All Night 7:53

Yeah, and it's it's really weird too. Like the last piece that I I tend to write children's lit, so I write middle grade for like eight to twelve year olds. Yeah, right. It's it's it's where we get away with all the fart jokes. It's perfect. But the last piece that I wrote, I was like, I know where I want it to end, and I know that I want X, Y, Z to happen, and then I got up to like X and Y. I'm like, how do I get to Z? What is going to happen here? Like, I am nowhere near the word count I thought I would be at this point in my story, and now other things have to happen, and it's like such a universal feeling among writers where it's like I am like 70% of the way through my draft, and I thought that I would be a hundred percent of the way through my draft, and this is a problem. Or a lot of fantasy writers have the opposite problem where they're like, I am 150% of the way through my draft, and I need to cut a whole bunch of words now.

Kim Barden 8:58

Honestly, editing with fantasy is just cut, cut, cut it's um to a certain extent. I mean, the my fourth book was an interesting one because that one's about 125,000 words or a hundred and no, I think it's a hundred and thirty no, sorry, book four is a hundred and forty thousand. Um but originally it was one twenty. That's where I got the confusion. So in this instance I had the opposite for book four. I actually had to extend it out to align things or put more emotion in and things like that. But normally, yeah, you'd have your you know, 150,000-word book, which you finally managed to cut down to 110. Um, you know, four to five hundred pages. And yeah, it's uh it's it's always a nightmare. But I kind of find it fun in a way. I feel like I've become the queen of like slicing and dicing. Um, in our little writing group that I've got with two other two other writer friends of mine, and they beta read for me and we kind of swap manuscripts. Um, one of them's known as like the emotion um person who kind of like drags more from you to get to get more feeling and nuance. Whereas I'm the one that comes in and just goes, All right, these three paragraphs, you said the same thing, merge them into one and get rid of that whole page.

Booked All Night 10:14

So that's me.

Kim Barden 10:15

Yep.

Booked All Night 10:17

For for other people's work, that's me. Uh for my own work, uh, we had I don't remember the craft book that we had read, but it was like there are two types of editors, and one of them is a samurai and just slices through things, and the other one is like a uh tweed-sleeved professor and analyzes over all of them, and like when I'm going through my own work, I am very much tweed-sweet. Like, I'm that professor. But going through other people's work where I don't have some emotional attachment to it, I am the samurai, and I could just be like, Yeah, you said the same thing 14 times on this page. The half of this page can go. Look at that, we're down. We just cut like a hundred words, we're good. It's fine.

Kim Barden 10:55

I love that. Yeah. I never thought, I think, I think I'm pretty brutal with my own work as well. So yeah. That's so interesting that you're different for each. I suppose we look at our own work differently because it's come from us. Like I'm a big believer that as writers, there's always some little portion of us within that story or those words, as if we're giving a piece of our soul with each story that we write, and it means that you know we assess it differently. I guess it's the same of everybody perceives themselves differently than other people do. Yeah, it's fascinating, human nature.

Booked All Night 11:30

Plus, plus we've read it 850 million times and things start blurring again what we meant to write, and our eyes no longer see mistakes because we could probably recite to you like at least the first 50% of our book from memory. Yeah. And and people just like they're like, oh no, you just like write, edit, and then publish. Like, that's so cute that you think that it works that smoothly.

Kim Barden 11:56

Um, no, no, no, we're in the trenches with this. Um but yeah, that's so I totally forgot what I was just about to say. I had a funny point to add to that, but anyway, disregard.

Booked All Night 12:09

Um I call that the thought train taking off, but I didn't catch it.

Kim Barden 12:16

Yeah, it just it immediately left as soon as I thought it. Anyway, probably like half my book ideas, you know, when you get one at night and then you never remember what it is the next morning, even though whatever you were thinking of that night was the most brilliant thing ever.

Booked All Night 12:30

I started keeping a notebook next to my bed just for that, because I'm like, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and be like, oh, I've solved a plot hole and I'll leave a note for myself. But in the morning, it does not make sense. Like, what was it?

Kim Barden 12:42

I'm just gonna ask if it makes sense, because I feel like not only do I have doctors handwriting, I probably will have no idea what I'm trying to say, even if the words were legible.

Booked All Night 12:52

Yeah. One time I just wrote Clockwork Peacocks, and I was like, what does that what? What does that what could that possibly mean?

Kim Barden 13:02

So you know what? That would be a great book title.

Booked All Night 13:04

Right. So But I'm like, I'm working on a middle grade sci-fi piece. What does Clockwork Peacocks mean? This does not belong here. What is going on? And then I just yell at myself. I'm like, I mmm. Or I write down the most asinine idea, but it's like in detail, and I wake up in the morning and I'm like, no. No, like rip it out of the notebook and like throw it away. Like, no one can ever know that I thought that ever. Like, that's no.

Kim Barden 13:36

I love that. Maybe I should. Because I did try and put it on my phone notes for a little while, like as in grabbing my phone in the night, but I also put my phone on do not disturb, so it's like this fighting battle of trying to get it off do not disturb to get into the notes, and then even though the brightness is on the lowest, I always feel like it just glares you in the face, and then you just you get this blindness. So um, that didn't last very long.

Booked All Night 14:02

Yeah, retinas, but retinas. I don't need retinas. I don't need that, it's fine. They can just go. So I do have specific questions to get to in the interview. Yes, it's lovely. I've been only been talking for 15 minutes, and it's fine.

Kim Barden 14:15

I'm so sorry, I go off on tangents all the time. So just pull me back in line when you need me to.

Booked All Night 14:19

That's totally fine. Feel free to interrupt me. Rob will tell you. I am a talker, just go right ahead and talk over me. It's cool. So, what fairy tales were living rent-free in your head while you had first started forming the idea for this series?

Kim Barden 14:35

That's a really interesting question. So, I'm a massive um fairy tale fan of the original Dark Fairy Tales, and obviously, being a millennial growing up in the 90s with the Disney's Renaissance, we've all got those favorites. But there was always something super fascinating to me about the original fairy tales and then how Disney made them quite bright and you know, um lovely and Cinderella. Like exactly, and my mum has massive book collections, she had all of the original tales. Um, you know, we've got a couple of Folio Society editions and whatnot, and so she would sometimes read them to me at night. So I grew up with this weird contrast of these Disney movies and these ones where yeah, Cinderella's stepsisters cut off their feet and toes, and the Little Mermaid was only 12 years old, and you know, ended up watching the prince marry someone else and turns into sea foam and dies. And yeah, yeah, so there are a couple of fairy tales that I really loved from that um that has kind of lived rent-free in my head for a very long time. And when I was writing this, I wanted to keep obviously the the known ones. Um, so you know, she's finding Princess Snow, which is Snow White, which is Rose Red, um, you know, and then you've got Hansel and Gretel, and then uh a few of your major ones, but there are a couple in there that I really wanted to include that weren't um as known. So even though I had the major ones being used, there were minor ones that some of my all-time favorites that I really wanted to include. Um, you know, and that was the soldier in the tinder box, uh, the three crows. Uh, I really wanted to include the little matchbox girl in there, but I couldn't quite see where it would fit because to this day, that that story still makes me absolutely bawl my eyes out. Um, oh my god, I'm getting like teary thinking about it. If I sad for anyone listening, if you haven't read it, it's like it's beautifully sad. It's yes, it lives rent-free in my head. So I couldn't include it in this, but yeah, I have included everything from The Little Mermaid to um, which was also one of my favorites growing up, possibly because the illustrations were just stunning. Um, you know, and there's there's a lot of room for this series as well for you know offshoot novellas or um other things as well. So it's not to say that in future I might not find a little matchbox girl to fit in there or a swan princess or anything like that, um, which I know isn't, you know, an original fairy tale swan princess. It's the based off the uh ballet, but I love that story too. So I think there's different different ways that I can weave it in over the years, but yes, to answer your question, they're the ones that are probably in my head rent-free that I just really wanted to to include, or at least have some kind of head nod to it. So, you know, there might be a tavern that's named after them, or somebody's name is from a main character from that particular tale. So there's a lot that will go over people's heads that haven't read those original tales or know them, but there there are enough nods that for people like me, or from the sounds of it you, who've read them and know them, you'll read it and you'll recognize those little tributes, um, which I really wanted to do.

Booked All Night 17:48

That's nice. I had had uh I don't know how many American literature classes, but we have like the American fables, quote unquote.

Kim Barden 17:57

Oh yeah.

Booked All Night 17:58

Really yeah. Uh and one of them that has always stuck with me is the green ribbon.

Kim Barden 18:03

I don't think I've heard that one.

Booked All Night 18:05

Oh, that one's really messed up. So it's set during uh the French Revolution, and the man falls in love, and the woman always has a green ribbon tied around her neck, and one night he's like, Why do you always have the green ribbon tied around your neck? And she unties it and her head falls off because she had been at the guillotine. And I'm like, why are we winding this as children?

Kim Barden 18:25

Yeah, I've heard that story, but it's not called the Green Ribbon. There's another version of it. Um yeah, except I think in that the one that I've read, she's her throat slashed, so her head isn't. Yeah, that's interesting how they like. I think that's another thing that's cool about these fables and fairy tales. There's such cross-reference depending on what region of the world you're in. Yeah, like if you're in Europe or Australia or America, it's um, yeah, I really love that. So it kind of reminds me about um there's this podcast uh where there's this woman who she's got a PhD in mythology and a whole bunch of other stuff, and she sort of um went tracking to find the origin like the origins of different fairy tales. This is me going off on another tangent again, sorry. Oh, go break it up. Um and one of the most fascinating episodes that I read, uh well, listened to was uh about Cinderella and how it actually stems from a Chinese tale. Um, because the slippers represented the bound feet that they do on women, and that's where kind of like the glass slipper concept came from, and it was this original tale from thousands of years ago that kind of influenced um Charles Perot to write Cinderella, yeah. Which it was it was fascinating. I'll see if I can find it and send it to you if that's something you're gonna do.

Booked All Night 19:42

Yes, please send it. That's absolutely like the academic nonsense that I love to listen to and peruse. I I love stuff like that, especially like the regional variants of fairy tales, especially like Grim, right? So like a lot of the grim fairy tales came to America as like publication was starting to take off, and they were like, well, fairy tales are definitely for children, and that's why most of the fairy tales that have been published in America, they have the happily ever after. They have a happy ending, they don't have violence. Like Red Little Red Riding Hood is a really uh great example of it because the end of Little Red Riding Hood is that the wolf falls upon Little Red Riding Hood and eats her and she dies. The end, period, stop. But in America, the huntsman shows up and cuts them both out and they sew up the rocks into the wolf's stomach. Yeah. Yep. And I'm like, cool, that's not the version that I have at home, teacher.

Kim Barden 20:37

Um I was like, that's not the English version I've got of here.

Booked All Night 20:41

Yeah, that's not because cause my mom was the same way. We have special editions of Grim Fairy Tales, we have Hans Christian Andersons, we have Perot, like we have all these fairy tales, and that's what I grew up on, and then I went to school and they were like, and everything was happily ever after. I'm like, nah-uh. Like you're you're wrong.

Kim Barden 21:00

Uh it's it's so interesting, and you think, you know, uh obviously this day and age, we wouldn't happily give that to a child, like especially the um Sleeping Beauty one, you know, where she wakes up pregnant because the prince didn't just kiss her. Um so it's it's super interesting because it's like I read that as a child, and I don't know, I don't think I'm traumatized from it. Like, I I you know what I mean? Like, I to me, to me, it was you know, it was confronting, but so's the world, and that was the whole purpose of these tales to kind of warn you about what happens and prepare you for the cruelties of the world. So it's yeah, it's very interesting how much they've changed to suit time and and cultures and and countries, and yeah, little red riding hood, she definitely does not survive in the end.

Booked All Night 21:49

Yeah, no, she she just did she she wool food, and so is her grandma. Uh yeah.

Kim Barden 21:54

And it's like console and gretel, like they both escape, you know, and they defeat the witch, but in the Original one, um, Gretel ends up burning with the witch. So yeah.

Booked All Night 22:07

I had I don't remember which year of college, there are quite many years of college, but uh I had a uh myths and folklore class, and it was really fun. And my final paper was about how creepy all of these stories were when you take like a modern lens to it, because yeah, you know, like Snow White is like 11 years old, uh The Little Mermaid was 12, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, of course, you know, is like rape culture. I'm like, this is really weird. But also some of the female characters were weird, like Little Mermaid, she watches the prince's window for a hundred nights and just like watches him with his candle on and then off, and like basically watching him like flick his light switch on and off, and it's like, yeah, see that's creepy too. So, um what is the thing?

Kim Barden 22:50

It's like coming into the level of obsession, yeah.

Booked All Night 22:52

Yeah, I'm like, what is the lesson that we take away now in modern day when it's like that's not appropriate behavior, but also his behavior's not appropriate behavior. Who are we supposed to side with here? Because like you're both creeps.

Kim Barden 23:08

Yep. And that sounds like a fascinating subject, like, to be able to do and then submit to. That sounds like fun.

Booked All Night 23:16

Yeah, my teacher was like perfect.

Kim Barden 23:21

Distinction.

Booked All Night 23:22

Yes. Lovely. Uh what's the word I'm looking for? Uh perfectly jaded for academia, you know, like wonderful. Everybody else is like, oh, happy endings, and I'm like, they're creepy.

Kim Barden 23:38

You're like, let's dissect this and every problem associated with it. No, I love it. I love it.

Booked All Night 23:45

And my final question for this section. Okay. So these grave hearts, we're gonna say, fractures the story across rival courts, shifting alliances, characters get scattered across the realm. So, what changed in your approach when writing the story reached this level and scale of the consequences from the previous book?

Kim Barden 24:08

You're asking me some toughies today. Um, so books two and three, as I said, are on the same timeline. So, book four's major challenge was having all of those point of views and then kind of bringing them back together again. So, this book being the second last book in the series, I'm just gonna lift it up. Um, basically, I love the colours. Um, if you can tell, Little Mermaid themed in this one. Uh so with this one, the the trick was bringing those point of views together in a way that starts tying up the threads for the finale. But what that also means is that we're kind of at the lowest of the low in this book. So I had to get everybody to a certain point where it really does beg the question of how far you would go for Happily Ever After. Like, what would you do and what kind of wild, you know, shit are you gonna get up to to do it. So we see a lot of um characters in this one shift from you know, they they could have been good and now they're sort of slipping into darkness, and then you've got others who kind of realize maybe that wasn't the right choice, and I'm gonna do this. So there's a lot of um reflection, I guess, in this one, and a lot of things that happen that make them second guess, and it kind of flips on on both sides. So the struggle with this one is we have the original kingdom that it's set in, which we're familiar with by now. It's featured in the first book, so there wasn't much world building, obviously, that I had to do with that because I've already set it up. It's a very European-looking town next to a big lake. Uh, and then you've got Feldrin, um, who's sort of a similar kingdom in a way, so there wasn't too much that I need to translate because they're quite close uh, you know, side by side on the map wise. But when we ventured into the Myrrh Kingdoms, which is the Isle of Nisa for the sea nymphs and Teal Cove for the mermaids, I had the big question with that on how are they going to be depicted, right? So, what's different between these two underwater kingdoms that also differ from the land kingdoms? Because at this point, you know, there's probably different languages, there's different cultures, there's different fashions and styles. So I really dug quite deep in this one to differentiate a lot of that. Um, and it was really fun. I sort of combined a few different languages for the mermaid language, um, you know, took a lot of Japanese words. Um there's, you know, different fashions that I did for each each mermaid kingdom to clearly distinguish who's from where or what they represent. Um, and that was that was such a lot of fun to do. Uh, but I did I did have to spend a lot of time planning that out on a big board on what each kingdom looks like, you know, not only um geographically, but what that looks like from a culture perspective, a food perspective as well, and you know, what kind of matters uh to them. So in this instance, you kind of have you know, the sea nymphs have the sea witch as a queen, and then um the mermaids at Tilcove kind of have a King Triton-esque type king, but it's mermaid prince that we're focusing on. So, how's he a bit different to to the other heir that's there? And it was really fun to play with all of that and kind of create these new worlds within this already existing world.

unknown 27:21

That's fun.

Jessica 27:22

That sounds like a lot of fun. I can't wait to read it.

Kim Barden 27:24

It was it was fun.

Booked All Night 27:28

I can't wait to read it. I'm gonna order the whole series and throw it on my shelf, and it can sit there until I'm done with other books, but I am gonna read it. Oh, thank you. Totally, totally up my alley. Uh, and I'm very happy to announce that we are at the first game of the podcast, and because you have copies of your book, I finally get to play Bring Your Own Book.

Kim Barden 27:48

I'm really excited to hear about what this is, yeah.

Booked All Night 27:53

So, Bring Your Own Book is a little bit like uh Cards Against Humanity, where I have the black cards with the options on them, and your book is the white card. So you'll just flip through, go to the first full paragraph of the page, and pick an answer that fits from there. Okay. Okay. So the very first one, I'm gonna say a name for a cat. Just flip to a random page.

Kim Barden 28:21

So I have to go to the first full paragraph?

Booked All Night 28:23

Yes.

Kim Barden 28:24

Uh the name for a cat is Bryn.

Booked All Night 28:27

Brynn.

Kim Barden 28:28

What a cute cat.

Booked All Night 28:30

A very cute cat. Flip to a new random page, and uh this one will be the subtitle of a new Fast and Furious film.

Kim Barden 28:42

It's not somewhere my sister and I went.

Booked All Night 28:52

Flip to a new random page. Uh text on a tombstone.

Kim Barden 29:00

Faith in snow.

Booked All Night 29:02

Oh. That's that's actually quite lovely. Yeah, that that fits quite quite well, actually. New new random page. Something we're all thinking but are too afraid to say.

Kim Barden 29:20

It was a risk, a big one. I feel like these are actually very valid. Yeah.

Booked All Night 29:26

These are these are actually like hitting up pretty good. Like the first time I ever played this game, period. Uh we had gone to the library, my friend Maggie, who also hosts with me, and one of the first things was like, oh, it's the currency of the future. And I flipped to a random page, and the very first word on it was children. I'm like, I give up. This is I'm done playing this whole game. This is wrong.

Kim Barden 29:50

Oh my god, I would have lost it.

Booked All Night 29:52

I was dying. Maggie was like, Jessica, no. But it is fun to play outside of the book recommending such horrible things, yes.

Kim Barden 30:04

I I agree, yeah. I mean, this is why Cards of Humanity, though, is such a popular game, right? Because it just takes it to that kind of next level. It's also like that um that Broadway show, Book of Mormon, like it kind of just takes it to that next level. Yeah, yeah.

Booked All Night 30:19

A new random page. The most important ingredient and a magic potion.

Kim Barden 30:30

Here we go. Uh, more salty meat with bread.

unknown 30:39

Okay.

Kim Barden 30:40

More of the same dreary monotony.

Booked All Night 30:42

So beautiful. Uh the last one, new random page. Part of a note passed between desks in elementary school.

Kim Barden 30:54

Okay, do we want to pick a dialogue here? It's still just first paragraph or first dialogue on the page.

Booked All Night 31:00

Uh, still first paragraph. Okay. I would say, yeah. Um.

Kim Barden 31:09

I don't know if this fits at all. Um but do I just read out the paragraph for this one?

Booked All Night 31:17

Or just the first sentence in it? Whichever part you think fits best. Because it's just part of a note past it. Part of a note. Yeah.

Kim Barden 31:26

They had no idea what lay behind the door. That means otherwise, I was gonna say the dialogue that's under it is be a good little crow and open it for me. And I was that's why I was like, can I do the dialogue? Because I feel like that would fit really well.

Jessica 31:44

What are these elementary kids up to? What is going on?

Kim Barden 31:52

That's a really fun game. That's great.

Booked All Night 31:54

It is great. I'm so happy I finally got to play it. I would say elementary school students are probably the most crow-like in that they just pick up whatever they find on the ground and they're like, it's fine, it's shiny. It's shiny, it's mine forever. So these next couple of questions are specifically about reading and writing and like the craft of storytelling. So your book aims to pull readers out of reality and make characters feel like their entire personality for a while. What techniques do you rely on to create that level of emotional immersion?

Kim Barden 32:28

What techniques? So a lot of of what I write, so to preface, all of my first drafts are a trash fire. I think we established this earlier that the magic happens in editing. Yes. Yes. So I think with with my personal craft, you know, when I'm doing the first draft, my biggest uh, I guess, goal is to, you know, get it done, obviously. But word vomit. So um when I say word vomit, I just, you know, it doesn't matter if the chat is 15 pages long or three pages long, as long as I get down what I want to get down. But I'm really big on, I guess, feeding as much emotion into that as possible. And then in the editing stage, really focusing on showing what I'm trying to portray instead of telling. So instead of, you know, he felt the wind, it's more like talking about how goosebumps raise on his skin because the wind's going underneath his his jerkin. And so it's it's setting that scene on how they're feeling without using those filler words, and I think that's really important. And even though sometimes you know that makes your manuscript a lot bigger, uh, because you know, that one sentence turns into two paragraphs, it does, you know, take that emotional punch a bit more, but I also like to put a little bit of my own experience into it when I can. So um an example of that, I guess, is uh I mean, not to get morbid real quick, so we'll just go over it. But my brother died during while I was writing book three. Uh so the the that's okay. So it's been five years, and so a lot of this is attributed to him as well. So there's a character in particular called Dante, who's he's been dead for the whole series. This isn't a spoiler, you find out about him in book one, but he's he's kind of from the past uh of Evelyn's character, and a lot of his traits or conversations or memories that she has of him um is directly from me. So it was kind of like my own form of processing grief at the time, if that makes sense, kind of incorporating uh, you know, sections of of my brother into that book, and I think you can really um feel it, or at least I think people can feel it. And I've had a few readers write to me that you know the opening scene of uh book four is actually a scene that involves both of these characters, and I've uh a few people mentioned that they cried. I was like, I'm so sorry. Uh but also as an author, you're like, yes, I may pick cry. Yes. Because my biggest thing isn't getting five stars, right? It's did I make you angry enough that you threw the book across the room? Did I make you loathe a character? Did I make you love a character? Did I make you you know put in your review we must protect this particular character at all cost, you know? Um, did you cry?

Booked All Night 35:10

If I'm screaming at it, it's a good book, even if I'm like, I don't my god, you're so stupid, and I turn the page and keep going, like like emotionally. Exactly.

Kim Barden 35:18

So that's a big um thing for me. So a lot of the techniques of that is um, as I said, trying to put as much emotion as I can into it and making it very clear what I want from these characters, and then in the editing process, um kind of using that show-don't tell technique. But then when I come back to it a lot later, uh, you know, I'll leave it for six months to 12 months before I even look at a draft again. I I'm kind of then in a dissecting stage. Like, am I still feeling anything from this scene, or do I need to dig a little deeper into that? Uh, and then after that, I've got that beta reader that I was telling you about, who then kind of plucks more from me pending on what she's feeling as well. So for me, it's kind of a mesh of all of those techniques put together to kind of really get that emotional drive for these characters because that's such an important part for me as a writer, getting that emotion down as opposed to just, you know, doing action-packed or just overly addressing. I want everything to have a meaning or a link somehow, and and and really see these characters change and grow and um and you know, learn in in a way that you know makes us as humans feel it with them.

Booked All Night 36:31

Yeah. I am the opposite. Uh I often leave placeholders where I'm like, she was mad about that, and we're moving on to the action. And I will come back and explain what anger feels like, but it'll be like a year from now.

Kim Barden 36:46

Yeah, yeah.

Booked All Night 36:49

Emotion is not it's it's really weird. I think emotion is very weird to write because I'm like, if I'm writing a fight scene, aren't you just angry naturally? Like, can't you don't you understand that she's mad? Why do I have to tell you all the mad feelings that she's having? But that's not how that works in a book. You have to explain things.

Kim Barden 37:09

Yes. I said sometimes my first drafts are the same. I'll just be like, She was mad, or her, you know, her face went pink, or or you know, yet heated her cheeks or whatever, and then I kind of just move on, and then later on I'm like, okay, we can we can we can bring more from this, and then sometimes it's far too much, and I've got to dissect and cut, and then you know, other times my mate will be like, You've cut too much, you need to give me more, and I'll be like, but I just cut all of that. Um, so then I rewrite a big chunk of it.

Booked All Night 37:40

Um I had I had a piece I'd sent to a friend from my MFA, and she was like, Jessica, there's like a page and a half of this girl doing chores. Uh no, yeah, and then no emotion whatsoever when she gets yelled at in the next chapter. Nobody wants to read about people doing chores. Just cut this whole section. What is wrong with you? I'm like, no, but it it's important for my word count to have that extra 150 word.

Kim Barden 38:13

We've all been there. I had three pages once. It was in book two where um the main character Evelyn is cleaning a cauldron. She cleans it for three pages, like aggressively. Um, and there's like one piece of black sludge that she just can't get off, and for some reason I was just stuck on this cauldron. Uh in the final book, I want to let you know that it's now one line. Um it was three pages of, and I was just like, Yeah, you clean that cauldron, you get that aggression out. Um yeah, and I had to have a hard conversation where my friend was like, no, no, no, no. Here's your sent like no, here's the sentence, just see ya, and I was like, Bye. There goes like 1500 words. Oh, funny.

Booked All Night 39:03

It's so true. So I saw in your uh bio that you wrote Gilded Mirror entirely on your mobile phone.

Kim Barden 39:13

I did. I do not recommend it.

Booked All Night 39:15

Yeah. Uh I did that for a paper when my computer died my senior year of college. Also, do not recommend it.

Kim Barden 39:21

Do not recommend it, yeah.

Booked All Night 39:23

Uh, how did that constraint affect your drafting habits and did it change how you think about like perfection or accessibility in writing?

Kim Barden 39:33

It it was an interesting process because at the time it was for National Novel Writing Month in like 2018. And I, you know, I had a few pieces of work that I'd gotten up to that 30,000 words, and I just dropped them, right? I never finished them. And the whole point of NanoRimo was to do 50,000 words in 30 days. Yep. And so by using that mobile phone, I had the ability of um, because at the time I was working in the city in an office, so the phone was portable enough that I could do it on the train, uh, on my lunch break, when I was taking, you know, after work, if I was meeting people for, I don't know, a drink or dinner or something in that period between work and them arriving, I would spend the two hours there writing on the phone. And it was, it was kind of like this accessibility of being able to get the words down without lugging a laptop around, without setting my expectations. And because I had not finished so many things before at a laptop, I thought maybe I needed to tackle this differently, right? Because I'd never written a novel, I didn't know what my writing process was. And you, as you probably know, or anybody who's looking to write a book knows you can read so many books on how to write a book, and none of them give you an answer because the thing is there is no answer, and it's really frustrating when you're still trying to figure out how it works for you, and so this kind of unlocked how it works for me, and it unlocked that I'm just gonna get it out and word mom it and just see where this goes uh and and do it from there. But I did find an app at the time which made it way easier. Um, I cannot remember the name of it, but it was basically a novel writing app. And what it did was it put it in Times New Roman and it formatted it with indents and paragraphs, and you could do new tabs like you would in OneNote for chapters. So I could go back and forth. It gave me my word count in real time, and I think because it was layered or or set out as a novel, that was my app for writing, so it didn't feel like I was just in my notes or getting confused, and I ended up, yeah. I think by the end of that seven weeks total, it took me to write 90,000 words because I just kept going. Um, obviously, a lot of that book was entirely rewritten because autocorrect does not do nice things. Uh, and book two, I tried to write it again on the phone because I was like, maybe this is how I do it. And um, book two just wasn't working on the phone, so I switched back to a laptop. So I now write on a laptop, but I think I think using that phone was kind of like an unlocking mechanism for me to be able to go, okay, I can do this. Maybe it wasn't the phone, it was you know the word vomiting and just making sure that I get this down because magic happens, you can't edit a blank page. So let's let's try that instead. And maybe the consistency is what I needed. So um, yeah, I've got nine drafted manuscripts now. Um, so I've got a nice backlog, which is great. Um, but all of them have been five days a week consistency, just like I did during NanoRimo. I focus on word count, but I just make sure that it's more that I'm just word vomiting what I can and getting down what I can, and even if I'm hating it, just keep going because I can edit it later. Um, you know, some days you're not feeling it, some days you are. But when you look at it as an entire whole manuscript and draft, you don't know what days were the bad days and what days were the good days because it all blends in in the end. So um I think that was a big thing of what it what it taught me. Um, but I I do have a little dent in my pinky from that period, and it's never quite gone away. Like it's so yeah.

Jessica 43:20

It's a little little scarred reminder to never type it up on your phone.

Kim Barden 43:24

Yeah. Uh so it's it's great for anybody who's on the move a lot, if especially if you've got one of those Samsung's that you know are double open, like the big double screen. I feel like that would have been great to use at the time.

Booked All Night 43:38

I did mine on a BlackBerry, if anybody remembers those, because it was like 2012. Yeah. Oh, okay. Uh and I don't recommend that. I ruined that keyboard. Um my computer got a virus, and while I was waiting for it to get fixed, I had to retype my thesis based on old drafts of my thesis. So that I could then go to the computer lab and get it printed and fixed and everything. And I was like, I'm gonna throw an entire building across the room. This is absolute nonsense.

Kim Barden 44:10

I'm just imagining you like internally screaming the entire time.

Booked All Night 44:14

Yeah, I was just like wide-eyed and just like if you looked at me, you could probably hear the internal scream happening in my head. I was just like, hmm. People would come up and be like, have you eaten today? Get the hell away from me. Like, I it was it was a rough time. It was a rough time in Jessica's history. It was oof. I love that. And then, yeah. Oh, and then the note on on craft books. I wound up majoring in writing for my master's degrees, and they of course you always read all these craft books, and every last one of them is like, just sit down and do it. And I'm like, I hate you. I hate you in your just sit down and do it method. Like, there's a part in Stephen King's on writing when he's like, Yeah, I just sit down and talk about it.

Kim Barden 44:57

That's my favorite one. That was the most useful book.

Booked All Night 45:02

The part that I There is one part of that that continues to terrify me to this day, and it's when he's talking about when he was writing Carrie, and he wrote the scene where they're all throwing tampons and pads at her in the locker room, and then he was like, That's going nowhere, and he threw it out, and his wife took it out of the trash can, the physical trash can. I'm like, I don't have a physical trash can, I don't print out my work and like put it somewhere. It is digital, period. It is it is on a space that no one can access except for me. So if I have an idea that someone is like, wow, that's a great idea, I'm never gonna know. And so I don't delete anything. Like my hard drive is just full of half-written notes that I'm just like that's going there, and like other drafts that are like, okay, I cut this from something, but maybe it'll fit into something else, and it just goes to this very long document, and I'm like, that's where it'll stay, because it might be helpful one day.

Kim Barden 45:58

He, as I said, I think that's the best, the best book on writing. Like, to I mean, I the first half is obviously a biography of his life, but um, I think most of the habits that I picked up were from his book as well. One of them being ignore the red lines, just keep going, hence my word vomiting. I don't I don't go back and re-edit chapters as I'm going, um, because he's just like just get it out. And honestly, that that alone is on repeat in my head as well. So very such a good book, yeah.

Booked All Night 46:30

Like the get it out part is like really great advice. And it's true, like the more you keep going back to like re-edit it, the more you're just gonna be like stuck in chapter three for eternity. Uh, but a lot of the other books that we read were like every day at two, I sit down at my laptop and words just flow from me. I'm like, isn't that nice for you? That is not how my brain works.

Kim Barden 46:52

That is not how my brain works. Some days are great. I'll do like 3,000 words in two hours, and other days I'm lucky to get 70.

Booked All Night 47:00

Right? Um I'm like, I've got ADHD and depression. It's a miracle if I remember what I wrote yesterday. This is not how my brain works. One of one of the books we read, I think it was uh Writing Down the Bones, and there's just a whole chapter on pens. Just pens. Just what kind of pens you should be doing your writing with. I'm like, I don't write with a pen, I do everything on my laptop. What is this outdated nonsense?

Kim Barden 47:26

Yeah, I need that.

Booked All Night 47:28

Like uh, it just made me feel so frustrated because as you are getting into that sense of like this is how I write, when you are reading all of these books that are like, this is the way to write, and your writing process doesn't match up with that. It kind of creates this feeling of inadequacy and just, oh well, I'm not writing correctly, I'm not able to do it. And I think a lot of people fall into that hole of like, well, I'm not doing it the way Stephen King did it, so I'm obviously never gonna get a book published.

Kim Barden 48:00

And it's like But I think it's also like it's it's also the opposite where you know people are like, you'll find your own way to do it, and then you'll say, Well, I'm stuck at 30,000 words, and then they'll say, Well, you're already there, just keep going. And you're like, that is so unhelpful. Yep. Um, thank you for giving me absolutely nothing to work with.

Jessica 48:19

Thank you. Excellent advice. Excellent advice.

Kim Barden 48:23

Just keep going. Okay, great. Yes.

Booked All Night 48:25

Yep. Uh I've got I remember when I first started querying, uh, and of course, you know, when you query, you wait like sometimes up to a year for a rejection, which is just at that point I figured you didn't want it. I didn't need the email to let me know that you didn't. But my mom doesn't understand that like you send it off and you leave them alone, right? That's how finding an agent works. Even finding a publisher, you send it, and if they want it, they'll get back to you. She's like, you should be calling them every day. I'm like, no. No, no, no.

Kim Barden 49:02

But they tell you to send a letter to the CEO or something as well, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. If they ignore me, that's quite common. You know, I might never hear from them ever again. I'm just grateful if I get a response, to be honest.

Booked All Night 49:17

Yeah, uh, even a form response is really nice. Um, but no, I will not be following up on this um because I want to get published and not blacklisted from the entire industry.

Kim Barden 49:27

So, beware of this woman who's acting like a little mermaid staring at a prince's window.

unknown 49:34

Right?

Booked All Night 49:35

This crazy bitch listened to her mother do not answer her emails, and I feel like that post-note would go up everywhere if I listened to that. So, yeah, it oh so rough. So rough. Uh that brings us to the second game of the podcast.

Kim Barden 49:56

Right. I love me a good game.

Booked All Night 49:58

And this one is a. I'm actually gonna go to the first game that I was gonna play. This one's gonna be Space Em or Embrace'em. So Space Em or Embrace'em comes with a little uh story to it. You are cruising through the galaxy with a uh cargo full of tropes and cliches, and you're getting sucked into a black hole, and you have to get down to a certain number by ejecting these things off of your ship. The problem is your computer is a little broken, and you can only see two options at a time. So you you can choose to keep both of the options and we'll move on. But you do have to get down to a magic number that I rolled before the interview.

Kim Barden 50:38

Interesting. Okay, yeah.

Booked All Night 50:40

Okay, so your first two are a cursed object that whispers your worst thoughts, or a morally grey love interest with excellent banter.

Kim Barden 50:50

So I'm picking the one that I want to throw away and the one that I want to keep?

Booked All Night 50:54

Yes.

Kim Barden 50:55

Okay, I want to keep the morally grey because banter is always like top tier for me in books. Dialogue's a big win, so we'll get rid of the other one. Okay. The cursed object.

Booked All Night 51:06

Cursed object is out the airlock. Next to Hey! Uh a prophecy everyone misunderstands, or blood magic with a personal cost.

Kim Barden 51:20

Keep blood magic, get rid of prophecy. Even though I have prophecy in my own series, so I'm really sorry, but like.

Booked All Night 51:28

You're like, I've done it for five bucks. We can it's done.

Kim Barden 51:31

We can eject it now. Yeah.

Booked All Night 51:34

It's done. Enemies forced into an alliance, or a kingdom built on an ancient lie.

Kim Barden 51:44

I wanna I wanna keep both of those. Okay, we'll come back to that. I like both of them. Yeah.

Booked All Night 51:50

Love that actively complicates the plot, or a mirror that shows you who you could become.

Kim Barden 51:59

Let's eject both of those.

Jessica 52:04

Out the airlock.

Booked All Night 52:06

A chosen one who refuses the role, or a happily ever after with fine print.

Kim Barden 52:14

That is so interesting because both of those tropes are basically my entire series. So I can't I can't eject them. So I'm gonna keep both of these ones.

Booked All Night 52:26

Okay, we have to keep going because we are not down to the magic number.

Kim Barden 52:30

Okay.

Booked All Night 52:31

Okay, so a morally grey love interest with excellent banter or blood magic with a personal cost.

Kim Barden 52:38

Alright, let's eject blood magic.

Booked All Night 52:40

Blood magic. Enemies forced into an alliance or a kingdom built on an ancient blind.

Kim Barden 52:48

I love enemies with forced alliances. I'm like a sucker for it, so I'm gonna have to get rid of the kingdom.

unknown 52:56

Okay.

Jessica 52:57

And a chosen one who refuses the role, or happily ever after with Mine Prince!

Kim Barden 53:05

Alright, I will I will eject the reluctant hero and keep the fairy tale ending with mine print. That was odd.

Booked All Night 53:15

I'm not done yet. I gotta put on one.

Jessica 53:18

Go ahead. Three one last round. I'm so sorry. Morally grey love interest with excellent banter or enemies forced into an alliance.

Kim Barden 53:31

They're like. This is incredibly difficult. Um I'm gonna. They're both so good though. I'm just okay, I'm gonna keep I'm gonna keep the the banter because I feel like the great stories and great storytelling is a lot of it is in the dialogue. Be you know, the way the characters react with each other, the banter that they've got, and not just necessarily like love interests. I think with, you know, your funny side characters and stuff as well. So I'm gonna have to keep that one and we'll eject We'll eject the other one.

Jessica 54:11

Okay, and this is the last time. I was so sad. This is the last option. I'm so sorry. Morally gray love interest with excellent banter, or a happily ever after with fine print.

Kim Barden 54:25

I wanna I'm gonna ride. I'm just I feel like I just defended dialogue so strongly. So, okay, fine, we'll get rid of um fine print, happily ever after.

Booked All Night 54:38

Which leaves you with a morally grey love interest with excellent banter. I rolled a one today. I'm very sorry.

Kim Barden 54:43

That is brutal. I'm sitting here being like, surely I've got like three or four. Um, that was brutal. Thank you for stressing me out this morning.

Booked All Night 54:54

You're very welcome. So fun.

Kim Barden 54:58

Uh that was a good game, though. That was a great game. And a lot of tough choices.

Booked All Night 55:03

I go out of my way to find the tropes in people's books to put in those games so that they honestly it's smart, such a smart way to do it. It's so fun and so like agonizing because some of them are like yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Kim Barden 55:21

So I bet you enjoyed that. I'm glad you did.

Booked All Night 55:24

I did enjoy that. I also we also play uh never have I ever spoiled my own book, which is always fun, and I'm like super petty about it. I'll be like, never have I ever written a book called The Gilded Mirror. Like, you like and you know, if you've done five or more of them, you have to spoil something from the book, and I'm like, that is brutal. Yeah, I'm like, I'll stalk you on social media and make you spoil something. I'm not above being incredibly petty with the options that I put together for that round.

Kim Barden 55:53

That's so funny. Okay, I'm really grateful that you didn't play that one with me because I am terrible. I'm a terrible liar, and I am terrible at at like there's been so many times in my street team or in my newsletter or like a you know TikTok video that I'm doing where I've almost said something that I shouldn't have said, and yeah, I've had to have some of my like street team admins and stuff be like, Kim, you need to you need to delete that now.

Booked All Night 56:19

And I'm like, um But I want to say it, yeah, it's hard.

Kim Barden 56:25

Yeah, so I need to I need to learn how to do that and turn the subtitles off my face. Um because apparently my face gives me away when I know something or something's gonna happen. I'll be like, I can't answer that, but obviously my face is telling you answer.

Booked All Night 56:42

I do love going to panels with like authors like that that have you know subtitles like in bright neon across their forehead, and people be like, what you know, are we is this character gonna die? And they're just kind of like deer in headlights. We're like, oh my god, they're gonna die.

Kim Barden 56:58

That's me. I'm full, like, no. I'm like sweaty palms, yeah.

Booked All Night 57:06

Like you just get a notebook, like, no, absolutely not.

Jessica 57:10

Absolutely not what you're talking about.

Kim Barden 57:12

It's like those viral videos, you know, where um they've been like sticking the face, the bit of paper with like the smiley face when they're have you seen that? That that tricks? Yes. Yeah, I feel like we need one of those where you just stick the paper on it, it's a smiley face, so they can't see your expression or the customer service face.

Booked All Night 57:30

Like, yeah.

Jessica 57:30

Do we have water? Yes, we do. Oh my god, how did you know?

Booked All Night 57:35

Yeah. We need that for some authors. We need that for me. When we're sometimes we read books and I've already read them. And one of my favorite things to do at the end of the podcast is we speculate about what's gonna happen next in the book. And for the last couple of books that we've read, I haven't gotten to do that because this season we're rereading the Hunger Games, we're doing a whole series all the way up to the release of Sunrise on the Reaping in theaters.

Kim Barden 57:59

I'm so excited for that. That was my book of 2025, Sunrise on the Reaping. Like that was my book of choice for last year.

Booked All Night 58:08

My co-hosts have not read Sunrise on the Reaping yet. And so in this reread, I'm like, oh, Sunrise, oh, sunrise, and ballad, like they haven't read them, and they're like, Jessica, turn your face off because you're ruining things, and I keep sitting there like and yeah, it's it's bad.

Kim Barden 58:29

I am you and you a me because I would be doing the same thing. Yeah.

Booked All Night 58:32

It's bad. It's bad. I have to mute myself and like get out of the room. It's terrible, it's terrible. So, final round of questions. These are totally unhinged, sleepover-worthy questions. Love. Yep. Always fun to do the absolute nonsense. So, which character would get banned from a group chat within five minutes?

Kim Barden 58:52

These are the characters from the book, right? That's who we're yes. Um, I'm gonna say Pip. Yeah, he is a very sarcastic meanie and just likes to take the kiss on everyone.

Booked All Night 59:07

If the Gilded Mirror showed a good reads review written by your characters about you as their author, what would it say?

Kim Barden 59:16

Um cruel, manipulative bitch. When is this over?

Booked All Night 59:28

What did we do to deserve this?

Kim Barden 59:32

This, yes. And I'll be like, exist.

Booked All Night 59:35

Exist you'd simply being alive. I'm so sorry, but not at the same time. Yes. Who would survive? Who would survive a reality TV competition and who would be eliminated immediately for being too much?

Kim Barden 59:51

Snow. Princess Snow, for sure. She Yeah.

Booked All Night 59:57

She'd survive or she'd be eliminated immediately.

Kim Barden 1:00:00

Uh, I feel like she could go either way, to be honest. Because because I she's very um she can dig her heels in, and she's been in enough situations that she can she can sort of adapt in that. She's very um thrifty is not the word. Um savvy, maybe is a better word. Like she's very savvy, and I think she would kind of claw away, but at the same time, she rubs a lot of people the wrong way. So depending on if it's a a viewership watching for entertainment purposes, or if it's like a survivor, um, and she's getting voted off, uh she'd she'd definitely be the villain on the show, uh, and and could potentially get voted off immediately as well. But she would it there is a very high possibility that she would claw away to the finish line too. So can I pick one person just for that answer? Because I feel like she could swing both ways.

Booked All Night 1:00:58

I mean, yeah, you can pick it if you're like this person. Either way, it's it's her.

Kim Barden 1:01:03

Amazing.

Booked All Night 1:01:04

I think he justified it enough, yes.

Kim Barden 1:01:06

Yeah.

Booked All Night 1:01:07

Which character knows that they are in a fairy tale and is deeply annoyed about it?

Kim Barden 1:01:16

I'm gonna say Evelyn, the main character. Like, she would be pissed. She would be like, Are you effing joking? Um, yeah, I'm definitely gonna say Evelyn for that one.

Booked All Night 1:01:30

Coming up to you like you could have done this in any number of ways, and this is what you chose.

Kim Barden 1:01:36

Oh yeah, and she would have been like, and out of everyone, she's like, Why me? Like, why is this always me in the middle of this? I don't approve. I'm not no not too much.

Booked All Night 1:01:45

Absolutely rude. Coming for you. Ridiculous. Like ridiculous.

Kim Barden 1:01:49

Yeah.

Booked All Night 1:01:51

Yeah. What is the pettiest magical rule in your world that you secretly love?

Kim Barden 1:02:08

Oh my god, I don't know if I can think of one straight away. I feel like because you've got different you've got different classes of magic. Um, you know, one that comes from the land, one from the original gods who are kind of you know the most powerful, um, and then blood magic, which has got your usual um, you know, has a cost to it. So I suppose you know, most magic has a cost, and that's just part of it, but I wouldn't call it petty by any means. I mean, I guess in this instance, Miranda has to eat maiden's heart. Um and the the fresher the heart, the more I guess she powers up or or regenerates. So from a petty perspective, there is one moment in one of the books where she has to eat an old heart, which is really gross, but um, I really loved that she had to do that to you know replenish her power. So maybe that that so my pettiness is that she only had like a you know week old decaying one to eat, and that made me feel great.

Booked All Night 1:03:21

Heard it here first, folks.

Kim Barden 1:03:24

Yeah.

Booked All Night 1:03:25

If you had to swap one happily ever after for maximum chaos, whose would you sacrifice first?

Kim Barden 1:03:36

People aren't gonna like this answer that malic. Yeah. I would it would incite chaos. The amount of the amount of messages I've had of being like, you better not kill him, you better give him a happily ever after, you better not like we will riot. Um so it I feel like yeah, there would be absolute chaos if I decided to change his happily ever after or not give him one or kill him off, or um, but yes, that would incite chaos officially.

Booked All Night 1:04:07

And finally, which character would you defend online, even if they were objectively wrong?

Kim Barden 1:04:23

I'm gonna say Paulkin is a fairing, which is always right in my eyes.

Booked All Night 1:04:30

So we asked this of all of our guests at the end of our interviews. Is there anybody that you would like to thank today? Anyone from workshop buddies to publishers?

Kim Barden 1:04:40

Uh yeah, mainly my beta readers. I think they are just I wouldn't be here without them to, you know, pull up the emotions from me or do any of that stuff. So um my beta readers are the big one and Jared, and I don't know, like with writing, it's such a solo thing, but there's so many people that are involved with it, formatters, cover designers, uh, you know, other writers and authors and things like that as well. So I always just want to thank all of them because I don't think you can go far in this community without being a part of that community. And the Australian indie community, especially, is is quite small in the fantasy space. So um I think in the US it's a bit different, being that you guys have, you know, quadruple the amount of people there that we do here. Um yes, so our community is quite small and a lot of people, you know, know of or have met or or know through. And um it's it's close knit in that way. So I don't I definitely wouldn't be where I am now without that community. So I guess I guess I want to thank them because they're the best.

Jessica 1:05:46

Very nice. And then just go ahead and plug your socials for us before I read us off the stream.

Kim Barden 1:05:52

Amazing. Uh so all my socials, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible. It's all under K E Barden Author. So that's one word. Uh I've got TikTok, I've got threads, I've got Instagram and Facebook. There's a Facebook page as well, so I'm probably most active though on TikTok and Instagram, so that's where you get most of your announcements first.

Booked All Night 1:06:13

Lovely, easy to find, easy to do. Thanks for staying up with us. Follow us on Instagram and threads at Bookdall Knight Pod. Drop a comment to let us know what you thought of today's show, and join our Discord server for giveaways, excerpts, and more. It's still in the works, but we're aiming for a hundred members. Catch our live author interviews on YouTube and leave a question for our guests on our Discord server. Check out our shop and website at bookdallnight.co. That's bookdallnight.co. And if you're loving the chaos, don't forget to rate us five stars. Until next time, booklets, and remember to stay booked all night.