How has your, I guess, how has your understanding of the industry and your comfort in your place within it changed over this time? Are you more settled now, more willing to take risks? How does that feel?

changed massively I think I was so naive coming into it and actually I think most new fiction writers probably are quite naive unless they've worked in publishing which so many people have now just have no idea that like not all books get a marketing spend to start with you know you assume if your book's getting published it's going to be in shops it probably isn't so all of these things I feel a bit, in some ways I feel quite jaded.

And I think I'm kind of coming at the other side of that now to really think about, well, what's, how do I work with that? Like I want to sell my work and I want to be able to do this for a living, but I also want to have that space to experiment and maybe fail as well.

Like maybe write some things that maybe don't work, just allow myself to do that.

Cause I think that's a really essential part of being creative.

So it's a really, I'm glad that we're speaking now because I am, very much thinking about all of this stuff every day it's like where do I go now I've got published quite a few books now I've been very fortunate to write in lots of different ways and I've always been able to rely on my brain my creativity to kind of show up and do the work but it's not inexhaustible that's something I have to think about as well as it is it is finite even if I do have a big capacity so what do I want to be spending it on I'm And if you write something that doesn't really work and never goes anywhere, that's a bit demoralizing, but maybe that's just part of it as well.

Maybe that's how it has to be.

Have you found it trickier moving into different genres and kind of getting right into it? Is there anything about the process that does change?