Go with that, J.R.

Ward.

Yeah.

Discuss among yourselves.

Absolutely.

You know, I mean, I think like, I mean, all good stories based on conflict and stakes.

Right.

right,

How do you feel about that? Do you think about how other people will see these characters? Or do you look at them and say, these are my creations and this is exactly how I envisage them to be?

So a couple of things on that.

One is, If you knew people who live in your city or your village and you had to cast those people, it was never going to be exactly right.

It just isn't.

Because they're real people to you.

Well, as crazy as it sounds, this world that's in my head is pretty real to me.

And in terms of keeping things straight and the who's and where's and all the things, it's kind of like gossip in any town is the way I feel.

would you say, who would you say is your, is, would you think of or consider your biggest influence when it comes to the path that you decided to go down from lawyer to author?

And I was like, wow.

I was like, that is some serious shit.

I was like, okay.

So then I spoke with Tosca and I just had a real human to human conversation with her.

Just looked her in the eye and was like, what's your vision? Like, what's kind of getting a bead on her? And we shared the same vision about what the series should look like.

And, you know, Passion Flux has been a great partner.

They're woman owned, mostly women who are employed by them.

Do you remember what like the original spark was for this series that you saw that you said, okay, this is going to start it all? Yeah.

one thing that like continuously comes up on our podcast as we talk to authors is the crossover between authors who started in law and then moved into writing and i just find it so fascinating that it is just something that keeps coming up when did you make the decision to kind of take the leap from your law career into becoming a full-time author was it when you sold your first book or were you kind of balancing both for a while

I was writing for two hours every day before going and working.

And then I wrote all weekends to do my first three books.

And then my husband, who was at the time in New England, wanted to go back to his home in Kentucky because that was where where Louisville is really Louisville and how the city takes care of its citizens and the profile of the city within the state.

And, and this community here is his passion.

And so I decided that I would of course come down, like if that was important to him, I was going to kind of burned out because doing that, you know, wake up at five 30, go to bed at 10 o'clock at night, you know, Monday through Friday, and then work, you know, right on the weekends, that was a big grind.

And I thought this will be great.

But we will get into that because before we kind of get into the nitty gritty, can you tell our listeners a bit about your upcoming release, the St. Ambrose School for Girls and what it was like kind of stepping into the psychological thriller genre?

Or is that not necessarily how it works?

So I think you're right.

I think the reader has to know what they're thinking.

But I also think if a character is on the page...

I feel like the reader gets to know them as a friend.

And in the way a friend can describe to you something that happened to them, you kind of know their orientation, right? You're right, though.

I do agree with what you're saying, that the interiority, I think is the word you used, is important.

Can you take