Monday Mini: We Wrote a Book!

Yes, we did, but only with the help of an amazing team of women. We talk about the process and what we're excited to share with you.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Stephane
Never Told You, a protection of iHeartRadio. And for this
a Monday, many, Samantha and I wanted to talk about
a big event, make a loud noise. It has been
a part of our lives for a while now. Yeah, yeah,

(00:28):
we've hinted at it. We announced it in our recent
book club, but we wrote a book we did. It
is called Stuff I Never Told You The Feminist Past,
Present and Future. It comes out on August twenty ninth.
You can pre order it at stuff you Should Read
books dot com. You can also see an excerpt from
it with some wonderful illustrations. We'll talk about that more

(00:48):
in a second, and you can also find the cover
announcement and a linked pre order on our social media's,
So go check that out if you haven't already. But
we wanted today to kind of talk about talk about it,
talk about this, yeah, because it has been a part
of our lives that we kind of weren't supposed to

(01:08):
talk about on the show right for a while. But
it has been a just for me at least, like
a very big part of I passed, Like I guess
nine months I don't know. I mean it's longer than that,
but for like really hit the ground running nine months, right.

(01:30):
We wrote that book in like six months though, I know,
which was incredibly daunting on top of a full time job. Yeah,
it was a lot. It was. Yeah, I would say
that we've been talking about doing this book since I
actually signed on. Even before I signed my contract to
be full time, the book discussion had happened and we

(01:53):
were like, Okay, we wait, we wait, we wait, must
write today. Literally the process and thank god, we had
at some great book like brainstorming between any and I.
He's even joined us at one point, talking with us
and helping us through the writing process at the very
beginning when she was our executive producer. But yeah, it's
been it's been a long time coming. It's a little

(02:16):
outdated already. Apologies for that, because yeah, it was written
in twenty twenty one. We had everything done and it
went into editing process all of twenty twenty two, and
now we're at the finalization mode and now being able
to talk about it. We've got an amazing team with
Flat Iron. They have a great crew of people, mainly

(02:38):
of women, so that was delightful. To see. We were
in the hands of these amazing women as well as
our people who helped us, whether it was our editor
slash advocate slash ghostwriter as well as our illustrator. Yes,
and we're going to be talking more about them in
a second, because they this would not have happened at
all without them. Oh, there was a lot of hurry

(03:03):
up and wait with this, which is always a stressful thing.
And as you might know if you listen to the show,
Samantha and I are both prone to stress. We'll say understatement, Yeah,
so it has been stressful. But we were very very fortunate,
very very lucky to have this opportunity to work with
the people we did work with. But for kind of

(03:24):
a basic layout, a lot of this was you, Samantha,
A lot of it was your idea, but we chose
like there's thirteen chapters, but I'm pretty sure sure we
chose like ten topics like abortion or reproductive rights and
LGBTQ plus rights, both of which are probably going to
be the most outdated by the time it comes out
Civil rights, but also things like athletics, dress code, all

(03:52):
kinds of staff where we kind of talked about why
it was important we looked at the history of it,
we looked at the future of it, and we talked
about why it mattered to us personally. Also a ray
Kit chapter and shout out to Renee Shelby, who we
had on our show when you first started, so we
have then, who was amazing. We used so much of

(04:12):
her research in that, and it has these fictional women interludes,
which were also your idea. Were some of my favorite
things where I got to write about like why this
character matters and the tropes behind them and all that stuff.
And that's what you can see if you go look
at the excerpt that's up right now on the website

(04:33):
on stuff you should read books dot com. But there
was this really really cool graphic novel Elements that you
were a big proponent of and I'm one hundred percent
behind you, and I was so glad that you pushed
it where we got to work with this amazing local artist,
Helen Joy and it was a really great collaborative process,

(04:54):
but it was also kind of hilarious how amazing she was.
Where I would literally be like in this frame, it's
a bam. Have you seen Spider Verse? It's like that,
But like with tennis and Helen's like, Okay, I can
make that happy. Yeah. She was so talented. She used
in Atlanta based artists and does so much here and

(05:17):
has a beautiful artwork if you can go check her
out o. Her last name is Choice Choi And Yeah, actually,
our good friend of the show, the creator of our logo, Pam,
was the one that linked us to her, which we
were so excited to have because of course that was
two things that we thought was important. That they are
local as well as that they are a feminist but

(05:38):
they were part of the marginalists community and that they
we are as a crew, because we wanted to be
obviously very succincted that we want to practice what we
preach in how we produced what we were writing in.
Helen was right in that realm, and she did an
amazing job communicating with us and letting us know what
could and couldn't happen, helping us think through our ideas.

(05:58):
She made a really cute guitars of us. Yeah, and
it's quite funny and I enjoyed every bit of that. Yeah.
It is one of the coolest parts of the book
in my opinion, and it's one of the things that
I've kind of like shown people when perhaps I shouldn't
have been, like this, look how good it is. The

(06:30):
way we did this is Samantha and I split who
did what chapter, so they were kind of isolated in
that way. And there is a flow throughout for sure,
but it was kind of me working on this chapter,
Samantha working on this chapter, et cetera. And at least
for me, when I was working with Helen, I would

(06:50):
write out, this is like probably too long, here's this,
and here's the imagery. You know, I'd have links and
all this stuff, and I think about it from her,
and all she's getting is like kind of my you
know what I mean, right, But being able to take
that and make it her own and make it this

(07:12):
like really beautiful, beautiful piece that was exactly It communicated
exactly what I wanted it to and what I needed
it too, because it does tell the story that starts
a lot of these chapters, and her illustrations are throughout,
but it's just like so key to the whole book,
like it is, you can't separate it out the illustrations

(07:35):
and the rest of it. So I feel so fortunate
that we got to work with her and that we
got to see like what she made based on kind
of our word salads, right, it really was literally for
you are way more descriptive because I was like, well,
three words maybe because she did an amazing job in

(07:56):
cultivating exactly what we needed. She even helped some of
our activities because he asked, y'all, you know we love
self care, so we added little activities in the book
as well, which is kind of funny because I don't
know if it's all as accessible as we hoped it
would be. Anyway, Yes, there was a lot of complications
and tried to iron out what our hopes were versus

(08:21):
the reality of it. But yeah, so she did an
amazing job in all of those making sure that we
had exactly what we pictured, and she even depicted several
illustrations of real people and she did an amazing job
in that, just taking it like exactly as we would
want and putting it in reality in our book, and
it's gorgeous. So I'm very excited about that, and yeah,

(08:43):
I think it was. What was more fun is that
each of us took chapters that was aligned, kind of
like how our shows, you know which episode are hours.
I think everybody knows that outside of us just saying
this is us, we kind of know whose idea or
what we wanted to do with these things. And that's
exactly how the book turned out too, which is fantastic
that we were able to portray our personalities from the

(09:04):
podcast into the book as well, but still make it
a little bit different than the podcast. Yeah, yeah, it was.
It was a difficult ask of how we translate this
podcast into a book when we are we talk about everything, right,
and feminism is just such a huge topic and you know,

(09:24):
there's only so much we can talk about you and
I when it comes to feminism, but that we don't
want to ignore all the other things, So that that
was difficult. And we did want the activities as sort
of a like cleanser because a lot of it isn't
easy to read. I would say we made it. You know,
it's not gonna make you miserable. And we also have

(09:46):
warnings at every chapter, just like we did for our shows. Yeah, exactly,
kind of those content warnings of like if you're not
in the space for this one, this one's like this
level of rating. So I think that's important too, But
I just remember so fun, like working with Helen and
how excited she was to have like just these conversations

(10:07):
with us about like how can we portray this the
best way? So she was really a highlight and her
art was really a highlight in my opinion. Also working
with Jane Franzen, who is our yes editor, ghostwriter, handholder advocate,
did like all of the things because we didn't we're

(10:30):
new to this book world. It was kind of embarrassing
and the obvious how little we knew pretty early on
when we'd be in meetings with like book people and
we'd be like, um, please explain what that abbreviation means.
They don't know it. I think that the many many
rounds of like trying to stop people and be like, okay, look,

(10:51):
we're podcasters, writers, We're gonna have to start from scratch,
and whether that's talking about advertising, whether it was talking
about la a book, the concrete developments of how these
books will be laid out, what costs money, what doesn't
cost money, all these things that we have no clue about.
It was quite funny to sit there and be like, Okay,

(11:11):
I don't know what's going on. And for me, a
lot of the times I would pretend like I would
know and then come back to Janey and be like yes,
they just say to me yes. I would find out
later from that you had done that. I love it.
It's great. YE will help me because I don't know
what that I'm just gonna pretend we don't know. Now.

(11:34):
She was fantastic, Like we couldn't have asked for someone better,
who just really was able to adapt to like our
separate needs right and also was so kind and so
patient who kept us on task, who like made sure
we got everything done, but also was there if you

(11:56):
were like panicking, I don't know how to do this,
like this is way too much, she would be there.
And she was just so like we were doing this
during the pandemic. We were doing it over voice calls,
and she was just so like personable and would check
in with us and how we were doing and yes, nice.
Her personality was such a great fit with us. We
hope that we can talk her into coming onto the

(12:16):
show BT Dubs because her job is phenomenal in itself.
I will say, what we you know, originally thought was ghostwriting.
We had not used that as we thought it would
be used essentially because we wrote the chapters and they were,
they were painful. Sometimes Um I say this as the
person like, oh my god, we have to write. And

(12:38):
she was great giving us deadlines, which I need those deadlines.
Annie was done immediately, and I'm like, give me to
the last possible minute to write these twelve pages, because
I am screwed at this point. But she was so great.
What I would give her twelve pages of just rambling
and she would make it succinct and making it readable
and then even with our helping us change our original

(12:59):
plans and layouts to make more sense. So that's obviously
she is a professional, right and she was able to
help us understand that as well. And the layout looks
amazing in part because of her, because she showed us
or she tried to teach us, because this is a
better way. What again is feasible and what isn't and

(13:21):
what actually looks good versus what can only live in
fantasyland of scattered brain Samantha, which is what happened oftentimes.
And she did an amazing job. And again when I
would sit and be like, what do you think of this?
And then with brainstorm, I would come out right with this,
and then she would edit the hell out of it
and making sure that she's able to relay what I'm saying,

(13:43):
even not I mean to come back and back it.
Did you mean to say it this way or this way?
So that was real interesting. But she has been an
amazing mentor in this whole thing like that, that's nothing
short of watching her magically make this a book, I
feel like, instead of just essays that we're putting down,
which I felt like I was doing half the time,
versus like watching her, like doing those as a as

(14:05):
a mom, like how'd you taking care of a family
and they trying to take care of us? And during
a pandemic also while like it's going navigating the world
of COVID because we had so many in and outs
of a conversation that was quite interesting to see what
this looks like. But yeah, like in her being our
guiding light and being our face to face when we

(14:26):
were so confused in some of the emails that would
come through that were like we don't get it, and
would also hear us out when we were complaining because
we were like, this is this is impossible? Why are
we doing this? And her being a negotiator for us
some of the times, Oh yeah, there was more than
one instance where Samantha and I got an email and
we thought it was spam, but I guess it was

(14:47):
a real book email. And she was the one that
was like, No, this is real. You need to do this.
This is a part of the job. No one told us,
but thanks. Yeah, no one's talking to us. We don't know. Yeah,
that's a story for another podcast. But wow, that was
hilarious that that involved, Like, because there's so much good

(15:08):
that goes into a book. There's so much that goes
into a book. There's so many different people involved, and
so of course Samantha and I don't know right, but
Janey was great in that and it was just so confident,
like watching her in these meetings and watching her like
she what she did know. She was like, no, this
will work in this moet, this will work in this moment.
Like that was amazing to watch and it was much

(15:31):
needed because yeah, you and I were like, what if
we two write this, Yeah, and I will say for
this world. She also told us when we should advocate
for ourselves, because we would have just been like, okay,
they said no, and she would push back, Nope, this
is not they can do this. It's kind of like
having that behind us to give us the confidence to
note these things and not being taken advantage of. So again,

(15:56):
there's no way in hell I think we could have
gotten this guy without Janie. No no, And that was
on the table at one point listeners and I shudder sharing.
I shudder to think it would have been a messout her.
And that's not anything to say about you or me.

(16:17):
It's just that's not our skill set. That's not that's
not a thing. We know nothing about the book world.
And again, it is a completely different world when it
comes to jobs. Why would we Why would we as
individuals know anything about publishing world, Not even BookWorld, but
publishing world. It is a whole different beast that I

(16:37):
wasn't ready to tackle. In my mind, I'm like, yes,
this is how you write fiction. This is not fiction,
like we took portions and made some fictional elements, but
the reality of the most but the actual book of
it is nonfiction, historical contexts and or current events. So
having that, it's again a different beast in what is

(16:57):
being required of us. M You know, as much as
we are very excited, and I think I'm getting to

(17:18):
the point I can't speak for you. I'm getting to
the point that I'm confident in the book. I don't know.
There's so many like I am a naysayer, so i'd
always think the worst before the best, so that I'm
pleasantly surprised. So I'm trying not to be pessimistic, but like,
you know, really getting to the point I'm like, oh, yeah,
this is a book. I guess that's the reality of

(17:39):
like be like, okay, it's a book. Yeah, yeah, but
you know, we would not have done this. I would
not have done this on my own. We'll say like that, no.
And I want to be clear because I have felt
strange throughout this because the whole thing is a strange situation.
To have a podcast that turns into a book, it's
kind of new. I've always to get something published. I've

(18:01):
tried to get something published and have failed. So I
don't want anyone listening to be like, it's just I'm
very happy it's happening. It's just the way that it
happened was very stressful. I think probably publishing a book
is always stressful. But if it sounds like we're complaining
and you're like, well, you're so lucky you got it published.
I hear you, but it just what it was. It

(18:23):
was like a very stressful thing and the topic was
very stressful. Some of the subjects we talked about were
like personally very difficult. And I'll say, like we did
write it. I think we wrote it from August to February,
and that was like every weekend where I would be

(18:45):
like literally at my computer crying like sometimes because of
the topic I was writing about researching and that's what
I was doing with my weekends. And there is a
like dark part of me that's going to miss that
excuse of like leave me alone. I have to write
this book. But when I look back on this, I'm
hoping what I'll feel is like, yeah, like these fun

(19:07):
feelings for Helen and Jane and for you because somehow
you and I wrote a book together and didn't kill
each other, right, But it was a very stressful time.
I don't want to sugarcoat it. I'm very happy that
it's I'm proud of what we did, but it was stressful. Yeah,

(19:28):
of course. Yeah. We found a new appreciation for all
the authors out there who do this as their job
because it is it is a thing. And we've always
said that when we've had authors on our show or
like you published a book that's amazing, congratulations, you know,
feeling that seeing the side of it like oh wow,
and again it kind of was a little more again

(19:49):
and all the ideas what we created was brand new
to us, our brainchild, like it was mine and Andy's brainchild.
We thought of this, we created this, We wrote this,
So I don't I'm not try to take that away.
We did it woo. But the way it came out
it was very catered. The way that we have already
got publishers waiting for it. We've got people who are

(20:11):
in the marketing like hopefully it's going to do something
with it outside of us talking about it on the show.
We had editors waiting for us, we had an agent
waiting for us, like all those things. Because it is
an iheartbook, which is why it is the stuff you
should read books dot com because there's other books on
there from previous How Stuff Works shows that are on

(20:34):
there as well, which you should go and check out
if you haven't their books. But you know that there's
so much to this, like it is an unusual circumstance,
and we acknowledge both the privilege and both the stress
of given that responsibility because we want to be able
to say these things, tell these stories. But there's also
these anxiety which kept me up. I would have nightmares

(20:56):
I think I told you about some of them, about
this book, about if we failed writing this book, and
what does that look like? And how dare we even
say we have we should have this opportunity to talk
about it? How dare we think that we have the
rights to talk about it? And we had to change
some of the ideas because it was already so dark
that the way we had figured it out, It's like

(21:16):
it was going to be too dark. It was too dark. Yeah, yeah,
And I would say for me it might sound silly
and contradictory, but there's something about writing a thing down
that feels more permanent than just you and me talk
about this podcast, right, And so I know you and
I have talked about it, But I'm just hoping that
some people in my life won't ever know that I

(21:38):
did this, because they'll just be bad at me that
I published it, and not that I really want to
cater to them, but it just feels more like they
don't know what a podcast is. They're never going to
find it. A book feels in some ways more permanent,
and that was part of the stress for me when
I was writing out some things where maybe I'd never
written it down before, and I was like, this feels

(22:02):
really heavy and really real in a way that even
if I've talked about on the show, and I know
this is also like people the internet in theory you
can find anything forever, but it doesn't feel the same
if it's not like a physical media. I guess so.
I also it's very stressed about it. But I mean,

(22:23):
all of that being said, we are excited to share
it with all of you. We might be going on tour,
We're not sure yet, but we'll keep you posted about
all of that stuff. We'll keep checking in about this.
I'm sure we'll have some more stuff to say, some
more social media things. But yeah, we wrote a book.

(22:44):
We wrote a book. Yes, yes, yes, Also there's going
to be an audiobook, which I am very stressed about
but also very excited about. We haven't done the recording yet,
but oh god, who knows. Maybe they'll hate what we

(23:04):
do and they'll cut it. Oh oh oh No, I'm
sure I'll be fine. I'm sure I'll be fine. But yeah,
more to Kim, More to Kim. But in the meantime, Yes,
the book will be out on August twenty and ninth.
You can pree thank you for always reminding me of that. Yes,
you can pre order it as stuff you should read
books dot com. You can also see an excerpt with

(23:26):
some beautiful art Last of Us themed. You can check
out our social media for the cover reveal and also
the links to pre order the book as well. In
those if you would like to email as you can
our emails Stephanie and mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com.
You can find us on Twitter at momst podcast, or

(23:46):
on Instagram and TikTok at stuff I've Never told you.
Thanks as always too, all right, super producer Christina, our
executive producer Maya, and our contributor Joey. Thank you baby much. Yes, also,
this could not happen without them. Yes, and thanks to
you for listening, Steph, I Never told you s protection
of I Heeart radio from more podcast in my Heart Radio.

(24:06):
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