Plotting With Fate

·37 min·3 clips

Co-authors Tracy and Wendy reveal their lucky dice ritual and how a breast cancer diagnosis during querying shaped their writing partnership.

A signup plug opens the episode. The beta reader matchup gets the housekeeping first, with genre and time-zone pairing, a 3,000 word evaluation, and June deadlines laid out plainly. Then the conversation relaxes. Bianca Maray brings in Cece Lira and Carly Waters, and the show slips into its easy client-chat mode. It feels casual in a good way, more writing-room catchup than polished panel. The talk moves from updates into craft by way of a side story, which is very much the rhythm here. A memory about an old World Series shirt leads into connection, coincidence, and how small choices can mean more later than they seem to at the time. That becomes the turn into the book. Coincidence matters there, especially when Thea figures out what she wants to write and then meets someone connected to that idea. The panel keeps dodging spoilers, sometimes awkwardly, which gives the scene a funny workshop looseness. Thea carries the emotion. Her young daughter, Lucy, loves princesses, and Thea is worn out on bedtime princess stories. So she makes up another kind of story. That story raises the question of whether she could write a hopeful romance about Sam, her husband, returning to her. The panel does not frame that as delusion. It feels gentler than that. Thea knows what makes sense, but hope gives her a way back to writing. Sam stays close through the work, in a place ordinary life may not easily give her after several years of grief. The ad comes back at the end, pairing the practical writing-community pitch with the episode's softer faith in connection.

As heard by us

A craft conversation about using coincidence to carry hope through a story shaped by grief.

This episode follows the uneasy partnership between coincidence and intention in 10,000 Light Years from Okay, the novel co-written by Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Kassman.

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Why you'd press play

You get a hopeful-romance plotting question, a writer making room for grief, and coincidence arriving with suspiciously good timing.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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