Word Play with Kristine Raymond

Word Play with Kristine Raymond is a literary conversation show focused on authors, their books, and the writing lives behind them. The tone is warm and informal. Episodes often begin with a guest’s books, then move quickly into craft, memory, publishing, and whatever personal thread the book brings to the surface. Recent conversations have leaned heavily into holiday fiction. Guests talk about Christmas romances, seasonal anthologies, family traditions, decorated houses, tree farms, candlelight services, homemade cinnamon rolls, neighborhood lights, and the way childhood details can be carried into fictional scenes. The show is especially comfortable with working authors who write in series. It makes room for romance, mystery, romantic suspense, humorous mystery, thrillers, and cross-genre projects without forcing them into a single literary lane. One episode may cover a Christmas box set and a giveaway. Another may linger on a resort setting, wedding-planning details, and the research that helps a fictional place feel specific. The conversations also return to the practical side of authorship. Guests discuss co-writing, publishing routes, reader groups, social media, recurring characters, and the challenge of choosing which series to finish next. There is a strong sense of writers recognizing one another’s habits. Characters talk back. Focus disappears. A book stalls after three chapters. Another grows out of a family memory or a place glimpsed years earlier. The show’s appeal comes from that familiar texture. It is not slick or heavily staged. It gives readers a seat beside authors as they explain where their stories came from, what they are building next, and why certain traditions or characters keep tugging them back.