 Hello, everybody. My name is Shannon Ozerny. I am the head of youth services at the West Vancouver Memorial Library, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the 16th annual Booktopia Literary Arts Festival and the first ever virtual Booktopia Festival. We miss you so, so much in the library. We can't wait to see you all again. In the meantime, we are so excited that we can do this remotely and still bring you some awesome Booktopia contents. I do want to start by acknowledging that the library has its home on the unceded and traditional territories of the Coast Salish people, and in particular recognize the Squamish, Slewa-tooth, and Musqueam nations. Booktopia is a very special partnership between the library, the library foundation, and our friends at West Vancouver schools. A huge thank you to Mr. Ian Kennedy, director of instruction for working with us on virtual Booktopia, and our amazing teacher librarians who have really supported us in bringing this virtual presentation to you. A big thank you also to our community newspaper, the North Shore News. They have supported Booktopia every single year when we've been able to meet in person. So our format, I'm going to quickly, very shortly, turn it over to Jennifer. She's going to show you a little bit of behind the scenes stuff and her office. Then we're going to both be on screen together. I am going to pass on some of your questions, and then we will wrap up. So we are so thrilled that Jennifer is joining us today from Utah. Jennifer is the New York Times bestselling author of a host of fantasy and historical fiction books. I know that some of you actually studied A Night Divided, which is the amazing story of a girl named Greta, who has been separated from half her family by the Berlin Wall in 1961. And her latest book, Words on Fire, is set in 1893, and it details what I think is really little known history of Lithuania and focuses on a girl named Audra, who has to unravel some mysteries about her parents before deciding if she actually wants to follow in their very dangerous footsteps. It is an absolutely fantastic read. All Jennifer's books are just immersive and so well researched and taught, and just totally engaging. The perfect thing to read during this time. And I'm so glad that she's with us today. Jennifer, I am going to turn it over to you. All right, thank you very, very much, Shannon, and thank you for all those kind words. Thank you everyone who is joining us and to all those who made this event happen. I'm very grateful to be part of it. I think what I'm going to do is take you on a little tour of my office. As I do, I will show you a little bit about what I do and how I approach my writing, how I approach just my career in general. So I'm going to start by, I'll show you out the window of my office. You live in Vancouver, which is already just extraordinarily beautiful. So you don't need to see any beautiful sight from me, but this will give you kind of an idea of me living in the mountains of Utah. So this is the view out my door. I mean, at my window, just kind of a lot of farmland, a lot of open space, and we are right in the mountains. I love this because where I live, it's quiet, and there's enough place that I can just kind of get inside my head. And a lot of inspiration for the outdoors. I'm very inspired by that and what it means to live as a part of nature and among that. So that's just very fun for me. Alright, over here. This is my favorite shelf, like my favorite bookshelf. This is like, even if I love you, you don't get these books. These are mine. And you notice there's a Harry Potter missing right here. That's because my son took it to read. And I'm really like urging him to read on because I want the book back because he might destroy it because he's like that. And so I'm very anxious about my missing book. And part of that I want to show you something that's on that show. Sit down again. So I wasn't always a reader. I mean, I was, but I wasn't necessarily all about reading until third grade. In third grade, my teacher was Mrs. B. Hunnan. Mrs. B. Hunnan had a contest for us in third grade where every student got their name on a train car and the tracks went all the way around the entire classroom. And your train car would move forward along the tracks, depending on how many pages you read each day. Okay, I really wasn't the best reader, but I am super competitive. All right. So every day I would go to class and I would look for where my train car was. And if somebody's train car got ahead of mine, I would have to go home and read a book. And this was all very, very stupid, really, because the price wasn't anything. The price was like this three inch tall ceramic lion that doesn't have anything to do with trains. I think she just like pulled it out of a drawer or something, bought it at Salvation Army. I don't know why, but this was the price. So it was never about the price. It was always about just being the winner. And I would go and I would read every day. And at the end of the contest, two things happened. Number one, I got the lion. And this, it is on my favorite shelf because it is a reminder of the second thing that happened by the end of the contest. Mrs. B. Hunnan made me a reader. And she made me a reader for life. And so I have a specials shelf and I have a lion to always remind me of what a great teacher she was and what she did for me. So, on with the tour. That made me like weepy. God, that's stupid. It's like the third grade ceramic lion and I'm like, oh, I just love Mrs. B. Hunnan. Oh my gosh, she was awesome, though. All right, let me keep going. All right, behind me here, this is my research wall. So a lot of times when I'm researching, and I'll show you a little bit of it, there's so much information, and it just gets packed into paper stacked on each other or it's like loaded those notes on my computer and it's too much. And so a lot of what I do for research, I put it up here as a visual. And because of that, it helps me to have a really clear contact and connection with what I'm researching. This is a timeline I created for the book Resistance. And it's just kind of a color coded World War two timeline. I can get closer to it. It's all color coded because I'm OCD about those things. But then I realized timelines. This is a mistake. All this is is names and dates and places and history isn't names and dates and places. History is people. So I made another poster. This one. These are the faces who actually did what I wrote about in Resistance. This is my way of reminding myself that even though I'm writing a story that has fictional characters that real people lived and breathed and worked and fought and died for what they believed in. And this becomes my grounding in it. Right here. This was research I did. It's part of the research wall for Words on Fire. It's a map of Lithuania. These are just little places. This is where everything happens. That's for me to keep track of the timeline. Like if I say, hey, they've got to get from here to here. Can they actually do that in the time that I allowed for? And I keep track of this and all this way because the level of detail that I go into in researching, it's pretty amazing how much is required for research. Because a lot of times you don't even know what you're looking for until you just need that little piece of information. So like I'm doing a, I'm just finishing up a book called Rescue right now, which is another World War Two novel for that. I had these. All right, just reading, taking notes out of these. But this isn't enough, right? So I did more research. This is just the paper stuff. And I'll show you like how it is. It's like, all right, downloading the maps. And then I'll put in my own notes from the maps. It is creating notes, lots of notes, lots of notes. You know, just papers that I print out and then making notes in the column. This is where I start to do outlines, this sort of thing. And everything I create has just mass amounts of research for it. This is research for resistance. All right, part of resistance takes place in the Warsaw ghetto. All right, these are Nazi aerial maps of the Warsaw ghetto. And what I've done here, this is there so that I know they're sewer lines. And I'm tracing sewer lines so that I know if I say you can escape the ghetto, if you enter a manhole here and follow the sewer line, you can get out of the ghetto. Well, I can't say that in the novel if it's not true. And that's why research becomes so important. Now, Shannon mentioned Night Divided. A lot of research for Night Divided, honestly, was YouTube. All right, because in YouTube there are tons of interviews with people who actually lived in East Germany. So rather than me reading a third person narrative, here's somebody saying this happened to me. All right, for example, I watched a video with a man, he's an older man now, but he had come back to East Germany to do this interview. He had escaped. His method of escape was with a tunnel. And he's standing on a road in East Berlin. Now the road should be like this, right, just a flat road, but not the road he's standing on. This road was like this. And he said, we are right now standing over the exact place where my tunnel began to collapse. He said, if the Stasi had driven over this road while I was tunneling out, I'd be a dead man now. And so I take and I listen to this first person narratives and learned more about East Germany than I ever would have learned just in books. YouTube was amazing for that. All right, let's continue on the office tour. All right, we have up here. These are books that I have written right here. No, these are books that I have written that have been published. All right, and this is important to note. So when I was on the road to publication, I, I wrote one of the, I wrote four manuscripts, they were all terrible, really, really bad, they're going to be buried with me, because nobody needs to see them ever. Finally, I wrote one and I thought this is so good. It was called apprentice to a madman apprentice to a madman. I'm like, every kid on earth is going to buy like 10 copies and I don't know why you'd need 10 copies of the same book. I just thought it was that great. And so I started writing everybody with a pulse and sending in a query letter. So a query letter. It's a one page letter. It says, here's a little bit about me. Here's a little bit about my novel. Now, I sent it in. This is an actual query letter that I wrote. This is the letter. There's the rejection. All right, I didn't even get a rejection letter. I got a rejection scribble. But that's okay. I thought I'll make it a little bit better. I'll try again. This is the query. There's the rejection. I thought, I'll just keep trying. This whole thing is a rejection letter, but at least I got it on their stationery. So I'm moving up in the world, right? But the truth is, on my way to getting my first book published, all of these, every letter there, that is the trying and failing and trying and failing and trying again and again and again to get published. This is part of the process because it's how we learn to become better writers. It's how every time I would fail at this, I would say, okay, I've got to become a better writer. How do I do that? And I would work toward that. But with apprentice to a mad man, one day I thought, okay, I know this publisher. It's publisher X. And they pretty much take everybody. So I thought, well, it's not the way I wanted to break into the business, but at least I would break in and I sent off my query letter to publisher X. Now fast forward about three months. And it's my birthday. On the morning of my birthday, I got a call from my cousin on her very first manuscript and her very first query letter, she sent it to publisher X. And publisher X, who accepts nearly everybody, of course, sent her an acceptance letter. And she writes me to say, isn't this awesome? We are going to have an author in the family. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's, that's great. And I just really hate you. All right, because I wanted to be the author in the family and I had done all of this. And on one manuscript and one query letter, she was the author in the family. And I thought, okay, all right, this is not the way I wanted to have this go but at least I know publisher X is sending out their acceptance letters. So I went out to the mailbox and sure enough, there was mine. And I opened it up and I thought, okay, at least we can be the two authors in the family and I opened it up and the publisher who takes nearly everybody sent me a rejection on my birthday. And that was a bad day. There's not enough ice cream in the world to make that better. I know for a fact I tried to drown myself in it. And I went in the house, and I thought, all right, for me, there's only going to be one of two possibilities. Either I will admit, I'm never going to become an author that I'm not good enough that I don't have the talent I don't have what it takes and I'll just walk away from this, or option two, I will never fail at this again. And so I took a really hard look at my writing and I said, what am I doing wrong? Where is it that I am falling short? And I thought, I think I know what it is. And so I'm going to write one more manuscript and we'll just see. That became my first published novel. Show it to you. And so that one was Elliot and the Goblin War. This is what got me my agent. It's what got me first published. This was a small series, maybe only four people in the country heard of it, and three of them were my mom. All right, but this is how I broke in. What I learned I was doing wrong is I was writing for somebody else. I was writing for a publisher. I was writing for kids. I was writing for the reader. I wasn't writing for me. And as soon as I said, okay, I don't care about the rules. I don't care. I'm just going to write something that I love. That's when I finally began to get success. But I never take it for granted now because my road to get to where I am. It was rough. And I wouldn't trade a minute of it. Because if not for those rejection letters, if not for all that, I never would have reached the point to say, okay, what am I doing wrong? And how can I fix it? And it taught me you can get to the very, very bottom of anything you were trying to do and still reach your dream. All right, it is always possible. There is never a point when you say goodbye to that. So these are the books here that I have published. Very happy with them. I've got up here just things have given me a German mark. This would have been East German money. This is a little tiny piece of the wall, which I kind of like. This is a little character that could have been in that Elliott and Goblin War debut. So just kind of fun. All right, this shelf is one of my favorites. This is like my general just writers reference books. And I use these actually quite a bit for just various purposes, but not necessarily the kind of books that most people would have on their shelves. This is my handbook of poisoning. This isn't like, here's some things about poison. This is the actual technical scientific manual, all things poison. And my family is like, Mom, why do you have that? Do you have to cook dinner tonight? And they said it wasn't the handbook alone. It's when they saw the book next to it, which is how to disappear completely and never be found. And they're like, seriously, Mom, why are those books together? And I'm like, well, because obviously you might need one and then the other very, very soon. But I also have, because I told you, like I really draw on the outdoors a lot, how to die in the outdoors. This is literally everything that could go wrong just by stepping out your door. So be grateful if you're quarantined because this, I mean, this is serious. It's just an awesome book. And this one, and believe it or not, this is actually a really useful book. It's not just comedy. It's actually a great survivalist manual, the zombie survival guide. And this is like real no kidding tips of survival hints. And I use those things in weird sorts of ways. All right, finally, down here. This is my thinking about like things that I might want in the future. So I've got, you know, some books that might interest me. This is Spies of Mississippi. This is kind of a civil rights United States civil rights sort of book. This is the killing ground. This is the British Army, the Western Front. This is about this is a World War One novel. And then some of you might have said, okay, why do you have two boggle sets? Like what could you possibly have? This is actually for no kidding, like a book I'm working on called Black Ink. All right, so Black Ink is the story of a boy. Well, I should tell you, okay, in my small town, there's this church that this old stone church that used to be the church in town will it burned. And so there's only the frame of it now. And it just makes it kind of creepy, honestly, because it just used to be something and now it's just this brick frame. Anyway, I will drive by or walk by this church. And one day I just thought about a boy who might be living secretly in there. And then I started to ask questions about, okay, who is this boy? Why is he living there? And that was the start of Black Ink. Black Ink is the story of a boy with no memory. He has no idea who he is. He doesn't know anything about himself, but that's okay, because he has a sharpie. And every day he writes on his forearm. Now, if what he writes about himself is true, the ink stays on his forearm, but if it's not true, it soaks in. And every day he writes a different name on his arm. He's trying to figure out his name and still he has not figured that out. But every day he tries a new name. And on weekends, this boy volunteers at the old folks home, because if he plays boggle with the old folks, they will feed him. So boggle, as you saw, it's just a dice game. It has letters on all sides. You shake up the dice, and then the letters fall into a train. You try to find words. And one day this boy shakes up the boggle set. And when the dice fall, he reads out, they know you are here, run. And so it's going to be a story about a boy with no memory, but he's got a magic sharpie and a boggle set that sometimes talks to him. That's why I have boggle. And that's part of, you know, that idea, it just came from me walking by this church and imagining a boy. But ideas, they are everywhere. They are everywhere around us. Like for me right now, this is my works in progress file. Like every one of these represents a different story that I am working on. And everything in just a slightly different place. And so if I get bored with one project or if I get stuck, I just, I just, you know, move on to a new file folder and I go there. But ideas truly the way that I find ideas is as soon as something grabs my attention for any reason like that church, as soon as it grabs my attention, I immediately start to ask questions about it. And the questions I ask lead me to story. And you can do this right where you're at. Like right now, you can start to do this. And so if you just look around your area, just pull something and it doesn't even matter what it is that you pull. So for example, I could say, all right, I got a pen. And you might say like, oh, yeah, that's going to be a riveting story. Please tell me more about the pen. And it could be as simple as all right, this pen is no ordinary pen. Because if you write something with this pen, what is going to happen? And hopefully immediately, you can start to go, oh my gosh, if you wrote something with this pen, then maybe whatever you draw becomes real. Maybe you can write the future and whatever you write down, that's the way it's going to happen. Maybe you can write yourself into a portal and you just do the paper and the paper that you write with becomes the portal. And all of a sudden, all these possibilities occur. Guys, that's a pen. And if you can create story from a pen, you can create story from anything, just look around you as soon as it grabs your attention. You take it and hold on to it. And then you start to ask those questions and then from that story comes. Now, for me, when I get the idea, I'm going to try to figure out the ending. Okay, but the way I do it, let's take our pen, for example. All right. And so I'll be like, that's my whole idea. A pen. Yay. And I'm going to say, okay, but something about this pen. Now, I'm not going to accept one possible answer. I'm going to make myself come up with five. All right. You can write the future. You can write yourself into a portal. Anything you draw becomes real. And I'm going to get five. And one of those five, I'll be like, oh, that's my story. That's my idea. And I just kind of, I'm like, okay, so now I have point, I have point and where the story is going to end. And I start to think about who uses this pen. Why do they have it? Who wants it? Is this rare or common? Can anyone get one? Is there a competing pen or am I holding the only magical pen in the universe? Well, how did I get this? And I'll ask questions. And then it's just about connecting the gap. How do we get from here to here? And how do I do that in the most interesting way possible? And from there, I start to build an outline. I'm actually working on one right now that I can't find. This is kind of outline, but I've started to write text to it. And I start to create that outline. And then I write a first draft. And the first draft is complete and utter garbage every time because everybody's first draft is complete and utter garbage. And then I rewrite and I rewrite and I rewrite and eventually I don't totally hate it. And then if I keep rewriting, eventually I get something that might be publishable. And if I keep writing, hopefully I write something that ends up in your hands, which is why we are here today. And I'm very glad to be here. So Shannon, I'm going to hand it over to you for any questions that listeners might have. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm going to get us both on screen here. I'm glad I was muted because when you held up that lion, I cheered like it was the Superbowl or something like that. No, I'm serious. I love that lion. Like it is so precious to me. I mean, you saw me. I got all stupid emotional about a lion. It's amazing that things that mean so, so much. We do something similar at the library where we think, oh, we're just giving away an eraser or a tattoo or something like that. But it represents such a bigger, more life-changing experience. I could not believe you still had the lion. To me, it represents exactly what you say. We don't ever know the influence. Like what is going to be the trigger. Miss Honey did not know that that had such an impact on me until book two of the Mark of the Thief series, which was dedicated to her. And then I found her and sent her a copy of the book and explained to her. This is why and book one and book three of that series were also dedicated to teachers who had no idea that this little thing set me on the course to where I am today. Oh, I love that. I love that. And speaking of teachers and classrooms, we do have some questions. I'm just going to spit them out. This question I love. I always love to hear what authors have to say about this. How do you decide on the names of the characters in your books? Awesome. There are three ways I do names. The first way is summer symbolic. In Words on Fire, Audra gets her name because in Lithuanian it means store. It's actually a Lithuanian word. And the language then would have been banned. And I was so fascinated by that. If her name is a word that's been banned, her name is illegal, which means her existence is illegal. So it was a very symbolic sort of a name to give her. Sometimes names come out of baby books the way a lot of us are named. So for Night Divided, I was looking up, you know, German names from the 1950s when Gerda would have been born, when Fritz would have been born. And then I'm just going and I'm looking for names that aren't like some German names are very complicated and hard to pronounce or remember. So I was looking for ones that aren't too complex, but that had a definite German sound to them. And if they didn't sound too much like other character names. The third way is I just make them up. I just make them up. And so it might be me putting letters together. So all of my fantasies, most of the names in there are just made up names. And I just combine one letter with another. And I'll give a trick for people who want to make up names and just don't know where to start. Just take an actual place name. All right, just take an actual place name. So I live in Utah. All right. And but you can't use that if you're trying to make up a place. So we're just going to change one letter. So how about instead of U-T-A-H, we go to U-T-A-L. Now it's Utah. And let's say, all right, I want to add a letter before that. Let's add, well, let's add a C-H. No, it's Chutol or Chuttle. All right. And just one letter at a time, you just change, you add or delete just one letter at a time. And pretty soon you've got a completely original name. But you started with an actual name. That's a trick that helps a lot of beginners. That's a really, really good one. I love that. Another question about your characters. Do you base your characters on people you know and sort of a follow up to that? This listener is really interested in how you came up with the characters of Audra from Words on Fire and Jaren from the False Prince in particular. So if you can speak to Audra and Jaren's birth stories a little bit. I can. I can. For Audra, a lot of my female characters in historicals, they're naturally these bold sort of girls with these very strong instincts of this is what I want and I'm going for it. And so I really wanted Audra to be different. I really wanted Audra to not know what she's doing and to not be super confident in herself. Because I think that was a reflection more of how most of us feel like we are. And so I think that's part of why Audra is resonated with a lot of readers because they're like, I have no clue what I'm doing either. But I've got to make a decision somehow even though I don't know what's at the other end of this path. I don't know if this is even what I want. And so Audra was designed for me definitely as a character who was just trying to figure out who she is. And I really love her for that and to watch her grow through the book. Alright, Jaren. Okay, I do not base characters on real people because as you know, because of him, I am horrible to my characters. Like I am so cruel to them. If I was basing it or thinking of a real person, I would never be able to be as mean as I want. But there is one aspect of him that is based on a real experience. So I used to be the high school debate coach. One of our debaters was Ken. Ken was brilliant. He's popular. He's a student body officer. He's a great kid, a wonderful debater. But Ken was a thief. You see on weekends, we'd go on the bus and drive to a school for a competition. Ken, every time, every week, he'd go up and shake the bus driver's hand. Just, oh, thank you for driving us to the tournament today. And while he is shaking the bus driver's hand, he would steal the watch right off their wrist every time. And he'd take the watch to the back of the bus, hold it for the whole bus ride. And at the end of the bus ride, Ken would come forward with the watch and he would show it to the bus driver and say, hey, I found this at the back of the bus. Is there any chance you dropped it? And the bus driver would be like, oh, it's so good to find honest young men these days. And I'd be like, don't thank him. He stole that from you. And Ken stole from his debate judges. He stole from other competitors. He was so good at it and he returned everything, I think. But he was so good at it when it was ever time to write the thief scenes in The False Prince. I always, always thought about Ken. Oh, I love that. Ken the thief. Ken works for your credit card company now. He literally does. That's his current job. He works for your credit card company. Yeah. Don't give him the handbook on poisoning. That's me. We also have a question too about how kind of the state of things, the state of the world right now is impacting your creative process. All right. Yes and no. Yes and no. It is, it is a crazy time, right? And it's a time when we get like hit with unexpected emotions, you know, where we're like, this is awesome. I don't have to go to school. I could be home all day. And then we do that for a while. We're like, I am home all day and we miss our friends or, or weirdly, we kind of miss the routine of school. Or we just miss being able to just go and just be out in public. And that just messes with us emotionally. My belief is that when a door closes, a window opens. And so it's about keeping our eyes on that window and say, okay, don't think about what it is you can't do. Don't think about what opportunities you are missing. Think about what this has offered you as an incredibly wonderful, unique time. I am home now. That's why I get to work on this. I can never do this with a regular schedule because I'm so busy doing all the things I would normally do. But here I get a chance to just let my imagination wide open because I finally have the time for it. And so yeah, if I focus on the closed door, I get kind of bummed. Well, you had just this presentation. I mean, you were supposed to be in Vancouver tomorrow. We never would have got to see the inside of your office. We never, I don't think you'd be traveling with that lion. No, that's exactly, that's exactly it. But there, there is nothing that is all good or all bad. And so we just stay focused on what is really amazing and what is really great. And really, if there's something you want to do, you want to perfect your jump shot. You want to get, you know, better at any skill. You want to paint something. You want to write a story. You have been handed the gift of time. And so use it because this may never come around again that you have this concentrated time. It is an opportunity if we take it. Absolutely. I do have to ask because it didn't come up in the tour. And people might be wondering the typewriter behind you. What's the story of that typewriter typewriter? Let me take it over to you. Um, few years ago, my husband gave me this gorgeous typewriter for Christmas. And you notice that there's this paper in it. Let me get really close on it. That is a concarte, which if you were Jewish in Poland, you would have to have those as papers in order to get anywhere around. So I'm going to take it over to you. So I'm going to take these as papers in order to get anywhere around. Um, part of the theme of resistance was, um, using a typewriter just exactly like this one to falsify papers so that you could pass yourself off as a Jewish Christian. I mean, as a Polish Christian and thus be able to move around. So I have that here. Um, this piece that is, um, symbolic for the false Prince series, just the keys. Um, this is also made by my husband because he's awesome. That is, um, the medallion from the cover of Mark of the Thief. It's a 3d printed in metal. And so it is the medallion. Um, one time and they stopped because it's this big metal piece that's going through the metal detector. And they're like, what is that? And I'm like, it's an ancient Roman medallion. And they're like, oh, oh, sorry, that must be worth thousands. And I'm like, no, but it's very cool that he did that. Is it heavy? What? Is it heavy? Yeah. Yeah, it's heavy. It's, it's got definite weight to it, just like the bowlers would have had back in ancient Rome. Right. So yeah, he did awesome with it. So cool. All right. I got a couple more for you. Um, you talked about how, um, when you were younger and, and you were sort of motivated by the competition of reading, what role did history play when you were growing up? Have you always been fascinated with history or did you get this kind of bug later in life? No, I was, um, I benefited from having really great history teachers, really great history teachers, um, who didn't just teach me names, dates and places that they taught me stories of history and, and just really lit up my imagination with possibilities. Um, I appreciate it even more now. Um, but because I understand that history is, it's not a timeline. It's a cycle. That everything that happens has happened before and I realized that the better I know my history, the better I know the future. It's part of why this pandemic, it doesn't worry me too much because I mean, it's serious, but we've, this has happened before in history and we've come through it. And so I know we're going to come through this again because I know we've come through it before. And so, um, history, um, it, it, I owe that to my teachers, um, but I continue to love it and study it to this day. I think, I think the stories of history are the best stories ever told. Awesome. I love that. You bring so much gratitude just to your work and to writing and, you know, the, the question that, um, that someone asked that I really liked and that I think I went to ask all of our Booktobria presenters, which you've touched on a little bit, but what are you most grateful for, um, right now or in your writing career? Um, God, um, for my writing career, I am grateful it exists. Um, here's the thing. I get to imagine an idea in my head. It's like a little seed that just, a little spark that just starts there and I, and I toy with it and I turn it and eventually I start to put words on paper and eventually those words, um, I can make a living off of what I, I put down on paper and then I can share it and I can be talking to, um, young people in Vancouver about something that just started as a seed in my head. I mean, how could I not think that's amazing and be grateful every day that I get to do that and call that a job? I mean, that's, I don't work, right? I write and it's just an amazing thing. Um, but in terms of what am I grateful for? Um, I'm grateful for my foundation. So when, um, so I had a single mom growing up and we had very little money in eighth grade. I had two pairs of pants. I had a pair of jeans and then I had a pair of pants that she sewed for me. All right. No way. I'm going to school and a pair of home. So there's no chance of that. So I really had this one pair of pants and, uh, and so I didn't have a lot that other kids had. Um, but my, but I had a library card and a mom who would take us anytime we wanted to go and she would let us fill up the back wells of, um, the back seat with books as many as we were allowed to check out. She let me check out that many books and she would bring me and in that way I had every opportunity that anybody else had because I had access to knowledge and it was so simple and easy to get there. And, uh, and I'm so grateful for that foundation because everything I am today, and it doesn't mean everything in my life was easy and most of it wasn't, but because it wasn't easy, because I had to go through a hard times, I am who I am today and I wouldn't trade a bit of it. Um, I think why you, if you see gratitude, it is because, um, I have everything to be grateful for and very little in my life to complain about. I love that. And the coffee mug quote of what you were saying, I don't know if you caught yourself. You said, I don't work. I write. I mean, how gorgeous is that? Oh, I love it. It is, it is being able to do what you love. You know, that's gratitude. Yeah. Well, we are going to end it there because we can't get on a higher note than that. So I'm going to press stop on the recording. I won't disappear from your screen. Uh, I just want to say a huge thank you to everybody for watching. Jennifer, we might just have to bring you back next time when we can in person again, just so we can actually all meet and say hi. I was wrong about that, but I'm so glad I got to be here with all of you today. Thank you very much for tuning in. Thank you. And everybody else, we've got a couple other booktopia videos on the way so you can check those out. In the meantime, thanks so much for tuning in with our very special chat with Jennifer Nielsen. Bye everyone.