Lee Woodruff, IN AN INSTANT

[1:14]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time To Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions. So please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Happy Monday. My book blast continues for Memoir Monday. This is part two of the memoirs I've been releasing as part of the book blast because I love memoirs. And, of course, other books, but I really love memoirs. Anyway, enjoy this collection of diverse voices, thoughts, feelings, topics, and everything on this Memoir Monday. And you can go back a few days and listen to part one of the memoirs I'm releasing as the book blast. Enjoy, and I hope you connect and really enjoy them like I did. Leigh Woodruff is the author of In an A Family's Journal of Love and Healing. As co author of the bestselling In an Instant, along with her husband Bob Woodruff, Lee garnered critical acclaim for the compelling and humorous chronicle of her family's journey to recovery following her husband's roadside bomb injury in Iraq. Appearing together on national media since that February 2007 publication of their book, the couple founded the Bob Woodruff Foundation to assist wounded service members and their families. To date, they have raised more than $75,000,000 to help veterans successfully reintegrate into their communities and receive care. Leigh has been a contributing reporter for CBS This Morning and Good Morning America. Her bestselling book, A Life in Progress, was followed by her first novel, Those We Love Most. A freelance writer and print journalist, Woodruff has penned numerous articles, including features and essays about her family, parenting, and caregiving. She currently runs a media speaker training business. And by the way, Leigh is going to be our guest at Zibby's Virtual Book Club late this summer. So definitely check that out at zibbyowens.com, and you can come at the end of August to our book club where we discuss her book in an instant. Welcome, Leigh. Thanks so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I am so happy to be here. And I just first of all, first and foremost, I fell in love with you over your name before I even listened to the podcast. I'm honored. Great. Well, I will thank my parents for that. Excellent. Yeah. So I reached out to you because I read your first book when it first came out. When was that? Like 2007 or something? Very good. Yes. Yep. Anyway. Yeah. So it was forever ago. But I've like sort of kept tabs on you this whole time. And as subsequent punks come out and you've I feel like you've written four words for other books. Like, I feel like I see you everywhere. And I've just been like, I don't know, you've just been like taking up little space in my brain. So when I saw you were doing an event with someone I knew, I was like, Oh, well, let's try this. Awesome. Well, and you, listen, we'll talk about that maybe because you're supposed to be interviewing me, but so impressed with the way you've just taken books on and made them. They've always been cool, but like this mantle is passing

[4:31]Lee Woodruff: to your generation of keep reading, which is amazing.

[4:35]Zibby Owens: Thank you. Yeah. I love reading. I mean, I I didn't I I don't know. It's just sort of evolved to this way. But Wait. Before I forget, congrats on selling the memoir. Big deal.

[4:45]Lee Woodruff: Very excited. Let me know how I can help.

[4:48]Zibby Owens: Thank you. That's really nice. Yes. I'm hard at work on that. I've written like 40,000 words first draft, but it's due in September, so I have to kind of crank it out. Yeah. But it's really fun. I'm learning a lot. Good for you. Congratulations. Thanks. So tell me about for people who don't know your story. Yeah. Tell everybody what happened. Tell everybody about Bob and what happened with him and how you decided to write a book and your foundation and just like the whole story, if you don't mind. I am happy to do that. My husband is a

[5:20]Lee Woodruff: correspondent for ABC News. And fifteen years ago, he was well, we've had this. We started I started marrying a lawyer, and then he it's a long story, but it's all in the book. We moved to China. Got married and moved to China. Tianan Tiananmen Square happened, and Bob spoke Mandarin. So he was out translating and bit the got the journalism bug. He was like, this is what I wanna do. He was not a great lawyer because he's the most disorganized person in the world. So that began a series of moving. You know, when you're a reporter and you wanna move to the next level, you move all over the place. Ultimately, in 2,006, Bob was named the anchor with Elizabeth Vargas of World News. And we moved back from London. He'd been doing the weekend anchoring. And so this thing that he'd worked for all of his life and and myself as well kinda came true. And six weeks later, he was in Iraq for, like, the ninth time. He did bet he'd been embedded for the war and everything else. And a bomb went off like it does almost every day. And he really should be dead. He took shrapnel to the face. His skull was blasted open. So luckily, thanks to the incredible work of the military and the medics, he was airlifted out of there in the middle of a war zone and they got his skull off within an hour to save his life. And so began my journey into the world that so many soldiers and airmen and marines and their spouses, of course, have lived in. So sitting in the hospital in Bethesda, naval, Bob was in a coma for five weeks. And it was you know, everybody was pretty much telling me this isn't gonna you know, he will probably never work again. He may not speak. You know, no one really knows. Fast forward to this miracle guy who is back reporting today doing all kinds of things. Is he the would he tell you he's the same person? No. He struggles for words sometimes. And, I mean, literally has like a plastic skull on his head, but he's a really he's a miraculous person. Now what do we do as moms and spouses when the bad thing happens? Somebody like you and I probably pick up a pen. So my only thing that I could control during this whole thing, because I couldn't unwind the tape, was to just pick up a pen and start writing because that was the only control I had in my day. So that journal fast forward to Bob, you know, starting to get better and coming home. And then people who knew that I was a writer said, would you ever wanna write a book? And I was like, I have this like 800 page thing. And I was never going to write a memoir. I always wanted to write fiction when I finally got to a period where I thought kids would be old enough and I could write. But it was Bob's doctor who said, all of these young men and women are coming through this hospital with these kinds of injuries and nobody out there in America knows this is happening. That was back in 2006. So you need to write a book about that. And that's what In An Instant became.

[8:17]Zibby Owens: Wow. Well, that's no pressure or anything to tell that story on behalf of like all those families. Oh my gosh. So what was it like

[8:26]Lee Woodruff: when you first found out? Can you go back there and talk about it for a sec? Like, what was that moment like when you heard? What was it like going to the hospital? Like, what was that what was it like? It was very surreal because I got the news in Disney World. I was down there with my kids shooting a TV pilot, and I was thought it was a wake up call. It was right exactly at 07:00 when I'd set up a wake up call. So it was that was super disorienting. And I basically got the call that said he's been injured. He's going into surgery. We don't know if he's gonna make it. You need to tell your family as fast as you can because we've all been holding this news internationally because we wanna respect the family. So I just flipped into like what I called in the book general mode. I just went into like, okay, I've got four little chickies. How do I show them that this is can't fall apart. And you know that as a mom, right? You've got all your little ducks behind you and they're watching you. But I literally, I was just saying this the other day to somebody, I physically felt my heartbreak. Like this is, you know, everything that I've read about you and I listened to you and how much you love your husband and your family. Bob was my best friend and I literally just felt it crack. And then I just thought, okay, girl, like pull this together. You gotta get them home. You gotta get over to Germany and see what's left of him, and you've gotta figure this out. Wow. But we are resilient, we people. We women, especially, Zippy. Right? We just we get it done. We'll get it done. We'll fall apart later, but we'll get it done. Yeah. Well, in the moment, sometimes there's not really a choice. Right? What are you gonna do? Just like lay in your bed in Disney World? So that was my favorite line. People were always like, I don't know how you did that. I couldn't have done it. I'm like, what's the like, Valium and Jack Daniel sounded pretty damn good some days, but that's not gonna get me anywhere. I'll just be an addict on the couch. And then, you know, I won't be winning any motherhood awards on that one for sure.

[10:16]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. So how did you deal? I have a new thing called moms don't have time to grieve, which is like a support group and Oh. A column in this magazine that we've started not magazine. I don't even know what to call it. Medium publication. And there are so many moms who are going through grief of some kind. And I know it's not grief specifically, but it's also for people who are going through an illness or of a spouse or a loved one because it's that suspension of time when like the regular world keeps spinning forward and and you're like, no, no, I'm in this alternate universe of doctors and hospitals and whatever, and and time is now divided into different chunks and my life is totally different. How do you deal with that when you have kids? I mean, there is this you don't have a choice, you have to just get up and go. But I don't know. I mean, I know obviously your kids are older now. Is there something like, what about those moms? The ones who just don't have time to grieve? The ones who No. No. It just yeah. Just like what do we do as moms? Yeah. And obviously, there's no choice. And so you have to function. You have to take care of them. You have to get food on the table or whatever. But, you know, having lived through this, is there any advice you have? Like, for moms who are going through all of these emotions while also trying to raise their kids and have them not be, you know?

[11:28]Lee Woodruff: I think that's a really important question because I think sometimes we try to protect our kids too much. And I think our children need to understand there's some fine balance and we all have to find it as moms between being real with your children and showing them that you are sad, but not blowing sunshine around so that when they do hit their own hard part of the road, and we all will, whether we will all lose parents, we will all struggle somewhere, that they understand that you can be low and then come back up again. So I remember my daughter who's now 28 was just so, so close to her dad and so worried, so anxious. She would say to me, you know, is dad going to be okay? Is he going to be the same? And I said, Honey, if I told you an answer on that, I would be lying. I don't ever wanna lie to you because I want you to always believe what I have to say. And I don't know the answer, but I believe in my heart that your dad will be okay. And I think I said something like, you know, I believe that, you know, God will make dad okay. Like, let's put it on a higher power for like, let's just throw it out. Let's spray it out there wherever we can. And that sort of worked because I wanted her to know that I would always tell her the truth, but that I always left the door open for hope. So I think as moms, we need to find a way to do that. And my grief just leaked out. I was great at crying in the car, great at crying in the shower, unexpectedly crying at a Verizon commercial, like some of that crazy stuff. And the amount of truth I told the kids about what I thought the future would look like or how I felt that day sort of dependent on their ages. So I had we have a team a and a team b, and there's six years difference between my daughter and the twins who are now 21, but they were five at the time, which is amazing. So they were sort of like daddy has a boo boo kind of level. And then the other two were watching the story on CNN before I I could tell them what happened, which is pretty horrible, had a much greater, you know, understanding. I have the same thing, by the way. I have twins and I have a six year gap, but my twins are older. Way.

[13:30]Zibby Owens: Yeah. I have two sets. How is your oldest? My twins are four well, they'll be 14 in a couple weeks and my littles are seven and a half, almost eight and and six. Oh, wow. Okay. So The next one, they're seventeen months apart. Yeah. Wow. So we have I know. I look at your mouth. I'm like, how is she doing all of this? But I can relate because people used to say that to me. They'd be like, how are you doing all this? But if you wanna get something done, give it to a busy mom. Right? Yeah, exactly. Also, I've stopped doing like lots of other things. Like I'm getting help from so many people and so many things like friends and family and like my daddy. I mean, I'm getting lots of help. I have a team. We're helping with work. I mean, I'm not like, doing everything. Still you have to think about all this. It's your voice. It's your concept. It's a lot. I'm proud of you. Thank you. No. I mean, I work around the clock, but I don't feel like it's work. Yeah. So much fun. You love it. I have to remind myself to, like, you know, stop.

[14:22]Lee Woodruff: I have to like force myself to stop. How great is that though? That you I know. I know. Here's something you said, and I'm gonna make about you for a second. In your blog, you talked about when you heard that your book was in the window at Barnes and Noble. But the first thing that you said is I grabbed a kid. And I heard that because the hardest thing we moms do is figure out how do we keep our fire lit inside of us and keep something that sustains us because sure as hell isn't motherhood. It's gonna be a long time before they have their own children and come back and thank us like I did to my mom. But you figured out how to sustain it and then keep the rail of the mommy thing going too. And that's the biggest trick I think in this life for women. I don't know that I would have been able to do it or have the perspective if I hadn't gotten divorced and remarried and have that time. So I also don't want to like set it up that I am this like super woman and I'm dealing with like I do have time to breathe every other week and I credit that with everything. Like I remember who I am. I sleep. I like, you know, it's so I don't know. Well, love that you said I love that you said that because none of us are superwomen and there's so much pressure on us to like pretend that we are.

[15:31]Zibby Owens: But you're getting it done. How about that? Thank you. Well, I mean, you're like an inspiration, right? Like you're I mean, to get through I don't know. It's just so when so okay. So you're writing to feel better Yep. For yourself. You decide to turn it into a book. Tell me about what happened then and then the subsequent books and like how it felt to have the story really public, how to be a writer, how to be a best selling writer. Like, tell me about that whole part and like still with the trauma sort of lurking overhead.

[16:01]Lee Woodruff: Well, probably like you, I just felt compelled to write. But I also was writing for Bob because if he did wake up, he would wanna know everything that happened as a reporter. And life in a hospital moves so fast. But I was also writing for the kids because I thought if he doesn't make it, I was actually writing our life story. So the book is really a love story in a way. It's a story of a family. It goes back and forth in time from us meeting and our life leading up to the event, leading up to his injury. So there are a lot of fun moments in it and they're all the stories of our life. So it's in fact, I found the original manuscript the other day and so much is cut out of it as you will find out. I thought that was a turtle moving that- Oh, sorry. It's my dog. Love that. And we realized it needed Bob's voice. When he woke up, he had he couldn't really write, but he had written all these things leading up to it, like when he was embedded. And then eventually he was able to dictate to me for his chapters. But the story just poured out of me of everything. And when I turned it into, there was like a little bit of a bidding war, I guess. And when I worked with Random House and Susan Mercandetti was my editor, she just was able to cut away and keep it close to the story, which interestingly enough, I remember people were kind of pissed at the time. They never set it outwardly to me. Was sort of like, Well, I wasn't in the book or I was just a sentence or a mention. It's been really fun to go back and look at the original document and see that everybody was in there, but you have to make choices obviously as an editor. So the book stuck to us pretty much in the story of recovery and injury and everything that was left on the cutting room floor were a lot of fun things. That became the next book. Then they came and said, what would you like to write next? And that was a book of memoirs. I mean, of essays rather that some are funny, some are more serious, just about life, about being a mother, about being a wife, a sister, a girlfriend. And a lot of that was extracted from the parts that had to get cut from this 800 page, whatever it was, vomit vomitorium of words and stories. But that was fun too. That was a happier book. And it was interesting because people will say, I feel like I know everything about you, and you know this. But I would think to myself, no, you don't. Because I I you know, there is so much that I didn't say, couldn't say, wouldn't wanna say. You never wanna injure a family member in a book. It's a fifteen minutes of fame moment when you publish the book, but it's a lifetime of someone's hurt feelings. So I feel like I did an okay job. Anytime I would put anyone in the book, I would, you know, send it to them and make sure that this represented them. And fast forward, so Dan Harris is an ABC reporter. So he wrote the book 10% Happier and funniest story ever. We were at we actually Bob and I introduced Dan and his wife to each other. We were out to dinner once, and Dan was like, thinking about writing this book. And it's about was about like getting addicted to drugs and stuff. And we were like, really bad idea. Like, don't do that for your brand and your image. Course, the book's a giant bestseller, Dan's Hatch, this whole meditation business. So he was writing about us in his book and how we introduced him. And he was like, can I say this about you? And he said something like, she's a really you know, she's a great ribald woman. I'm like, let's talk about that adjective. I need to select my own adjective. So definitely give people the choice to, like, pick their descriptions or at least look at what you're gonna say about them if you're writing memoir. That's a good tip. I'll store that away. Yeah. I'm trying not to write about that many people, but I was I just wrote one section. I was like, I should probably send this to this person. Send it. Because probably not even expecting to be in this book. So No. Definitely send it and give them some controls, and then you ultimately have the controls. But, you know, I think people just wanna feel like they had a voice somewhere in there. It's true. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[22:52]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Very true. And tell me a little more about what you're doing now and how, like, all of that led to today? Like what happened in between? A

[23:00]Lee Woodruff: lot happened. So before Bob got injured, was starting to do some TV stuff. I'd always been a writer, but mostly like magazine articles and other stuff. And then I'd been in marketing communications all my life. So our book came out, it was one of those everybody wanted to know what had happened to Bob and we had gone black. And, you know, honestly, that's one of my proud moments as a mom because I could see early on a lot of messed up people in TV. You know, there's just a lot of ego and everything else. So I we chose to live out of the city. We chose to like we didn't do the whole social thing. And I didn't want my children to feel like they were any different just because their dad was on TV. So I think it was shocking to all of us when this happened and he got injured, just the attention that I was not prepared for that. I know that sounds really stupid and naive, but that was not my husband. Was a different sort of person. So we just completely laid low and we laid low because he was still putting his words back together and he was still, you know, learning how to talk again. Like it was a very slow and scary process and he was missing a skull for three months. Like if I, and I could never touch his head, but if I did, would've, I guess felt his brain under his skin until that was ready to gross happen. So when the book came out, I think there was a lot of curiosity about Bob because we had kept him hidden. We had so many funny moments, Sibby. Like, we he was ended up in a New York rehab hospital, but we had to give him a fake name. So we called him John Steele, like, man of steel. Like, you can't kill this guy. You know, blow him up, give him a fake head. The doctors would be like, okay, John Steele and Bob should be sitting there like no recognition that that's his name. Many, many funny moments, which somehow I think mostly ended up in the book. But the book came out and we went it went right to number one, I think, because people wanted to know what happened. And so it started with and these were the days. It started with the Oprah appearance. And so that really launched sort of a speaking career for for me and, of course, for Bob. So a couple more books. And I unhinged from some of my marketing clients, moved into this career of that, became a contributor on ABC. And then when Gail King started at CBS, got hired to be a contributor there. And then the the babies went off to college and I thought, what do I wanna do now? And I've and I've been writing other stuff. My novels haven't quite worked. I haven't never leaned completely into it, I will do that someday, but I'm sort of having fun with work. So I keep working on stuff in the background and writing other people's forwards. And I reignited something that I had done earlier on in my career, which is was communications consulting media training for all different clients because everything is external communications today, podcasts and webinars, and we're all showing up in this way. And there are tips and tricks to just be better at it, to be more concise, to answer difficult questions, to answer the question that you want. So I have been having so much fun with a lot of different clients from philanthropy to business, to finance, to education, to tech, and I'm loving it right now. So I feel like I'm the old lady in the kids' hat. Like, I work with all these young people, and they are keeping me hip on what's happening, and it's really fun. Really fun. So wait. What should I know? I never took, like, a marketing course on how to be You are just doing fabulous. And anytime you wanna No. No. I mean did it. You know? No. You're great. It's more you know, some of it is just body language, and and we none of us have torsos and legs today. So there's a different way to show up on the Zoom screen. We need to be more animated. We need more emotion, more engagement. But if I were doing a confrontational interview right now, if you were, you know, a politician who'd gotten in trouble, you don't know what question I'm about to ask you, because I'm just about to tell you I have a tape of you nude with someone else's husband, and you've been going like this, because this is what we do when we tell people that we're listening. So you are just playing right in as I'm talking and I'm setting it up and you're nodding. So just some of those little things we don't think about with body language

[27:02]Zibby Owens: and words. Now I have to stop nodding.

[27:06]Lee Woodruff: You're doing just great. Most people overtalk? Yes. We say we just keep talking and talking. And because we haven't prepared the beautiful piece that we should have said, the front comes at the end. So if we think about our messaging or you're doing your book tour and you're getting ready to do that, I will give you a free session so you can just Oh, amazing. How about that? That sounds great. That's my pleasure. I

[27:30]Zibby Owens: thank you. Yes. I'm I will absolutely redeem that. I was asking to benefit everybody listening in case there were, like, tips and tricks. But, yes, I will take it all. I'll take it from you.

[27:40]Lee Woodruff: There are a lot of tips and tricks, but it they're so they're so particular to the person. So many of them. Right. Yeah. Hard to generalize. So do you still, like, write in a journal, like, personal journal diary type of way for yourself? Like, you still turn to that or not really? I don't. That was, I think, my compulsion to make some sense of the thing that made no sense. But I had journaled sort of through life. I go in bursts. And if I could not sleep, I would be further along in the writing that I wanna do. But I have sort of a novel started and I have a part two to In An Instant because everybody always asks, so what's the after part like? Because the book really sort of ends with Bob kind of coming home from the hospital and still putting it back together. And I am really trying to be thoughtful about how you write about the after part because it's so not perfect and it's so filled with warts and yet it's very human and we're we all struggle in relationships about various things. Like nobody's perfect. And I think COVID has laid a lot of that bear for a lot of people we see behind the curtain. And I just need to figure out how do you write about that in a way that could give so many people who find themselves, you know, in the after part of something, some hope, but also some realism. And do it in a way that preserves everybody's dignity. That's a that's a big ask. Have you read Love You Hard by Abby Maslow? Love her. She's one of my buds. Oh, good. Oh, good. Great. I actually, in taking notes to think about this book, went back to Abby's book, circled all this stuff that at the time I was like, yes, yes, yes. I felt this. This is so true. And then sent her an email. Was like, God, Abby, it just like, let's talk. Because we're both there's just this expectation when someone has an injury and it's an internal injury, there's an expectation that everyone says to you, Oh, he looks so good. You know, and you're just thinking, Okay, well that just muted my ability to tell you if I'm having a hard day or if I'm sad or if I'm missing something. And she's, it's a beautiful book and anybody who's ever experienced any kind of loss, she's

[29:39]Zibby Owens: a good, really good writer. She is. All right, good. Well, I was gonna connect you, but now I don't have it. Do

[29:46]Lee Woodruff: you have any advice for aspiring authors? Oh gosh. I think there's never been a better time to be a writer. There's so many wonderful outlets for your work. It the old funnel system, which was really hard to get your agent and do all that. I think just keep writing. And and I think the hardest part about being a writer and finishing a book is who are your first readers? Who are the people you turn to that can give you honest feedback? And the hard part about that is if you turn to six different people, you will get six different answers. So somewhere in there, you need to find the one north star that you believe in, but you also need to decide what it is that is important to you. And ultimately, you have to override. My last book, which is called Those We Love Most, is a novel, and it started with a phone call I got. And I was at a in Kansas City of all places doing a speech. I'll never forget, I can still see the hotel room. And a girlfriend called me and she said, Lee, oh my gosh, in my town, this old man just I'm sorry, it wasn't an old man. That was my town. She was one town over and a young kid had been in a car early in the morning, was not drinking, but there were empty beer cans in his car and a little boy rolled off the sidewalk with his bike and was killed. And she wanted to see if I could talk to the parents. And I said, I can't right now, I'm going downstairs to give a talk, but let me do it later. I thought, I just remember walking down the stairs or the elevator and just thinking all of the lives that rippled out and got hurt from that one thing. And that became the basis for my novel, but it was looking at four different lives and the kind of the secrets that we keep. But the boy had died and the mother went in his room and there was this she hadn't been able to feel his presence. And then she had this dream sequence, this this vision of the boy, like, leaving his room and going, winding around the trees. And it sounds kind of cheesy. And my editor was like, I don't know about this part. And I said, you know, and she was not a mother, fabulous editor. In fact, she has a book coming out. Christine Pride with Joe Piazza has a great Yeah. They're coming on. They're coming on my podcast. Okay. Christine, like, I am hugely a fan of of Joe's from her podcast. Love that. But Christine is solid gold.

[32:00]Zibby Owens: She was on already been on. She's coming back on. I have the book here somewhere. So yes. Now I just read it. It's really good. And, anyway, she she was

[32:09]Lee Woodruff: ten years younger, not a mother. And I said, you know what, Christine, I'm gonna fight for this segment because this, if you were a mom and your child died, you would want to be visited in a dream and know like that they were okay. Just I need this piece to stay in. And that was the override that we were talking about. I really did just what give you like 20 paragraphs there. Can you believe I reconnected that whole thing to your question? I knew it was coming. That's the point. At the end of the day, you're the boss with your book, with your writing. Love that. Leigh, thank you. I could talk to you all day. I feel like you have so much wisdom and experience. And anyway, maybe we can meet for coffee. Nibby, we're gonna meet for coffee someday, and you're just delightful. And I just I just I'm so thrilled you're doing what you're doing. Thank you. Thanks so much. Yeah. And keep being a mom and finding all the ways that we can still be our womanness while we're being our momness. Keep grabbing my kids.

[33:05]Zibby Owens: The maneuvers when they should be doing their homework. Those are the memories they're gonna remember.

[33:10]Lee Woodruff: I look like some creepy person in the dark here. I'm sorry about No, you do not. You look great. Good predator, but I'll be back to prey on you, girl.

[33:20]Zibby Owens: You'll be in my dream sequences tomorrow or whatever. No. Okay. All right. Have a great day. Thanks so much. Good meet you. Thank you. You too. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to part of my June Book Blast. I hope you enjoy it. Come back tomorrow for more.

[33:47]Zibby Owens: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.