The Strengths of Disabilitieswith Katie Mettner

My chandelier is not weight-rated for my fat arse, so...

Welcome to The Two Authors' Podcast, an entertaining chat show hosted by bestselling mystery and thriller authors Douglas Pratt and Nicholas Harvey, in lively, humorous and informative conversation with distinguished guests who share their thoughts and experience about forging a successful author career.

Welcome, everyone, to this week's episode of The Two Authors' Podcast, brought to you as always by the amazing Vellum, the best formatting software anywhere.

Planets in outer space use Vellum for their formatting needs.

Absolutely. I hear it's the number one formatting solution on Jupiter and Saturn.

It might be the only one. It might actually be the only non-organic thing on either planet.

It's number one. Number one in outer space. That's all we're saying.

That's the new tagline. Vellum: number one in outer space. All right. I'm using their box set feature, which I think I've mentioned before. I've put together several ebook box sets. You can use it for print too, but I use it for my stories. And you and I are doing a little thing for some promo stuff. We've got the Lounge, which we're putting a promo together for, and everyone's sending me short stories to drop in there. The box set feature is freaking gold, man. It's so easy to set all that up.

The great part is, I've done box sets before, before I used Vellum, on other formatting, and I could do the box set, but if I updated book one, I had to go and update it all the way through the whole thing. Vellum doesn't make you do that. It's pretty fancy. You update one file and it covers every box set that file is in. So if book one is in three different box sets, it updates all of them.

I think it's brilliant.

Yes. They want to make life easy for us, the Brads do. They're pretty cool. Got to love them.

Especially on Jupiter.

All right. A big thank you to all our Patreon supporters. A huge thank you to Doug Sjoquist. I've probably butchered that pronunciation, but Doug, you're a superstar. Thanks for joining.

It's pronounced "Doug".

You'd think I'd know that by now. So thank you, Doug, for joining our Patreon. We very much appreciate it. If any of you feel you get some value from the show, it's three dollars a month.

All right. Our guest today is romance and romantic suspense author Katie Mettner, whose books feature protagonists and characters with disabilities, and we'll chat with her shortly. But first, a Two Authors' Question from our recent guest, Gerald Kilby.

Gerry Kilby, thanks for sticking around. You have a question for us. We're turning the tables. What have you got?

Okay, so here's one. When you've started to write a book, have you ever abandoned a manuscript and said, "Never touching that ever again"?

Nope. Not in a long, long time. When I first started writing I had a bunch of half-finished manuscripts, and they're still out there. But since I started doing this as a career, no. I pretty much follow Robert Heinlein's rules: finish what you write.

Can I ask a second question? The follow-up is this: what do you do to get you to the end of that book? To not stop, to finish it?

I thought you were going to ask why I kept going with one of them after you'd read it. Let me explain, Gerry. I actually have a full head of hair, and somewhere around the middle of every book I'm just ripping it out. And I drink a lot. So maybe that's it. Honestly, when I go into a book at this point I have an idea, and while I'm a plantser, I plot a little bit, mostly if I do plot I throw it all out. I have an idea where the story's going, so I can work through it. And if I get stuck, I just kill somebody and move on.

In the book.

In the book. If I get stuck, I think, well, let's just kill somebody, and off we go.

And Nick, have you any secret sauce for finishing a book?

I think what really helps is that Doug and I have somewhat the same strategy. When we release a book in a series, we set up a pre-order for the next book in that series, six or nine months ahead, or twelve months in one of my series. That forces us to come up with a cover, a title and a basic blurb for the next book, because we put the link in the back of the book: when you get to the end, click on this link and pre-order the next one. So it's a marketing strategy, but it means we've already had to come up with some framework for what that book is going to be about. Then we have six or nine months in the back of our minds thinking about what it's actually going to be about. You can adjust the blurb a little, but you're somewhat locked in. I think that helps a lot.

I'm going to start an AJ Bailey book next week, and I set it up a year ago, so I already know generally what it's about. These books have dual timelines, and I know what the back timeline is. So I feel like that helps me a lot.

The second thing I'd say is that we all suffer from the muddy middle, right? I've learned that in every book I'll get to some point in the middle third and think, this sucks, it's droning on. My wife follows along, and it's one of my common questions.

My wife is the same. She has the same procedure with every book.

She gets the chapters every time. So I'll go to Cheryl and say, "Is this creeping along? Is it boring? Is there not enough of this?" I just did it on the Nora Sommer book I'm finishing now, and she said, "No, no, give me the next chapter." You get those things that bump you through it.

In fairness, Cheryl is really helpful for you. I asked my daughter, "Is this really bad?" and she said, "Yes."

Well, why is that not helpful, Doug?

I did abandon a book last year. I said, "I can't write this. This is beyond my capabilities," for lots of reasons. I went off and wrote a different book, which did very well, and then this year I came back to that first book, and that's the one I'm writing now.

I'm glad you said you've come back to it, because "I'm not good enough to write this book"? Gerry, please.

I was going to say, I may get on a plane and fly to Ireland just to smack you around the side of the head. It's what friends do. I will also say that I've read, and I can see, that there are books that belong at a certain point in your life as a writer. Our friend Jamie has one that's more emotional, more personal. That might not be something you can do right now, and you may have to get to it later on.

I was writing a techno thriller, supposedly as a palate cleanser. It's a follow-up to one I wrote called Brain Game. It's basically about an AI that goes rogue, and our hero has to deal with it. You'd think it's a really simple plot line. It's been used how many times? But we're now in the age of AI, and AI is pervasive. When you're writing about AI in that context, a whole bunch of stuff comes in on top of you. Where are we now? Where's it going? What's it doing? How do people feel about it? What are the fears people have? When you start exploring all the fears, it just gets bigger and bigger, and it got to the point where it was a bit too big for me. My head couldn't cope with all the possible ramifications, so I parked it.

Now I'm back to it this year, and this year is better, because I think we as a society have a better picture of what's happening with AI. I've been bringing all sorts of really interesting stuff into it in that middle, as you call it, where I have to stop and do a whole lot of rethinking. I'd say this is probably the most difficult book I've ever had to write.

Let me add a caveat, because I actually did abandon one. I'd forgotten. Right before I went full time, I had a series I wanted to start, and I'd got halfway through the book. It was all about a pandemic starting, and I was writing it at the end of 2019, while I was still working. Then I quit my job, I put it to one side, and then my Chase Gordon series took off and I never went back to it. I thought I'd need to give it some time before we talked about a worldwide pandemic again.

Well, let's not go back there. Great question, Gerry. Thank you very much for sticking around, and it was great having you on the show.

I appreciate it.

Katie, it's lovely to see you. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

And you're in the beachside resort of Wisconsin, I believe?

Correct. It's very, very warm and beautiful here.

We'll roll with that.

That's fair. I was going to say, now we have cheese questions. You get thrown out of Wisconsin if you can't talk cheese. Most people coming on this podcast are expecting the cheesy questions anyway from Nick and me.

Katie, give us an idea of how you got started writing and when you were first published.

Sure. I've always loved to write short stories, whatever I had time to do, but it was after my amputation in 2011 that I finally had time where I couldn't do anything. I was stuck sitting, waiting to heal. So I thought, okay, I'm going to write this book I've been thinking about. I was a full-time medical transcriptionist and I had three kids, but I tried to sneak words in wherever I could get them. A hundred and thirty-six thousand words later, I had a book.

Wow.

I know. And I knew nothing about what was going on. It was romantic suspense. I wanted to get paperback copies for my family, but I didn't know anything about indie publishing at the time. I was completely new to it beyond reading on my Kindle. I didn't know the inner workings of it. And so I actually accidentally published it on Amazon while trying to order paperbacks.

What, accidentally? Did you spill tea on the keyboard and suddenly it was out there?

I hit the publish button, but I thought that was just to get me the copies. I didn't realise that was the step to get it on Amazon. That was Halloween of 2011, so I'll be celebrating fifteen years on Halloween of becoming a published author, somewhat accidentally. But everyone loved Sugar, and so we just kept going from there.

If you were ever going to accidentally pick a time to get into the indie publishing world, 2011 pretty much nailed it.

Pretty much nailed it, that's right. It was the heyday. People read your book just because it existed. You didn't have to advertise.

It was just wild.

All right, you touched on your amputation, so let's talk about that a little, starting with your accident. How old were you? Thirteen? And you had a dramatic accident on a black diamond run, I believe.

That was it, yep. I was snowboarding a black diamond run, and I had to avoid a small child, so I had to take the tree option because I couldn't plough over a little toddler.

That is fiction writing 101 right there. Love it.

Yes, a hundred per cent fiction writing. I was on the bunny hill, my first time down the hill. I didn't know what I was doing, and there weren't even any ski instructors to take a lesson if I'd wanted to. I crashed at the bottom, and that was pretty much the end of that story. Of course, I was thirteen, and that was back in the eighties, when they didn't have the techniques they have now. They tried to salvage the foot, and over the years it disintegrated to the point that I couldn't walk on it at all, or it would just fracture.

So it came down to: amputation is all we can offer you, it's all we have left, or you're in a wheelchair. And I said to my husband, "Well, I'm in a wheelchair already, because I can't walk on the foot. So if I get rid of the pain, at least it was successful in one way. Even if I never get up and walk again, at least I'm not dealing with the pain." So I opted to do that, and I was fortunate to get great prosthetists, and I've been walking ever since. I still use my wheelchair for some things, but it was definitely the right decision.

I cannot imagine having to be in the position of making that decision. And this was over a long period of time, right? When did you have the amputation? You said 2011?

I had the amputation at thirty-five. So it was a lot of years and a lot of surgeries after the original injury.

Twenty-some-odd years later. Wow. Gosh. And it's been successful? You're pain-free?

Pain reduced. Pain reduced, and I'm able to walk. The limb is getting to the age and the point now where they'll need to do some work on it, but I've been trying to put it off because my kids have all been in college and I've wanted to be able to take part in their events. But when you have a good prosthetist, they can do just about anything for you.

That's definitely an area of huge advances. We talk about the surgery advancing, but prosthetics have made big advances too, right?

The one I'm wearing right now has the whole back cut out, with one little strip that's attached by strings, and I have a BOA tensioner dial in the front that I tighten to make the socket squeeze in tighter through the day. So it's very adjustable, and it's been very successful.

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So talk to us a little about the main challenges you've faced as a writer. You were already writing before the amputation, right? Playing around with it?

Playing around with it, yes. I had three kids, so it was pretty much just for fun at that point.

What challenges have you faced that we wouldn't think of?

Well, I write main characters with disabilities. In the very beginning I was fighting books like Me Before You, books where the character who's disabled is either a poor pitiful Pearl or dies at the end, or is miraculously healed by love. That was my other favourite.

I found the need was there for the disabled community to be represented accurately in romance, but it was also still a hush-hush topic for abled people. The reason my covers always just had heads was because you couldn't find stock images of people with disabilities. So a lot of the time my books were bought and read without people realising there was a character with a disability, and I would get pushback on that. People would come at me in private messages and say, "You need to disclose this on your books," and I'm not using the words they would use. I don't get that mentality. You don't have to finish it.

So slowly I realised that the disabled community wants these books to read, but they're not my audience. I mean, they are my audience, obviously, and I love them, but my real audience is getting these books into abled readers' hands and teaching them about our community while giving them a story.

Okay. So the disabled community was your audience, but what you wanted was to reach the able-bodied and start spreading a message.

Correct. The disabled community loves the books. They would email me nonstop: would you consider this disability, or would you write about that disability? And over the years they've also helped me reach a lot of abled readers. I probably have as many abled readers now as disabled readers, which starts changing the mindset that people with disabilities need to be hidden away, that they can't have an epic love story, that they aren't out working and contributing to society in any positive way.

And with time, of course, time changes everything. Back then I was the only one writing romance with a main character with a disability. Now I'm in a group chat with about fourteen other women who are authors with disabilities writing main characters with disabilities. So it's been cool to see that progression of acceptance over the years, and the younger generation of authors coming up to keep filling the needs and wants of readers.

Let me ask you this. For anyone who wants to include a disabled character, what's the first thing they should do, and the first thing they should avoid doing?

The first thing they need to do is have some kind of knowledge about it beyond Google. And it's always helpful if they have a reader or a friend they can reach out to with questions. The other thing they need to think about is the plot of the book. If this person has a particular disability, are they going to be able to do what's happening? That's a big thing for me writing suspense: will the disability I've picked carry over and allow me to do what I need to do with the plot?

No, but wait a second. Katie, have you watched Reacher? There's no reason for that human to be physically able to do the things he does.

Okay, but I say the word "accurate" a lot. Even though it's fiction, I try to make the disabilities accurate. Obviously in fantasy you don't need to do that, you can do what you want. But if you're writing any type of contemporary romance or romantic suspense set now, or even in the past, you've got to have that knowledge.

A lot of abled authors ask me what the first thing they should do is if they want to write a character with a disability, and my answer usually is: don't. Because the representation needs to come from within the community more than it needs to come from the abled community, because that's what we've always had. We've always only had books written by abled authors who get it wrong every single time.

Unless they have, for example, children with disabilities. I know a lot of authors like that, and they live that life, they live in the community, and they have a deep understanding of how to write those characters. But people who don't know anybody in the disabled community are going to struggle a lot to write a main character with a disability and get it right. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's going to be more work than they think, between research and finding people who can help, and, like I said, not using Google.

One of my Nora Sommer books features a sight-impaired character. She's completely sight-impaired, and I knew I needed somebody. I wasn't going to rely on just putting my version of it out there. Through another author friend, I found someone who's sight-impaired. She's actually in Scotland, she taught at a university, and she's an absolutely lovely lady. I sent her the chapters as I wrote them.

The biggest thing it gave me was that, knowing I was sending it to somebody who lives with that challenge, it really made me think about the details and put myself in their shoes, literally every step of the way. I felt like that made a big difference. I felt accountable. She had some really good feedback, and fortunately not a huge amount of adjustments. Several times she said, "Wow, I'm surprised you got this right." And I feel like the only reason I did was that I had her, and I knew someone was going to call me out.

Now, she did have notes on the rest of your book, though. She said, "You got this right, but maybe the rest is crap."

And I think that's important too: holding yourself accountable if you're going to do it, having somebody you can send the chapters to, so that you feel confident putting it out there and that you're not doing harm to the community by writing that character. That's always in the back of my mind. I am part of the community, but I don't want to put anything out there that is somehow going to do harm to someone who picks it up, someone I don't know.

So my goal is always to make it as accurate as it can be while still making it romantic and fun, because we're all human and we all have the same human experiences, regardless of whether we walk, use a wheelchair, or talk with our hands. That's what I try to portray on the page.

A lot of people talk about using sensitivity readers. Is that something you'd advise? And if so, how would you go about finding them?

It's so easy to find sensitivity readers now, and I do recommend it for sure if you're an abled writer. It can be someone you know in the disabled community. It doesn't have to be someone you pay. It just needs to be filtered through the eyes of the community you're writing about. You can find them on Instagram, or you can Google and find them.

I've done it myself. Several authors have sent me their books and I've sent them my notes, and I've had a couple who refused to release the book because it was so wrong. They said, "I can't in good conscience release it this way." One in particular was an amputee book, and they just didn't realise all the things they got wrong, because they didn't know anyone who was an amputee. They wrote it from their perspective of what they thought an amputee would do, say and go through, and it just didn't work.

But I do recommend it. It's much easier these days than it used to be, because there are a lot more connected communities for writers.

And you touched on this. You have romantic scenes, shall we say, in your books. They're not sweet and clean, as they say. How do you approach that? Look, I'm awkward as hell. I don't write romance scenes in my books.

Ask his wife. She'll say, "No, no, no. He gets it wrong all the time anyway."

I don't even try.

I always address intimacy in every book, whether it's closed door or open door, because my disabled readers want that. They want that discussion and that acknowledgement, whether it's between an interabled couple or a couple who both have different disabilities. It's an important aspect to cover in any romantic relationship, because obviously you're not swinging from the chandeliers.

There's a lot of vulnerability, especially in an interabled couple, for the person with the disability to be able to be vulnerable with their partner and trust them. Hey, I take my leg off and I'm a captive audience there. So that discussion, understanding, sharing vulnerabilities, and having a successful relationship displayed on the page is always my goal. Even if it's a bit start-stop. In some of my books it becomes comical, not in a poking-fun way, but there's a lot of that when you're disabled. You end up laughing in the middle of intimacy because of something that happens, and that's just natural.

Doug's wife Ashley does that a lot too.

Yeah, probably.

But she appreciates his attempts.

I want to back up, because the swinging-from-the-chandelier thing means I now have to find a steamy book that involves chandelier swinging. I always think of the same thing. I know it's a figure of speech, but first of all, my chandelier is not weight-rated for my fat arse.

Well, these days you can get the swings. You can get the mesh swings and put a bolt in your ceiling.

I went to my wife and said, "Hey, I'm thinking about redecorating the bedroom," and she said, "The fuck you are."

There are some books where it's just not possible. The one I'm writing right now takes place in a cave in the middle of a Cascades blizzard. Nobody's getting busy in some random cave in the Cascades. It's just not happening.

I don't know. I was going to say Hollywood would have them getting it on. You know, I'm pretty much always in the mood, so...

I should add that there's a serial killer on the loose.

Still. We can get it done. I've got time. It's not going to take that long.

Just so you know, Katie, Doug is not one of your sensitivity readers.

Yes, I've sensed that.

I joke, but honestly I'm like Nick. I don't put sex in my books, because I just feel weird when I do it. I appreciate anybody who can. I'm always thinking somebody's going to write to me and say, "You're doing that wrong."

You can always tell a male-written romance from a female-written romance. It doesn't mean it's bad, but you always know.

So I don't do that stuff.

Let's talk about your advocacy programmes. Tell us a little about Books Breaking Barriers.

Books Breaking Barriers is designed to do what I talked about before: getting books with disabilities into the hands of abled readers in a way that isn't "scary", and I'm putting scary in quotation marks. They find a book they can enjoy and talk about on social media, and spread the word that not just me, but all the authors with disabilities writing these books, are sharing their truth about their community. These books have changed so much since Me Before You and the books that used to have characters who were disposable, which is the best word I can use. And there's nothing to be afraid of in these books. There's nothing gross. They're no different from any other romance you'd pick up off the shelf.

So I started the initiative with a lot of information, teaching people-first language. All the information they need goes into the package, so that when it arrives at their door they feel confident not just reading the book, but talking about the book with others, which is very important.

Any influencers can go on my website and send me a message. I have two options, either a romantic suspense or a contemporary romance, that I include in the package, and then they have the opportunity to read it.

When I was a kid I didn't eat well. I still don't eat vegetables. My mum used to cut my carrots up really small and hide them in the mashed potato, thinking I'd deal with them if they were hidden in there. In book terms, is hiding the disability behind something else, to make able-bodied readers more comfortable as an entry point into that world, something you consider? Or do you stay away from that, and it's basically: here it is, take it or leave it?

That is pretty much my go-to. I'm not ashamed of being disabled, and I don't think we need to hide it. But I have done two series where the character with a disability is a secondary character in the first book. For instance, in Cupcake neither main character has a disability, but her best friend is disabled. Then the second book is Tart, and it's about her. By then readers are already hooked because they read Cupcake. I've done that a couple of times, and it has been successful in drawing people into the second book, because they already know the character from the first and they're no longer trepidatious about it.

That works with my contemporary romances. With the romantic suspense for Harlequin, every book has a character with a disability, because even when they're part of a series, they're standalones, so it doesn't work as well there.

Cool. Tell us about the December of Disabilities project.

There's another group that runs one, but they don't focus on books written by authors with disabilities. So I said to my group of authors, if it's called December of Disabilities, it should be books written by authors with disabilities. There are certainly enough out there. I have seventy-five of them myself.

So I started making lists, and I need to get the list updated with the new releases. I put it up on my website and people can use my list for their December of Disabilities reads. They can read one, or they can read twenty-five, and they'll find everything from contemporary romance to suspense to thrillers to LGBTQ. Then they submit a form to me and they're entered to win a prize of books at the end of December.

That's very cool. That's awesome.

You mentioned Harlequin, so let's jump back. How did your Harlequin deal come about, and how did that change your author business?

I've read Intrigues since I was fourteen years old, back in the day when they had to be delivered to your house, so I know the beats of Harlequin Intrigue pretty well. I decided I was going to submit a book to them. I'd always written my indie books in first person, and they don't take first person, it has to be third. I really wasn't comfortable writing in third person, but slowly I wrote a couple and thought, okay, I can do this.

I wrote the first one, Going Rogue in Red Rye County, in about five days in the middle of COVID, when I was taking my [unclear]-year-old son to college for the first time and leaving him there in the middle of COVID. So I escaped into this other world when I could to write the story.

I submitted it through a Twitter pitch Harlequin ran at the time, Romance Includes You, which interestingly has become an actual scholarship now, so I'm pretty excited about that. You pitched your story to an editor in about 140 characters, and you also had to use that long hashtag, so you didn't have much room. If you got a like, you sent in your whole manuscript. So I got a like and I sent it in.

And then it got lost in their system. It was about five months later that I finally reached out to one of the concierge ladies, and she was able to find the manuscript and get it into an editor's hands. The editor called me and I got the call: they wanted to buy Going Rogue in Red Rye County, which was fantastic.

As we got working together, she said we really should find out the rest of the story, because at the end of that book there was still one character they hadn't found. She was still on the run. So she said, "How about we do two more?" I finished that arc, and then she said, "How about a few more?" So I kept sending proposals.

Did you write them all as fast? Five days is pretty quick. Did you write all of them that quickly, or did you slow down?

I can usually write one in ten days now.

My gosh, how many words are they?

They're only sixty thousand words.

She says "only" sixty thousand in ten days. Both of us write sixty-five or seventy-five thousand words, and we're like, what?

Yeah, that's a six-week process for me. Nick, we are failures is what I'm hearing.

Well, you know, you guys are writing...

I'm in the middle of the second Kat Cromwell book right now.

When you're writing police procedurals, it does take more time. You have to be more precise. Those steps you have to take when you're writing any kind of law enforcement book take a lot longer than a security book where they're not following the rules of the law.

But you also have to remember that when you submit to Harlequin, you've already written about the first eight thousand words, because they ask for a synopsis and the first three chapters. So I write those eight thousand words, and when it gets a yes, I come back to it and I really only have fifty thousand words left to go. I've always been a fast writer. I write as fast as I can and I don't care what it looks like, and then I leave it to sit for about a month, at least long enough to forget what the whole story was about.

It doesn't take a month for me. I look at what I wrote yesterday and think, what the hell is that?

I have lunch, go back and think, what is this? I stopped for a break just to go for a pee and thought, crap, where was I in this story?

There are days like that too. But generally I try to edit a different book in between, so that I forget those characters and everything that happened, and when I come back to it I have fresh eyes, which helps a lot. Then it might take me another week to two weeks to edit it to the point where I feel I can send it to my editor at Harlequin. They send me back the things I obviously missed, I fix those and send it back, and then it goes to the copy editor. So it's a process.

But I always feel that at the end of the process the book is the best it can be, telling the story in an accurate way for readers with disabilities and also engaging abled readers to want to pick up the next book in the series. That's always my goal.

Harlequin has been wonderful at finding stock for covers that represent the disabilities, which is not easy to do. So it has been nice to see these books on the shelf in Walmarts across the country, with characters with disabilities on the cover.

I was going to ask about that, because I was just in a Walmart and saw they had that whole Harlequin wall, and some of them featured disabilities.

Harlequin has worked really hard to develop shelf space with Walmart that is inclusive and holds a selection of all their books every month, which hasn't always been the case. I'm excited to get Fatal Connection on the shelf in November, actually I think it's December, because the hero uses a wheelchair. He's a hemipelvectomy amputee and doesn't use a prosthetic, and he's in his wheelchair on the cover. You guys can see it, even though no one else can. I feel that matters, not just for the curiosity of abled readers who pull it down, but for disabled readers to see it.

I was actually surprised, because Walmart doesn't have a huge book selection. It used to be a long row and now it's shrunk down. But my wife and I were both surprised and pleased to see so much representation on the shelf.

Yes, they've worked really hard. They've changed how they work with Walmart. They've cut out the middleman who used to stock the books, and now Walmart does it. There have been some hiccups, but overall it's become a better situation for readers.

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Well, the readers didn't give me a choice on that one, as soon as they saw this tiny five-pound puppy in my hands. She was actually a gift from my brother-in-law, my husband's brother, who I donated a kidney to seventeen years ago.

Wow, that's quite the trade. He got a kidney, you got a dog.

That's what everybody said: "Well, I guess we know what a kidney's worth now." It was around the thirteenth anniversary of the transplant, and all my kids had moved out, so they replaced my human children with her. Frankly, she is kind of like a child. She definitely has the personality of a toddler. She's been growing up on camera as I've done my books over the last four years, and she has a lot to say about things, and the readers just love her.

Most people don't think you can have a miniature dachshund as a service dog, but I do. She's been a trained service dog for about two years now, and she pulls my wheelchair. Well, I help wheel it.

I was going to say, that's an impressive pull right there.

She was supposed to be a miniature wiener, and she is not. She is a big girl, so she's capable of doing a lot of that. But mostly I use her for balance. I have a special leash so that I don't have to use a cane when I'm walking somewhere. She's low enough to the ground that she balances me through the leash, so I don't fall, which is important. She's a delight. We love her to death, but she is definitely a dachshund in her behaviour and her attitude. Right now she's in her bed, wound up in all the fleece blankets.

Well, it's Wisconsin. She's probably cold.

Exactly. She has no hair, so she's always cold. We have a ton of fun with Lil on the page and in the videos.

We have two more questions, and this one we ask everybody. What do you consider to be your author superpower?

I think my author superpower is considering my readers my friends more than my readers. They started out as my readers, but they've become my friends. I don't care if they never read any of my books again. If I find out they're in trouble, I'm going to send them a private message and see how they're doing, because maybe it started with books, but it doesn't have to end there.

A lot of my readers who were abled when I first started writing fifteen years ago have unfortunately had to join the disabled community. So I try to be that person they can talk to if they need advice, or just somebody who will listen.

That's brilliant.

That's awesome.

We have our final question of the interview, from our wheel of questions.

This could be bad.

It could be bad. It could be really good. It could be funny. It could be pointless. It's just random. But we've got the whole clickety-click.

We've got the momentum building now.

Okay. If you got to choose, would you rather be a dragon, a mermaid, a yeti or Sasquatch, depending on where you are, or a werewolf?

I'm going full yeti. Live alone in the mountains.

That's fair. Nick, I'm going to guess yours. I think you're a mermaid.

A merman. I'll go with merman, or whatever the male version is called. But yes, I'm going to live under the sea if I can. How about you, Doug?

I would probably choose a merman, although a dragon would be cool. The trouble with dragons is, it's really cool and everything, you can fly, the whole flamethrower thing, but everyone's trying to kill you.

Exactly.

But mermaids historically aren't always nice. The Greeks thought they were pretty nasty people.

They've been picked on over time too.

So who knows? I'll have to contemplate it, just in case this ever actually happens.

In case that problem arises. Katie, thank you so much for spending the time with us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me.

Big thanks to Katie for joining us on the show. That was great. Good intel there from someone who lives with a disability and deals with it in an amazing way.

Very much so. And it makes you think, as able-bodied folks writing characters with disabilities. As I said in the interview, I included a sight-impaired person in Silent Sommer. She's not my main character, and I'd have a lot of reservations about writing a main character with a disability.

And understandably.

My Kat Cromwell character has a neurological issue. I have a neurological issue too. It's not exactly what she has, but I feel like maybe that's a qualifier. It definitely makes you think. It's not something to be taken lightly. If you're going to do it, it does require the research. Don't half-arse it and just look at Google.

So yes, you need to do some research, and there are plenty of people who will probably talk to you. You can go on Reddit, you can go on Facebook and find groups that have discussions about it. Network out there and you'll find someone who can help you. And sorry, Katie, I'm going to offer you up here: email Katie. She's writing about disabilities of all kinds that she doesn't have herself, and dealing with the folks who live in that space, so she can point you in the right direction.

She'd be a great resource if you're thinking about writing a character with a disability. And we did a lovely bonus with Katie that goes to our Patreon. It's an extra-long one. Every guest we have on, we do a little bonus question, and it goes in that group. Three dollars a month. That's it. Less than a dollar a show, and you get those bonus extras.

If you're interested, The Two Authors' Podcast is over at patreon.com. And huge thanks to our friends at Vellum. We're looking forward to seeing them soon. It's not long now: we're going to Vegas for Author Nation. We're both going to be there, and we're on a thriller panel with our friends Cheryl Bradshaw and Mary Stone. Unfortunately, it's being moderated by some guy called Tom Donnelly, but we'll suffer through. If you're going to be at Author Nation, be sure to look for us and come up and holler.

You can ask for autographs, and Nick will autograph whatever you want. And we have some cool badges to give out.

Badges? We don't need no stinking badges.

But we'll have them anyway. All right. If you're thinking about getting Vellum, go to tryvellum.com/twoauthors to get your copy. It's a marvellous thing, and if you haven't got it, think about it now, because it's the best formatting solution in the world.

Outstanding. Until next time, be kind to each other, and fair winds and following seas.

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